Are you delivering life-changing adjustments… but still seeing gaps in your schedule? In this episode of The Successful Chiro, we break down Dr. Noel Lloyd’s powerful “Testimony Factory” strategy — a system designed to help chiropractors generate 5 testimonies and 5 referrals per week. Most practices don’t have a referral problem. They have a communication problem. You’ll learn: Why patients don’t fully understand your scope of practice, the script that triggers natural referrals, how to build a visible testimony wall, and how to turn everyday wins into consistent new patients. If you want steady growth without feeling pushy or salesy, this episode gives you the blueprint.
In this episode, we tackle the real reason many chiropractic practices struggle with referrals: silence. You may be delivering incredible results inside your clinic, but if those wins aren’t being shared, your community never hears about them.
Dr. Noel Lloyd calls the solution a “Testimony Factory.” The goal is simple: generate five testimonies per week, which can naturally lead to five new referrals per week. Instead of hoping for word-of-mouth, you systemize it.
Here are the key strategies discussed:
When a patient shares a win, interrupt the moment with this trigger statement:
“I never tire of hearing how chiropractic helps people.”
Then follow with two powerful questions:
This shifts the interaction from passive gratitude to intentional referral activation.
Make patient wins visible. Create a Victory Vibe Wall by writing patient wins on a small whiteboard, taking a quick photo, and framing it behind the front desk. For a more polished look, use Canva to remove the background and print uniform framed images to create an “art gallery” wall of testimonies. Visible proof builds authority and trust instantly.
Use the CA Handoff Strategy. Walk the patient to the front desk and have them repeat their win to your CA. This energizes your staff and allows everyone in the waiting room to hear a live testimonial — turning checkout into a marketing event.
Reinforce referral behavior with systems:
The bigger idea: you are not asking for praise. You are providing the public with a counter-narrative to the “aspirin deficiency” mindset. If people don’t hear chiropractic testimonies, they won’t walk into a chiropractic office.
The miracles are happening every day.
The question is — are you making them visible?
If you want help implementing this inside your practice:
👉 Book a free discovery call with Dr. George Birnbach to evaluate your systems, referrals, and growth opportunities: https://myfivestar.com/work-with-us/
📍 Join us live in Chicago for the “Too Many New Patients” event (March 21-22).
Two full days focused on generating consistent new patients, building internal referral systems, and creating predictable growth: https://myfivestar.com/in-person-seminar/
🔔 And make sure you subscribe to The Successful Chiro so you don’t miss next week’s episode.
Now go build your Testimony Factory.
Production Note:
This episode was created using AI-generated voices to deliver training content based on Dr. Noel Lloyd’s teachings and Five Star Management materials.
Welcome to the Chiropractic Deep Dive. This is a special segment of the Successful Chiro Podcast. And if you're a chiropractor, or honestly, even if you just work in the profession, you are exactly where you need to be right now.
Absolutely. It is great to have you back, by the way, it's great to be back and you're right, the focus today is laser sharp. We are tackling a problem that I think, well, I think it haunts the quiet moments of almost every practice. Oh, I know exactly what you mean. It's that feeling where, where you just delivered an incredible adjustment.
Right. Right. The patient stands up, the lights come back on in their eyes and you just know deep down you just change their life. It's the best feeling in the world. Yeah. But then, and here's the problem we're getting into, you walk out to the front desk, you look at the schedule for next week, and there are just gaps.
Yeah. The new patient phone line isn't exactly ringing off the hook. Exactly. It's what we call the referral gap. You're doing the work inside the four walls of your clinic, but the community outside doesn't seem to know about it. They're completely in the dark. And before we solve that, and trust me, we are gonna solve that today with some very specific high level tactics.
We need to acknowledge the team that powers this deep dive. Yes, we do. This Deep Dive is brought to you by Five Star Management and speaking as part of the five Star management team. We know firsthand that being a master adjuster is really only half the equation. It is. You have to master the business of healing too, because if you can't keep the doors open and the appointment book full,
you can't help people. It's really that simple. It is, and that is exactly where today's source material comes from. We are diving into some notes from a high level Zoom training call led by Dr. Noel Lloyd, a total legend. Absolutely. And looking at the notes from this call, Dr. Lloyd didn't waste any time on, you know, philosophy or billing codes or anything like that.
He went straight for the jugular of practice growth. He really did. The entire topic was just one word. Testimonies, testimonies, but uh, not just testimonies as a sort of nice to have thing. Right. He wasn't talking about getting a pat on the back from your favorite patient. Huh. Dr. Lloyd framed this as a strict operational necessity.
Yeah. He started the call by identifying the root cause of low referrals. Hmm. And I have to say, this is a hard pill to swallow for some docs. Oh, for sure. Because he said, look. It's not that people don't like you. It's not that your technique is bad or your bedside manner is off. It's that your current patients have absolutely no idea what your scope of practice actually is.
Yes, they think you are the neck pain guy. Or the back pain gal, and they have no clue, literally no idea that you can help their cousin with asthma or their aunt with chronic migraines. And to prove this point, Dr. Lloyd shared a story right at the top of the call, the migraine story. Oh man. Reading through this anecdote and the source material, it actually made me cringe a little bit because it is just so relatable.
It's the nightmare scenario for any practice owner, it really is. So Dr. Lloyd admits, and this takes a lot of guts to admit to a room full of other successful doctors that he had this loyal patient, she was a regular, came in like clockwork, paid on time, totally loved the care she was getting. The ideal patient.
The ideal patient, but he had never explicitly educated her on the full range of conditions that chiropractic actually treats. He just sort of assumed she knew. And the assumption is the killer. Yeah, it always is. Always. So. The inevitable happens. He's adjusting next door, treating a different patient, and he's explaining to this other patient how their migraines have completely disappeared, thanks to the adjustments he's celebrating that win with them and the loyal patient,
the one who's been there forever. She hears this entire conversation through the wall, right through the wall, and she confronts him later. She's shocked. She walks up and says, I didn't know you guys help with migraines. Oh, wow. And then she drops the hammer. She says, my sister has been suffering from debilitating migraines for years.
I never told her to come here because I just didn't know you did that. Oof, that hurts. Physically. It does. That is a referral that doubt on the vine. Not because of bad clinical care, but purely because of a lack of communication. Exactly. And then that patient asked a question that I honestly think should be taped to the mirror of every single chiropractor in the world.
She asked, what else does chiropractic do that I don't know about? What else does it do that I don't know about? Wow. That is the gap we are closing today. Ah. The mission of this deep dive is to help you build what Dr. Lloyd calls a testimony factory. A factory. I love that word because we aren't just hoping for good word of mouth anymore.
We are manufacturing it. We are, and we were looking at a very specific target metric here. We want you to aim for collecting five testimonies a week, which is designed to generate five new referrals a week, which might sound aggressive if you're currently getting zero. Sure. But the systems we're gonna unpack today, everything from the victory vibe wall to the Mix Tile strategy, they make it almost automated.
But uh, before we get to the how, we really have to deal with the elephant in the room, right? Why is it so hard for us to just ask? This was such a fascinating part of the Zoom call, Dr. Lloyd asked the group and remember, these are highly successful chiropractors on the line. He asked, why don't you ask for reviews?
And the answers weren't what you'd expect. Not at all. They weren't about a lack of time. They weren't about logistics or not having the right camera. They were 100% emotional. Yeah. One participant just bluntly said, we're wimps, brutally honest, but accurate. He called the wimp factor. Another doctor chimed in and said, it just feels clunky.
You know, you're in the zone, you're palpating. You're just stopping the flow of that to say, Hey, could you record a video for me? It feels like you're breaking the clinical frame. It feels like an interruption, like you're stepping out of the doctor role and into a salesman role. Exactly. And digging even deeper into the psychology of it, there is what the participants call the desperation myth.
The desperation myth. Explain that one. A lot of doctors feel that asking for a review or a testimony signals to the patient that their practice is struggling. It feels like begging, like, please help me. I really need the business. Which is so ironic, right? Because the patient is the one who just got their life back.
You aren't the one in need in that dynamic. You're the one who provided this solution, right? But Dr. Lloyd offered a reframe on this that I think is just brilliant. If you take nothing else away from this deep dive today, take this mindset shift because it completely removes the ego from the equation.
Let's hear it. He pointed out that the pharmaceutical industry, big pharma, spends roughly $50 billion a year on marketing worldwide. 50 billion. That is a staggering number. It is. And what is that money actually buying them? It's buying a narrative. Exactly. It's brainwashing the public into thinking that headaches are caused by an aspirin deficiency.
They are constantly relentlessly telling a story that health comes from the outside in via a chemical that is a billion dollar propaganda machine. Yeah. Working against the chiropractic philosophy every single day. Every single day. So Dr. Lloyd's point is that when you ask for a testimony, you aren't begging for a compliment.
You are providing the necessary counter narrative. I love that you are fighting a propaganda war. If you don't share that patient's story of natural healing, the only story they and their friends and their family will ever hear is the one big pharma is paying to tell them. So it isn't self-serving to ask for a testimony?
Not at all. It is a public service. It's actually a moral obligation to the truth that completely turns the ask from something selfish into something heroic. It really does, but let's be real for a second. Even if you feel heroic on the inside. It can still be really awkward in the moment if you don't know exactly how to do it.
You need a system to bypass the awkwardness. That's the key right there. If you have to summon encourage every single time you wanna ask a patient, you just won't do it. You'll find an excuse. But if it's just step four on a checklist, you'll do it every time because it's just the standard operating procedure.
So let's get tactical. Let's look at the low tech systems first. These are for the doctors who don't wanna learn new software today, but wanna start getting testimonies tomorrow. And there's a great concept shared by a participant on the call called the Victory Vibe Wall. I love this name. It's great, and I love it because it leverages fomo,
fear of missing out. The setup is incredibly simple. Yeah. A patient reports a win. Say they tell you, I walked 18 holes of golf without back pain for the first time in five years. Huge wins. Huge. So you grab a small whiteboard. And you write that win on the board, you take a quick picture of the patient holding the board, then you print it out, just a standard photo and put it in a nice 10 by 12 frame.
Behind the front desk. The placement is what really matters here. It has to be behind the front desk. Why is that specific placement so important? Because every single patient checking in or checking out is going to see it. They see this growing collage of smiling faces and whiteboards. It creates a community feel and the psychology completely shifts.
How so? Instead of the doctor asking, Hey, can I take your picture? Patients start looking at the wall and asking, Hey, how do I get up there? That is the holy grail. It totally flips the dynamic. It validates their progress. It actually becomes a status symbol in the practice, like I'm a victory vibe patient now.
Now, for the doctor who still feels guilty asking maybe that desperation myth is still whispering in their ear, there was another strategy discussed called the charity approach, and this completely solves the I feel selfish problem. It's brilliant because it effectively outsources the motivation. You set up a policy in the office for every Google review
a patient leaves, the clinic donates $5 to a local charity, say a youth shelter or a local food bank, and if they refer someone, if a patient actually refers a friend, the donation bumps up to $50. That is so smart because now the ask isn't, Hey, help me grow my business. The ask is, Hey, help us support the local youth shelter this month.
It changes the patient from a customer. Into a donor. They feel like a philanthropist just for writing a quick review, and it anchors your clinic in the community. You aren't just the local back cracker, you're the community hub helping the homeless kids. Moving a bit deeper into the teen culture side of things, there was also the patient of the week concept.
Now, this seemed less about external marketing and more about internal morale, but Dr. Lloyd emphasized how crucial that is. It is essential. The idea is to select one standout patient each week. Maybe they had a miracle breakthrough, or maybe they've just been incredibly consistent and dedicated to their care plan.
So what do you do with them? You sit them down in a quiet consult room, turn on a camera, and just let them tell their story. Yeah, just a casual interview. But the crucial step isn't just posting it to Facebook or YouTube. It's what happens inside the office. Exactly. You play that video at your weekly team meeting.
You have to remember your front desk team, the billing team, they deal with money scheduling, insurance denials, and sometimes really grumpy people all day long. Right? They rarely get to see the miracle that actually happens back in the adjusting bay. They see the credit card getting swiped. They don't see the relief on the patient's face.
That's such a good point. Showing them the video reconnects your staff to the why. It reminds your ca that their work is literally saving lives and a staff that believes in the mission is infinitely better at asking for referrals than a staff that just wants to go home at 5:00 PM Okay, so we have the victory vibe wall, the charity angle, and the team meeting video.
Then we got to the visual strategy. That honestly blew me away when I read the notes. The art gallery strategy? Yes. This is for the doctor who wants their office to look like a high-end brand, not a community rec center. It utilizes a very specific workflow with Canva and mixed tiles, and the participant who shared this claimed it takes get this 30 seconds to execute.
Let's bring down the recipe because the details really matter here. Step one is the same. Catch the win. The patient says, I can lift my toddler again without pain. Step two. Write it on a small whiteboard. A step three, snap the photo of them holding it. Now here's the pivot that makes it look incredibly pro.
Step four. You don't just print the raw photo, you open an app like Canva on your phone and use the background remover tool. It's just one tap and the messy clinic background, the spine posters, the computer cords, the adjusting table, it all disappeared. You're just left with a clean silhouette of the patient holding the sign.
Exactly. It's such a simple hack, but it makes a massive difference in quality. Huge. Then step five, you drop that silhouette into a pre-made template. Maybe it has your clinic logo at the bottom, and a nice clean header at the top that says My Chiro story. And step six, you upload that final image to mixed tiles.
For those who don't know, mixed tiles are these eight by eight inch framed prints that stick directly to the wall, but they're re stickable. They don't use nails or damage the paint. So the end result is a wall filled with these perfectly uniform, black framed clean images and uniformity signals authority.
A bulletin board with a bunch of random photos and thumbtacks looks like a kindergarten classroom. A perfect grid of identical black frames looks like an art gallery or a museum exhibit, and the participant on the call said they get about 24 of these up on the wall in a single month. It creates a literal wall of proof.
It's social proof on steroids. When a brand new patient walks in for their day one and they see 24 people on the wall holding signs that say pain-free, sleeping better off meds, the sale is already half made before they even meet the doctor. It really is. So we've covered the visuals, but Dr. Lloyd is a master of communication and he really drilled down on the scripting because eventually you do have to open your mouth and say something, and this is where most doctors fumble the ball.
The patient says, my headaches are gone, and the doctor just says, oh, that's great, and then moves right on to adjusting the next vertebrae, right? Dr. Lloyd suggests using a pattern interrupt instead, a specific phrase to stop the momentum. I wrote this down because I want every single listener to practice saying this out loud.
The patient shares a win. You physically stop adjusting. You make direct eye contact and you use the trigger statement. You say, I never tire of hearing how chiropractic helps people. I love that phrasing. I never tire. It shows passion. It validates that what just happened for that patient is special. It signals that this isn't just routine for you, it's a victory.
And immediately after that statement, Dr. Lloyd layers into very specific questions. First, whom have you told? Which is a subtle accountability check. Like, have you been keeping this a secret? Exactly. And the second question, who else needs to hear this story? That is the bridge. You aren't asking for a name and phone number for your marketing file.
You are asking them to mentally scan their own social network for people who are currently suffering. And then comes the tactical maneuver that I think is vastly underutilized in most practices. The ca handoff. Walk us through this because it changes the dynamic of the waiting room entirely. So you've just had this powerful moment in the bay.
You don't just send the patient up to the front desk with a travel card and say goodbye. You walk them up yourself. You get the attention of your ca. Let's call her Mandy. You say, you say Mandy. Stop what you're doing for a second. You have to hear this Mrs. Jones. Tell Mandy exactly what you just told me about your headaches, and then Mrs.
Jones tells the story again. She tells it again, which cements the win in her own brain. Mandy gets to celebrate with her, which boosts Mandy's mood. But the real secret weapon here is the audience. The other patient's sitting in the waiting room. Exactly. They are sitting there scrolling on their phones, waiting for their turn.
Suddenly they hear a live emotional testimonial happening five feet away. They look up, they listen. It completely validates their decision to be in your office that day. It's a live commercial. Yeah, and it costs $0. It turns the mundane transactional checkout process into a transformational marketing event.
You literally cannot buy that kind of advertising. Uh, I wanna touch on a few of the advanced operations that came up later in the call because capturing the story is one thing. Operationalizing the referrals is another. There was a visual idea involving pill bottles that I thought was just, well, it was visceral.
Oh, the shadow box. This was a major standout. Describe that for us. Imagine a large shadow box hanging on the wall, glass front. Deep frame. Mm-hmm. Inside it is filled to the absolute brim with pill bottles, empty ones, presumably. Empty bottles, yes. Bottles that patients brought in because they don't need them anymore.
Maybe it's ibuprofen, maybe it's opioids, maybe it's prescription sleep aids and surrounding this massive box of discarded drugs are the written testimonies from those exact patients. That is a direct strike against the aspirin deficiency myth we talked about earlier. It visually demonstrates the subtraction of sickness.
It's such a powerful image. It says to anyone walking in, look, here is what we got people off of. It proves that health isn't about adding more chemicals . It's about removing the interference. Another operational tip they discussed was about timing. How do you know when a patient has a win?
Because sometimes they don't even realize it themselves until you point it out. That's where goal tracking on the travel card comes in. On day one, the patient says, honestly, doc, I just wanna sleep through the night. You write that specific goal down on the back of their travel card, not buried in the computer software, but on the physical card you hold in your hand every single visit, so it's right in front of your face every time you treat them.
Exactly. Three weeks later, you look at the back of the card and say, Hey, how was your sleep last night? The patient pauses and says, oh my gosh, I actually slept eight hours. Boom, you catch it. If you just rely on your memory, you'll miss it every time the travel card tells you exactly when to deploy the trigger script, finally closing the loop.
Mm-hmm. You have the testimony, you have the good vibe. How do we get the actual referral name and get them in the door? You need physical tools for the patient to take with them when they leave. The standard friend of a friend cards are great and effective, but I really liked the doctors with a heart coupon that was mentioned.
This is a specific physical coupon? Yes. It's handed out at specific intervals. Usually visit two or visit five. It's a tangible, valuable offer. They can physically hand to someone who is hurting, but the strategy that really leverages behavioral psychology the best is the thank you card strategy. Now this is for after the referral actually comes in, right?
Yeah, right. Let's say a patient, Bob. Refers as Sister Sally. You send Bob a handwritten thank you card. In the mail it says, Bob, thanks so much for sharing the gift of health with Sally. But inside that card you include a free adjustment card specifically for Bob. Sort of a have one on us as a thank you exactly.
It rewards the exact behavior you wanna see repeated. It's positive reinforcement 101. Bob feels incredibly appreciated and he's now subconsciously conditioned to refer again because he got a surprise reward for doing it the first time. So let's pull this all together because what we are doing here is we aren't just crossing our fingers and hoping people talk about us at the grocery store.
We are building a machine, a testimony factory. We're using the Victory Vibe Wall or the Mix Tiles Art Gallery to make success visible to everyone. We're using the I Never Tire of Hearing script to trigger the referral conversation and we're using the CA handoff to broadcast that success story to the whole waiting room.
And we have to do it because the alternative is silence. And silence lets the aspirin deficiency narrative win. As chiropractors, we simply cannot afford to be silent about miracles. So here is the challenge for you listening right now. You don't need to do all of these things at once, pick just one. Monday morning.
Go get a small whiteboard or download Canva on your phone, or just write that trigger statement on a sticky note and put it on your desk. The target is five testimonies a week. Start counting this week. Now, if you are listening to this and thinking, well, testimonies are great, but my practice has much bigger cracks in the foundation, we have got you covered.
That is exactly where five star management excels. If you need a comprehensive overhaul, whether it's associates, systems, profitability, or new patient marketing, you need to talk to Dr. George Birnbach. Dr. George Birnbach is the absolute master of practice systems. He's seen it all and he knows exactly how to fix it.
And right now you can book a free discovery call with him to look at your specific growth potential. The link to book that call is right there in the show notes. Do not sit on that. And if you want to immerse yourself in this kind of high level training in person, there is a massive event coming up that you absolutely need to be at.
Yes, get your calendars out right now. We are talking about the too many new patients live event. It's happening in Chicago, Illinois. This is a two day live deep dive. We're talking about everything we touched on today, but with way more depth. Dr. Lloyd mentioned there will be some amazing speakers covering everything from external marketing to internal referrals.
These are heavy hitters in the profession. It's the kind of room where the energy alone can change your practice trajectory. You're just surrounded by winners for two straight days. Absolutely. It's really hard to stay stagnant when everyone around you is growing and sharing their playbooks. The link to register for the too many new Patients Chicago event is also in the show notes.
So go book the free call with Dr. George Birnbach, get your tickets for Chicago, and of course, hit that subscribe button right now so you don't miss our next deep dive. We have a lot more great material coming down the pipe. We certainly do. Any final thought to leave them with today? Yeah. I'll leave you with Dr.
Noel Lloyd's core philosophy, which really anchored this whole discussion for me. He said, I believe everyone needs to hear a chiropractic testimony in order to enter a chiropractic office. Wow. That's a heavy statement. It is. Because it means, the question isn't whether the success stories exist. We know they do.
You see them every day. The real question is, are you giving people the chance to hear them? Go give them that chance. Thanks for joining us on the Chiropractic Deep Dive , and we'll see you next time. See you then!