The Private Practice Business Academy

To GROW your practice you must deliver high-quality patient care and at the same time be able to generate a profit. Being a great practitioner is just not enough. You must be able to pay the bills and yourself to stay in business. In this episode of the Private Practice Business Academy, i speak with the CEO of a PT franchise. He discusses his career at length from humble beginnings to developing a management system to help coordinate over 40 clinics and hundreds of employees, that helped generate over $41 million dollars at the time of sale. All done by showing value, and this one secret trick used to motivate staff. Listen now

Dry Needling is a tool & NOT a discipline- Dr Jan Dommerholt

Statistics can be made to prove anything - even the truth. ~Author Unknown. If you don't know your numbers, how can I help your private practice grow? This is an exact conversation I had recently with a new coaching client. We "assume" as long as we are cash flow positive we can start buying that new equipment, hire that new employee or even spend money on a new marketing campaign. But the truth is without knowing your exact numbers, you are setting yourself up for failure. There are hundreds of practices that are closing TODAY because what used to work years ago is no longer working. In this new healthcare economy, you have to be business savvy and a marketing convert.

Physical Therapists are a wealth of knowledge. They are also some of the most athletic and fit healthcare practitioners out there. So when i heard that my guest was actually a competitor on my favorite show "The American Ninja Warrior" - I just had to get him on the show. Listen to his journey of how a possible failure turned into a very successful book and is leading to be much much more. Listen now

It has always been a dream for many in the healthcare field to work with professional athletes. The problem is, most don't know where to start. Even more so , most don't want to put in the hard work of getting to that level. But is it really hard work or just being consistent, persistent and personable. Listen how you can start treating high level athletes today. Stay passionate about your profession- Dr Joe Simon

Dr Trent Nessler has a passion for helping athletes. But he knew to differentiate himself and his product from other’s in the marketplace he would have to hang up his clinical hat and put on his business & marketing one. With over 15 years of experience and an impressive track record of managing over 75 sports medicine and physical therapy clinics, Trent started his new entrepreneurial endeavor to profoundly change the way you treat athletic injuries.

If you look at all the success in my life, I owe a majority of it to my mentors. I don't think healthcare practitioners embrace the mentorship or coaching aspect when it comes to business. Well, to be honest, MOST spend almost ZERO on marketing and depend on the now infamous "word of mouth" (FAILED) marketing campaign.

"You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”- Zig Ziglar. Understanding that your patients are the key to your private practice success. How can you change the way you practice your profession, after hearing Kathy's story. Listen Now

Its all about cash flow. HMOs and BIG Insurance have dominated the field, of how healthcare has been practiced for over 20 years. Medicare is bankrupt.Or so they say. Lower reimbursements and higher overhead. Providers are seeking variety of ways to keep their practice afloat. But nothing can prepare your practice for ICD 10. Except Melissa Nielli. Listen to the episode of how she can save your practice and get you prepared for the NIGHTMARE of ICD 10.

That's a great point you brought up, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of each other. I certainly don't have the business background that John does. He doesn't have my clinical background. Like you mentioned, it was a nice symbiotic partnership that developed quickly. Our decision-making was easy. The dilemmas was...

Most doctors believe that word of mouth is a form of referral marketing, but what they fail to understand is that referral marketing through word of mouth is reactive and NOT proactive. To make a patient become proactive for referrals requires something tangible.

The first thing they would say to me, "Oh, you mean acupuncture." I'd say, "No, we're not doing acupuncture. We're doing a Westernized model of needling that utilizes the central nervous system and utilizes the muscular system. Those are the target points. We're only looking at musculoskeletal dysfunction."

I find this extremely interesting that the entire basis of what you're doing is just educating your customer or the patient so much so and not charging them. But obviously, the ones that are outside of your network, you're charging them. But still, you're educating them so much so that they would have to come to you for more information or to get treatments....Absolutely Brilliant

So, we figured "Why not put the physical therapists right where the source of the problem is, right there with the employer?" And headed on right away, rather than waiting until the employee goes to a doctor or finally comes around to physical therapists. Because for the most part, physical therapists seem to be at the end of the problem, rather than the very beginning with that. And that's just kind of how our healthcare system is set up. It's very reactive and they wait until a problem happens.

I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue, and from there, I just stepped into learning everything I could do to heal myself. I am healthier now, than I've ever been. And when I took this perspective of functional nutrition, kind of looking at the root cause from a biochemical standpoint of what was going on in my body, you know, from the endocrinology perspective, and brought it with me to my pelvic pain patients, I began to realize that that was a real big missing piece in my physical therapy practice.

You have to ask yourself, how many hours a week am I planning my marketing? How much a month am I planning my marketing? And again, if you ask the average practice owner, this is very, very limited amount. It's something that they're not confronting, or afraid to confront, or just don't know how. And so they're not putting down on paper how am I going to reach this goal with my marketing activities. And so, with the planning of your marketing activities, whether it's going to be online, offline, all of those kinds of things, is going to be the right estimation of what it's going to take to hit that goal. So I want my practice to grow from 100 patient visits a week to 200 patient visits a week this year. Well, how am I going to do that and what's it going to take to get there? So, do I have the right budget? Do I have the right amount of personnel? Who am I going to use to help me hit those targets? And one thing that I've come across over the years is that many practice owners want the new patients, but they

Over time, we realized that our products translate very well to the injured population. You don't have to be an elite athlete to need compression and ice. And that leads us down to the place where we are today, launching our business into the clinical space which is orthopedic, physical therapists, chiropractors, anybody who puts their hands on a patient and would have that patient benefit directly from a really compliant and simple compression and ice platform...

Competition doesn't mean anything, because there are so many people that need our services that aren't using our services, from chiropractic massage, physical therapy, everything. We who do this profession know that everyone can benefit from our services. "I mean, you didn't view your competition as competition, which I coach a lot of my clients on their mindset as well, the same way. It's an opportunity". I thought that was a great line. You should think of competition as an opportunity".

Do you have a product idea that can help not only patients but clinicians as well? I meet so many clinicians across the board that have amazing ideas but they do not implement them. That's the biggest takeaway is that Cindy did, she implemented her idea and had enough knowledge to realize that you couldn't do everything yourself, so obviously to obtain the grants, the researchers, you let them do what they were good at which is obviously is obtaining the research; and not having a biased aspect of it as well so your company doesn't have a big role in it. That's basically part of the marketing strategy.

If a physical therapist did the correct documentation, a staff physical therapist did the correct documentation, they would make their practice owner easily an extra $12,000 a month. This is all because most physical therapists do not document everything....