Why 85% of Chiropractic Associateships Fail

Most owners who complain that associates don't work anymore have never actually built the system that would make an associate succeed. Dr. Noel Lloyd calls it the 85 percent number. In his read, 85 percent of failed associateships come down to the person offering the job never learning how to develop the associate they hired. And Noel knows the failure mode intimately because the reason he learned to build associates in the first place was that he stopped being able to practice at all.

Noel is a Palmer 1971 grad, the founder of Five Star Management, and the sister company The New Patient Academy. In the early 90s he took a ski accident in Sun Valley, Idaho hard enough that a neurosurgeon "closed him" on a bi-level cervical fusion. He walked away from the surgery, walked away from active practice, and had to figure out how to build a business he couldn't adjust in. Over the next 20 years he built Sound Chiropractic Centers in West Michigan to 10 locations, coached over 70 associates through his system, and sold every single clinic to the associate he trained inside it. He's 77 now and still coaches. The doctors he's coached for four-plus years are the ones running $190K months and hiring associates who pay for themselves inside two weeks of licensure.

In this episode, Noel breaks down the win-win associateship model that Brian Morris (Ep 47) learned from him in Chicago. The trifold objective: help as many people as you want, have as much fun as you want, make as much money as you want, all while working for me. The three-criteria hire: driven, teachable, likable. The three external marketing pillars that still work in 2026: screenings, massage events, and health talks, all facilitated by a Community Outreach Assistant (COA) whose job is to make marketing fun for the associate on day one. The base-pay-plus-percentage comp model that lets a modern associate take home $250K to $400K in year one at 25 percent of collected money. And the marketing-first hiring test he uses on day one to see whether a prospective hire will actually go out and produce new patients.

The conversation also gets into the origin story of the whole thing. The Sun Valley accident. His buddy Tom West adjusting him under an emergency in Idaho. The neurologist trying to close him on surgery. The pain that kept him "flipping and flopping on a trampoline" through the night. His first satellite clinic (511 square feet in downtown Seattle with two reception-area chairs he bought at a furniture store and a superstar associate named Craig who got the clinic to 367 patient visits per week). His fastest launches (161 new patients in the first month of a mall-based Everett clinic, 206 paid visits by week seven). And why his biggest mistake in that Everett clinic was putting only one chiropractor at the bottom of the new-patient waterfall. He should have staffed it with three or four and run shifts.

If you've been burned by an associate hire, told yourself associates don't work anymore, or want the philosophical floor under the practical 100-in-100 launch system Brian Morris (Ep 47) teaches, this episode is the master coach who trained that master coach.