My Formula for Hiring, Giving Bonuses and Reviewing Our Chiropractic Team

Are you struggling with hiring and leading your Associate Docs and CAs?

One of the core foundations of our PX content revolves around Team & Leadership. After you’ve mastered certainty in adjusting and communication, it’s time to focus on developing a rockstar team to run alongside you.

We’re diving right into the successful formula that has been used at PWC to not only sustain but also keep growing at such a rapid pace.

Over 15 years we’ve hired and managed A LOT of great staff members. After all of those years, we’ve developed principles to keep up with the constant growth of our practice.

Dr. Tony Ebel breaks down the top 3 questions he’s asked when it comes to his chiropractic team.

1. When should I hire?

I break this down to 3 timeframes:

Hire Early ✅
Hire On-time 🟡
Hire Late ❌

The chiropractic profession attracts solopreneurs that often don’t have the foundation of hiring skills and are left to trust books and random advice along the way.

And even worse, since we are typically overachievers, we tend to think we can take on way too much for way too long without added help. Sound familiar? This includes scheduling, payroll, marketing, adjusting, and the list goes on.

If you’re finding yourself overwhelmed with the day-to-day operations of your practice, do not worry. I’ve been there.

So here’s the deal. I’m a big believer in hiring before you’re actually ready. That’s right! I’m already breaking the rules those business books told you.

So why hire them early?

When you hire early, you actually have far less stress in the process.

You're not finding yourself in a five-star panic looking for this person on the team
You're not so buried that you take the first person that walks through the door
You're not hiring in a state of fight or flight which creates space for an effective hiring process

The result of this has not just led to our big growth, but fast growth.

The second reason hiring early is less stressful and more effective is because then when you make that hire you and your team are not so slammed and so buried that you skip a key thing that most people do when they finally hire: Onboarding and Training

Did you know the first 90 days is the most crucial timeline when bringing on a new employee? Doing a really good job the first 90 days without the pressure of performance expectations is easily the greatest thing in the world.

Early to me is not actually early. It's the right time in my opinion. Because if you hire when it feels it is on time, you're still probably going to be a little behind.

When you hire early, you get to control the main components such as finding them, hiring them, training them, in a more complete and more organized way.

The new hire will appreciate you bringing them on early too.

They will immediately become wildly productive and impactful, quicker, faster, and better. Can you imagine feeling like that at your last job? And as a result, we’ve seen our practice grow when we can set up the new employees to win.

What about on-time and late hires? Well, those are not ideal options for hiring and we try our best to always avoid it.

2. When do you know when to bonus?

Let’s talk about money! One of the more frequent team questions I get from other owners is when to bonus or increase the pay for an associate doctor and CA staff?

Let’s break this down using the 3 T’s of how we DON’T pay our team members.

Time ⌛| Tasks ✔️| Time ⏰

First, there is TIME. When it comes to accumulating the amount of time someone has been on your team (one year, three years, and so on), this doesn’t mean they’re increased production for your practice by being there for a while.

Then there are TASKS that are already on their to-do list. You can have someone in your team who gets a lot of tasks done, but are they just busy doers? Are they just finding busy work that doesn't actually move the needle?

Then there is the TIME it takes to do those tasks. If they're spending a lot of hours and they're really slow and not getting a lot done, it’s hard to justify reasons for an increase in pay.

On their own none of these actually mean more impact, more performance, and more productivity.

This is where your job as a leader begins!

It’s now your job to get the right person on your team, get them trained, equipped, and resourced to be more organized, to be more efficient.

Therefore that leaves us with when is the best time to increase someone's pay?

When they have clearly earned it through performance and increased impact and ease.

You can easily measure this by creating key performance indicators (KPIs) that create impact and income for the practice. When you’ve established clear KPIs, it's clear to see that the work you are doing is moving the needle.

Your goal when going through the interview process is to find people who do things really well and do things on their own. They are self-managed employees – idea generators, innovators, and GSD’ers.

No one gets paid extra because we have to hold their hand all the way down through the task. That's not really helpful. Okay. That's slow, that's inefficient and that's costly.

When you’re growing, reaching more kids and families, that means you’re generating more revenue and profit for the practice – and it’s clearly trackable.

At this point, you know that you are rewarding the employee for growth in your organization and can increase pay accordingly.

Tools and Resources Worth Checking Out

Willpower Doesn’t Work - A great book on creating the right environment
Monday.com - Software to track project progress and timelines
Slack - My favorite internal communication tool

3. When would you do a performance review?

Weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly?

This may surprise you and once again be against what you’ve read about or learned in school but I don’t schedule performance reviews. And here’s why.

I’ve found there are only two (2) times to do a performance review.

Just like we do with our patients, our team members get progress checks.

1. They’re stuck and need a new Care Plan.

Just like with patients, it’s pretty easy to see when our team is struggling. Maybe they are stuck, not happy or thriving. We quickly sit down and see what’s happening with them and help them with their “subluxation” and get them back on track.

We commit to figuring it out during this review. We find out what the person is really hungry to be getting after, or the kind of change of pace that they want to have within their roles. We collaborate, we get after it, and get them back on fire.

2. They're freaking crushing it!

This one is straightforward.

Whenever we notice someone going above and beyond their role, we sit down and we give them exactly what they deserve. We give them tons of praise, tons of gratitude and we give them that kick forward in their pay.

So to sum up our progress checks, they’re either:

Behind Pace - Stuck (energy, production, etc.) and we figure it out!
Ahead of Pace - Crushing it (when they’re going beyond) Praise, pay, etc.

As you can see throughout this post – we don’t do the ordinary. And we don't look to grow ordinary practices and businesses.

We look to grow extraordinary practices because we have an extraordinary mission and vision with pediatric, prenatal, and family chiropractic.

It’s a lot to take in, but the ultimate goal is to have happy employees that are highly motivated and engaged.

If you’re looking to take a deeper dive into your business, The Pediatric Experience offers world-class pediatric chiropractic online training that is easily accessible, wildly applicable, and ridiculously affordable! We pride ourselves in being the most organized, effective, and implementable Pediatric Chiropractic training platform on the planet! Learn certainty, science, adjusting, communication, marketing, systems, and more from the world's leading Pediatric Chiropractic experts, Dr. Tony Ebel and Team PX!