Shawn Dill and Lacey Book, The Specific Chiropractic Center
Shawn Dill is a 1995 graduate of Logan College of Chiropractic. Dr. Dill has become a noted authority in Upper Cervical Specific Chiropractic. He is the CEO of The Specific Chiropractic Centers, which now operates eight Knee Chest Upper Cervical Specific clinics, and also offers consulting services to entrepreneurs and health care professionals through his website, www.ShawnDill.com.
Dr. Lacey Book graduated Cum Laude, or with honors, from Life Chiropractic College West. Dr. Book is currently a candidate to become Board Certified in Chiropractic Pediatrics after completing an intense program administered by the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association. Dr. Book has extensive knowledge in the care of pediatric patients and the unique challenges that they can present.
https://shawnandlacey.com/
https://thespecific.com
https://blackdiamondclub.com
Grab their book: None of Your Business: A Winning Approach to Turn Service Providers into Entrepreneurs
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For details on the program visit eckfeldt.com/thrive. That's E C K F E L D T.com slash thrive. .
[00:00:58] Welcome everyone this is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host and today we have two guests we have Shawn Dill and Lacey Brook. They are authors of None of Your Business which is a new book coming out. We're gonna talk about that. We're going to talk about their background. We're gonna talk about the work they did with the specific chiropractic centers and scaling that business. Interesting story I'm sure. I'm curious to get into it learn more about the background. Shawn Lacey welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having us. Bruce we appreciate it. So let's talk a little bit about background so how did you get into business originally what was the story there.
[00:01:31] Tell us a little bit about the chiropractic centers and what you learned from a scaling a business scaling a service based business. What were the takeaways for you.
[00:01:38] Well you know we're both chiropractors by trade by profession and so we both have a big passion for the chiropractic part of what we do servicing the world. You know when you when you go to school you have this vision right. Like I'm going to change the world and I think we think we both were cut off of that same cloth and that that's where we were when we graduated and I graduated in 1995 considerably earlier than then.
[00:02:06] We're gonna date ourselves here all right.
[00:02:09] And then when I graduated in 1985 it was an interesting time in healthcare. And so was the advent of managed care insurance changes were happening now. And so you know I was 24 years old and I know I did what every know it all 24 year old that I moved to Costa Rica. And so that's actually where I started my practice Anderson. And frankly the first year was terrible.
[00:02:34] They didn't speak Spanish. It was it was very rough. And I would say that at the end of the first year sort of began my journey into learning business through this revelation that you know if I'm going to be able to eat I'm gonna have to figure out how to be a good business person.
[00:02:49] Yeah well that is pretty typical. I mean I think a lot of people a lot of folks that get trained particularly at a fairly sophisticated skillset you know whether it's medical or technology or you know marketing.
[00:03:01] I mean they're experts at what they do but they have sometimes no clue about what it takes to run a business. And those are two different things.
[00:03:10] Yeah I can't agree with that more. It's really funny when you hear Sean story I actually went to chiropractic school after working in chiropractic offices for about seven years. So I thought you know I think gosh I was probably 25 at that time and you know much like Sean. I also thought I knew everything. So I thought working a front desk of an office meant that I knew business. So I went to chiropractic school became a chiropractor. And what's amazing like you said in all of these other industries and professions we don't get taught any business. I mean it is miniscule if that right we get taught our trade are our service and we become really good at that. And by the time I got to school I realized I knew nothing about being an entrepreneur and I was not able to even sit in that mindset. And you know the more and more that Sean and I work with other service professionals it doesn't matter what profession you're in to step into being an entrepreneur is very difficult.
[00:04:07] Yeah I was originally trained as an architect and I remember I did two degrees in architecture.
[00:04:11] I think I had one credit that was essentially about law about limiting like legal liability as an architect. But there was nothing around you know how to set up a practice how to market how to get business how to manage clients. I got none of that. And but yet you know the whole vision as an architect was to go out and you know launch a practice launch an office of you own have your own business.
[00:04:32] So it's just it's baffling to me you know that that you know schools the training is so focused on the technical side of it but yet you were given no kind of business and some business business process so so what I guess what did you learn or I guess what were the takeaways in terms of your experiences as you know in businesses and technical businesses and seeing the need for better kind of skills and capabilities around running the practice out of it more than just the the the technical side of it.
[00:05:00] Like what what were the key takeaways or what did you see the need as and how did you kind of package it or or identify it as something that could be offered and what you know basically I think that there's there's four areas that Lisa and I focus on with our work and that's marketing and sales those are the givens in business right marketing and sales. And we distinguish the difference of marketing. Actually is not the pursuit of her doesn't acquire new clients. What it does is it creates awareness and creates awareness about who you are and what you have to offer the world. And then the selling part that's where you get clients right. So then now that I'm aware of you. That's great. But now I need to know what you have to offer for me. Do you understand me. Is your your business. Does it help people like me. And then what does it look like to work with you. And then we also focus on two other areas entrepreneurship which is all of the these things about being an entrepreneur and one of the big distinctions that we make and we made dive into this with you is the distinction between being self-employed and being an entrepreneur.
[00:05:59] A good way. Yes.
[00:06:00] Two different things and so we're trying to get people to understand that they need to be an entrepreneur and then the last is mindset which you know gosh it's it's a tough thing because most of us in the service world we have a service heart and so if we had to we'd give it away for free. And the reality is we have bills to pay and so mindset around money and how it impacts our relationships with our community with our clients and also with those around us significant others. We do a lot of work there because once you can get that straight then you can be successful and you know one of the things that I think that the impetus for this is we've had the ability and the opportunity. We've been super blessed to travel the world and speak to tons of people in the healing arts specifically. And I frankly think that some of the very best clinicians in the world nobody knows about them. They're just in there in their office that they're struggling to make it not to make things go they can't make ends meet. And as a result nobody really gets to experience what they have to offer and that's just heartbreaking.
[00:07:00] Yeah in this situation I've worked with a couple of different medical practices and and there's certainly this mindset switch evolution that kind of happens where they go from you know sort of seeing patients seeing clients and and they just they're so driven by the impact that they're having on on these individual folks lives. And that's and it's great. But what ends up happening is they have to make the switch to seeing that the bigger impact they can make by taking a bigger stance in the business and rather just focused on seeing you know patient patient patient patient every day. If they can really focus on being a CEO growing the practice opening multiple offices you know being in different geographies that if they can see the impact they can have with that they can kind of scratch that service itch that they have.
[00:07:44] But at a much bigger level I'm curious is that like do you see that happening in multiple areas. I mean is that something that you you see common.
[00:07:52] I want to this is a perfect segue way to my big takeaway actually is is it's interesting that you say that because we do see that often we do see that people have such a passion and a desire to make an impact that they start to move themselves into a new essentially position within their own business. But here's what we found in the reason we actually stumbled upon this is because much like other successful entrepreneurs out there I'm sure they can relate. We did a lot of things wrong. First to figure out how to do it right. And the big takeaway for me was infrastructure before growth. I think that so many people get very excited and they don't have the infrastructure and the systems in place to properly scale their business and they essentially put the cart before the horse and that's why you see people that have big hearts big desires big passion oftentimes they'll open another office or two offices and then the whole thing will collapse because you didn't have the infrastructure in place to sustain it. We see that often.
[00:08:52] We talk about the scaling problems. You know we don't want to go problems let's fix the problems before we scale. Yeah I think the bigger is there. I mean is this is this something that you can just learn is there something. I mean why do you think this is a problem for folks why do you think people don't think about the systems and the processes and getting these right before you think about scaling. Is there such as education or is it more than that.
[00:09:13] Well you know I think what it boils down to is you know and this is hopefully we're touching the hearts of a lot of the listeners here is that when you know that the person that goes out and you know as you were describing go to school you have this dream of opening your own solo practice. And you just decide I'm just gonna dive in and I'm going to do it. And so you you jump into your own practice and now we look back and it's you know five years later and you are doing well. And so now you decide to enter into this idea of scale and what happens is this is more common than not. And it's actually somewhat humorous but I think that all of us can see this in ourselves is that the reality is is that you when you open your practice nobody helped you.
[00:09:53] And so you know I came in I had to learn this myself I had to learn from the School of Hard Knocks. And so what happens is that their strategy for scale is very much the same. It's going to bring in more people. And you're going to you're going to suffer like I did. You're going to you're going to learn and they don't they don't create systems and processes because they never had systems and processes to get to where they are and they don't recognize that they don't recognize how important it is and they have systems and processes. Just in their own heads right the way that they operate but they don't want to formalize it and they don't realize that that's the death trap in scaling.
[00:10:28] Yeah. And so do you think the. Do you think the solution.
[00:10:31] Or how do you tease that solution out of himself the processes in their head like how do you get them to realize that. How do you get that process out of their head and what do you put it into. Like how do you externalize this so other people can actually follow it.
[00:10:43] Well you know there's a lot of ways that we could that we could do that and I think that it depends on each individual's learning style depending on the culture of your of your clinic. But I think that you know one of our mantras and this is a difficult thing because there's you know the dichotomy here that says basically you know successful people have the ability to maintain two seemingly contradicting ideas simultaneously in one's mind. And the first idea is that look there is no one right way to do anything right. And so now we're here speaking from our experience but never would we think that this is the only way there's there's so many ways to go about any sort of thing that you'd want to do any endeavor. But at the same time that I say that there's no one right way I always say at least in my business or in Lacey nice business in our business that there has to be a way to do everything.
[00:11:30] And I think that's the first step is there has to be a way to do everything from opening procedures all the way to clothes and then the next step is Well let's document that. One of the best tips that I have come across is you know in today's day and age of social media as you could even create your own private Facebook group. Facebook has a tool that's called workplace that new. It has it's a paid service but you could just make your own Facebook group if you're if your business was small enough and we could begin to post videos of our employees or any of the key individuals doing their job and we're posting it in secret and then from there we could sit down and then dissect what they did a great tool called Train you or you could begin to create in essence your own office procedures your own office manual and a lot of people think office manual that isn't an employee manual but I'm talking more like a how do you do thing.
[00:12:24] A Practical Guide. Yes. Yeah. Interesting. Let's go back to it. You had a comment earlier on which I think it was a good one I wanted to talk about a little bit. So the whole idea of an I can forget how you phrased it but it was something long nights do you own a business or do you have a job. Give me more. Tell me more about what you mean by that or what that means and help explain to the audience.
[00:12:41] Yes. And I love that one you know a lot of people in the service world go into their business because they were trying to escape either the reality of working 9:00 to 5:00 and having a boss or maybe the idea of it and they thought to themselves Well you know what I would love to do someday I just want to be my own boss I know what growing up for me that was like a cool thing that you want to be your own boss. Now if you are your own boss all you've really done is translated Of course it's sort of a horizontal move where rather than have a boss whose name is Joe. Now you have you know your boss and but your attitude is still like a working from 9:00 to 5:00 I punch in I punch out. What's nice is I am my own boss I really don't get yelled at or scrutinized because I'm my own boss now an entrepreneur is very different because it's not really just being your own boss because in fact as an entrepreneur we actually answer to a lot of people that are our client tell the community that we serve becomes our boss. And then as an entrepreneur it's not a 9 to 5 job. You know entrepreneurs are logging you know tons of hours. But here's the big difference and I think that this will really resonate with your listeners is that in the service world it's a passion. So it doesn't feel like we're you know that's something we talk about that a lot.
[00:13:58] It's kind of cloaked cloaked in this service.
[00:14:01] Yes. And it's and it's you know it's super popular in the in the entrepreneur world. I'm not I don't mean to step on any toes but it's also not a grind. Right. You know there's this thing that you know you'll rise and grind. Well as an entrepreneur and providing a service that you're passionate about it doesn't feel like grind it feels like play or at least it's highly purpose driven.
[00:14:22] I mean I think there is a there is a interesting nuance in the service in lots of service roles as that because because there is such a satisfying element of being of service and of helping people of of seeing the impact that you can have on folks that can often either offset or mediate some of the some of the challenges from the business side of it. But there are the business issues are still there. Like you still have the challenges of running a business making payroll of you know selling of managing the office managing the people like all those things are still there. It's just because you're having this impact you're kind of willing to do it. I think a lot more than other businesses.
[00:14:59] You know I think that's the thing too is that you know when you talked about that idea of the service sometimes we get lost in the service and then then then those elements that you talked about you know paying the bills doing payroll being worried about taxes keeping the books balanced. Those things actually become vilified. So a lot of times you know service providers actually see that as somewhat like the devil. Oh my God I don't I don't want to do these things because when I'm doing those I'm actually not being true to my service. I'm not being true to the people that I serve.
[00:15:29] Now I'm finding myself being this you know that the CEO and being the boss and again here's here's the reality is the route to serving more people is to be ultra successful the more successful you are the greater bandwidth you have the greater reach you'll have and the greater capacity that you'll actually have the change the world I think that was part of our biggest revelation if you really do think you're going to change the world you're going to need a lot of capital and resources to do that.
[00:15:55] So talk about that so I can talk about the capital side of it because I think the sort of the double edged sword of services businesses that they typically are pretty easy to start. In the sense that there's not huge. You know I don't have to go and buy raw materials and make product and inventory or a lot of RFD. So they're kind of easy from a capitalization point of view to start but they can be very difficult to scale. Win win do you see or how do you see capital playing a role.
[00:16:18] At what point in a service based business.
[00:16:20] Well obviously two types of capital right. So we'd have then the financial side of things but also we have the human side. And because we are in a service I think that's one of the limiting factors that a lot of service providers don't consider. You know most of the time it's it's you that provides the service. We're very big advocates of and I think that it just as a thought process that every every listener should know the ceiling on their business with their current setup so that would you know it also could be infrastructure restraints and you know depending on the service but it could be you know square footage if we're in a restaurant the number of tables the turnover we need to know the actual limit to what we can do I think that most service providers are blind to that. And then we need to know. OK. So if the limit of what I can service is X number of clients be it per day per week per month per year then we need to know. OK. So when I reach that have I actually exhausted all of the resources. So that might mean that just me as an individual that's the max that i could service. But I have the square footage to actually actually service double that I would just need another service provider.
[00:17:23] Yeah. Yeah. We talked about I don't know if you've you've read the goal and the Eli Gold rats and The Theory of Constraints but that whole idea that every process every business is basically the throughput its ability to produce is limited by a single constraint somewhere in the system. The challenge is finding that constraint. It may it may not be obvious or it may not be easily foreseeable from the outset. And the problem is if you improving any other part of the business will not actually improve the overall throughput unless it's the constraint that you're working on. So I like that idea that you know from a service from a like the restaurant example you know if if the if the number of tables is not that constraint adding more tables won't actually help you grow the business like you have to figure out which is the constraint in the business. Good.
[00:18:05] I got to tell you too I want to add to that a major issue in health care which we ran across when we're talking about scaling issues is a lot of health care professions in order to get an injection of financial capital oftentimes that needs to be done by somebody that is licensed within the profession. Yeah. And so that becomes a unique barrier oftentimes to grow in scale because you need to find no one somebody that's in alignment and will work the way that you do. Number two has the capital to invest that's already not doing it in their own business. Sharing the same degree as you do that becomes actually a big problem. So you know if you're in the health care industry or you're a service professional within health care you really need to understand how to navigate those murky waters of you know licensing and setting up proper corporations and to make sure that you can receive you know financial injection from somebody else.
[00:19:02] No it's certainly a challenge I mean this is the whole licensing side. I mean it's even though I see it a lot in the medical side you know if I'm a dermatologist and I want to open a bunch more offices why can't just you know sell a big chunk of my company to some private equity firm. Right. And like I've got to I've got to make sure that I'm not running a mark of my professional licensing standards and practices and that allow me to actually practice. Yeah. Kind of an add a complexity for most of these service businesses. Mm hmm. So let's talk a little bit about you know from a strategy point of view as you begin to kind of scale the service business how do you how do you think about the marketing and the customer side.
[00:19:37] Like how how do you evolve kind of the sophistication on the marketing strategy in the customer strategy to help fueled the growth and the scaling process well through through our our viewpoint and you know what we did is we created one successful chiropractic office that utilizes quite a unique model. We practice something called upper cervical it's all cash model. The fees are on the high end and then we have to consider inside of there I mean. So that speaks a little bit just in the structure of the business model the business model creates some constraints as far as what your ideal client or your target market would be. But then we need to drill down a little further and sort of figure out as a company who. We are meant to serve or who we best work with. Obviously there's economic considerations there's frustration levels pain points etc. But one of the things I think is very difficult in the service world is that if we do go to scale and we do open multiple offices. So now when we go to the second office and we bring in new providers and they're working in the second office because they're unique individuals they may not particularly enjoy working with the same individuals that we're in in let's say the mothership. And so the ideal client needs to be loosened enough that it will be flexible to allow a lot of individual providers in in the model. But it also needs to be tight enough that as a company that we're clear you know what we stand for and what we're delivering out to the world. And the reason why is because then obviously we want to be able to utilize universal marketing right. Yeah exactly. If we're not utilizing universal marketing we're not really in effect scaling.
[00:21:13] We just own multiple businesses.
[00:21:17] So I think that's the challenge is we want it. It's really getting honed in on that ideal client target market. But now we're talking about it through a different lens because we're talking about having it having a tight enough that the company will thrive. But having it loose enough that it allows for individuality in the delivery of the service.
[00:21:34] So tell me more about the book what else you would also cover in the book and what else can people learn by going through it.
[00:21:40] Well first of all you know one of the things the genesis of the book there is this well out my admission here and I signed some of the show notes. Sometimes these show up there is this could be my admission I'm a I'm a reality show junkie watching reality shows and my my explanation is I feel like I can learn a lot about human psychology. That that's that's my that's my explanation for it.
[00:22:01] But I remembered that I'm studying I'm studying for learning market research.
[00:22:09] There was a show called the restaurant many years ago and it detailed it was a reality show that detailed a chef and their journey in opening a restaurant and the chef obviously is very talented you know very well known in essence a celebrity chef. But at the end of the series the restaurant ends up being in dire straits financially. Ultimately the investors having to make a choice and asking the chef to either buy them out or they were going to make a change. And I realize they're watching this. I mean I don't think that's how they thought the show would end that we had to we had to reach people with this idea of look you could be a great chef. And like we discussed before they're not teaching you how to run a restaurant in culinary arts now. And so the gist of the book is falling in love with the idea of being an entrepreneur and getting your business tied through having strong marketing systems strong sale system which look I think that's probably the weakest link and service providers because they think that sales means used car salesmen and they think that look I provide a service. Why would I have to sell it. A lot of people think especially in the medical industry I'm above that. I don't have to sell which is an absolute lie right. That's that's not true. And so it's learning those skills and then really making sure that you know from a business side of things that you understand what it is that you're getting into as an entrepreneur that you're building good solid systems and processes that will be repeatable and allow you to scale and that we're developing a vision and a mindset for success and for abundance.
[00:23:43] It makes sense.
[00:23:44] And so tell me about how how you're building your business and how you're working with these folks.
[00:23:49] What is what is your business model like and how are you scaling the work that you're doing.
[00:23:53] Yeah I know and I love that because from a business model perspective I think that that's a great question too for each of the listeners to think about. What is your what is your model is it does it really represent an investable opportunity. And so our sort of crown jewel here is the specific chiropractic centers. That's our passion. It's a franchise of chiropractic offices that spanned from Kuwait to Boston in the United States. And we're currently undertaking some international exploration into Mexico and the Philippines. And so that's right. That's our passion. But just as we talked about we realized really early on look especially because we're performing and providing a highly specialized service human resource was one of those limiting resources right that we could scale but we would just have to be putting anybody into these offices to provide. And so we began a teaching program it's called The Art of the specific and so look this is for every every listener I think this is vital to you have to know you know what it is that you deliver and there has to be a way that you deliver it. And there might not be adequate training for that. So that provided an opportunity there and then we began coaching some of the people that didn't necessarily go on with us into our franchise. And so we created this thing called the Black Diamond Club which is basically a mastermind Think Tank for service providers where we work on on a continual basis. Those basically four core pillars of marketing sales entrepreneurship and mindset. And so all of those things are integral. Needed it's not for distinct businesses. They're all interrelated businesses that help to feed. Ultimately our core business which is the franchise.
[00:25:27] Yeah. And so and what is your vision where are you going to take this. What's what is the plan for the future.
[00:25:32] You know I haven't let go of that. You know I think I was 20 years old when I entered into Chiropractic College and that idea of changing the world right. So now we want to see you know offices here. Here's my thing is. And from a service provider is is accessibility. So we would love to see every man woman and child on the planet have access. That doesn't mean that they're going to acquire but they have access to our service. And so that's our goal is to really see if we can make a global impact. I don't know if I'll reach it before I die. Time is limited on the earth. But that would still be the vision.
[00:26:03] Excellent. It's a great story. I love the big picture thinking and really thinking through the processes that you need to put in place to get there. So kudos.
[00:26:11] Good work too. Any last takeaways for audience in terms of things to think about or you know if you're in a service based business how to kind of start thinking about the next stage of growth.
[00:26:22] Yeah I would say one of the biggest things I think about if you're a service professional is to to be very aware of building systems and infrastructure that aren't based around your personality. I can write and I think that you can attest to this. There's so many businesses out there that are personality based businesses. And while yes we can't take the personality out of the business person that's always going to be a fundamental and integral part of a business. You need to work really hard if you want to grow on creating systems that anybody can utilize. That's what allows you to scale. They can't be based on who you are as an individual. They need to be a little bit more generic. So the next person can come in and start to figure out how to reproduce the same results that you did. And I would say that that's one of the hardest things as a service provider to step away from having it be all based on themselves. And you just can't grow in scale that way.
[00:27:21] Yeah yeah no I think that's very true and it's tough. It's a tough shift to make some people don't successfully do that. I think it's a it's a thing that really is a sign of whether or not you're gonna be able to grow unskilled a business.
[00:27:32] Shaw, Lacey it has been a pleasure if people want to find out more about the two of you about the book about the work that you do. What's the best way to get that information.
[00:27:39] Yeah so our Web site is https://shawnandlacey.com/ guess we both have somewhat unique spelling for SeanandLacey.com or Black Diamond Club.com.
[00:27:51] They could find us there and in our book on Amazon none of your business is available there through Amazon.
[00:27:57] Awesome. And I'll make sure that all those links are in the show notes so people can click through and get that short list it isn't my pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time with me today.
[00:28:04] Oh it's been fantastic. Thank you Bruce.
[00:28:06] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full is a podcast episodes. Download the tools and worksheets and access other great content. This is a Web site that scaling up services dot com and toll free to sign up for the free newsletter scalingupservices/newsletter.