Why the Best Associates Will Never Work for You

Most chiropractors believe their associate hiring problem is a supply problem. Not enough graduates, not enough talent, the schools aren't producing the right people. Dr. Peter Kevorkian calls it a structure problem. The best associates aren't coming to work for you because they're going to start their own practice. The ones who do come are walking into a business they didn't build, didn't pioneer, and don't yet know how to grow. If you don't train them like a pioneer all over again, the relationship breaks within a year.

Peter is the President of Life Chiropractic College West. Before that, he and his wife ran a cash-based, adjustment-only practice in Massachusetts for over 25 years. He was a civil engineer before he was a chiropractor, has been adjusting patients for 42 years, and made the transition out of practice in 2024 to take over Life West. When he left his clinic, he had 208 patients on active weekly care, the majority of them attending once a week for 20-plus years. Some families he adjusted across four generations.

In this episode, Peter breaks down the model that built that retention: a clear definition of the chiropractor's role (remove nerve interference, not treat conditions), an annual membership pricing model that capped a family at roughly $4,000 a year and an individual at $2,000, a 30 percent margin above bare-bones overhead as the operator's stress floor, and five practice principles he taught for decades (take care of everybody like family, tell the whole truth, make the concept of vertebral subluxation real, deliver the goods, be affordable and available). His high-volume model meant 2-to-3 minute adjustments after the initial care phase, which is what made the annual fee math work.

The conversation also gets into Peter's contrarian read on the talent shortage. The profession doesn't need fewer chiropractors. It needs more. Every spine deserves chiropractic care from birth to death, and one chiropractor can't adjust them all. He also explains the academic vs. relational skills gap (today's grads test higher than ever on competencies and clinical sciences, but a generation raised on screens has measurable deficits in eye-contact communication and patient connection), the two-year max associate contract he recommends before any ownership talk, the humility test he runs on every potential hire, and the satellite-campus expansion strategy he's running at Life West (Bellevue Nebraska is open, more coming, 92 percent of students enroll within a 50-mile radius).

If you've struggled to find associates, watched two-year hires walk out and start a competing practice down the road, or wondered whether the long-term cash retention model is even still possible in 2026, this episode is the operator playbook from someone who built it and is now training the next generation to do the same.