A chiropractor once described his setup to me like this: he had a guy. Not a company, a guy. Somebody local, reasonably priced, who built websites on the side. Whenever the chiropractor had an idea, he’d call the guy, the guy would build it, and that was the extent of the relationship. It worked, until it didn’t. The chiropractor wanted to know why his site wasn’t ranking for anything, and the honest answer was that nobody involved had ever been responsible for that question. The guy built what he was told to build.
That conversation stuck with me because it gets at something chiropractors rarely think through before hiring someone: the difference between hiring a company with a system and hiring a guy who takes direction. They are not the same kind of relationship, and the difference matters more than most people realize going in.
Who’s Actually Leading
When you hire a website guy, you are leading. You come up with the ideas, you decide what the site should say, you pull something off ChatGPT and hand it over to be built. The guy executes. He’s not pushing back on whether the idea is good, he’s not weighing it against what actually works for chiropractic practices, he’s building what he was told to build. That’s the job. It’s grunt work, and calling it that isn’t an insult, it’s an accurate description of the arrangement both people agreed to.
When you hire me, or any company with an actual system behind it, the direction runs the other way. I’m not asking what you want built. I’m asking what you’re trying to accomplish, and then I’m building it based on what I’ve seen work across chiropractic practices, not based on whatever idea sounded good that morning. You’re leaning on expertise instead of directing labor.
Neither approach is wrong. They’re just built for different people.
What You Get With a System
The benefit of hiring someone with a real philosophy and a tested process is that you’re not the only person in the room who knows anything about what makes a chiropractic site work. I’ve built enough of these to know what tends to convert a new patient and what tends to just sit there looking nice. That knowledge doesn’t come from a single client’s opinion, it comes from patterns across a lot of practices over a lot of years.
That’s the whole value proposition. You’re not paying for someone to type code. You’re paying for someone to make decisions you don’t have the background to make well yourself, because you went to chiropractic school, not web design school.
What You Give Up
Here’s the honest trade-off, and I’d rather say it directly than let someone find out the hard way. When you hire someone who operates on a system, you don’t get to steer the ship. If you’re the kind of chiropractor who wants to approve every button placement, rewrite copy because you’d phrase it differently, or override a recommendation because you saw something on a competitor’s site you liked better, this relationship is going to frustrate you. Not because I’m being difficult, but because the value of the system only holds if it stays intact. A system that gets overridden every time a client has a preference isn’t really a system anymore, it’s just a guy with extra steps.
This is why I say clearly who this isn’t for. Micromanagers, people who want to approve every decision, chiropractors who already have a clear vision they’re not willing to depart from, they’re often better served hiring someone local who will simply build what they ask for. That’s a legitimate need. It’s just not what I offer.
What a Guy Gets You
The upside of hiring a guy is real, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. It takes the labor off your plate. You don’t have to explain your philosophy or trust someone else’s judgment, you just say what you want and it happens. For a chiropractor who already knows exactly what they want their site to look like and say, and who doesn’t want to negotiate that with anyone, this can be the simpler and cheaper path.
The risk is that you’re only as good as your own knowledge of what works. Most chiropractors didn’t go into practice to become amateur marketers, so the ideas being implemented are often untested, sometimes pulled from an AI tool with no context for whether it applies to a chiropractic patient base at all. The guy isn’t going to tell you it’s a bad idea. That’s not his role in the relationship.
Figuring Out Which One You Are
Ask yourself honestly: do you want to be led, or do you want to lead? If you want a partner who brings a tested approach and you’re willing to trust that approach even when it’s not exactly what you would have done yourself, a company with a real system is going to serve you better. If you already know what you want and just need someone to build it without questioning it, a guy who takes direction well might genuinely be the better fit.
I built my website service around the first kind of relationship, because that’s what I know how to deliver well. It’s the same approach behind my local SEO work, which only works if the strategy is allowed to run its course instead of getting redirected every time a new idea comes up. If that sounds like a fit, I offer a free website and SEO review with no pressure attached. If it doesn’t sound like a fit, that’s useful information too, and I’d rather you know that now than three months in.
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