Single Visit Margin is the one number that tells you what your practice actually keeps after every patient walks out the door — not what your P&L says, what reality says.
If this were your practice, you'd keep $13.60 from every adjustment — operating at just 18.9% lean. Most practice owners don't know their number. Do you know yours?
Find Out My SVM →Your accountant tells you the practice is profitable. Your bank balance tells a different story. The gap between those two things is what we call bloat — and most chiro practice owners have no idea how much of it they're carrying.
The P&L shows revenue minus expenses. But it doesn't show you what you're actually keeping per visit, after you pay yourself, pay tax, and cover every dollar that left the account. That's the number that actually matters.
A vanity number. High revenue with high expenses and low margin is just a bigger treadmill.
What you keep per visit — after expenses, owner pay, and tax. This is the real score.
SVM is a per-visit profitability score. It takes everything your practice spends — operations, owner pay, and tax — and expresses it as a cost per visit. Stack that against what you charge per visit, and the gap is your real margin.
A practice charging $72 per visit with a real cost of $70.90 is keeping $1.10 per visit. That's 1.5% lean. The P&L might show a profit. The SVM shows the truth.
The Lean % is the clearest output of the SVM — it tells you what fraction of every dollar you earn actually stays in the business after everything is paid. Here's how to read it.
A lean practice isn't built by chasing more revenue. It's built by widening the gap between what comes in and what goes out — on a per-visit basis. We call this The Wedge.
Most practice owners try to solve a margin problem by seeing more patients. But if your SVM is broken, more volume just means more work for the same thin margin. The Wedge says: grow revenue while reducing your cost per visit. Every visit becomes more profitable without adding hours.
The gap between these two bars is your Single Visit Margin. The wider it gets, the leaner your practice.
Your SVM improves when your cost per visit drops relative to your OVA. There are four places to find that reduction — and not all of them require cutting.
The simplest lever. If your cost per visit is fixed and you increase what you charge, the margin widens immediately. This doesn't mean charging more — it means capturing more of what you're already worth through better billing, fewer write-offs, and optimised fee structures.
Not all expenses are equal. Fixed costs spread across more visits become cheaper per visit. Variable costs that scale with volume are the ones to target. The question isn't "what can I cut?" — it's "what am I spending that doesn't show up in patient outcomes?"
More visits from the same fixed cost base means each visit carries less overhead. This is the efficiency game — the same rent, same equipment, same team, more revenue flowing through it. The SVM improves without touching a single expense line.
Many practice owners underpay or overpay themselves relative to what the practice can support. The SVM forces clarity — if your total take-home exceeds what the margin can sustain, you're borrowing from the business. A lean practice pays the owner well and still keeps margin.
The SVM Calculator takes under 2 minutes. All you need is your last year's P&L and what you charge per visit.
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