First Impressions of Your Office

Thousands of chiropractors around the globe have found the secrets to using their office environment as a machine to attract new patients, better educate them toward a healthy, chiropractic-centered lifestyle, reduce wasted overhead and increase profitability. But for thousands of others, their office environment actually scares patients away.

Prospective patients have all kinds of preconceived notions about chiropractic, many of which are not at all reflective of what this profession represents or deserves. It's unfortunate, but true. Expectations become reality as patients drive past your sign, step out of their car and walk through your front door. Simple, inexpensive strategies will transform these negative impressions and prepare them for the health and wellness that awaits within.

The Approach

The path to your front door is the patient's portal to health and wellness. Inspect your entryway each and every day, and do so with your eyes wide open! Ensure that the trash can is not next to your sign. Be sure there are no cigarette butts or large ashtrays outside your door.

Planting colorful annuals is a great way to show life, so keep them healthy and properly watered. Have your landscaping professionally manicured, weed the beds and remove any refuse from the beds regularly.

Door and Entry

Your front door says a lot about you and your practice. Ensure that it conveys a sense of convenience and professionalism. While practices may accept every credit card under the sun, dime-store thinking compels doctors to advertise this irrelevant fact by adorning their front doors with cheap credit-card stickers.

The professional approach is to ensure that your front door is commercial grade, preferably high-quality glass with minimal trim. Cheap plastic storm doors have no place in a professional environment. Avoid residential aluminum or wooden doors. The threshold should be durable and not worn or rotting wood. A high-quality glass door makes a great impression.

Use a professional, easily read font for the doctor's name. This may also be where you want to include the names of other providers, as well as any other services that you offer. Display your regular business hours either on or within 4 feet of the door.

Tell It Like It Is

Businesses use signs to promote their existence, but for some reason chiropractors think it is important to tell their entire life story. While you may want patients to know that you offer more than just an adjustment, few understand what wellness really means. Decompression, AK, or upper-cervical specific is even more of a mystery for them, so don't waste valuable real estate to advertise what very few people understand.

While you may want to set yourself a step above the competition in your neighborhood, use your signs to advertise the core of your business.

Signs are used to pinpoint your location to the masses. This means that unless you have a sign as big as a bus, be sure that your name and your profession are clear and easy to read. Avoid ornate fonts, as they are difficult to read.

You are what sets you apart from your competition, so be sure that your name is clearly represented on your sign. If a prospective patient remembers your sign, remembers where it is and now has the need to see a chiropractor, be sure that they can find you in the phone book.

Most patients will refer their friends to the best chiropractor, you. Patients also tend to refer you by name, not a slogan. If your sign reads "Chiropractic Wellness Center of New York" instead of your name, how can a prospective patient ever find you in the phone book? Ensure that the contents of your sign, your phone listing and your Web site are all consistent. It will simplify a prospective patient's ability to find you.

The position of your sign and how much time one has to read it should determine what size the lettering should be. People reading your sign as they walk in a strip mall need lettering of at least 4-6" to capture their attention, while signage read from a four-lane highway requires lettering of at least 18" and possibly as tall as 24" or more to be legible. If your sign is parallel to the path of travel, the size will actually have to be 20 percent larger than if it were perpendicular to the path of travel.