BASED ON AN EPISODE OF Business School for the Rehab Chiropractor EP 239: The Biggest Lie Chiropractors Believe About Marketing Listen to the original episode → |
Ask most chiropractors what their practice needs most, and you’ll hear the same answer nine times out of ten: more new patients.
It’s an understandable answer. It’s also, in most cases, wrong.
Scroll through your own feed and you’ll see why this belief sticks. Thirty new patients in thirty days. Twenty seven patients in twenty days. A new patient special to land nine patients in nine days. Marketing agencies build entire businesses around that promise, because it’s the thing chiropractors ask for, and it’s an easy thing to sell. Run the ad, watch the numbers, adjust the creative. It feels like progress because it’s visible and measurable. But the thing you ask for and the thing that actually grows your practice, and grows it fastest, are often two different things.
This article breaks down the three ways any business, including yours, actually grows revenue. It makes the case that pricing, not another marketing push, is usually the faster and more sustainable lever to pull. And it walks through why raising your prices feels so much riskier than it actually is, what it takes to do it well, and how to tell which lever is genuinely right for where your practice is right now.
The Three Growth Levers Every Chiropractic Practice Has
Here’s a principle that applies to any business, not just chiropractic. Whether you run a rehab practice, a frozen yogurt shop, or a marketing agency, there are only three ways to grow revenue:
- More patients. Get more people in the door.
- More value per visit. Increase frequency, retention, and the care plans patients move through.
- A higher price per patient. Charge more for the same time and the same value.
Most chiropractors only ever pull lever one. It’s the default, and it’s the lever every ad in your feed is selling you. But it’s also usually the slowest and most expensive lever to pull, because it requires a constant, unending stream of new leads just to stand still.
Lever three is the one most owners avoid, and it’s the one that changed the trajectory of my own practice. When I opened Strive to Move, I charged $60 a session. Over time, that became $70, then $80, then $95, then $125, for the same service and the same time with the patient. The volume of patients didn’t change. The revenue did.
In 2019, I restructured my business model entirely and raised prices again. Average revenue per client went from around $1,000 to over $2,000. That year, my practice grew 34 percent. The following year, in the middle of a pandemic, I saw fewer new patients than the year before, and the business still grew. That’s the proof: getting more new patients is not the only way, or even the fastest way, to grow.
One caveat worth naming directly: if your practice runs on insurance, lever three is largely off the table. Insurance contracts fix your price. Warren Buffett has said the worst business to be in is one where you don’t control your price, and that’s exactly the bind insurance-based practices sit in. If that’s you, the conversation about cash pay, hybrid models, or the specific patients and services you take insurance for becomes part of this decision, not a side issue.
Lever two, more value per visit, is the one that gets skipped over most often, but it’s often the easiest to build on top of what you’re already doing. This is frequency, retention, and the care plans a patient actually moves through, not a one-off adjustment, but a full plan with rehab, follow-up, and a clear next step built in. A practice that treats every visit as an isolated transaction leaves this lever untouched. A practice with a real care plan and a retention system captures more value from the same patient relationship without needing a single new lead. It’s not as fast as raising your price, but it doesn’t carry the same identity risk either, which makes it a reasonable place to start if pricing feels like too big a jump right now.
Why Raising Your Prices Feels Riskier Than It Is
If pricing is the faster lever, why do so few chiropractors pull it?
Because marketing feels safe, and pricing doesn’t.
When you run an ad, send an email, or launch a new patient special, you stay at a distance from the person on the other end. You can watch the numbers, adjust the creative, and never actually face a human being telling you no. It’s measurable. It feels productive. And critically, it protects your identity, because an underperforming ad campaign says nothing about your worth as a clinician.
Raising your price doesn’t offer that same distance. When a prospective patient says you’re too expensive, what most chiropractors hear isn’t a comment about the market. What they hear is “my care isn’t worth it,” and underneath that, “I’m not worth it.” After years of school, loans, and a doctor’s title, that’s a hard thing to sit with.
This is also why “get more new patients” is such an appealing goal on its own; it can quietly become a substitute for profitability. A new grad heading into his first year of practice once told me his only goal for the first three months was to get busy. Not profitable. Not sustainable. Just busy. Busy feels like progress. It isn’t the same thing as a business that works, and volume-based thinking, chasing busy instead of profitable, is exactly what keeps a practice capped.
What It Actually Takes to Raise Your Prices
Raising your price isn’t as simple as changing a number on your website. A few things have to be true first.
You have to communicate value, not just announce a price. Patients don’t push back on price in a vacuum; they push back when the value hasn’t been made clear. That starts with how you talk about outcomes, not just services.
Your case presentation has to hold up under real confidence. If you’re apologizing for your price in the room, patients will feel that before they hear a number.
Your systems have to support the higher price point. That means the patient experience, the results, and the follow-through all need to match what you’re now charging. A higher price without the system behind it just creates friction.
Underneath all three of those is the real shift: trading the belief that “I’m a clinician, not a business person” for “my job is to communicate the value I provide clearly, and charge a price that reflects it.” That identity shift, more than any pricing script, is what actually makes this work.
Choosing The Right Growth Lever For Where You Are Now
None of this means new patients are irrelevant, or that pricing is always the answer. The right lever depends on where your practice actually is.
More patients is genuinely the right move when:
- You’re early in your practice and still building a patient base and a track record
- You have real capacity to absorb more volume without straining your systems or your care quality
- Your pricing already reflects the value you provide, so more volume compounds a healthy margin instead of masking a thin one
Pricing is the faster, more sustainable path when:
- You’re at or near capacity and the honest constraint is time, not lead flow
- Your margin is thinner than your patient volume suggests it should be
- You’ve been treating “more new patients” as the answer for a while without the revenue to show for it
Reading your own capacity, margin, and patient volume honestly is the actual work here. It’s rarely as simple as picking one lever forever; it’s picking the right one for where you are today, and being willing to revisit that as your practice changes.
Growth Isn’t A Marketing Problem
Growth isn’t about doing more marketing. It’s about deciding what kind of practice, and what kind of pricing, you’re actually building.
If your practice isn’t where you want it to be, the fix is rarely the next ad, the next new patient special, or the next agency promising thirty patients in thirty days. More often, it’s a clearer, more confident answer to a question most chiropractors never ask directly: what am I actually worth, and am I charging like it?
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the three ways a chiropractic practice grows revenue Every practice, and every business, grows revenue in one of three ways: getting more patients, increasing the value per visit through frequency and retention, or raising the price per patient. Most chiropractors default to the first lever, even though the other two are often faster and more sustainable. Should I raise my prices before I try to get more new patients? It depends on your capacity and your current margin. If you’re already near capacity or your margin is thinner than your patient volume suggests it should be, raising your price is usually the faster path to more revenue. If you’re early in your practice and still building volume and a track record, growing your patient base first may make more sense. Does raising prices mean losing patients? Not necessarily, and often not at all if the price increase is paired with clear communication of value and a confident case presentation. Justin raised his own prices from $60 to $125 a session over time without losing patient volume. Can I raise my prices if I take insurance? Insurance contracts set your reimbursement rate, so this lever is largely unavailable for insurance-based services. Practices in this position typically need to look at a cash-pay or hybrid model for the services where pricing flexibility matters most. How do I know when more patients is actually the right move? More patients makes sense when you have real capacity to take on volume without straining your systems, and when your current pricing already reflects the value you provide. If pricing is already thin, more volume just scales a problem instead of solving one. What’s the fastest way to increase chiropractic practice revenue? For most practices with room in their pricing, raising prices is the fastest lever, since it doesn’t require any new leads or additional time from the owner. The tradeoff is that it requires clear value communication and confidence in the room, not just a new number on a price sheet. |
Podcast Connection This article expands on Episode 239 of Business School for the Rehab Chiropractor: “The Biggest Lie Chiropractors Believe About Marketing.” Listen to Episode 239 → |
If pricing is the lever your practice actually needs to pull, that’s exactly what CBA and Mastermind are built to help you implement. Book a Strategy Call to figure out which lever is right for you.