We recently connected with Bonnie Fischer, D.C. and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Bonnie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
When I was in chiropractic school, one repeating theme that was drilled into us was that the initial start up cost of opening a practice and the daily operating expenses would be a major factor in determining whether or not you’d be able to keep your doors open the first few years of practice. After already having taken on close to $200,ooo in student debt, I wasn’t fully prepared to take on the extra expenses and challenges of starting a new business in addition to learning how to be a good doctor. Instead, I decided the best course of action would be to work under the guidance of an experienced doctor/business owner so that I would be ready to take that leap when the time was right.
Fast forward to 8 years later in practice and I had become very comfortable in the clinic I had been working out of, but my potential for growth had really started to be more and more limited. At that point, I had learned a lot about what not to do in a business and I also learned that there was a huge need for more access to resources supporting women of child bearing years through their journeys with fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum care. With the support and guidance of my family, I decided in 2018 to open my clinic, AlignSD Wellness Center.
My vision for the clinic was to create a healing space that was focused on the health and well-being of women and their families, not just from a chiropractic standpoint, but from a patient-centered approach that offered the best resources for each individual. Since we’ve been open, available services have included chiropractic care, acupuncture, physical therapy, and nutritional counseling. Our current in-house services include chiropractic care, therapeutic massage, near infrared sauna, and nutritional counseling. We have also worked really hard to establish good relationships with other healthcare professionals in our community so that we can offer trustworthy referral resources to our clients. Right now we are working on creating a free lactation support group for local moms and hope to add in-person lactation counseling services soon!
I feel very blessed to be one of the businesses that survived the pandemic. Our clinic was just shy of two years old when the shutdown happened. I think that if I had been brand new to the profession and hadn’t taken the time to fine tune my professional skills as a doctor before I jumped into being a business owner, there would’ve been a really good chance that we wouldn’t have made it through. Even with my years of expertise, it was still really challenging navigating all the chaos and confusion around that time. I’m happy that things are feeling like they are getting closer to pre-pandemic life and I’m really optimistic about the future of AlignSD and am grateful to have my clinic, our team, our colleagues, and, of course, our clients!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I absolutely love being a perinatal and infant chiropractor! I was really lucky early on in my career in that I very much knew that I wanted to focus my training on helping women with managing common pregnancy related conditions as well as general prenatal support to help moms prepare for labor and birth. Over time, and with a lot of hands-on clinical experience and feedback from patients, two major issues became very apparent to me. One, our healthcare system is not set up in a way that helps women prepare for a successful transition into motherhood and two, too few new parents know that the baby’s position in utero and the birth process itself can have a major effect on the baby’s spine and soft tissues and their ability to adapt to life outside the womb.
In our society, pregnancy is celebrated (as it should be!), but so little information and wisdom is passed onto expecting parents on what life will look like once baby has arrived and the family settles into their new routine. For many mothers and families, the experience can be quite shocking when reality doesn’t quite match expectations. Wouldn’t it be great if we spent more time and resources on helping these families feel confident and well-equipped to handle the new challenges that come with the arrival of a new baby? I believe so and in that regard, I have made it my mission to create programs and protocols to offer to my patients as educational tools and resources so that when a challenge arises in the postpartum period, they already have a plan on how to respond or who to reach out to for additional support. One of my programs that I have invested a lot of time and love into is my online course for expecting mothers, Blooming Into Motherhood: Preparing for the 4th Trimester, and I am very excited that we are getting closer to launching soon! My hope is that this program helps shed light on the truths and “what I wished I’d known” of the postpartum journey.
As for babies beginning their journey in life, parents want their child to have the best opportunities to be healthy and happy, but if the baby is born with abnormal tension or torsional patterns, they may have more difficulty adapting to everyday stressors, just like an older child or adult. We can see this in their inability to perform normal daily functions, like eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom. It is my mission to educate our community on the importance of regular chiropractic care starting at birth so that we can give these growing children the best environment to thrive in so they can reach their maximum potential.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
I’ll be celebrating my 20th anniversary of moving to California later this year and although I’ve lived the majority of my adult life here, deep down I’m a Midwest girl who wears her heart on her sleeve and I live my life from a place of integrity and good ‘ole fashioned Midwestern values. I make my best effort to treat people the way I want to be treated and I very much appreciate honesty and sincerity. I think that really comes across to my patients and they know that my intention is to help them reach their goals and that I’m not here to take advantage of them. At least that’s how I hope I come across to my patients and having been in this profession as long as I have, I have patients who have been coming to me for years, maybe not always consistently, but they keep coming back and they keep referring their loved ones and friends. That is the biggest compliment that I could hope for.
If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?
This is a really interesting question to answer because, in life, as a young adult envisioning your potential future, your dream is that you’ll have an amazing career that you are passionate about, that you love showing up for, that keeps you interested and motivated, and gives you a sense of purpose, but is also a very lucrative way to make money. Haha, and therein lies the rub.
What’s interesting about my profession is that the way to maximize earning potential is to be self-employed and, in reality, not all doctors are equipped to be entrepreneurs and not all entrepreneurs are equipped to be doctors. There is a big learning curve for this profession because you need to excel at both. I’m lucky in that I come from a family of entrepreneurs (although not in the healthcare industry) and I have a good support system that gave me a solid foundation of what to expect starting out as a new business. I started really small in my early career because I wanted to become a really good doctor. I wanted to feel extremely confident in my approach and care for my patients. Once I achieved that, I was ready to move onto the next step and take on the role of owning and operating a clinic. It hasn’t been easy, but having the love and passion for patient care is really what motivates me and keeps me trying as hard as I can to best serve my patients as well as create a profitable career for myself. So yes, I would absolutely do it again.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://alignsd.com/
- Instagram: @alignsd_wellnesscenter
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alignsdwellnesscenter
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/align-sd/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/bonnie-fischer-dc-alignsd-wellness-center-san-diego-2