Serious Savings: Keeping a Chiropractor Open During the Global Pandemic

From Launch to Lift-Off 

For Kendra, the dream of opening her own chiropractic office came true in the Fall of 2018. After many years of schooling and eight years working for others, she was finally able to become her own boss.  Kendra knew that this step wouldn’t come without a series of risks but she was ready to face them head on. Kendra took out a small business loan for a store front office, renovated the space to include four small rooms for adjustments, one small staff room with a kitchenette and one larger waiting room.  By opening this business in a developing neighbourhood, Kendra was able to acquire new clients quickly allowing her to hire three other chiropractors and a full-time receptionist.  Her hard work was paying off and Kendra looked forward to seeing her business grow.  

The Pandemic Problem

After a wonderful Christmas vacation, Kendra was ready to return to work in January 2020.  However, Kendra quickly started hearing reports about a pandemic in China. She, like most of the Western world, acknowledged the severity but also thought of it as worlds away. 

In the spring of 2020, when the Canadian government officially announced that the country, and world was in the midst of a pandemic. Before her eyes, she watched multiple businesses and restaurants close down and feared for her own business, staff members and livelihood. For the first two weeks, Kendra’s patients were still coming to her office, but by the third week, cancelations were climbing. 

Thankfully, Kendra’s business was considered essential, allowing her to remain open but she still saw a decrease in clients due to safety concerns. She was forced to lay off two of her chiropractors, leaving just herself, one other chiropractor, and a receptionist. As a business owner, she felt the financial and emotional impact of having fewer clients and having to lay off her staff. She wanted to continue helping people while also paying her remaining staff. She needed an sanitizing solution that had high efficacy and was affordable. 

Searching For Solutions

Within the next months, Kendra enhanced the cleaning protocols at the office. Normally, each patient would have a 25 minute appointment, leaving 5 minutes to clean and prepare each room before the next patient. This allowed for each chiropractor to meet with at least 16 clients in a day resulting in at least 56 clients coming through the office on any given day.  Now, the receptionist needed to clean each room for ten minutes between clients allowing Kendra and the other chiropractor to only see 12 clients a day.  In addition, Kendra now had to consider the costs of her supplies.  

On a daily basis, Kendra was spending ~$40 on surface wipes, hand sanitizers and having masks available for her clients.  In addition, she hired a fogging company to come through her office once a week to spray all their surfaces down, resulting in an additional $300/week.  These methods were not sustainable for Kendra.  If she was going to maintain these protocols, she would be spending ~$10,500 on disposable surface wipes a year and ~$15,600 on a fogging company. While these solutions had high efficacy on hard surfaces, they still didn’t solve the issue of airborne bacteria.  In addition, her receptionist was being overworked and Kendra worried that if this method continued her receptionist would leave and live off of CERB until things settled down.  None of these solutions were financially sustainable over the long-term for her new business.  

Kendra decided to make some changes. More information was coming out about the virus, while it is airborne and can be found on surfaces, it typically requires the infected carrier to directly pass it to another person. That meant that the unused items in the room, the walls, and the floor didn't have to be cleaned between each use. Kendra deemed it appropriate to go back to the 5-minute cleaning protocol. With this change, she estimated that she would spend ~$30/day on cleaning wipes, masks, and hand sanitizer.  This would bring her annual costs down to ~$7,830.  This would allow Kendra and her other chiropractor to return to seeing 16 clients a day which would off-set some of the cleaning costs.  Still, Kendra was tired of seeing her hard earned money go into the garbage in the form of surface wipes.  She knew she wanted to invest in a long-term solution and fast so she didn’t have to waste any more money.  

To communicate her extra cleaning protocols, Kendra took to social media.  One day, she saw an ad on Instagram, catered to medical offices for a sanitization device from a company called “In The ClearZone”. Clicking on the ad, she was led to their website. She discovered air purifiers which had the capability of sanitizing both air and surfaces through UV and hydroxyls-naturally occurring elements making these devices eco-friendly. She was hopeful that she could adopt a new, green cleaning option. Still, she was concerned about the price. She’d looked into other air purifying products, but the prices for their air purifiers seemed outrageous. They didn’t offer active disinfection and charged extremely high prices.  She decided to contact In The ClearZone for a quote on their products. 

Serious Savings

Kendra was promptly emailed back by Jenessa, the CEO of the company, asking if Kendra would send the dimensions of each room. Shortly after, Kendra received a quote. For each room adjustment room, Jenessa recommended the Breeze which would cost her $249 , The one Atmosphere, for the waiting room, would cost her $1,199. She did the math - $2,480 including taxes! Then there were replacement parts that would need to be changed each year accounting for ~$100. Kendra would 100% afford these prices!  She also knew that she would want to continue wiping high touch areas like adjustment tables and door knobs.  However, she estimated this would cost her ~$5/day or ~$1,305/annually.  Also, she would no longer need a weekly deep cleaning service.  With this solution in place, Kendra would commit to a one time purchase of ~$2,480 and annual costs of ~$1,405.  What a difference! 

Kendra immediately made the purchase, finally feeling a sense of hope for her financial situation. Three weeks later, the products arrived. She was happy to find out how easy the set up was. Kendra decided that by assigning the high touch point wiping to the reception and by rotating rooms after each appointment, she would safely be able to bring back another chiropractor. This relieved a lot of stress for Kendra and her team since they knew that this was an effective and easy solution that they could safely manage.  It all took Kendra less than an hour to read the Owner's Manual, set up and start the products.  She also shared the Owners Manual with all her staff so they could have a better understanding of how the technology was keeping them and their clients safe. In addition, In The ClearZone provided her with marketing materials to strategically place around the office so Kendra’s clients could read more about the technology themselves. 

After installation, Kendra and her team were finally able to take a deep breath, feeling safe.

Not only was she saving money, but her staff and clients were happy to know that there was a reduced risk of contracting the virus through the sanitizing effects of In The ClearZone’s products. Kendra has now had them installed for 3 months and has never been happier with her ability to service her clients safely.