Latest / The Chiro Money Show / 048 | 94.7% Referrals, Zero Marketing, and Where AI Fits in Your Practice w/ Dr. Laurence Tham
Transcript
- Scott Campbell: Hello, welcome back to the Chiro Money Show where we're helping chiropractors make better financial decisions so they can build stability in their finances and a lifestyle they love. I'm Scott Campbell, financial planner with Align Wealth. Chris and I have an awesome guest interview lined up for today's episode, and one I've been looking forward to getting out to you guys. Dr. Laurence Tham is a CMCC grad, class of 2002, and he has never practiced a single day in Canada. One week after his board exams, he flew to Australia with his new wife, about $5,000 to their name, and three months of locum work lined up. That was supposed to be a 10 month trip, it turned into 20 years. He built one of the largest chiropractic practices in Western Australia, raised his kids there, and in 2022 the family moved again to Portugal, where he is today. Here's why we wanted him on the show. Laurence built that practice with essentially no new patient marketing. Nearly 95% of his patients came from referrals. And when you ask him how, he doesn't talk about ads or funnels or screenings, he talks about communication. So I have three things I think you're going to take away from this conversation today. One, the difference between an attraction problem and a conversion problem, and how to tell which one you actually have. most docs are spending money on the wrong one. Two, his three rules for failure: fail fast, fail forward, fail firm. If you're in your 20s or 30s or you've got kids who are. That part of our conversation will be worth the listen alone. And finally, three, where AI actually fits in practice. Laurence is building a tool for chiropractors called Align OS, and his take is not the one you'd expect from someone building an AI tool. He thinks the practices that will win over the next five years are the ones that use it to become more human, not more efficient than just for the sake of cutting overhead costs. And a quick note: this will be part one of two with our conversation with Laurence. Part two will come out next Thursday, and it's a different conversation entirely. Laurence also works inside a group called Tiger 21, which is essentially families whose net worth starts at $20 million. We get into what he's learned from sitting in those rooms, some of the experiences he's had, and how those experiences and conversations could benefit our listeners of the show. Before we get into it, one quick ask. If you're getting something out of this show each week, please consider taking 15 seconds and leave us a rating or review wherever you're listening. It's the single thing that helps us grow the show and help other great docs out there find us. All right, let's get into it. Here's our conversation with Dr. Laurence Tham Chris: Doctor Lawrence Tham, welcome to the Chiro Money Show. Thank you for joining us. Laurence Tham: I'm excited to be here. I really appreciate you guys inviting me on the show. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Chris: Awesome. Well, we would love to dive right in and kind of start with a bit of your origin story. just looking at your your background and kind of where you ended up now, you you wouldn't really expect like, hey, this is a CMCC grad it from Toronto and you spent most of your career practicing in Australia and now you're based in Portugal. Can you Yeah Laurence Tham: Yeah, the funny thing is is well the funny thing is I'm a CMCC grad, but I've actually never practiced in Canada. so that's I'm not sure if I'm the only CMCC grad who's ever done that. so yeah, it's it's I mean, I guess I'm old enough now to kind of say that, you know, I actually have something to say. It's kind of crazy. So my story is that I graduated I I grew up in Toronto. That's I was born and raised in Brampton, Ontario. but I I left for Hong Kong for four years of my life, between five and nine, and I went back to Canada not special being able to speak English, which is kinda strange, right? I'm nine years old, going back to Canada, I'm Canadian and then but not being able to speak English because I spent, you know, four years speaking Cantonese and had to relearn English again. So, you know, people joke about me later on that you know, had this Chinglish. they always laugh at me about Chingless, so which me you might even catch it as I speak, but it's because I've missed those fundamental years, you know, grade one to like four, where the grammar is set and I was not here for that. And I had to relearn English, which is embarrassing. I you know, grade five or four, grade four when I was nine years old. So I spent most of my time in in Toronto and North in North York and then I went to University of Waterloo and you know, when internet just started in ninety four, that's when that, you know, the emails started back then and then I went to C C C in ninety eight to two thousand and two. So I'm in class of two thousand and two. The crazy thing is that I I didn't know where I wanted to practice. You know, I got married in two thousand one, you know, four days after nine eleven. I'm actually coming to my 25th wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks. And what was crazy about this whole journey was that my wife and I didn't know where I want to set a practice. I've always wanted to go, you know, open a practice right away. The challenge was finding a location where you want to go, like this is where I want to plant my roots. And I I couldn't find a place that resonated with me, you know, for some reason. I don't know why. But the story goes is that in during my time at CMCC, I was actually the president of The World Congress of Chiropractic Students, which was the WCCS. And that is like an organization of like students from all around the world from every single chiropractic university. And then they would come together once a year. And we held, I was the president when we held it in Toronto. And the next year following happened to be in Sydney, just after my wedding. So I got married on September 5th, 9/11 happened. September 15th was my wedding. We went to Hawaii for my honeymoon and my wife flew home to Toronto. I just continued on to Sydney and and that trip really changed my life because I got to Australia. It just was not what I expected. And for some reason I just fell in love with this. Something about it kinda drew me in. So when I flew back, I'm like, Hey, I still had like half, you know, six months left or at least eight months left at school and I'm like, I don't we don't really wanna know where we wanna set up practice. You hate your job. Why don't we go to Australia and just travel and work and find locum works and stuff. And that's sort of how that conversation started. And I actually had my fourth year. So when I was in first year, we are teamed up with the second year, third year, and a fourth year. My fourth year, who graduated a couple of years ago before me, was already in Australia. And so I emailed him out of the blue and he's like, Yeah, I can find your work. And he found me three months worth of locum. I'm like, all right, well at least we got three months of work. And if the all fail else fails, I can always come home. So my wife and I, she quit her job. We had ten thousand dollars that she saved up, I think over the th four years that she's worked. And you know, I think I bought a computer, a laptop, you know, for two thousand, which got ripped off. I got I got scammed in some interneting internet some bid stuff and then went down to eight thousand. I think my insurance in Australia cost me like three thousand. So we're down to like five thousand dollars between the two of us when we w left and went just went to Australia doing locums and that one year turned into twenty and I end up spending twenty years of my life in in Perth, Australia and also Sydney, Australia, twelve and eight years and then had my kids there. And that's sort of my journey there. So I practiced only in Australia and then four years ago in twenty twenty two after the COVID nineteen, all the pandemic stuff, we left Australia and then moved to Portugal to kind of travel. That's pretty much my backstory. I just wanna kinda at least you give you that sort of framework and then we can kinda discuss anything you want in between. That has happened in my Scott Campbell: Lots to dive into in between those points in time for sure. I'd love to hear a little bit about your time in practice to start things off. You were in practice, you kind of started practice in around two thousand two or so in Australia, is that right? Laurence Tham: Yeah, so I graduated 2002. I think I I I think we I graduated on my birthday actually in May the third on 2002. And then I wrote my board exams straight after that. And I I left pretty much one week after my board exams. I think it was the Ontario board exams. And when I left, I actually w went across to Australia. I was probably the very fur I believe I am the first person to practice in my class simply because everybody had to wait for their board exam results. At the time, twenty somewhat years ago, I didn't Australia actually accepted just me graduating from from Toronto from CMCC. That was good enough. There was no exams back twenty-four years ago. so I practiced on July 1st, Canada's Day. that was my very first day in practice. And that was very memorable for me because obviously be in Canada, Canada's Day, and that was so I started practicing there. I did locums there for about four months, three, four months, just moving around Adelaide, and then until I found some permanent work as an associate in Perth. Chris: Mm-hmm. Can you tell me a bit more? I know you're you're a why guy. Like the why behind behind it is really important to you. So how how and why did you guys end up choosing Australia? And like what what stood out to that what what stood out about Australia? Laurence Tham: Yeah, I think, you know, we we we talk about sliding door moments, right? And sliding door moments, for anybody who doesn't know, it's like these moments in your life where you make a decision where there's that movie called Sliding Doors with Gwen F. Pautro back in the nineties, probably. And you guys are probably too young for that, but there's like this moment where you she leaves the you know, whether you leave or take this guy or not. So these the moments like you decide to do something or you don't decide, and then it kind of creates this split path, right? And choosing to go to Australia was definitely one of those sliding door moments. Because if I didn't go, I know I'll probably still be in Toronto. Not that that's a good or bad thing, it's not evaluating w either or it's just a different life that I would have had. But choosing to go to Australia was definitely a a big moment. And come to think of it, you know, I remember reflecting back as I just was in Toronto. That's where I met Scott you know, a lot a couple of months ago. It's been twenty four years since I graduated and I don't know what I was thinking, to be honest with you. Like I d you like it was just one of those like I'm I just got married. we barely have any money and we decided to like uproot our whole entire life of what we knew to move like across halfway across the world. I don't know what we're thinking, maybe because we were young and naive. But the one thing that kind of stood out to me was this at the time, and I can try to kind of give you the impression of what happened at the time, was us not knowing or getting the gut feel of like nothing really kind of resonated with us. forced us into a decision and go, why why don't we try something that we haven't tried before? So the idea of going somewhere new, taking a risk, at the time we have nothing to lose. I mean, we didn't have a house, we didn't have a mortgage, we didn't have kids. We just got married. She hated her job anyways, like what else like we could go and if all else fails, we would just come back. We s we had the buffer of knowing that, you know, we're Canadian citizens. You know, we still have our parents back, you know, back in Toronto, both of us, and it doesn't matter, like we can always just come back. And it's no different. Like if I went there for four months or six months, coming back would be the we'd be the same position as we were before we left. The only difference that maybe she doesn't have a job, but I didn't have a job anyways, right? I just graduated, so I had no money. So it's one of those things that we just took a chance. And to be honest with you, it was about one week. I still remember this. It was about one to two weeks. After I landed, we were walking on the beach in Adelaide. And it was winter in in Australia at the time in July. I was walking on the beach. I'm like, this is life. Right? To like, you know, think about a Canadian boy who you should back know a little bit of backstory. in my second year, I was getting together with James Richards, who I believe you've already interviewed, and also one of our classmates, Scott, we used to do these masterminds. And at lunchtime, we used to like sit down with this book. We bought this book and we used to write our goals and our life dreams and everything else. And what I wrote in that book was that I was seeing 300 a week, working three days a week by an ocean. I don't know why I wrote that. I just did. Fast forward two to three years later, I'm literally in the like, you know, from Toronto. There's no oceans around us. But somehow a new water was a big part. And then I happened to be walking on the beach. I'm like, this is crazy. Like this is what life is about. This was such a different contrast on how I grew up in Canada. And this is winter. I'm still walking on the beach. And so that's when I started thinking about life. And for me was I told my wife this specifically, which was, we should consider staying. She's like, I told my you told my mom, which I did, she sat me down before I left. She's you're gonna bring my w daughter back, right? I'm like, Yes, I will. I promise. We're there for 10 months. Because my brother was getting married next year. It was like, Don't worry, I'll be back. Ten months. That's all we're going for. And and two weeks into the trip, we're like, I think this is we should really consider staying. And she's like, what about my parents? I'm like, and this is exactly what I said to her. I said, it's great that we want to live for our parents, but at some point they're gonna move on. And do we want to spend that r like that feeling of like we did it for them, not for us? You and I just got married. This is our we are family now. And we should make decisions based on what we want, not what our parents want for us or what what they want for themselves. And that kind of really opened up a lot of conversations around like what is it about? And so the my reason why was actually we had this independence, like this whole freedom of just being able to do our thing. Christmas, Easter, we didn't had no obligation. And sometimes, yeah, it's it feels like That's sad, you don't have family around. But for us, those first Christmases, those first Easters, we hadn't we didn't have to have go to any family. We could do whatever we wanted. You know, we didn't have to Chris: Yeah. Laurence Tham: go to the Christmas dinners. We didn't have to go to, you know, to see the family. as much as we it was sad to miss them, but it was like we get to do our own thing. And so that really kind of opened up the thought around freedom and the freedom of just being able to do the things we wanted to do. And in hindsight now looking back, you know, the decisions I made. Even the decision to go into chiropractic was about freedom because I had a career in ergonomics. you know, I went to Waterloo, studied kinesiology and was moving towards that the you know, the life of in a corporate world, living, you know, nine to five job. And I realized that had a a limit in terms of how much income I could earn, because it's always gonna be a salary. And I had limited amount of movement of where I w I could go. And that sense moved me more to chiropractic because I feel like in chiropractic I can make as much money as I want to, depending on how much want how much I want to work and how much freedom that would be to have a practice. Now I also felt obviously practice has its own limitation, but it's definitely more freedom than setting your own hours than it is to work for a corporate, you know, telling someone out to clock in at between nine and five. So in reflection after all these twenty four years since passing graduating, it's about freedom for me. It's about like the ability to choose the life I want to live and I'm constantly trying to strive towards that. Have I got total freedom? Of course not yet, but it's like this is what I'm striving for. And the decisions I made, it's always been about freedom. So your answer to why, it's that's the reason. Be able to do Chris: Hmm. Laurence Tham: the things I want to do. Chris: Love it. That's a great answer. Thank you for sharing part of that journey. I know Scott is probably dying to ask you some AI related questions and we'll get there, I'm sure, Scott? But wanted to ask Scott Campbell: So and did Chris: if you could share like What would you what would you recommend or if if you're talking to a new grad, someone that's just graduated and they're maybe they've been locoming or they're, you know, an associate somewhere and it's kind of temporary for in in their mind and they're kinda like you were thinking, you know, I gotta start my own practice sooner than later, but they're just not sure where where when or or to do that. What what would what would be your advice for them? Laurence Tham: Yeah, I think the the challenging thing is like as you start to commit more, you lay more roots down, the harder it is for you to to lift, to to kinda like change, right? we all know this in our lives. Like the more once you commit to a car, you know, or once you commit to a house or mortgage, it doesn't mean you can't, but it's definitely harder for most people. obviously I've kind of lead you know, like I've moved several times and I've and it's because of that one That's why I call it a sliding door moment for me, because because I made that leap in in to Australia, making leaps like I went from Perth to Sydney, which is like Vancouver to Toronto, for example, like lifting my family and moved to the other side, and then moving to Portugal, living in a foreign country in a language I don't even speak, like it's not so foreign to me. Like it's still a challenge, but it's not as foreign because I did the initial thing. And that's just one of the reasons why we moved to Portugal, was because I wanted my kids to feel like they were global citizens. I know, I'll get back to your answer in a second. Let me tell the story because I think it's relevant to Chris: Yeah. Laurence Tham: to the mindset that I have. In nineteen ninety eight or ninety-nine, I remember Dr. D. Martini came to our school and he was in the gymnasium and he was actually doing a sp talk for our CMCC students. And I remember it was packed in the gymnasium, it was filled, it was like hundreds of people in there. And one line just stood out to me. He said he used to live in the the boat, the the the yacht, the world cruise line called The world. It's still existing. It travels basically this is this massive cruise line, like Royal Caribbean or whatever, and it travels all around the world continuously, 365 days. And you you don't buy like a ticket. What you do is you own a like a room, like you can buy an apartment on this. And he owned it. And so he would used to say, you know, I don't if you're anybody's familiar with Di Martini, he just has these ramblings and these things, right? He was just used to say, he goes, The world is my home, and each country I go to is just a different room in the house. And like that line stood out to me 25 well now it's like 27 years ago. And for some reason I was like, wow, that's really cool concept. And that's how I start to see the world. Like I mean rather than thinking like, I'm Canadian or I'm Australian or I just start to see like these are just different rooms in the house I'm just living in temporarily. And the house is like the the you know my family is is my house, my home and and it's we're constantly moving. So that's the mindset that I have around moving. So therefore, what I'm saying to you, going back to you, like not being not established, sometimes what happens is that you gotta be careful not to be influenced by external circumstances or people around you to say, you must do this. If society says you must have a practice or you must do this by age 30 or whatever, I feel like that's a lot of pressure on someone who is undecided or unsure. And if you're unsure like how I was. Maybe there's something in that, right? Maybe there is something that tells you that you're you haven't found the right thing. If you're unsure with the partner that you're going, you know, want building a relationship with, maybe there is something. I'm not saying there isn't. There's also the other argument, which is like you might have you you might have like spent your whole entire life not deciding at all. That could be a problem too. So like you gotta find that that line of going, like, are you a very person who doesn't make any make any decision? That's terrible, right? But also being forced to make a decision is also not right. So Everybody's different on this. But for me, it's like you don't want to overcommit to something that you can't get yourself out of in the future. So oftentimes I think that, you know, owning a practice, that's locking you in for a long time. Now it doesn't have to be, but it does lock you in, which means because you're going to there's this sunk cost fallacy that you're gonna feel like you're gonna have to stay with it for a long time, right? You're gonna have to sign a five year lease that, you know, if it's not working in the first two years, you probably should just get out and just suck the loss. versus like trying to slog it through for three more years. and then you're gonna get to this point like, I'm okay. Well, maybe I should sign a five year list. Then now it's 10 years later, right? So I feel like oftentimes we make these decisions based on external circumstances versus about like what feels right for you as a person. So I think that is everybody meant to own a business? I don't think so. I've met a lot of my classmates or colleagues in chiropractic that really probably shouldn't be owning a business because owning a business is a totally separate skill set than in just being a chiropractor or practitioner. And so sometimes you're a really great practitioner and doing this role of owning a practice actually takes you away from what your core skills are. and so I feel like you gotta know who you are. So first of all, finding alignment, right, which is in your name, right? So finding alignment with who you are as a person is such an important element. You gotta know who you are. And if you don't, that's the first thing I would figure out is what makes you tick? What do you value? What what do you actually want and desire? And stop going after what everybody tells you, but what do you want? Right. So I think that oftentimes like when you guys talk to clients with wealth and stuff, I'm sure you have different clients will come to you like, this is what wealth means to me, which is completely different to the other person. Nothing is right or wrong simply for the fact that everybody needs to understand is like what's right for you. And then obviously the goal is to go, but are you saying that because that's what your parents taught you? Or that's the people you surround with, or is it something that you truly want? Some people really do want have a lot of money, but what is a lot? You know, to me, I thought like when I was a kid, like earning a million dollars would be like a lot, right? But now, you know, sometimes then you start getting into the world and you're like, maybe I need five millions. And and now I work with, you know, which we'll get into, which I work, you know, work for Tiger Twenty One with ultra high net worth, people to enter is minimum of twenty million. I didn't even know that wealth existed. You know, in that mind like people have 50 to 100 to 200 million. That's their net worth. And I'm like, what are those numbers? Like I don't even I can't con contemplate that. And I never understood it until I'm actually in it. Now it's like now it's a norm. But I wish that I wish the feeling I had with that norm was was pushed onto me a lot younger because that would have probably set different expectations, right? Because now it's like, I'm 51 years old. Now I'm thinking like, okay. Like that's actual wealth, like 20, 50, 100 million, that's actual wealth, not the three million or five million that I used to think wealth was. Now, again, it's not right or wrong. It's just more like it's all relative to the people and you're surrounding yourself with. And so I feel like if you're not sure where you're at, there's probably something in your history and your past of your success, things that you have got up to this point, even if you're 20 or 25 or 30 years old listening to this, there's already history. That shows you what you value the most. Understanding why you made those choices, understanding what drew you to things that you have already made choices for, rightly or wrongly, there are probably clues there that gives you an understanding of possibly of what trajectory of what you value in the world. And I'll say one more thing, which is if you're between 20 and 30 years old, this is your prime time. Meaning this is the prime time for you to go and figure that out. Your job isn't to have it all figured out when you're twenty-one years old. Your job is to use your twenty to thirty to try a whole bunch of things in life to then use thirty to forty to leverage that. But if you don't if you waste a time between twenty and thirty to trial or don't trial anything, you don't know what who you are. You So that's why I hope that makes sense. So cause you I got a 18 year old and a 15 year old, and my eighteen year old is going to college and university in a couple of weeks. And my goal is for her to just try as much things in her twenties. And she's gonna make mistakes and all that stuff, but I'm not asking her to figure her life out. I'm fifty one, I have still no have no idea what I'm gonna do, right? I'm still trying to figure this out, but at least I have some clues of what my skills are and and I've leveraged it in my thirties and my forties. And I think the twenty to thirty year olds, you have the most amount of energy, you have less debt. sorry, you may have a whole bunch of debt, but you have Like no mortgage, no ties. and you can Chris: Thanks. Laurence Tham: it's almost like climbing a a rock climbing wall. And like when you're 20s, you're like you just climbed a couple of steps. So if you fall, you're not gonna die. Like you're just gonna fall, right? Whereas if you're like 40 years old and 50 years old, you have a mortgage, you got two kids, they're in private school, you're a little bit higher on the mountain. If you fall, you could break a leg and that could take you out. And that's what you don't wanna do. And I have this rule I was telling my daughter the other day going for a walk. There's the three rules for failures. Number one is you want to fail fast. You want to learn how to like take things in action where you want to learn fast, fail fast quickly so that you can actually get feedback. Right? We all know that one. The second one is fail forward. If you're gonna fail, you might as well fail forward, meaning like you're gonna take something away. Always there's a lesson in that so that you can take something away, like I took something away. If you failed and didn't learn anything, that's just a dumb mistake. Like that's just dumb, that's a dumb loss. You wanna be able to learn from that mistake that you can make so you don't repeat it over again. And the last thing is most important, which I told her is learn how to fail firm, right? And the reason why you want to fail firm is because you want to be able to live another day to play the game again tomorrow. This is a game of life. And I use the analogy of Alex Honnold. he was in the movie Free Solo. He's like the first person to free solo Al Capitan, right? And he basically if anybody know about Free Solo, they're basically climbing Al Capitan in in California, which is a sphere shaped like this pure face rock. No ropes. That's what free soloing is about. And there's this part of this movie where I don't want to spoil it, but like I will. So if you don't wanna listen to it, that's fine. But there's this part of the movie and it's like maybe like twenty minutes in, he's like just about to make this leap. And I'm like, wow, there's only twenty minutes and how is this movie gonna like end? What are you gonna do? And what happens was that he goes, No, not today, and he decides to climb. He was already halfway and then he decided to climb back down. Because the goal is if he mi takes that risk, which we all do at some point, if he misses that, that's game over. Like that's done. You don't get to live another day. And I think that that's important for us learning about failure is that you want to learn how to fail. And I want my daughter to fail. I want everybody in their 20s learn how to fail, but fail firm. Fail fast, fail forward, but fail firm, meaning that you can. You're not gonna break something enough that it's going to take you out. Don't want to risk everything all in, and then you're like, I can't start from zero. You're starting from zero. Always be able to like land on your feet. Sure, take the lessons, but you're still able to have the energy. Or the physicality, mentality, spiritually, whatever, emotionally, to be able to take on more things. But it's a lot better to do in your twenties or thirties than it is to do it in your fifties. Doesn't mean you can't though. That's the the the whole point. Chris: We can still we can still fail in our fifties, forties, thirties? Yeah. Laurence Tham: absolutely. I'm still failing all the time. Chris: Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Scott Campbell: Thanks for sharing all that, Dr. Lawrence That's such great valuable advice for really anyone, whether you're in your early twenties or or get in your 40s and 50s. I'd love to go back. You you talked about kind of school core skills and how not everyone is meant to be a business owner. I'd like to go back to your time and practice. You you built one of the largest chiropractic practices in Western Australia, And you You did so by like you you are a business owner, but you stressed that you were able to build a successful practice not not through marketing. Like it wasn't heavily heavily grown through marketing, but done done so through one of your core skills, which is is is is a parent on this conversation, which is your communication skills and what you're doing with your patients, you know, at your report of findings or your initial consultations. I would love to hear more about kind of I'm sure that also is built upon what you did in in coaching and what you're doing now with your with your app, which we'll get into here as well. But tell us more about how you built your practice kind of on the backbone of communication and that skill. Laurence Tham: Sure. And I think that the you know, so we gotta remember, like I started practicing in two thousand two thousand and two. and I practiced till about two thousand and fourteen. So those twelve years, you know, if you look at the time, you know, my core building the practice was I bought the practice in two thousand and four. that's before Facebook. This is before the iPhone, this is before social media, YouTube, so any of the stuff that we have available now, right? So the only marketing that we were you know, really had to do with was like spinal screening and like letter drop boxes pretty much or like, you know, ads in the newspaper. Like that's was our marketing and what we did. This is back in the day. God, I feel freaking old when I say that out loud. but so but you gotta put that in context, right? So w I think that war the reason why I think things are different now is because everything's moving in such a fast-paced world. But what I traditionally when I work with chiropractors or listen to chiropractors, everybody's so worried about new patients and new patients and new patients. And they forget that that's only one component of a successful practice. What you need to understand is there's three major components that you have to have. Attraction is definitely an important element for your practice survival and also its longevity, right? But that's only one pillar. The second pillar is your ability to convert. So conversion, I feel like is actually the more important. Important thing that most people do not focus on enough because but it's the strongest lever. So for example, if you have a hundred new patients coming in and you're only converting of say 5%, only five of them, if you just improve your conversion rate to 10%, all of a sudden, like every hundred new patients are effectively more valuable to you than when you were still working at 5%. So I think people need to remember that conversion is actually the highest lever to change your practice. And it's the should be the first thing that you should actually look at. But no one spends the time there because I don't know, for whatever reason, because it's time consuming or they think they're really good at it, because we have this bias within ourselves, this this cognitive bias of ourselves. The last pillar is retention, right? The ability to keep the patient. So you have attraction, which is attracting the right type of clients. Conversion is the ability to be able to convert them from a patient to a obviously, sorry, a prospect to a patient, right? Retention is to take a patient to become a patron, right? Someone who is actually staying for life and becomes a client. And those are your three pillars. Now, a successful business, a successful practice needs all three, right? You can't have a successful practice without all three. But if your conversion and your ret your ability to retain is high and is really strong, you don't need as much attraction. You still need attractions, but you don't need as much. And so that's the key element. So when I built my practice, I didn't do any marketing at all. Well, I did marketing, but not like like trying to get new patients. I did marketing from a content perspective, I did videos and everything else, but I had a 94.7% referral rate, which means that out of a hundred patients that came into my practice for me, 94 of them were from referrals. And maybe five or six of them came in off the street. So that difference, like Think about what attraction is. Do you just want to attract the number of new patients, like 100 new patients for whatever time period? Or do you want to attract the right client, the right prospect, people who are ready to who's already pre-motivated, pre-interested in what you have to do, or pre-interested in what you're actually offering, sorry? Like they're going to be much easier to convert and retain in the future. So it kind of works in these circles and these three pillars are. are more the are very important in every practice. The challenge but chiropractors thinking is that they just think that this is what I need. And they don't work on these two and they start constantly losing all this people, which is like this holes in the bucket analogy that everybody you can pour as much water as you want. And you you know with Facebook marketing and all this other marketing, yeah, you can put tons, thousands each month into this bucket, but it's just constantly leave. And in your analogy it's like, yeah, we can you can I can constantly invest like 10,000 a month into investing, but if you constantly invest in things that don't grow in value, they constantly invest in things that are constantly losing value, then what's the point of investing? Like you wouldn't do that. Like no client would ever on and any of your clients will be going, okay, you know, Scott, Chris, I'm gonna invest 10,000 in this, but you just keep on like, but it's losing money every single time. that's okay. I just keep on giving you $10,000. Like that's stupid, right? At some point, they're gonna you're gonna have to say like whatever you are investing, that's not, you know, it's not actually holding its value, right? I we need to actually grow faster. Instead of investing in bonds, you know, which is you know, growing less than inflation, like let's focus on some growth here and some like some stability. Like we're gonna have to start thinking differently. I think that most people don't look at their practice as an investment. And that's the problem. They chase after this because everybody's competing here. But the thing is if they just focus in on conversion and then retention, it's so much better. So let me tie this all up. So conversion and retention is all about communication. My like The thinking about conversion, like you're competing now, especially in the today's world, you're competing against all the other, not just other chiropractors, but you're competing against all the other therapies and all the other products and services that are available in the healthcare, you know, targeting your specific audience. You're not the only person who's like, you know, the only thing that can solve the problem. And now with AI and and the ability for information, you have two problems going against you. The two problems is this. One is the commoditization, of just products and services, right? People are trying to find the cheapest thing to solve their problem. Now the problem is that as soon as we start to go there, as soon as we start to kind of like think of ourselves as like the lowest person wins, which is what Facebook marketing is, right? Come for us for $29 and We start now pricing ourselves away to like a Kmart model or like a Target model, like the lowest price possible, versus putting ourselves in a position of luxury. Right? There's a massive difference on how you sell let's call it Toyota cars versus a Ferrari, right? It's very different than going to a Zara clothing store versus like going to a Gucci store. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but they're very different target markets and plus selling models, It's very different than buying a Casio watch than it is to go buy a Rolex, The whole experience is different, the pricing is different, and I guarantee the numbers of Toyota cars sold versus the number of Ferraris sold every year is very different. Guarantee the Ferrari is very, very low, but the profit margins are much higher. And when's the last time you ever seen a Ferrari ad on television? Right? versus how many Toyota adds, you know, what a feeling are we jumping in like, you know, every time you see it on television, like that's the thing. That's different. So where do you want to position chiropractic and where do want to position your practice? So thinking about from that perspective, one of the most challenging things that we could really do is how can we communicate? How can we communicate our message, our value in the eyes of the prospect? Not what it means to us, but what actually means to the person that's coming in. And each person's different Scott, if you came to me And the next person came in with Chris. I guarantee you, the way I speak to you, sure, the fundamentals are the same. But if I use the exact same wording and script for both of you, it's not gonna fit because Scott, you're gonna come in with certain things. You are you're a different type of personality, you're gonna have different thoughts with different value, and Chris is gonna come with different values. And so therefore, I have to be able to tweak what I am offering to each and every individual differently. And I think that's the thing that we That we miss and it's a skill, meaning it's something you have to master, no different than an adjustment that you know a chiropractor listening to does want to understand. It's like you didn't get better by just learning it from a teacher. I still remember the very first day of technique class, a CMCC. I remember who I was palpitating. I was palpating my friend Kim Spears and she because her last name was S and I was in T, like it was just we're just in the same group. I remember feeling her spine. And I remember feeling her spine going down and they asked for I couldn't find the spinous process. I'm like, my God, if I'm gonna be a chiropractor, I can't even find this. What am I gonna do? Like I remember that whole feeling kind of came across to me. Of course, like you figure it out over time, but that takes time, years, and practice. There's no different when it comes to communication. But we don't spend enough time doing that because we think we have it. We can talk, we can, we can describe it to our colleagues and stuff. But are you though? Are you actually saying the things that the person needs to hear? If not, how do you know? And that affects not only the conversion but actually affects the retention as well. Chris: Hmm. Wow. So much good there. I don't know where to go next. Scott Campbell: I know where I wanna go next. I know where to go. I know where to go next. We're ready to go into maybe the AI side of things because I think what you're talking about here, Lawrence, ties really closely into the app that you're building on. Is that right? Laurence Tham: Yeah, so I've been working, I kind of look back at my career and go, you know, I've been coaching hundreds of chiropractors from all around the world. And, you know, everybody has their own unique difference. I don't I I don't like coaching in a way that he goes, here's this is my style, follow this style. Because I feel like everybody's looking for different things. We started this conversation around freedom. So someone's freedom is is earning tons of money. Someone's freedom is like being able to spend time with their kids and and only working three days a week. someone's freedom is to be able to take three months off in their practice and travel, you know, and take, you know, take that three months to be able to travel around Canada or, you know, Australia on a caravan, you know, with their family. Like everybody's freedom practice is different. And my my goal is to kind of understand that person first before I coach them and go, like what do you want? But more importantly, why? And why do you want it for? Chris: Mm-hmm. Laurence Tham: You know, because a number is just the number. You want to see a hundred a week, two hundred a week, three hundred a week or whatever, like that's just the number. The goal isn't isn't the number. The goal is like what you want it for? Right? 200 a week translates to X amount of dollars, and the X amount of dollars allows you to save this much so that you can have it for retirement or whatever. So understanding that is important. So when it comes to communication, it's exactly the same thing what I've been talking about. Right. When you're talking with patients, they c yeah, sure they might come in with a back pain or a headache or whatever problems they have. But why though? Right? Like, because we're like chiropractors sometimes can be like, A hammer to a nail, like, I see a nail, I'm gonna hammer it, right? It's like, no, like it's you gotta stop and think, why are they presenting to you? So I always have this frame of going like, why here, why now, why me? So meaning like when someone comes in, like that's the frame that I'm constantly asking, like, you know, we hear this a lot and and and prior chiropractors can will understand this, is when they come in and say, I've had this problem for five years. I'm like, okay, well, but why, like my brain needs to go, why did you make a decision now? Like you've been suffering for five years off and on, but why did why now? Because that question, if you can somehow piece it from just talking to them or understanding them, or just maybe just blatantly ask them, sometimes you get a better understanding because that's the leverage, right? The leverage is like, no, you know what? Like I've been having this problem off and on, but I have this three-year-old kid now that I really want to lift up and and play. And I never had, you know, never had it before. And now it's like really struggling and I can get barely get out of bed. Okay, well, the The problem isn't the back pain. It's what the back pain basically has impacted on his life or her life that has stopped him. That's why they came now. Like that's the why now. Right. And I think that's important for people to understand. If a script won't grab that. A script, if I just told you like say this, say that, they're just basically trying to convey the same thing for a 60-year-old male to a 30-year-old female. It's the same script. That's not gonna work. We're human beings. We like to communicate. And that's the thing that AI won't replace. Right. That's the thing that a you know, AI, we all seen the AI slop now, but the challenge is like AI at the moment at least can't replace the human touch and the human connections and the emotions that we have. And so what I see at AI is that it's not gonna replace chiropractors, but it can definitely inf impact chiropractic practices. And what I want to utilize AI for is to help you be more human. So let's be very clear. Like AI is there, it's a tool. And we're not escaping this. Like, this is like the internet. This is like social media. Like it is gonna be with us, whether you like it or not. You can put your head down and go, like, I hope this goes away. Well, it's not going away. Like it, this is gonna be progressively more. And so you can either use it as a as a friend and an ally, or you can see it as an enemy. And an enemy to me would be like these practitioners thinking, like, it's all about efficiencies and like trying to like, you know, make things faster. I can actually I can run this practice by myself. Okay, that's great. Scott Campbell: Right. Laurence Tham: But is that the type Scott Campbell: Yeah, thank you. Laurence Tham: of practice you want? Like, is that the type of practice that your patient wants to experience? Do I want to walk into a practice to have just a bunch of robots and things that call my name and just like sit down and you know? Or do you want someone to, or or do you want a practice where you actually feel like a human being and treated like a human being, like when through the conversations and actually understand, have the chit chat, the water cooler talk? Like that's what I see the value is. So, yes, you can replace your CA. With an AI, robot, or tech. I'm sure that's available and that can be done. But is that what a CA's job is? Just to book appointments and be able to get them from room to room? And I use this analogy. I've heard this once, like, you know, in New York is very famous for this, right? You have the dorm in in London will also too. You have the doorman in front of these beautiful luxury apartments, you know. And sure, the efficiency pencil, you know, the the the the PwCs, Deloitte's will go, you know what, if we just replace this doorman who You know, let's say we pay him a fifty, seventy thousand dollar salary to stand there. We can just build a ten thousand dollar door opener you know, with a code, you know, that can open the door. You don't need to do that. We can save fifty thousand dollars per year. And this is a one-time thing. Like how amazing would that be? Sure, you then you replace it, but then but the question really needs to be asked is is the doorman's job just to open the door? Of course not. Like you could think about the doorman's there for status, right? Can you imagine like you walk into a party like? The person greets you, knows you by name, and knows like who should be in this apartment, who shouldn't be here. There's also the point of like just knowing they can do certain things for you, maybe the and the status of feeling like I live in an apartment with the doorman. You know, so all these things are there, hidden, that are not factored in sometimes when we're calculating for efficiency. So I feel like AI can be used as a tool. I know I'm gonna answer your question, but I this is sort of the realm of where I feel AI is going. But the key element is that I feel that the practices are gonna do well is gonna be the ones that embrace more humanality and embrace more human elements into the practice that could really change the way how we interact. We don't have to use AI just to to create more efficiency. We can, of course, Chris: Okay. Laurence Tham: do that, but do in a way where it allows you the freedom to do all the things you don't wanna do, especially for the CAs, so they can actually be the person to be a concierge. When I hired my CAs, the number one rule was like, They were not there just so they can work on a computer. I want to see a who can be a concierge. I want a person who can meet and greet someone and actually have a conversation and make them feel like home. I built my practice based on the Starbucks model. And I know, you know, Starbucks is not necessarily the the the peak of like conversation at the moment, but when Starbucks started, like this is going back 24 years ago, right? The Starbucks started the concept of something called the third home. The third place, sorry, third place. And the third place concept is this is that you have home and you have work. And Starbucks was the third place, which is like before you go to work from home, you go to Starbucks. Or on the way home from work, you go to Starbucks. And it was like the third place. And Arnold Bernier is the one who introduced this idea to me. And I'm like, that actually makes a lot of sense. And so I created my practice to be the third place. It's like people from the beginning of the day leave their home before they go to work to get an adjustment. And they go to work, or they come home from work and they come to see me before they go home, de stress and you know, get their nervous system functioning properly, and then they go home to their families after a stressful day at work. And so, what I wanted to do is like if it's gonna be a third home, it's gonna feel differently. It's not gonna be a clinic, it's not gonna have like freaking you know, spines on the walls and all these like degeneration models. No, no, it was all about happy faces, it's all about nice couches and cushionings. It's gonna have beautiful musics and sounds. It's gonna have nice smells of like beautiful candles and happy people being there because you want to be there. Cause if you want to be a third place, you want people to want to feel like to be there, right? And so that's the challenge of like milking my practice was like I wanted people to feel like this is a place that you would love to just hang out and chill. But at the same time, like you're there for a reason. So like it's the combination of those things. I don't want people to stay forever because you know we gotta keep moving good high-volving practice, but it's like, But you want people to kind of feel like, like there's this sense of peace for five minutes, I can just chill and relax before I go to work or before I go home. So I think AI can enhance that because now you can remove all the other technical stuff that, you know, people have to do and now it allows the humans to be more human about it, you know, to be able to make those interactions. And I feel like that's a a thing that a place that we can actually do. Scott Campbell: from your experience right now, at least where we're at in 2026, like AI has been around for a bit now. What has been your impression so far with the the doctors that you're speaking with? Are they is the majority in the camp of like embracing it and wanting to implement it into practice, or do you see more kind of pushing against it? Laurence Tham: You know, I guess I I don't Scott Campbell: And it's so hot. Laurence Tham: know if it's yeah, I I haven't like for me I feel like I'm ha maybe it's because the people I hang out with. the people that I'm surrounded by is probably bar are people who are embracing AI. However, is they it's like it's like anything else. I don't know if you feel challenged but I feel challenged by it. I'm like I'm not an AI expert. I don't know anything about coding, but AI has definitely given me the ability to create like dreams into reality very quickly. And I feel like a lot of people, practitioners, want to learn AI, but they don't have the time, the energy, or the effort to do like be the practitioner and do this at the same time. Think about this. When I first started in practice, you just have to be a really good practitioner, right? And then like 10 years later when social media is like, you don't have to be a good practitioner, but you also have to be a really good social media expert as well. Right. You got to be good on camera. You got to do podcasts and Like it just gets worse and worse. Now you're wearing now ten different hats. Not only am I a chiropractor, I need to be like the CEO, I need to be an HR manager, I need to be like the marketing, I need a Facebook expert, I need to be, you LinkedIn expert. Like you just like it's just so overwhelming that now you gotta add AI into this. It's like, my God, right? And so I feel like people are just overwhelmed. And they don't number one, they don't know they know it's important, but they don't know where to start. And they don't have the time to learn it. But I'm gonna push up back against that because I feel like if you don't learn some of it, I think you'd be very challenged in about two to three years time. And the separator, and let's go back to the young chiropractors now. I think if you're in your 20s and 30s, like that's your leverage, right? Your leverage is like you grew up in an in sorry, social media world. Like my daughter grew up in the social media world in a way. And not that she had social media, but it's like you grew up like not ever knowing internet didn't exist before you, right? I grew up that the reason why I pointed out at the beginning of the thing that I said '94, when I went to University of Water, it was the first time I ever got an email, was because to point out that 18, zero to eighteen, there was no internet. Okay? At 18 years old, when I went to the University of Water, was the first time I ever experienced the internet. Right? So I knew a life. And so anybody who's like in their 50s or maybe even late 40s knew a time when there was no internet. But now my daughter's age is like they didn't know a time before social media. And so The the reason why it's important to kind of distinguish that is because we as we get older, the 40s and 50 year olds or 60 year olds, we have our leverage is experience. We know how to like we can see things more, we understand the world from the experience point of view, which is a disadvantage for someone in their 20s. However, the advantage of a 20 to 30 year old is that you have like your language of social media and internet is just part of your life. Like you've never learned to live without it. So therefore, you have leverage to be able to catch up. So that's the leverage you can play on with any generation. Like, you know, when I'm 60 or 70 years old, I guarantee you, like the next generation, like there will be they would have never lived a time before AI. Right. So therefore, like they will have an advantage while the 30 to 40 year old becomes the R the 50 year olds, they're gonna feel a challenge, but you have the experience. So like it's every generation will go through that phase. So I feel like the the challenge right now is you have to learn to embrace it. You I think. The only way to embrace it, just as I talked about mastery, the only way to embrace it is that you actually have to use it. You can't just understand AI from a book. No different than you can't understand how to cook a meal with just by reading a recipe. Right? You literally have to physically roast a chicken or put a steak on the you know, season a steak and whatever. Like that's the only way to learn. You can't learn it from a book. And learning AI from like just by reading and watching a few videos. without doing it and actually utilizing it every day, I think you'll you'll be a disadvantage. So I encourage my kids, I encourage everybody to at least use it so you can see the potential because it leads you down these rabbit holes that you never thought of if you didn't start in the first place. Scott Campbell: Speaking of using it, I'd love for you to now share us a share a little bit more about how you're using AI in terms of the the app that you're looking to build out and get in out into the world and into practice. Laurence Tham: Yeah, so right now I feel the biggest challenge people are not doing is that they are spending in too much time on like scripts, spending too much time on attraction and not enough time with conversion. And so what I built a tool is for you to be able to extract enough information from your initial consultations to feed it into a system that I've built utilizing everything that I've taught around the frameworks on terms of conversion, basically selling, right? Learn how to sell. But with integrity, not by pushing, not by like and also selling with choice. That's that's just how I've always operated and never forced sell on anything. I've always kind of given people options because I feel like people need to feel like options. But you there's ways to influence a person's human psychology to help them make the wise choices. And so what I tend to do is that try to make I basically created a program where you input some information, and based on those information and what the feedback you got, we can tell you what you should be saying. what you shouldn't be saying and what analogies you you could be using to help make your communication a bit smoother and more individual individualistic to that person. And so that's what we're building out. And you know, it's on the trial right now. And that's really where I want to help people because I feel like I want to be able to help this profession do better. Listen, I I and I did this in my talk in Toronto, which is like it's as much as it pains me to say this, we're losing ground as chiropractors. And at least this is just my opinion. Course, I feel like the world is moving so fast to longevity, to all these other alternative stuff to kind of get healthier. Chiropractic is like we're being left behind because we as a profession hasn't grown together to share to understand the imp or at least share the message of the importance of how chiropractic and the nervous system is part of someone's lifestyle. And we have done a terrible job at it. And the my rationale is this. Think about if you ask a general person out there in the world, anybody in streets of Edmonton, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, what is a chiropractor? I guarantee you they can't tell you what it is. And I most likely 99% sure they're not gonna say the nervous system, right? But who and we've been beating that drum for so long because we can't agree in this profession. That's a totally different separate topic. But here's the thing. Who has claimed nervous system? Right? Breath work, Wim Hof. Like all of these new age, not new age, but all these new things, they're all talking about nervous system resets, right? Longevity is talking about nervous system resets. So where did we go wrong? We have we are fighting amongst ourselves, and yet other people are now seeing the benefits, right? Of all of these and stealing our, not stealing our language. I that's that's probably a little bit harsh to say, but they're taking our language of what we've been trying to build our profession on, and they're taking it and blending it into their thing. Right. If you talk about it to someone who does Wim Hof, for example, and cold plunge, what is it doing? Well, it's resetting my nervous system, right? It's resetting all these, you know, you know, the vagus nerves and all this they have vagus nerve stimulants and well, how like people are gonna go to the newest thing. And if we don't come together as a profession to start talking about and communicating in the right way, people are just gonna go to these things because they're sexier, they're newer, and they got cult cultish type of like tribes. to encourage these things. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm not saying that doesn't work, but that's where we're gonna lose. And so if we start don't do what we need to do and catch up or at least start to communicate better to our our public, we're gonna lose the languaging and we're just gonna end up being back pain, headache kinda, you know, therapist that anybody else can do. But guarantee a drug's gonna come out, right? With AI in the next five to ten years that's gonna solve all that problem. Where now what do we do? Right? How are we gonna be it be distinguished? And I think that's the trouble that people don't see. They they're just not seeing the the future of what what this potentially could be a problem for. Scott Campbell: Well, thank you very much for sharing all that on kind of where where you're standing with AI, where you see it kind of heading in the future, what you're building out with your app. Before we try and we're so for our listeners, we're having you back here for a part two episode that we're gonna be recording here shortly and getting out next week. but before we do that, Lawrence, let's maybe leave our listeners with a little bit of information about where they can find some more about yourself, more about that new tool that you've been you've been building out, and then we can wrap it up here for our part one. Laurence Tham: Sure. so basically right now you can go to getalignOS.co is the website that you can get some information on what we're building. You can have a free trial there. AlignOS is what I'm calling it because I want people to be aligned. We talked about being aligned is such an important and OS stands for the operating system. So having the importance of getting getting that you know, really important elements of making sure your alignment is aligned with the patients and the patients aligned with what you're doing, that will transform them as an operating system that will change everything. We're adding more tools before where I think I mentioned I mentioned to you, Scott was like my daughter and I are actually starting to rebuild people's websites. I I I didn't think that there would be a problem, but I mean now I look at like the I just like randomly gone through like some of my old clients and what their websites are. It's actually horrible on how bad people's websites are And because we don't spend enough time, but now with you know with AI technology and what we can capable of, we can spin up a website, you know, within five to ten minutes for you to view and change if you don't like it. And so she's going to university and I'm trying to get her to be an entrepreneur. And so, you know, she wants to be an entrepreneur. And so we're actually starting a business together to actually start rebuilding people's websites at a much lower cost and also be able to add some of these elements to help them adapt to what's AI. And we were just having a conversation on a walk yesterday. Is that what people don't realize is that we built the websites that most of us have is built for the Google world, right? That world is in the past, which means like people are searching for keywords. The people that are gonna be searching in the future are gonna be AI agents. And I think last month was when the first time where AI agents searched 54%, which is the first time that A AI agents have searched more online than it is than humans, which means that's only accelerating. So you just imagine like, are your websites built for humans, typing keywords, or are they built for the next generation of searchers, which is your AI? And if you're if your website is still like, you know, a year old or two years old, it you're basically built a website for the human nature. But 70, 90% of traffic is gonna be more for AI agents. So are you prepared? Is your website built for them reading it? They don't read like humans, right? They're not reading. You know, all the emotional keywords and stuff. They're reading from a different perspective. So I feel like the websites in the future has to be built for both humans, because they still need to see it and you know, obviously trust, but you also need to build for AI. If you want to know, you know, if people want to know about you, how are they gonna find out? You know, so people are not going to Google anymore and going, look, I need a chiropractor in North York, right? They're not looking for that. They're asking, like, hey, I have a back problem. You know, and I'm you know, then the AI is gonna have to interpret that and we're gonna get to the word goes, you know what you should do is like I'll book you an appointment for you. You have an appointment on Monday at nine. Is your practi your website and practice ready for an AI agent to be pointing at you and they book it for their client, which is whoever the o owns the AI agent, and also pay, right? For this so that they can and you actually have the appointment. So instead of like telling you about back pain and everything, no, no, they go, you know what, based on what you told me. I think you need to go see a chiropractor, and here's the closest best person And it's going to be at this address that's closest to you. And you should go see Dr. Scott, you know, and here's your appointment booked for you and paid. Like that's the world that we're moving towards that we haven't seen, but we're not that far. Like it is exactly what's happening. And we can get into like I feel like there's a lot of talk about crypto and and and digital currency. Like that's wow, because agents gonna have to spend money. They can't spend cash. This is where the you know, is your practice ready to be able to handle these transactions and also be able to re handle these scheduling from online agents booking for them for their clients? Because that's the world we're moving towards. Chris: Love that. Thank you for sharing the the the forward look to AI and and kinda what that means for chiropractor's practice. It's a great great first part of the conversation. Laurence Tham: All right, looking forward to hear talking more. Scott Campbell: Thanks for Lawrence. We'll make sure that we include all these details on Align OS and the the the new venture with your daughter in terms of building up websites. We'll get all those details in the show notes and we'll have you back here for next week for part two. So thank you to all our listeners and we'll see you again next week. Laurence Tham: See you later.