The ‘supplemental income’ smokescreen that conceals the true problem of weak prospecting and sales as the culprit for low income
NOTE: This article was originally released in 2005 in response to a surge of solicitations I received from MLMers who discovered what I do and who I represent.
Listen to the audio version of this article here:
A recent trend has developed within the Chiropractic sector, a spur off the beaten path of standard practice promotion and expansion strategy, largely due to economic downturn.
While oppressive regulation, declining insurance coverage, and the like can be to blame, purposeful motivations by Chiropractors have become all but non-existent, supplanted by the barest survival strategy.
Defeated by the idea of “supplemental income” is the will to fight for proper compensation.
Hence, an all-out invasion of Multi-Level Marketing (or MLM)* has beset struggling Chiropractors causing a vital problem to be ignored.
It All Starts With Seeming “Good Intentions”
While it can be good financial practice to have diversified sources of income, it’s obvious that one must ensure each source earns profitably. More vital would be the fact that no source should tax or strain any other, i.e. it’s fatal to make a new company you start utilize the resources of your existing one.
Multi-level Marketing, MLM or Network marketing have similar basic structures. In this business model, a distributorship is formed around a product whereby users become distribution points.
The concept is that one profits from his “down-line” meaning the levels of purchase and distribution below his. The larger the magnitude of the network, the larger becomes the profit.
Why Chiropractors and Their Consultants as a Target?
Whereas building a network on individual sales grows one’s network gradually, finding someone who is in contact with multitudes of people or prospects provides more rapid results. It’s on this principle that chiropractors are targeted by health product multi-levels.
It is this intent which has put me and Screening Experts in the watchful cross-hairs of multi-level enthusiasts, with many politely declined, very profitable offers received by me within the last three years alone.
Obviously if one can note the exponential factor of signing up one doctor as a distributor, calculating how many patients he may sign up under him, one would be foolish not to further multiply the product times the number of Chiropractic practices a Chiropractic management, consulting or coaching company, like I and Screening Experts, represent.
Admittedly, it is difficult to ignore the dollar signs.
With the knowledge that this model prolongs the “poor-compensation-for-care” issue, I have resisted such offers to this day and will continue to do so, short of any applicability to our purpose and true practice growth strategy.
This Is Not a Campaign Against MLM or Network Marketing
In all fairness, MLM as a strategy and business-building tool is quite valid, and it’s certain many products so distributed are worthwhile.
As for a supplemental income plan, it can be an easy way to so earn extra potential income.
It is only the idea that a doctor may like the business plan better than the product and tax his practice, using it for distributorship resources, that is brought into question.
Witness the many valid, non-MLM nutritional supplements on the market that can enhance patient care, not to mention setting up a sort of “down-line” that is ripe for referrals.
Why Is the Idea of Residual Income Pressed So Forcefully?
Residual income is a point that is often pressed by the sales pitches for the top multi-level marketed products. While a valid point, it can become twisted into an argument that anyone who has a “nine-to-five” or runs a company (such as a Chiropractic clinic) is a chump for not working smarter.
They argue that such a clinic may earn, but has no residual income. While this may be true in some ways, it is certainly not because there is no profit to be earned by Chiropractors. It is, rather, that such income potential is not recognized.
Every practice, factually, has more residual income potential than any MLM out there just on patient reactivation and referrals alone, let alone services and modalities chiropractors have not yet conceptualized as valuable which could be earning them a great deal more.
Further, if everyone is busy earning income, who will be out there helping the sick become well and keeping the well from becoming sick? Obviously, some professionals need to take responsibility for others, a concept many MLM participants fail to understand.
The True Test That Reveals if a Practice Has Been So Invaded
As for the products themselves, all a doctor or clinic director must do is to examine whether or not his initial interest was factually for the benefit of his patients, or if it was for the geometric progression one visualized in using a patient database to set up a network.
This is the acid test from which you can glean an instant answer, if you can be honest enough with yourself to confront it.
What Can Be Learned From This and Used to Your Advantage?
As for the MLM model itself, it can be learned from and utilized in one’s own sphere.
Imagine having lunch with a friend who says he is suffering from back pain.
You respond, “Evan, I am involved with something that helped me with that exact problem.” Continuing, you enlighten him about a tremendously effective product, formulated from a special ingredient, originating in the plains of the Midwest, which has been nature’s “best kept secret” for better than a century [since 1895].
You explain that it’s not only eliminated the worst of your symptoms, it’s improved your overall health and enjoyment of life and you are revitalized. So much so, you became a distributor, drastically improving your livelihood, happiness and prosperity as well as that of those you know and love.
In trying it himself, he becomes excited too and elects to become a distributor.
Before long, he is spreading the word to his friends, getting them similarly involved. A colossal network of distributors develops a down-line of thousands hence earning you some such title as “Master Director”.
What MLM company is this? Of course, it’s Chiropractic – started by a health guru doctor named “Palmer”, the OG who inspired multitudes of people like you to make it their main pursuit in life, fueled by similar passion.
This is not fiction or delusion.
This is your life’s work and a very successful model of how to promote what you do.
Screening Experts was founded on this principle, of one person receiving a miracle of Chiropractic care and so getting others to do the same.
Calculate what would happen if every patient you have ever treated were to respond this way. You would have it made!
If you still need to do the math, visit the bookstore and order a copy of my definitive manual “How to Recruit and Deploy a Patient Referral Army” to learn how to do this, simply and easily, and how you already have an army working for you that you didn’t even know about.
This is way more contagious than anyone would notice when they have their heads buried in the depressing ledger reflecting, not the injustice of oppressive enemies, but of our own lack of understanding of how to make people think like we do and value it and therefore make more sales, get paid what we’re worth, to do what we do, to live out our purpose.
As I discuss in the “Referral Army” manual and field guide, while you have been distracted by the financial bottom line, people are out in the trenches, taking grenades for lack of training on how to spread the word. And they are dying out there, losing their last ember of passion to help others for such failure.
This army is a “downline” you already had and were too preoccupied to notice.
Stick to What Has Worked for More Than a Century
The answer to the repeated attacks on this brilliant profession has been a steadfast front and communion of doctors standing up for it, ensuring it will endure.
The downtrends of reimbursement are sufficient now to where they can no longer be ignored.
Get the right answers to supplementing income that include getting yourself reimbursed or paid properly and in the correct proportion to the life you restore for your patients.
Do not devalue yourself. You are still the hero you set out to be.
Learn how to prospect and sell properly, and get paid like it. And may you never have the need for “supplemental” income.
