Todd MunsonDavid started the first practice 20 years ago in Kentucky, where I joined him 16 years ago as partner. Back then a 40-50 patient week was a busy week for us. We added clinics and satellite locations due to competition from the hospital, other private practice organizations and people starting private practices. We basically added a clinic on every couple of years, to the point now where we have seven offices and close to a hundred employees including about twenty therapists (PT, PTA and supporting staff).
The town where our biggest clinic is located has a population of around 25,000. I would estimate that the surrounding rural areas in which our other six clinics are located have around 80-100,000 people in total.
Being a strong entrepreneur looking for new ways to grow our business, David had attended several different practice-building type programs, of which a lot of times would emphasize brochures, the correct advertising, the correct business cards, etcetera, etcetera. To be honest with you, we never really saw much carry over in getting our practice to grow. The different programs cost several thousands of dollars but didn’t have a significant impact on our business.
My love in the aspect of Physical Therapy is being able to market to physicians and patients and having all staff take on a role in growing the practice as well. I had a successful marketing plan which I have used before which trained everyone on how to market from their posts within the organization. In other words, from the therapists’ standpoint: how they would market to the patients and to the doctors; how the front desk would do that too – all the way to the technicians. With this program, we increased our business by 30% that year after being stagnant for approximately four years.
David had seen the advertisements from Measurable Solutions as far as how to increase new patient referrals and to build your physical therapy practice and came down for The New Patient Course. At The New Patient Course we were able to evaluate our practice and set forth a plan of where we should be at with the number of employees; patient visits and percentage of arrivals as well as exactly how profitable our company should be where we were currently located. We saw that we could do significantly better with our current staff than what we were doing.
At first I was a bit hesitant because I had just instituted a program that was very successful with 30% growth and I thought that it might muddy the waters having something else added to that and make it not as pure. The neat thing was that we had a site visit from Measurable Solutions where they visited our practices, interviewed a lot of our employees and looked at the manual and program that we’d developed and to my surprise, actually complimented it and said that if anything works, don’t discount it -- Measurable Solutions only helps to accelerate successful actions. So that kind of opened my eyes that Measurable Solutions wasn’t there to knock down anything that already worked or that was effective – the technology would only enhance and increase the performance rate of our successful actions. Of course I was excited about this, so immediately after The New Patient Course we started the executive training at Measurable Solutions.
Prior to Measurable Solutions both my partner and I kind of prided ourselves in being the “best therapists possible.” In other words, orthopedic manual outpatient therapists where a lot of the manual skills were brought to us and we always treated patients. We felt that within our scope in the community, we were able to offer the best as far as Physical Therapy and in doing so we got most of our self-worth from actually being in the clinic and doing. We prided ourselves in “nobody is going to out-work us -- we are going to get there early and nobody is going to stay later” and we could out-hustle anybody.
Our decision to do further training at Measurable Solutions was based on two things: firstly, I was impressed that they didn’t discount what already had worked and secondly, one of the owners was actually a physical therapist in private practice who was successful and could speak our language and understand our nomenclature and what each one of us went through. I felt a special liking that there was somebody in this business that actually had performed the profession themselves. So that helped.
The biggest thing with practitioners is there is a tendency for physical therapists to be hesitant. Many people are successful in their private practice, however most of their success is really based upon what they feel they personally can do, i.e. how many patients they can see. With Measurable Solutions, you are allowed to go much further than what you anticipated you can personally do, because you are the executive within your corporation and work on it versus being in the corporation. It allows you to excel much higher as far as seeing patients, profitability and growth of your organization that you typically wouldn’t be able to do in of yourself.
I’m appreciative that we do have the technology that’s allowed us to put this in place, that’s allowed us to train our staff so that they can perform their functions at their posts, and allow significant growth, all with less-in-the-trenches work, and I thank the Lord that he’s given me the energy and strength for this information to be able to implement it and the growth that we’ve had and looking forward for even greater growth.
