By Johnny Johnson, PT
When I went into PT school in 1993, I had a goal of opening two physical therapy clinics in the area where I was raised. My concept at the time was to provide physical therapy services to my rural community in either a home health or outpatient setting. I started by contracting myself to local agencies for home health physical therapy. After developing a consistent patient load, I opened my first clinic in a rural area with a population of 13,000 people. In 1999, I started Rehab Access Physical Therapy with me working 3 days per week in the clinic and doing 3 days per week of home health. I had one front office person with no other technical support. Since that time, we opened another clinic in 2001 and bought out a third clinic in 2004. The original clinic is 50 miles south of New Orleans and the other 2 are in the suburbs of New Orleans.
Prior to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, we had built a successful organization with 16 staff members. Then on August 19, 2005, our entire world was turned upside down. All three of our clinics were shut down for 5 weeks. We lost half of our staff as a result of their homes being destroyed. Our original clinic 50 miles south of New Orleans was totally destroyed as well as the entire community. Even 6 months after the hurricane, there was no one living in that community. My family and I were out of the area for over 3 weeks with the uncertainty of what was left. The reports that I was getting were that it wasn’t looking good. After going through the initial grief, my mindset turned to, I did it once. I can do it again.
When I returned to our area 3 weeks after the hurricane, I was relieved to find two of our clinics had survived. I checked the answering machine and there were even messages from patients asking when we would be reopening. We had past patients who had lost everything and been displaced calling to find out how we were doing. My staff was calling to say that they were ready to get going. We reopened 5 weeks after the storm and since that time, we have been able to climb right back to treating the same number of patients per week. However, things would not have worked out so well if it was not for a one-on-one meeting back in August of 2003.
When I was originally growing my business, I based my growth on giving excellent service to my patients, developing good relationships with members of the community and waiting for “word of mouth advertising” to kick in. That was the extent of my marketing. I was successful at doing that, to a certain extent. The problem is you can only see so many patients in a day. I had to drive one hour to work every day, see patients until 5:00 o’clock and then many times see one or two home health patients after work. I was seeing patients six days a week and marketing in my spare time. This is a very exhausting way of doing business. At that time I received some literature from Measurable Solutions on how to get new patients using a different means of marketing a PT practice. I was intrigued about their message and attended the New Patient Course in August 2003. While I was in Clearwater, Florida at their offices, I met with Shaun Kirk, who is the president of Measurable Solutions. Shaun and I sat down for a private meeting regarding the situation of my business. Shaun outlined two key points for me to expand my business. He told me that I needed executive training and that my business would flourish if I had a location closer to where the physicians practiced. I spent over an hour telling Shaun about all the barriers that I would have to deal with and the reasons they would make it hard to expand. Our area is extremely competitive with numerous physician-owned PT clinics, private practices and hospital based outpatient clinics. At that time, I had figured it to be almost impossible to expand into the area where the physicians practiced because of the fierce competition in outpatient physical therapy. However, my mindset changed when Shaun asked me one question, “If you don’t make a change now, when will it be? When will you not be working fifty hours per week with twelve hours of driving per week?” That question motivated me to make a change.
Since that time, I have done nine executive training courses. We more than doubled the patient volume of our second clinic and we acquired a third clinic in a suburb of New Orleans with a higher patient volume and many more referring physicians. I was also able to fully staff my original clinic in the rural location without me having to be there (though that clinic has now been lost to the hurricane).
The training that I have received at Measurable Solutions has made a tremendous change in how we run our organization. I have been provided with tools that help grow our organization and I now know how to handle problems when they arise. I have been able to put together a great group of people who are dedicated to growing our organization.
The New Patient Course gave me practical marketing data on how to increase our patient volume ¬– and it really worked. The Executive Training gave me practical data on how to expand our organization. There is nothing more powerful for me than to know that I have the data to tackle any problem that may arise in our organization and handle it with the technology that was taught by Measurable Solutions.
Prior to training with Measurable Solutions, I had no one to ask regarding getting new patients, marketing a physical therapy practice, hiring staff, expansion, etc. Basically, I had no support group to ask what works and what doesn’t work in private practice physical therapy. It is hard to call and ask your competitors how to get new patients. It was even harder to call and ask them what I needed to expand.
I can honestly say my current situation would be totally different if I had not signed on with Measurable Solutions. It would be hard for me to be in a business at all after the hurricane if I had not done the New Patient Course and Executive Training. Fortunately for me, I was asked the key question, “If you don’t make a change now, when will it be?”
