Here are a few comments we've received from our numerous success stories:

Dear Dr. Owen and the AMC Family,

I feel the need to write to you all and tell you how lucky and blessed I feel to have found such a wonderful, up-standing group of chiropractors who really do want to see others in our profession succeed.

When I attended Sherman College, a program was in place that allowed senior interns who had completed their clinic requirements early to participate in an extern program where they would shadow a chiropractor in the field for the last quarter of school. Through this program I found Dr. Chris Musacchio and ultimately you. I was so impressed with him and his staff, how his office ran, and how much fun they seemed to have doing it. Being the “sponge” that I was while I was in his office, I asked him if he were able to go back in time and open his practice all over again, what would he do differently? He looked me straight in the eye and told me that he wished he had known about AMC.

Shortly after graduating Sherman I took his advice seriously. Through you, your Right Start program, your coaches—Dr. Chris Rush and Dr. Ava Carter, your seminars, your tapes, your instructions and all your encouragement, I am ecstatic to report that I have been open for just shy of three months and have already earned the right to wear my first ribbon at AMC at the upcoming seminar.

Having been exposed to other chiropractic management groups throughout my journey, I must admit that prior to externing with Dr. Musacchio, I was leery of the idea of joining one. But your company put all my anxieties to rest. Your logo of “We’re here to help chiropractors” is not just a slogan, it is the truth. You have helped me reach goals that I did not think possible until I “expanded my pan.” I am having fun, my staff is happy, my family is in amazement. My husband tells others how happy I am when I come home in the evening and how I wear on my face the fulfillment I’m experiencing. I am building the practice of my dreams.

“Thank you” does not even begin to encompass the gratitude that I feel for all you have done for me.

In Health, Dr. A. Boda

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I am Stephen Conicello. I practice in the upstate of South Carolina, Easley South Carolina. We are about 45 minutes south of Sherman and about 2 ½ hours north of Life University. I heard about AMC through Dr. Henri Dallies who is a doctor in Hendersonville, who is a mentor of mine. I do an upper cervical procedure called knee chest and he was a mentor of mine through the upper cervical knee chest. And I came to him and asked him why he used a practice management group because he seemed like he had it all together. He’s a very suave French guy and I thought well maybe he’s got it all figured out himself. I came up and saw his practice and he said, basically I asked him why does he do it and he said well do you want 75% of something or 100% of nothing? That pretty much hit me between the eyes and I said well you know, I’d rather have 75% of something.

Being in school, we’re really not taught much on practice management. We’re taught a lot of other ways that really don’t work too much out there, a lot of ways, stuff that I didn’t feel comfortable with using. I came to AMC for my first boot camp as a student. I was in 10th quarter at the time and I really was pretty much hit between the eyes and said Wow this is just something I need to have. When we spend 20 minutes on how to shake a person’s hand and the detailed procedure on how to shake a person’s hand that seemed pretty amazing to me. You know, they never talked about any of that kind of stuff in school, none of our mentors did. And I grasped the concept of needing to know procedures early on as far as before I got out of school.

Once I got out of school and got myself up and running and I went into the Right Start Program. I had great coaches through it and I found the right plan, I found the right land, and I picked the right man, myself. I guess I was the person God picked that person who was me and we just started exploding. A year and a half into practice and we are at 87 thousand almost 88 thousand dollars a month. A lot of people you might frown at that and say are you guys really doing that. Yep, we’re really doing it. You’re more than welcome to contact me at my office, its 864-855-3255 and we’ll tell you the real deal. You’re more than welcome to come out and visit us as well. We’re in the middle of nowhere in Easley, South Carolina, so don’t be scared. The procedures, I can honestly tell you literally in a nutshell probably saved our lives in practice because I can see where I would have no clue as to what I’m doing, especially coming in from school. It’s treacherous out there. There are a lot of people that want to take your money and not give you anything back for it. I’m Dr. Stephen Conicello, Thank you and God bless you, and please contact me if you need to.

Boot camp has been amazing. It’s one of those things where you can have the tapes, you can have all the papers, all you want on protocol and procedures, but what’s going to revolutionize your practice is going to seminars every other month, every month, every Tuesday, or whatever you chose to keep doing it. Because there’s stuff you’ll always be missing you’ll say Oh man, I’m not doing this or I’m not doing that. But as soon as you do it, Boom, flips things right around and you’re back on track again. That’s why it is so important to stick with it and stay on it. Honestly to me, I’m not going to leave ever. I’ll just tell you that straight up and this is somebody that’s doing almost 90 thousand dollars a month and I have room for improvement. I honestly want to bring on more and more doctors teach them how to do it, bring on associates, and build multiple clinics to get sick people well. That’s my hope, that’s my dream, that’s my desire is to take that money and get more sick people well.

Dr. S. Conicello

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What can I say about a company that I have been with for the past 7 years? 7 years with a company, 7 years with a consulting firm, 7 years with a family, what can you say about? How can you stick with somebody, with a group, with a family for so long? Well, it’s very simple. You first think about what’s in it for me, don’t you? Then you think about when you start doing better and you struggle but you start seeing the results. You start saying how can you give back so that you can also have other people benefit from the way you benefited. I guess it is one of the reasons why I am sitting here. After 8 years of practicing under someone where I learned tremendously I find myself opening office but not knowing how to run that office and how to make it work. I knew how to get sick people well, but if you don’t have people in your office what do you do? There’s nobody to get well. When the bills are your responsibility you start worrying. Gray hairs appear very fast. Why try to invent the wheel? Number one, it’s too big a wheel to reinvent but instead why not try to look for somebody who has already invented it, polished it and perfected it and then let him teach you how to use that wheel. First of all is it a good wheel?

Well after 7 years I can say that for me it was, still is. Hoping that it will keep being a good wheel for a long, long time. I cannot thank AMC enough for already what has happened. When in my first 8 years of practice, my best yearly salary was $33 thousand collections for the office. This past year it was $530 thousand. This year we’re going to beat that. Do numbers mean a lot? Yes they mean a lot. But just like Tom Owen says, collections, money, is nothing but the shavings of a good carpenters tools at work. But you have to look at how things work. The bottom line is how do you get a system that will allow you to maximize the knowledge that you have gathered. From school, with somebody else, another doctor, so forth and so on. And put it to work to help sick people get well, how do you do it? These people can help you and there is no pressure. It is an ABC system; down to earth as I like to call it. That helps you learn from point one. From the moment you meet your first patient that you are in control, that the patient is going to like you. You will know what to do, what not to do, what to avoid and what direction to take in order for the patient to say you know what, I like this man, I like this woman, I like this doctor and I think I need to stick around because he or she has something that I need. That is a good feeling. If you have the right heart and the right mind it is a good feeling because you know you have an even better chance of being able to help that patient. Not because of what you know, how you dress, but also because you know how to make that patient understand that what you have is best for them in a non pressure, simple, down to earth form ABC system again as I said. What do you say on visit #3, what do you say on visit #2? How do you make a patient agree to an exam, to have to receive X rays without even saying those keywords, how do you do that? And yet that is what we do. The last time I had a patient say no to exam and x rays was five years ago. Everybody else has to have their exams, x rays, so on and so forth. Some of you may say Wow after seven years either they have a lot to offer or you are a very slow learner. Well, I guess both. It took me a while to get going because when you have eight years of a certain way of practicing, you have certain ways that some of them are good and some of them are not good. You need to learn how to undo that. How to relearn the proper way and some people are slow to learn, slower to accept that, slower to change. Usually we don’t like change but once you understand that, it works.

So from a beginning of nothing, zero, now here we are seven years later and I can say at every single stage—I had a stage of 50 patient visits per week, a stage of 150 patient visits per week, and now a stage of 250+ patient visits per week—we are still learning. What’s wonderful of AMC is that at every stage of your practice, whether you are starting, whether you are developing, whether you have hit a plateau; whether you are ready to have another doctor work with you, guess what? They have a way to give you a hand and help you go forward and you know what? That is extremely comforting. When you have great minds that help you, to lead you in the right direction you in your own little town, in your big town, you can only do so much but if you have the help of all the minds to help you have a bigger vision to understand what that vision is all about, it helps you to grow. And once we tend to grow we don’t have to go back to the before phase; and that is what’s so nice. I said that a few years back, think of it this way. If AMC can help a French man make it in North Carolina, trust me, it can help anyone make it anywhere.

Dr. H. Dallies

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Dear AMC,

I just wanted to take a few minutes to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you have done for me and for my practice. I guess that in order to understand how far I have come, you have to know where I have been.

I graduated in October 2003 from Palmer College of Chiropractic ready to go to work helping people like I had been taught in class but knowing very little about practice, so I thought the logical thing to do was associate. I started my journey in Dixon, IL with an AMC doctor but found that the northern Illinois climate was a bit too harsh for this southern Illinois girl…tell them how great a difference in climate there is between the top of the state and the bottom, Dr. Osborne. I also am the last of seven children and have aging parents, so I wanted to be closer to home. Luckily, I thought then, my field doctor had an opening at her satellite clinic in McLeansboro, IL which was an hour from home. I soon found myself smack dab in the middle of an associateship nightmare. Allow me to draw you a mental picture of the “office”: Picture a 1960’s mobile home with a carport built over it. I think you could’ve made a sandcastle with the amount of dirt that was ground into the vintage carpet, not to mention that a hole had worn not only through the carpet just as you entered the adjusting room, but also in the floor below. I was granted enough money and the spare time in the office to paint the paneling lavender…a color that spoke to my innate if no one else’s…Are you starting to get a good mental picture?

I started practice there in April of 2004 and by Memorial Day the bank had called to let me know that my paycheck was no good for the first time. This continued about every two weeks for the entire summer and fall. I had never had a job in which it was more stressful to go to work on payday than it was to go to the dentist office for a root canal. I was to the point that each payday, I was nearly physically ill worrying whether the check would bounce. Needless to say this doctor WAS NOT WITH AMC!!! I spent my time angry and upset not only with my boss, but also with myself for doing nothing about it. I thought so many times about quitting. I had the letter of resignation ready and my list of reasons together, but I didn’t think that I could afford to quit, and I especially hated to leave my patients with no one reliable to take care of them. Finally, after Christmas that year, I had my fill. With two more bad checks, I decided it was time to call AMC and get some forward momentum going.

After my first bootcamp back in January 2005, I realized just how far off base I had really gone in practice and in life in general. I had no goals for myself anymore or for what I saw my practice being. I also recognized that I had several “anchors on my tail” and very little “wind in my sails”. That was tough. Many days I felt as if I had no one on my side besides AMC. I had joined on with the Right Start division of AMC, so we chose a town and were in the process of choosing a location when I realized that before anything was to be accomplished as far as the office was concerned, I was going to have to make some huge changes in my head and in my life. Feeling rather poor, in April I made the decision to help a chiropractor friend in town who was pregnant with triplets to make some money until I got my practice together. I had offered to help her in any way that I could, but I didn’t realize exactly what that would entail. I guess that meant working in her office like her and being paid the same salary that she was paying herself, which was less than the cost of two adjustments plus therapy per day. I was seeing 40-50 people a day, so something just didn’t quite add up for me there. After several weeks of being too afraid to ask her for more, she finally came in for an adjustment and I approached her asking for a certain dollar figure that I thought was fair. Well, obviously she didn’t think it was fair and paid me $25 dollars a day less than that for my remaining time there. Now I’m not in chiropractic for the money, but even if money is merely the shavings of a good carpenter’s tools at work, I was whittling skyscrapers and not even making a mess. She finally returned to work in October of 2005…you don’t think that I had the nerve to tell her to find other help if I didn’t have the nerve to ask for fair pay now, do you? At some point I realized, I WAS A DOORMAT FOR EVERYONE.

I had become everyone’s garbage dump and instead of doing something about it, I had silently let myself believe not only that it was good enough, but also that it was somehow what I deserved. Life changed dramatically once I saw that no one was going to change any of it for me. I was under the impression that I could only change one thing at a time, so I worked on my own head first, reading the positive materials that my coach recommended and listening to the Success in Your Routine and Made Up Mind tapes nonstop. Little did I know how much everything would change when I changed that one thing. I scrapped my entire search in the town I had been looking previously and restarted everything from square one and of the three towns I described for AMC, they picked my hometown as the best one to open an office in. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about that. I thought no one there would take me seriously, when the real problem was that I wasn’t taking myself seriously. Once I did, doors opened where it seemed only brick walls had stood before.

One of my biggest fears was asking for the money to get the office started. Between my own calculations and those of AMC, I determined that between start-up and operating capital I would need $100,000. I had never really asked for that much money for anything before. When I sat down with the man from the bank and he started thumbing through my bank proforma, he was truly amazed. His exact words were, “If this chiropractic thing doesn’t work out, you may want to go into business consulting, because this is the best business plan that I have ever seen.” That put me a bit more at ease (thanks again). I was introduced to a developer who was interested in revamping my sleepy little town of 8000. It took more time than I ever expected, but we eventually came to an agreement to break ground on the office in January of 2006. In the meantime, my husband told me to leave. I guess the positive changes I had made in myself were not changes that he could live with. I never told my coaches about all of the personal hell I was going through. I just couldn’t choke the words out. I felt if I did, I was making excuses for myself, and I refused to do that. After all I had seen many, many people come to the bootcamps who were in worse shape than I was.

Finally, in June of last year my new office was completed. I had planned to open June 5th, but due to some x-ray difficulties was unsure whether that date was going to work. At noon on the Friday before, I was given the guarantee by the x-ray installer that my machine would be functional, so we scrambled to print out, fold, and send our survey letters to all 1100 people who we surveyed to let them know. We got just over half of them sent out that day and the others went out on Saturday. The newspaper’s deadline for the Monday ad was the prior Thursday, so not knowing if I would have functional x-ray equipment, I had postponed the ad to the following Monday. We opened that Monday with no sign on the building and no number in the phonebook, none the less from June 5-30 we saw 103 new patients and collected right around $15,000. This past week of January 22-26 was a record setter for us. We had a goal of 200+ patient visits per week, $7500+ in collections, and 12+ new patients per week that we just couldn’t seem to break through. With the changes that we made after the meeting the weekend right before, we were able to see 215 patient visits, collect over $9200, and see 16 new patients! I am looking forward to reaching our next goal which will include the expansion of our office and will lead to the addition of an associate in our clinic.

We enjoy every day serving our patients and chiropractic. We had our first patient appreciation day in October and enjoyed seeing 89 of our patients on Tuesday and 21 new patients and lives to change through chiropractic on Thursday. I learn more and more every day and every meeting, and I expect that with AMC and God on my team, the sky is the limit. I look forward to my coach calls every week with Dr. Wampfler. She is truly a fine person, an invaluable coach, and an inspirational example. I don’t think I could ever thank her enough for all of her guidance and support. I also had great Right Start coaches. Mike and Dr. Rashidian both were positive forces and invaluable resources as I was getting things organized to locate a town and a location and to open the office. There has never been a request or question that AMC hasn’t had an answer for. I thank God every second for AMC because I know that not only would my practice not be what it is now, but it would still be just a dream in chiropractor’s muddled mind without you. Thank you for your support and acceptance from the beginning, through the opening, and into the future as we continue on this great journey. Thank you for giving me the tools to change my mind and my life forever. Thank you for helping me help more people and change more lives that I could have ever dreamed. Thank you for being a family that I am proud to be a member of and have no qualms about inviting other chiropractors to.

With My Deepest Appreciation, Dr. T. Kennard

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Dear Tom: I wanted to write to tell you how much I really appreciate you as a leader and person. What is happening to me and my practice is so great and practically unbelievable only because I tried for years to accomplish in my practice what is now being accomplished. Now this is only the beginning and I have much larger goals at this point that I will accomplish because of you.

I can remember being at a boot camp, hearing you talk on what I have to do to get this done and it is like I had been in a room very dimly lit where suddenly the room is getting brighter and brighter; Tom you have given me sight, I thank God for you! We have smashed several month records by almost three fold. I could not find good staff who would work, now I have the best staff that say they will retire here, I used to feel unsure showing patients long term care plans, now I not only have the confidence to present it, but the patients expect it, Tom I have always had a great spirit but this is life changing for me; I have not been a year in AMC and things are so great in my practice, I want always to be a part of what the Lord has used to bless so and I really do feel more grateful to you and all of AMC because of this; more than you know. I wish more doctors would just listen and follow what you teach, as I know it saved my practice life. I feel so grateful about all this and I wish there were some way I could thank AMC more and I always think of ways to bless the ones who have blessed me so. I am becoming the doctor mentally that I always wanted to be, it means so much and it is an answer to many years of prayer.

My area is about 80% Spanish speaking and I don’t speak Spanish not to mention I had trouble finding any reliable staff person; half of my practice life I had no staff person as they brought all there problems to work, so I literally worked alone for years at a time, phones, films, scheduling, exams all alone! I was convinced I had to move to succeed; just as you said the market is not the problem, I would have been in a new office with higher rent and swimming upstream! You have shown me and I have seen that I could start with nothing and out of nothing and out of no way, a way will be made; we have seen flat out miracles! My base was 12,000.00 and in eight months we were just shy of 30,000.00 by a few hundred dollars, “wow” I was sitting at my desk thinking I just collected about thirty thousand dollars in a market I can’t speak to with an untrained person who does not speak Spanish! Now I have seen and my concepts are so high and I have a lot of work to do.

I am a loyal and faithful man who will always want to be a part of AMC and it is worth so much. Thank you!

Respectfully, Dr. C. London