Spanning from Portland, Ore. to the Milwaukee, Wis. area, ChiroWay has come a long way from its original spot in Woodbury in 2010. And all of it has to do with the commitment of husband-wife duo Trent and Laura Scheidecker to chiropractic care and to ChiroWay’s members.
Trent Scheidecker graduated from Northwestern Health Sciences University five years ago. “I knew right from the beginning… that I wanted to open my own practice,” he says. So he researched, took on mentors, and learned how the business works, from opening the doors to regular care. That’s when he found a new way of providing care. “I found a group of chiropractors that had been practicing for 40 plus years in this model of care, offering chiropractic to their community in this membership system,” but it hadn’t been done before in Minnesota, he says. So he took it upon himself to share that system, and started ChiroWay of Woodbury.
“We call it non-therapeutic chiropractic care,” Trent says, “which is without insurance, without having to hassle around with third-party reimbursement.” This new system took off quickly, and by 2012 they realized they were on to something. Members (what some would call patients, ChiroWay calls members) wanted care for their family in different locations throughout the metro, and other chiropractors kept wanting to get involved.
So his wife, Laura, left her full-time corporate job and started working on marketing and communications not just for Woodbury, which she had already been doing, but for the new franchise setting. And the growth since then is mostly through word-of-mouth, she says. “It’s been friends of friends who have seen what we’re doing and talked to their other friend who also is either just graduating or has graduated [from chiropractic school] and they want to jump on board, too,” she says.
What they’ve done, Trent says, is take like-minded chiropractors “who have the same passion and philosophy for chiropractic care and asked them where they want to live, where they want to practice in a community setting,” so they can duplicate ChiroWay’s philosophy in another setting. Today there are six locations in Minnesota—with three more on the way—along with one in Wisconsin and one on the west coast in Oregon.
In the long run, the couple would like to see more ChiroWays around the country, but it has nothing to do with a number, they say. “I don’t think it’s the magic number that means as much to us as it does having the right what we call, ‘tribe,’ of chiropractors,” Trent says. “We want to make sure our tribe is happy. … So if that’s 25 chiropractors doing that, or 500, as long as all 25 to 500 of them are happy doing what they’re doing, that’s the end goal for us.”
“These people [the chiropractors] are like our family,” Laura says. Just like the members, which they make a point to thank as much as they can, including by being active in the community. Active participants in Woodbury Days and the Woodbury Community Expo, they are also members of the Woodbury Area Chamber of Commerce. ChiroWay’s philosophy involves doing business in the community they live in so they see members at the park and the grocery store, not just in the office.
“Our members are such a huge priority,” Laura says. “We wouldn’t be where we are—the franchise, anything—without the community support.”
