Transcript:

Michelle Grasek:

Welcome back. Today, we’re talking about some of the challenges facing the acupuncture profession, particularly when it comes to building and running a successful practice.

As you know, most acupuncturists graduate feeling unprepared for the business side of practice, and add in the difficulties of the current economy, and it’s understandable why many practitioners are feeling a little discouraged right now. These are very real challenges. And today, my guest, Amy and I are talking about how to move forward and make progress despite them.

How can we acknowledge what’s unfair without getting stuck in frustration? And how can we focus our energy on what we can control so we can make proactive choices to help our practices succeed? Amy Abelar is a repeat guest on the show.

She’s an acupuncturist who’s been growing her practice for the past 18 years, and she’s the founder of Acupuncture Practice Systems, where she teaches practice management, marketing, and business strategies for acupuncturists. Today, Amy and I talk about the sphere of control exercise that Amy uses to help overwhelmed practitioners figure out where to put their energy, why marketing and business skills are learnable, even if your acupuncture program didn’t prepare you for them, and how the stability and success of your practice ultimately allows you to keep serving patients and in turn provide stability for them. If things aren’t going the way you expected right now, you are certainly not alone, but you still have choices.

You can learn new skills, try something different, ask for help, and take the next step that is available to you. I hope this conversation feels encouraging and empowering and helps you figure out what that next step might be. All right, let’s dive in.

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Hi, Amy, welcome back. How are you?

Amy Abelar:

I’m good. How are you?

Michelle Grasek:

I am good. Thank you so much for joining me again. We recorded one very long, very wonderful episode that I broke into two previously and realized that there’s so much more that we could talk about.

So before I dive into it, why don’t you introduce yourself for anyone who hasn’t heard those episodes yet?

Amy Abelar:

Yeah, absolutely. I am Dr. Amy Abelar. I’m an acupuncturist, I am a business owner, and I’m an educator.

I’ve been growing my business, Nurturing Touch Massage and Acupuncture for the last 18 years. And last year, I started Acupuncture Practice Systems where I teach practice management, marketing business strategies for acupuncturists because our profession needs a lot of business support. I’m also fortunate to be starting teaching practice management at the master’s and doctorate level at the school that I went to.

I’ll get to be working with students as well as continuing to support practitioners that are already graduated.

Michelle Grasek:

So what school is that?

Amy Abelar:

ACCHS. That’s where I did my master’s. They asked me to come back and revamp and really make a practice management program that is going to be top notch.

Michelle Grasek:

That’s my dream, to get to tear down an existing class and then build it back up and say, okay, it’s 2026. Here’s what we actually need.

Amy Abelar:

Yes, yes. I’m very fortunate that they have a lot of faith in me. The dean now was a teacher when I went to school and he had reached out and said, hey, I remember back in school, you were super business motivated.

You already had a business. Would you be interested in teaching this class? And at first I thought, where am I going to find the time for that?

But I just enjoy so much helping the profession that I decided, yeah, let’s do this. And the schools need it. The number one thing that people complain about with acupuncture schools is they graduated knowing how to be really good clinicians, but they’re like, now what?

Now what do I do in practice? How do I open a practice? If there’s not a job available, what do I do?

That’s my goal is to just send them to fly with all that they need.

Michelle Grasek:

Yes. And we had talked about in your previous episodes, how you have a multidisciplinary practice because I don’t think you mentioned this in your intro. So you are practicing acupuncturist, of course, and then you have another acupuncturist and then you have something like, I forget, 20 massage therapists and then several admin people.

So last time we spoke, it was 24 people working at your practice.

Amy Abelar:

Yeah. I think one of the reasons why I’m enjoying this so much is because I can see one of the things I loved about acupuncture when I was initially looking to become an acupuncturist, since I was a massage therapist beforehand, was one of the things I love is I can get bored really easily with a lot of things. I get bored with my workouts.

I’ll do Bikram yoga for a little while, but I’m like, it’s the same poses every time I need something different. So I can get bored very easily. And one of the things I loved about Chinese medicine is you could literally reinvent how you practice over and over because there’s so many different specialties you could do.

There’s so many different successful business models, whether you are an employee, whether you are working for yourself, whether you’re a specialist, whether you generalize, whether you join someone else’s practice, whether you grow a business and hire other providers, there’s so many different things you can do that it’s gosh, there’s so many ways to succeed that it’s really hard to hear acupuncturists who are like, I don’t know what to do.

And I think I’m just going to quit.

Michelle Grasek:

Oh gosh, I hate hearing that. It’s heartbreaking. Right.

And I think that we really need more people in the profession saying things like there are so many different ways to succeed. I think there’s a lot of focus on how hard it is or the percentage of people who are not succeeding and choose not to continue. And I think those, those decisions are really complex for people.

I don’t want to minimize that, but there are people out there in acupuncture who are doing so well. And a lot of times people will say they must have started 20, 25 years ago when the game was different. Some of them did, some of them are brand new and taking their communities by storm.

There’s all different models for what people can implement to be successful. So I am really curious, what kind of patterns do you see when you are speaking to acupuncturists, when you are coaching them through Acupuncture Practice Systems?

Amy Abelar:

The number one thing, I would just say there’s different examples, but the number one theme is the this isn’t fair theme. Some of the different examples I’ll get, my school told me that there would be a lot of good paying acupuncture jobs when I graduated, and there wasn’t. Can we have a timeout for that though?

Michelle Grasek:

Because I cannot, I find it really hard to believe that schools would tell people there’s a lot of good jobs. Now I live in a rural community in upstate New York, and to give everyone context, especially if they’re new, so I always say we’re closer to Canada than we are to Manhattan, right? So we weigh up and there’s no jobs here.

If you really want a job, you can go into one of the medium-sized cities or you can go down to New York. Certainly there’s jobs in New York. It doesn’t mean they’re well paying, but they exist.

Amy Abelar:

Also true. Yeah, so there’s this whole theme, and it’s interesting because I think the Gainful Employment Act has created a lot more of acupuncturists who are like, yeah, that sucks. It sucks that I can’t pay off my student loans with the amount of money that I’m earning.

And yes, obviously, there was a lot of shady stuff that happened, for sure. Do not mistake that. I’m not saying that shady things didn’t happen.

I know when I went to school too, the person who was enrolling me, I don’t know if she was maybe newer in her position and she didn’t fully understand, but my own personal example of being frustrated with a school was I had asked, can I be in multiple cohorts at one time so that I can get done faster? Because I was commuting. I lived in Roseville and was commuting to Oakland for school.

So I would drive 30 minutes to Sacramento to get on the train. I would take a two-hour train ride from Sacramento to Oakland, and then I would walk the three quarters of a mile if the bus wasn’t readily available from the train station to school in downtown Oakland. And that is wild.

That was my commute. It was brutal. It was so brutal.

But my point is that because of the commute that I had, I was like, how can I get this done as fast as possible? Because I do not want to do this for the three and a half years. I was like, I really don’t even want to do it for that long.

But can I double up? How do I make this start to finish shorter? And they said, yes, you can totally be in multiple cohorts at the same time so that you can get done faster.

And I was like, awesome, sold. Let’s sign me up. What can I do?

And that was not actually true. It didn’t work that way because you have Herbs 1 and then Herbs 2 and then Herbs 3. And because of the prereqs, you couldn’t take certain classes without having had the prerequisite for it.

So it really didn’t allow me to do two cohorts at the same time. And in fact, it made my program an entire semester longer because I ended up with the semester I started in, I had to fall into the cohort behind me. So at the time, I was definitely frustrated about I got false information and now not only am I not doing it shorter, I’m doing it longer.

But the problem is that a lot of times acupuncturists will stay in that mindset and they will live there. They will live in the, my school said this or that, there was going to be jobs or the jobs would pay well, or I was going to get done faster or the exam would be whatever. Or they try business on their own without enough business knowledge because no acupuncturist graduates with enough business knowledge that they get from their school, which is what I’m really trying to change.

But a lot of times I find myself repeating things my mom said to me. When I would get really frustrated growing up with whatever was going on, school, other things, circumstances outside of my control, my mom would say, you know what? Have your pity party, but have it for five to 10 minutes.

You can absolutely be frustrated, pissed off, irritated, whatever. Feel how you feel. Don’t bury it.

Don’t disregard it. But then you can’t live there. You have to then make a choice to do what you can control.

You can’t control what happened, what they told you. Maybe they said you could work full time while going to school and you’re like, wow, actually that was not possible. Maybe whatever the story was that you were told and now you’re graduating and it’s not what you thought it was going to be.

You have to say, okay, not what I thought it was, but now what do I do? And a lot of acupuncturists just get so frustrated and so stuck in the, this is not what I thought it was going to be, that they don’t move on to the, okay, now what do I do? And that’s the pattern that I think a lot of people have to break through to get to the other side because you do have to commit to, yeah, this might not be what I thought, but now I need to make a change.

Now what is within my control and how can I make this successful, even though it may not look exactly like what I originally thought before I started school.

Michelle Grasek:

Yeah, that is such good advice. I feel like it’s super challenging, but possible to hold those two things even at the same time.

Amy Abelar:

Totally.

Michelle Grasek:

I love a good pity party for myself. It just feels right. So you’re like, I deserve it.

But then also like you can be super pissed at a situation that you are stuck in that you did not create and at the same time hold the intention or the question, what next? What happens next? And I think that’s so powerful to cultivate because the what’s next reminds you that you have agency, no matter what the situation is.

And I think agency, belief in your own agency to make change in your life is like a muscle. I really think that as soon as you start making moves, change something, take an action, even a baby step towards a goal. This is woo woo, but I feel like the universe is paying attention.

Things start to shift.

Amy Abelar:

Yes.

Michelle Grasek:

And if you think of it like acupuncture, it’s like the stagnation starting to break up and it’s not immediate, but the process is happening, but you have to put the needle in first. You got to do a thing, any small thing. I find that when I’m really stuck in those feelings, even doing an activity that I find productive but is unrelated is helpful to signal the universe or the energy.

So if I’m like, why are we having so many new patients cancel before they even get to the office? I don’t organize a cabinet or something and just tell the universe I am here. I am doing something productive with this energy.

I am releasing it in the process and it helps me. What I really want people to do is take a marketing action, but if they need to start with organizing a closet, do that first and then think about what is the next thing that I could do to make this particular situation less stressful, less awful.

Amy Abelar:

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I tell a lot of my patients that I’ve been finding, I’ve also been telling acupuncturists that I’ve coached is that have you’ve heard of the sphere of influence or sphere of control?

Have you heard of that exercise?

Michelle Grasek:

It sounds familiar, but I couldn’t tell you what it is.

Amy Abelar:

So basically what it is, and I do this with my patients all the time because a lot of the time we know we have patients that come in who are just overwhelmed. They’re overwhelmed by the symptoms they’re experiencing. They’re overwhelmed by the stuff that’s going on in their life.

They’re overwhelmed by the fact that they don’t feel like their doctors are being, that the doctors are being dismissive of what it is they’re going through and they feel alone and they feel all these things are happening. And so one of the things I’ll tell people to do, and I do this when I get overwhelmed too, is I will take one piece of paper and you write out everything that you are stressed about, worried about, irritated about, problems you’re having to solve, all of the stuff. You just get it out of your brain and onto paper.

And for me and a lot of other people, just that step feels better because it’s not rolling around in your head anymore. It’s on the paper. And it’s so funny because the psychology of people is we don’t like the things we’re stressed about, but also we can’t let them go.

And so we just tend to hold them. But if I, what if I forget, what if I forget about this thing that I’m, so yeah, what if you did forget, right? That might not be a bad thing.

But anyway, so if you put it on the paper, it’s not in your head anymore and you already feel a little bit better. But the second part of it is to take a second piece of paper and draw a big circle and label that your sphere of influence or your sphere of control. And when you do that, then from the first page, you go down each item and you ask yourself, do I have any control over this?

And if you do, you write it in your circle. And if you don’t, you leave it on the page, the first page. So the cool thing is most of the time, what happens is you have maybe 20 or 30 things on your list of things that are stressing you out.

And only five to seven of them is anything that you can control. So it immediately helps you separate out because everything can feel overwhelming and everything can feel out of control. If there’s enough big things going on or enough little things even going on that you don’t have control over, and then you just feel completely helpless.

When you separate it, you now have, I tell people with the first list, do whatever feels right. Burn it, keep it, pray about it, give it to the universe, whatever it is you believe. Try to let those things go as much as you can and focus your energy on the things that are within your sphere of control because that’s where you can actually make a difference.

And your energy, like you were talking about, putting your energy towards something you have control over, something that can be productive, something that doesn’t have to be your biggest problem that you start with, but it could be just something that helps you feel better because you actually have control over it. And then your attitude, it confirms for you that, oh, I do have control over some things. I can make a difference.

I don’t have to just sit with all of the stuff that I don’t like. I can focus on something productive. And when I do, I feel better.

And that feeling of feeling better, feeling accomplished, that you’ve made a difference, it drives you towards, okay, what else do I have control over? What else could I work on improving? And then the snowball moves in that direction instead.

So I ended up having a lot of clients do this, acupuncture clients, but then I also have a lot of my business coaching that is a lot of that. You have to get outside of the things that you can’t control and focus on what you can and just try to move forward with that because you are wasting your time and energy when you’re just harping on the things that are not in your control at all. So that’s a big tool that I think is really helpful.

Michelle Grasek:

Yeah. And I like the way that you phrase that. You think about what you can control.

You take an action that feels productive or good to you. And it reminds you, oh, I do have agency. I just made a small change in my life in this one way.

And as you said, it’s snowballs. So I think that’s so accurate. And I would also argue that I’ll say one thing that my marketing clients bring up lately is how weird and challenging the economy is.

And it seems a little unpredictable in new ways. It’s always unpredictable, but it’s really easy to get attached to that stressful energy and to assimilate it into everything that you’re thinking about. The things that I used to do that were working are no longer working or they’re just not working as well.

So they’re more effort for less return. And so I completely understand how easy it is to feel trapped in that vortex, more or less. But I do think that on the list of things we can control are, what can we learn from what is happening right now?

And then how can we apply that to a next step? Here’s the frustration. What is the next step?

I think often we don’t put marketing in the category of things we can control. We give that control away to the economy or we give it away because we don’t have confidence. And we say, oh, my school didn’t do a good job teaching me marketing.

So I can’t do that. I’ll never learn it. It’s not going to work for me.

Or I tried it once and it didn’t work. It was a disaster, quote unquote. It probably was not a disaster, but it just didn’t feel good.

And I never dug deeper to find another method that I could have tried that would feel better for my personality. I’m just writing marketing off. It’s out of my sphere of control.

When really, that is not true. The way that I always encourage people to think of marketing is as a grand experiment. Imagine you are a scientist like Bill Nye or Miss Frizzle from the Magic School Bus.

And you are having fun with these wild experiments because you are so unattached to the outcome. You’ve no idea what’s going to work. Maybe you try networking.

Maybe you try ads. Maybe you try writing for the local newspaper. Maybe you start a TikTok account.

And then as you’re going along after a couple of months, you have collected enough data to say, wow, I really hate TikTok. I’m not doing this anymore. Okay, fine.

Great. Maybe you find that, hey, networking is not as awful as I thought it would be. And I got a patient the other day.

And you’re like, okay, that’s data. Maybe I’ll continue networking for a little while longer. It doesn’t mean you have to get married to it.

You could divorce it at any time. But these are just experiments that are not meant to be personal. They’re not meant to reflect on your personality or your abilities or your ability to learn, right?

Whatever you put your energy into, you will get better at. I guarantee for everyone listening, you can learn any kind of marketing if you give it enough time. But I think it’s just such a shame that we don’t put marketing in that bubble, the sphere of control when that’s really where it should be.

Amy Abelar:

Yeah, absolutely. And the reality is nobody enjoys doing things that they don’t feel good at.

Michelle Grasek:

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Back to the episode with Amy.

Amy Abelar:

I think part of why acupuncturists avoid some of the business stuff is they’re not already good at it. And this is just this is a human nature thing. Not only acupuncturists. It’s a human nature thing.

We don’t like doing things that we’re not good at, especially if we have other things that we are really good at. Yeah, I’d rather do that because that’s what I’m good at. I just want to treat the patients because that’s what I have a master’s in.

The client’s getting off the table and saying how good they feel. That is a feel good. You know you’re good at it.

It gives you that immediate sense of gratification. It’s human nature for us to want to just do more of that. But just doing more of that won’t happen if you don’t have the patients.

If you don’t have, you know, you have to do the other pieces to get the patients into your office. And if you don’t know how to do that on your own, then you have to get help. You don’t get your real estate license before you go sell your house.

You hire a realtor because that’s their job. They know about that. We don’t feel like we have to do that with other professions.

And so I think with acupuncturists, a lot of it is that where it feels weird to use somebody as an outside resource. And if we don’t already know, we think that there must be so much to know in order to make ourselves successful that it feels out of reach. You could absolutely hire a coach.

They could take your marketing school program. They could become a member of Acupuncture Practice Systems. There’s so much that they can do to learn from somebody else who’s been there, done that, worked out all the kinks.

Buy the shortcut from someone who’s been there, knows what to do, knows what works and what doesn’t work so that you don’t feel like, oh my gosh, oh, I don’t know all of that. And it’s too unfamiliar. So I’m just not even going to try.

It seems like we feel like we have to swing the pendulum that far. You don’t have to go get a business degree, but you should learn business or learn some business things that are specific to acupuncture. A general business coach that’s not an acupuncturist is probably not going to be a good fit.

And they’re probably going to be outrageously expensive. If you learn from an acupuncturist who hasn’t grown the kind of business that you want to grow. I know people who they’re trying to grow a business where they have an admin, where they’re hiring other people.

And they’re like, yeah, my coach, they’ve never done that. They’ve never hired others. They’ve never, they’re probably not going to be able to guide you on hiring, firing, interviewing, how to run a collaborative environment, how to, if they, if that’s not something they’ve experienced.

So I think the business side of things is so foreign that it feels overwhelming.

Michelle Grasek:

Yeah. And I think there’s a couple of pieces that make that really challenging for us. One, I know my students are always telling me they didn’t have enough marketing or business education in school.

And I think that also means that we’re not taught that you have to invest in those things, that there is such a thing, an expectation for business owners to have a monthly marketing budget. You wouldn’t believe how many different advertisers or other marketing professionals, like social media managers, people that I’ve talked to get a quote from them. Their first question is always, what’s your budget?

We are just not even taught people are like zero dollars a budget. I’m not giving you any money on a monthly basis, but because there’s no marketing education. So no one ever said, okay, 10% of your income should be set aside for marketing and visibility.

But if we had known that from the beginning, I think it would be much more natural, right? It’d be so much less painful to hand that money over because already in your brain, you’re like, okay, it makes sense that sometimes marketing does cost money. I think it’s challenging.

And I’m curious, what do you walk them through when they come through with those feelings?

Amy Abelar:

Like being concerned about return on investment. One of the ways that I talk to people about it is to think about it from a patient’s perspective. So I’ll say, think about the person who’s struggling to conceive that ends up getting pregnant.

That person is more than happy to pay for the cost of the treatments because they have the baby at the end that is what they’ve been dreaming of. And if that costs them some extra acupuncture treatments, then they’re happy to have paid for that. I also have a patient who has to use her PTO or her sick pay every time she gets her period because her cramps and her clotting and flow is so bad that she cannot physically work.

So she never even dreams of actually taking a vacation because she has to save her sick pay and her vacation pay for days that she gets her period if it happens to fall on a workday. And so the quality of life that you as an acupuncturist can give back to that patient is worth way more to her than the cost of coming to you because now she gets to save her PTO and actually go on a vacation for these people.

For these people, they absolutely felt like the money they paid for their treatments was worth the results that they got. And patients are looking at it from an opportunity cost perspective.

Basically, patients understand they have to invest in their health in order to get relief, but it is worth it to them. They’ll say, okay, if I can pay for acupuncture and it gives me a quality of life that I have not had, it is worth it because the opportunity cost of not spending this money on acupuncture is that I just keep dealing with these issues I have for forever or an unknown amount of time. So our patients are making the decision to invest in acupuncture because they’re looking at it from an opportunity cost.

But on the flip side, we’re thinking about the initial costs. If all we look at when these opportunities come up is I don’t wanna pay for marketing school. I don’t wanna pay for business coaching.

We’re only looking at what that cost is. And we’re not looking at the opportunity cost of staying stuck. You’ve already spent so many acupuncturists.

You’ve spent $100,000 plus. Some it’s 50, some it’s 250. You’ve spent so much money on your education.

We call that a sunk cost. That money is spent. That degree is yours.

Yes, could we say that we should have gotten better practice management education in our schools? Absolutely, we can say that. But that doesn’t make you more successful.

You have to go out and look for these opportunities to learn from people who have been there and done that, who know what they’re doing, who are successful in the field, who are currently practicing and currently testing. For somebody like myself or somebody like you, you’re in a practice. You are, I know you’re not treating patients right now, but you have associates who are treating patients.

You are regularly testing what is working, what is not working. So I think people just need to get over the, I should have already been prepared for this before I graduated and get into the, yeah, that sucks that I wasn’t, but now what do I do? Because I’ve already sunk the cost of my education.

I already have the degree. What do I need to do to be successful so that I can make the degree worth it, so that I can pay back my student loans, so that I can continue to practice the medicine that I wanna practice and help people. How many patients are not getting help because the acupuncturists are shutting down their businesses?

If the whole goal is to help patients, you have to help yourself be successful first or your doors are not open to help these patients. That whole, you can’t pour from an empty cup. We tell this to patients all the time, but if you can’t help people, if you don’t have a practice.

Michelle Grasek:

Yes, that is something that I talk to my marketing students about. We’ll have the money mindset chapter of Acupuncture Marketing School. And they’ll mention that they feel greedy wanting to have a successful practice.

And we talk about how it’s not greedy to want stability for yourself and for your practice. Because if your clinic is financially unstable and there are people who are on the edge of closing month to month kind of thing. And COVID taught us how important it was to have lots of savings so that you can get through a crisis, right?

Because people had to close because they just didn’t have enough savings to support the business that they built through zero income. Fair enough. Who could have anticipated that?

But the idea is that the more stable your practice is, the better that benefits your patients, the more stable they can feel in their continuity of care. And sometimes that helps people just think about it differently, release some of those bad feelings about I’d like to be successful. It’s okay to want money for yourself so that your life feels stable, so that you can show up for your patients.

And it’s okay for you to want your clinic to be wildly successful so that it stays around a long time. And then maybe you can sell it when you retire and someone else can carry your legacy. I think we often don’t think about it in that way.

And I really like what you said about the opportunity costs because the example that comes to mind for me is I will often tell people that I get patients from networking, even though I’m an introvert and there’s ways to do it that don’t feel awful. And it’s about relationship building, blah, blah, blah. And they’re all bought in until they’re like, wait, it’s $300 a year to join the local chamber of commerce.

And I’m like, yeah, but divide that by 12. Like, it’s not so bad on a monthly basis. And they’re like, but I don’t know if it’s gonna work and I don’t wanna pay for something that I don’t know is going to work.

I get it. But that is exactly what you are describing that our patients are doing all the time, that the risk is worth it because the likelihood is that the outcome is going to be worth the money that they invested multiple times more. You really just can’t know that until you try.

Now, I will caveat that by saying, I don’t want people to just go dump money into ads or other marketing that they’re totally unfamiliar with and then just like siphon money away, but come up with a budget, an amount of money that feels reasonable to you, whatever that is, and then decide if this didn’t work out, could I still handle that sunk cost? I feel like most people take their marketing investment and now that they’ve spent the money, they feel much more committed to making the thing work. I spent the money, I better go to this networking meeting and I’ve got to hand out one card.

I’ve got to meet one new person. There you go. You’re expanding your visibility in your community step-by-step.

Amy Abelar:

Yep, absolutely. Yeah, a little hack for that, you have to figure out whether you want to spend your time or your money. But one of the reasons why people join Chamber of Commerce and things like that is because you can talk to a lot of different people in a small amount of time, having to have only driven to one location.

That’s one of the benefits is this is where everybody’s at and you can mingle and talk with a bunch of different people. So that gives you the access by spending that $300 a year. A lot of Chamber of Commerce will list their members on the website.

You could always just go individually, network with the people that you think would be a good fit and not join a chamber. But I will tell you that Chamber members do like to do business with other Chamber members.

Michelle Grasek:

Yes, they do. Because they’re small business owners. Absolutely, absolutely.

Amy Abelar:

And you’re part of that group and they want to support others who are in that group because they want others to support them too. And there’s more buy-in for them to support you when you are a member. So that’s definitely a factor.

And then alternatively, you’re going to these individual people. You’re having to drive to this chiropractor and introduce yourself there. You’re having to drive to this other massage therapist and introduce yourself there and drive to this other.

And there may be people that you wouldn’t necessarily think of. Maybe the guy who runs an automotive shop, his back has been killing him and he’s a great patient for you. But that might not have been somebody that you would have gone specifically to his automotive shop to try to network with him.

You know, it does give you access to people in a condensed space. So there’s ways to do things for free and there’s ways to buy access to a much more efficient approach. So then the question is, do you have more time or do you have more money?

And whatever you have more of, you can spend. I will add also what you were talking about with the whole money piece and people feeling like it’s bad to want success and bad to want money and that it feels icky. One of the things that’s interesting, so my husband and I have this conversation all the time because I have a very different idea of what financial freedom looks like than he does.

He’s like, we don’t need more stress. We don’t need more money. We’re good with what we have.

Everything’s fine. And I’m the one who’s like, grow. But I also wanna grow because I wanna help people.

But one of the things is, my husband was like, why do you feel the need to have more money? Are you coveting money? What is going on?

And I was like, no, it literally is not about the money. It is about when I have a friend whose kid is doing a fundraiser. Sure, here’s a hundred bucks.

I wanna be able to donate when I see an opportunity. I wanna be able to give gift certificates for raffles. That’s one of the ways that we market is a local schools, local charity fundraisers.

We’ll give them gift certificates for a free massage or a free acupuncture treatment that they put in their raffle and it helps to support their cause. And I wanna be able to give those things without having to think about it, without having to be like, ooh, can I afford to do that? I wanna just say, yep, that’s on my heart to give and I wanna just do it.

And I also pay my people really well. I pay them more than other places pay them, which I think is a really important strategy to less turnover, which is hugely helpful for a business. But if I pay my people really well, that means my profit margins are thinner, which means I have to have more volume in order to make up for the fact that I am paying my people really well.

And that’s a choice for how I want to practice, but that feels more ethical to me. Those things are extremely important. It is about how can I make a really quality experience for patients and how can I make sure my staff are super happy and well taken care of and treated with respect.

And really focusing on those two things as my main goals has grown the business tremendously because less turnover helps the business, great experience helps clients wanna refer other people. If I could give you a key, that is a key for sure.

Michelle Grasek:

I have two thoughts for you. The first is, have you ever read We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rogers? In her book, she talks about a lot of money mindsets and this concept that we’re talking about how a lot of people feel bad wanting success and money because they think money is bad or so much of this comes from the way we were raised and the messages we heard or like how challenging economics were when we were growing up, et cetera.

But she is really firm on the idea that every woman should seek to be a millionaire and I think she really focuses on women in her book. It’s been a while since I read it, but the reason is that when you are a resourced person, you can build the resources that you want to see either in your local community or globally. I always think of the starving artist.

It’s almost like a romanticized struggle, the challenge of being an artist. The poorer you are, the better you must be. The less willing you are to accept money, the more of a humanitarian you must be.

That doesn’t help you build up your community. If you are wealthy, then you could build a theater in your community and build out a children’s arts program or you could build out an entire basketball program. Whatever is close to your heart, that is what you get to support when you have the resources.

And then the second thing that I was thinking of is this phrase that I hear a lot from chiropractors, which is that chiropractors eat their young, which means that established chiropractors will hire brand new grads and pay them pennies until they are super burnt out and then they always leave after a year or two because they recognize they could open their own business, work less hours and make more money.

So when I was figuring out how much to pay my associates, I really kept that in mind that I never wanted to contribute to that economy. I wanted to make sure that my associates, as you said, feel appreciated. A good salary makes people feel appreciated straight up.

And then they stay longer. And again, as you said, that is really important for the long-term health of a business, low turnover.

Amy Abelar:

Yes, we’ve gone through phases where we’ve had high turnover because of a variety of issues and clients get nervous when there’s high turnover. They don’t like it. A lot of the turnover we dealt with that made clients uncomfortable was reception.

For a while, that can just, sometimes you go through phases where that is just a hard position to keep.

Michelle Grasek:

Thank you so much for being here. I think you have to leave very shortly to go take care of patients. Yes.

So where can everyone find you online? Where can they get in touch with you if they wanna work with you?

Amy Abelar:

Yeah, absolutely. My website is acupuncturepracticesystems.com and there’s a variety of options. Most people will join the membership.

It’s a really amazing library of resources, training videos, marketing materials, a whole bunch of things. And then people can interact with me through there as well if they have questions about things or they want more information about something, then we’ll create the content for them. So I’d say that’s the number one resource.

Michelle Grasek:

Perfect. And we will put that in the show notes for everyone. Thank you so much for being here.

Amy Abelar:

Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Michelle Grasek:

As always, thanks so much for listening. If your marketing is feeling stuck, I’d love to help you figure out exactly what to focus on next. The Marketing Breakthrough Audit is a personalized 30-minute video review of your website, your Google business profile, and other parts of your online presence with clear practical recommendations tailored to your practice.

No generic advice, just the changes I would prioritize if this were my own clinic. You can learn more and reserve your spot at michellegrasek.com forward slash audit. Thanks so much for being here.

I’ll talk to you next time.