With Measurable Solutions, you are allowed to go much further than what you anticipated you can personally do

Todd Munson

David 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.

How to Be in Control of Your Income

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a simple yet powerful tool to combat the current state of the economy? A tool that would require no money, very little time and give you and your staff certainty that you can control the income and expansion of your practice? This tool exists!

To find out more go to www.measurable-solutions.com or call us at 1-800-491-2828.

As a physical therapist with lots of experience in running a practice, Kim Chastain decided to make a change and do it right in her own practice.

As a physical therapist with lots of experience in running a practice, Kim Chastain decided to make a change and do it right in her own practice.

For 6 years Kim was partners in a national rehab company, managing to grow her clinics to six with the help of another local partner. But she felt herself hindered by restrictions on her marketing budget and time that allowed her no ability to really manage her clinics properly.

“I put in long hours, which in the beginning was fine as we originally had some control over who we could hire and what needed to be done. That changed over the years and I found myself working more and more and having less and less control. The only way we were allowed to market was by going out in person to doctors which was never really productive and again took away from what little time I had to run the clinics.

I wanted to be able to expand but found that with our skeleton crew we were wearing all the hats and there was no real organization, no method to grow predictably. We were doing duplicate work and no one really knew how to measure how well each was doing individually. If we were successful it was the “partner” that did it. If we were not, it was the “partner” that did that. As an executive responsible for the operation this may be largely true but it is a team effort and each individual who works there contributes to the overall success of the practice. Those contributions can and should be measured. I knew that even if I left this partnership I would still need to solve this problem. I also needed to solve the problem of organization itself.”

Kim finally decided that she didn’t want to continue in her business partnership. She was working long hours, wasn’t having fun and wanted the freedom to be able to expand as she saw fit.

“I had Measurable Solutions’ newsletter for a few months, sitting in my briefcase – I would read it once a week at least. I realized that all that they are saying, all the myths that they had listed – that was exactly how I thought. I thought, this is too good to be true…this newsletter was almost too good to be true. Then I decided I am going out on my own. I needed to gather as much information as I could because I knew that everything that I had been taught by this national rehab company, if I kept doing that, I was going to be in the same boat. I would never get out of my practice. I would never be able to work part-time.

“Shortly after I made this decision, I took the New Patient Course, as I wanted more control over my expansion. I knew I would really need to get the word out as I was going to be building my own practice from the ground up. I also realized that despite a respectable degree of success I really didn’t have the knowledge it took to effectively manage a practice.

I opened my new practice with all the information from the New Patient Course in place and my office manager had been trained on it as well. We just went like gang-busters. We had patients calling before we had actually opened the doors.
I then rolled up my sleeves and became trained as an executive as well at Measurable Solutions. I can say that I now feel 100% certain of success. Before I felt that only my relationships with doctors would determine my growth. Now I know I can grow as fast as I want to grow and that I can create a diverse referral base through what I now know about public relations and marketing.

I can also say with total certainty that I understand what it takes to make a team and how important every staff member is to the expansion of the practice. Having the ability to manage each individual’s production with statistics allows everyone to be self-sufficient and to determine their own pay as well. We are also starting out with a way to communicate internally which will not waste each other’s time and will allow each individual to do their own job; something which we never had before. I feel that I really can have the dream that I wanted, I feel that I can opt, if I’d like, to not work the practice at all. I feel that I have all the training tools that I need to create another CEO (that is not even me) and I could leave. That blows my mind! That I could not be there, and it can be a lucrative business. With the training, it’s whatever your goals are. Depending on how much you choose to expand is how much you will expand. And I can step out or not. That’s definitely being able to do what I want to do with my own personal life!
I have seen what’s out there by the so-called experts. This is the only workable technology that I have seen. Just the New Patient Course alone, you go back to your practice and you know exactly what you need to do when you go back. No other course has given me that. Even those specific to physical therapists.

Prior to Measurable Solutions’ training what was drilled into me was to buckle down and shrink. For 6 years that was what the philosophy was. Measurable Solutions’ philosophy is the complete opposite, you know, you have to expand! I never thought that I would be seeing 200 patients a week! I never thought that would happen!

If your goals are to be a slave to your practice and to have it be totally dependent on whether you are there or not, then continue to do whatever you are doing. But if you want some freedom and you want to be able to work part-time or not work at all and still have an income, you need to have these tools or you are never going to get out.

I consider myself fortunate at this point that I had the experience of running a practice against considerable odds since it opened my eyes to the pitfalls that are there. I am glad I took the opportunity since then to really do things right the first time in my new practice and would encourage anyone in practice for a long time or just starting out to get trained as an executive.

After 14 Months Our New Practice Had Expanded From Zero to 150 Patients

After only 14 months, Rex and Jill Holden expanded their new practice from zero to over 150 new patients using proven physical therapy marketing solutions.

What did you do before starting your practice?

We worked for the local hospital and did physical therapy in patients' homes for eight to nine years. Our practice is in Traverse City (the largest city in NW Michigan) and its surrounding counties which make up a populations of about 85,000 people. There were twelve physical therapy clinics in our community when we decided to open our doors. Rex had the idea to go into private practice four or five years before we opened. We started actually looking into it about two years prior to doing it. At first our staff consisted of one receptionist, now we have nine full-time employees and two physical therapists. We both do administration and physical therapy, but are weaning ourselves from the physical therapy part.

What method of physical therapy marketing did you use before working with Measurable Solutions?

We didn't do any physical therapy marketing before Measurable Solutions. I had seen "Out the Wazoo!" and just laughed and thought that's really corny. But I kept seeing it over and over and then I called them. I asked for some references and they gave me a couple of people who had gone through their program. After talking to those people my wife and I looked at the New Patient Course and we decided to at least find out what it is all about. So I thought, "What the heck?" and signed up for the course.

After the first half day of the New Patient Course we realized that we were going to end up doing more with Measurable Solutions. All their other clients that had gone through their program had been successful. Measurable Solutions only works with private practice physical therapists -- that was key for me. I remember going to lunch with one of their clients, and along with everything else, the one thing that stood out for me was that he was just so enthusiastic about Measurable Solutions and what they had done for him. That helped us feel more confident as practice owners.

What were your immediate results after doing the New Patient Course and what are your patient visits now?

Once we implemented this method of physical therapy marketing, we started getting ourselves known. Measurable Solutions helped us with a tailor made New Patient Course for practices that haven't even opened their doors yet. We promoted our practice within the community -- just to let the community know we even existed.

If was kind of a whirlwind. We were totally a new business and hadn't seen any patients at all yet as practice owners. I did the New Patient Course, came home on Sunday and we opened our clinic on Monday. Our number of new patients has gradually risen ever since we have been doing this program. I think we felt a little bit of a delayed effect before we started seeing a rise in the numbers which wasn't terrible as it took a while to get ourselves known in the community. We started getting referrals and then it really started going up even more. There was a bit of a lag but it was all worth it. We had seven patients the first week. One month after we opened, we hit 30 patient visits a week and have been experiencing steady growth since we opened our doors. After 14 months we were hitting over 150 patient visits a week and haven't looked back since.

What could you tell other private practice physical therapists who are thinking about doing the New Patient Course?

I cannot imagine not having this information. It provides a framework to develop a whole organization, the whole clinic and then to grow. I just don't see how you cannot have all of this information in place and survive.

We have seen success! That would be with more new patients, more patient visits, and improved teamwork in the clinic. Measurable Solutions helped is and really pushed up to the next level.

You think your whole being is being a therapist. Treating all these people and thinking "well, I'm doing that and people are coming in the door so I don't really need to do all that executive stuff and I don't have time to because I treat people." Well the truth is if you have the goal to expand, you've got to make some time to do that executive stuff, including marketing. You have to do it or you're not going to grow and do what you want to do. We found out by doing it! Our plans are to double the size of our patient volume right now, and have the clinic running totally independent without us. Then we'll see, expand further or take some vacations. We want to spend more time with our family. That is one of the main reasons we are doing all this.

If You Don't Make a Change Now, When Will it Be?

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?”