It started in a hotel room.
No sprawling agency, complicated marketing tech stack, or grand corporate headquarters. Just two people, three days, and an idea about how they could help chiropractors grow.
But the story of Perfect Patients actually begins a little earlier, and much closer to home.
Back in 2003, Steve Anson was trying to create a better website for his wife’s chiropractic practice. What he found wasn’t good enough.
There simply weren’t great website solutions built specifically for chiropractors – ones that understood not only the technology, but chiropractic itself, the doctor-patient relationship, and what makes someone choose one practice over another.
Steve knew technology and believed he could build something better. What he needed was someone who really understood chiropractic.
That’s where Bill Esteb came in…
Steve remembered hearing Bill speak at an Australian Chiropractic Association event years earlier. Bill had spent decades immersed in chiropractic, studying the doctor-patient relationship and helping chiropractors communicate the value of care.
Steve called him, they talked, and a few months later, when Bill was going to be in New Zealand, they decided to meet.
For three days, they sat together in Bill’s hotel room and mapped out what it could look like to build one of the best website companies specifically for chiropractors.
Perfect Patients was born.
Perfect Patients and Vortala: One Story From the Beginning
More than two decades later, we’ve grown quite a bit from that hotel room. But there’s something important we want chiropractors to know about who we are:
Perfect Patients is part of Vortala, and always has been.
Steve Anson and Bill Esteb founded the business and brands around a remarkably simple idea: use the Internet to help doctors grow their practices. Perfect Patients became the chiropractic-focused expression of that vision, and as the company expanded into other areas of healthcare marketing, Vortala grew with it.
Today, there are teams of people working behind the scenes on strategy, websites, content, SEO, paid advertising, support, and everything else it takes to compete in a digital landscape that looks almost nothing like it did when Steve and Bill sat down together all those years ago.
We’ve had the privilege of helping thousands of practices along the way. We’ve learned an enormous amount about what works, what doesn’t, and what it really takes to grow a chiropractic practice online.
But we’d argue that what matters most is what hasn’t changed.
Steve wasn’t trying to solve some theoretical marketing problem when this began. He was trying to help his wife’s chiropractic practice.
There was a real chiropractor on the other side of the problem. A real practice. A real family. Real patients. Real bills to pay. And a real desire to reach more people who could benefit from chiropractic care.
More than 20 years later, that’s still how we think about this work.
Because behind every search ranking, conversion rate, cost per lead, and new-patient number is a chiropractor who took a risk and opened a practice. Someone who looks after families like ours. Someone with a team depending on them, a family to support and patients they genuinely want to help.
That matters to us. A LOT.
More Experience, Not More Gimmicks
Digital marketing has become considerably more complicated since Steve and Bill sat in that hotel room. Google has changed. Search has changed. Websites have changed. Social media arrived. Mobile took over. Paid advertising evolved. Now AI is changing how people find information all over again.
We’ve changed with all of it.
But we’re not interested in complexity for complexity’s sake. We’re interested in what works.
Sometimes that’s sophisticated SEO strategy or paid search. Sometimes it’s improving the way a website converts visitors into new patients. Sometimes it’s simply getting our hands dirty, finding the thing that’s getting in the way and fixing it.
No magic button. No secret formula. No bells and whistles just so we can sell more bells and whistles.
Just practical digital marketing, backed by people who’ve spent decades learning what helps chiropractic practices grow.
That experience gives us something valuable. We’ve seen what works across thousands of practices, markets, and circumstances. We can recognize patterns, spot problems, and adapt when Google changes the rules again.
But we never want that experience to turn Perfect Patients into a faceless marketing company.
One of the principles that has shaped Vortala’s culture is an Outward Mindset: the idea that our success is a by-product of helping others succeed.
For us, that’s not corporate-speak. It’s the business we’re in.
When one of our chiropractors gets found by the right patient, that’s a win.
When their phone rings, when a struggling practice starts growing, when a doctor can hire another team member, support their family, expand their practice or simply stop worrying quite so much about where next month’s new patients will come from – that matters to us.
Their success comes first.
Trust Matters, Too
Tasha King of Perfect Patients visiting a long-time client.
Perfect Patients has spent more than two decades building relationships with chiropractors. We don’t want those relationships, or the trust our clients place in us, to become a shortcut for somebody else.
And we don’t believe in shortcuts ourselves.
We’re not interested in black-hat marketing tactics or confusing people into doing business with us.
We’re certainly not interested in pretending to be somebody we’re not.
We’d rather earn your business. Then earn it again. And again.
We do that by showing up, doing the work, and caring about whether your practice succeeds.
The Dream Hasn’t Changed
There’s something we love about imagining Steve and Bill in that New Zealand hotel room all those years ago, mapping out what this company could become.
They couldn’t have predicted Google today, smartphones, social media, AI search, or the increasingly complicated world of digital marketing. They couldn’t have known how many websites would eventually be built or how many chiropractors they’d have the opportunity to help.
But they knew why they were doing it.
Help good doctors build successful practices using the Internet. That’s the thread connecting that hotel room to Perfect Patients today. We have more people now. More technology, more data, more experience, and a couple of decades’ worth of lessons learned from working alongside chiropractors. But underneath all of that, we’re still trying to do what Steve wanted to do when he looked at his wife’s practice more than 20 years ago: Help a chiropractor we care about succeed.
No gimmicks. No shortcuts. We’ll roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and do the work.
Because behind every website, every Google search, and every new-patient number is a real person building a real practice, just like there was at the very beginning. And we still care about that person. A LOT.
Whether you’re a Perfect Patients client today or you’ve never worked with us before, if you need some help growing your practice, we’d love to talk.
Book a call with our team. Tell us what’s going on. Let’s see if we can help.