Here Dr. Swala shares his own story: I graduated in 2001 with a degree in computer science and started my career programming for a communications company in Canada. I developed a physical media scheduler for educational facilities that was web-based and was cutting-edge at the time. But something was missing.
I knew I was drawn to work with people in a much more personal way than computer programming. After I got into chiropractic college at the AECC in England I realized quickly that I had to choose between my chiropractic studies or continue with software development. Chiropractic won. I wondered at the time what would happen if I stayed with software programming, but the pull to become a chiropractor was much stronger.
During Chiropractic college I continued to work on some small web development projects, so I never really put down programming. In August 2008, I graduated from chiropractic college and moved home to help my mom who was battling Cancer. That came with all its own challenges.
Unfortunately being a chiropractor wasn’t what I expected. I worked my butt off in college thinking that the pains would end once I graduated but I was quite mistaken. New patients weren’t just walking through the door. I didn’t get it, I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. Everyone in the world needed chiropractic care but it appeared that they didn’t know it.
I trained with multiple coaching companies who taught me so much about running a practice. I worked in two high volume practices with amazing doctors, who both saw over 400 patients a week. By my 4th year in my own practice, I had decent retention and conversion at the report of findings was over 70%. However, I sucked at getting new patients by my own efforts or referrals from current patients. So I never got close to my weekly patient goals.
This was not because I wasn’t working hard at getting new patients. I was grinding it out for full weekends, sometimes 12 hours a day screening people. In addition, I was spending $1000’s of dollars in advertising and still ending up with only 2 or 3 new patients. I was able to justify the ad expense even with those low numbers, but financially as a practice I was not succeeding.
There was another cost besides the time, money and energy I spent building my practice. At 35 I ended up divorced, broke and started another practice from scratch for a 3rd time! Something I don’t recommend to any practitioner.
So I just kept on doing what I knew to get by. By August of 2015 my mom was really declining and taking care of her took up every spare moment of my time. I lost my dad when I was 15, so losing her now was hitting me real hard. I can’t begin to tell you the stress of watching someone who you love so much, dying slowly and painfully over the course of a year.
While this was happening, I was diligently trying to figure out how I could implement everything I had learned about passive marketing. After some trial and error, I finally nailed the recipe. The first month I implemented my new system I had 20 new patients in the door and right away. I knew I was on to something. I called my partners in practice who were both high volume docs and said “hey let me try something for you” and I duplicated the results for them.
I knew there were a ton of people out there teaching practitioners how to market, but I figured that if most docs had a life like mine and my colleagues, they didn’t have the time or money to experiment. If so, then maybe a complete done-for-you service would be desirable. Turns out I was right.
We’re now reaching over 1,000,000 people per month and growing with a natural health message! That really excites me for the future of the natural health professions. Each client has the possibility to receive anywhere from 15-45 new patients per month.
I truly believe that with the technology we have today, our profession has the ability to educate the masses about the benefits of chiropractic care. We can draw in volumes of new people like never before, and with an instant return-on-investment for the doctor.
It’s a win for the profession as a whole and for the individual doctors.










