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?”

The New Patient Course Gave Me My Life Back

By Rob Jordan, PT

Fifteen years ago I started in private practice. I had hopes and dreams and personal goals I had set for myself. I had no particular desire to become wealthy or powerful. I just wanted to take care of my patients and make an honest living for myself and my family. It didn’t take long, however, for reality to set in. Over the next fourteen years I faced one challenge after another. It seemed I spent most of my time putting out fires. It is sad to say, but I had come to a point in my career where I honestly felt I could not win no matter what I did. I came to believe that the whole world was against me.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I had actually become reasonably successful to the outside world. I had managed to build my practice to three facilities and employed eleven people. Unfortunately, my family and I were paying a tremendous price for my “success.” Every two weeks I paid payroll and all of my bills and prayed that there would be something left over for me. I was working fifty to sixty hours per week and taking my work home with me. I had become so jaded and discouraged that I was probably not much fun to live with. Fortunately, my wife and my family believed in me and their support kept me going. But, by the early part of last year I had all but given up. I was preparing myself mentally for the day when I would be forced to abandon my dreams and give up. Two years ago I had hired a nationally known business consulting company to come into my office for a week. I spent $18,000 for them to tell me that I needed to close two of my clinics and fire 8 people. I also needed to cut my salary by 50% and start charging all of my patients $20 per visit as a service charge. Not only were these suggestions worthless, charging extra is illegal. I threw them out of my office and began considering closing my clinic. Perhaps, I thought, I should consider another occupation.

I had been receiving postcards and mailings from Measurable Solutions about their physical therapy marketing solutions for some time. I had even spoken with a representative about attending a seminar almost a year earlier. Unfortunately, I did not take any action until February of last year. I enrolled in the New Patient Course as a last ditch effort to save my practice. Worst case scenario was that I would pick up a few physical therapy marketing tips. I was intrigued by the notion that I could market my practice without feeding every doctor and nurse within 100 miles in an attempt to make them like me. I was skeptical to say the least, but figured I would “poke this thing with a stick” to see if it was real.

To my amazement, the ideas presented in the New Patient Course seemed to make a lot of sense to me. I began to see that I could gain control of my practice with the simple application of their physical therapy marketing technology. It was if a black veil had been lifted from my eyes. I had done a lot of things right over the years, but I could certainly do many things better. I came home from the New Patient Course with an energy I had not had in a very long time. We began seeing a change in our referral numbers about 6 weeks after starting the New Patient Course program.

Following the New Patient Course I was presented with an option of continuing my executive training or simply returning home with the information I had been given. I knew in my heart that my company had potential, but I could not figure out what needed to be done. I knew that marketing and promotion had worked in the past, but every time patient visits increased like I wanted, the bottom would fall out within a few weeks. What I came to realize was that my company simply did not have the organizational capacity to handle the increased load. I also came to realize, painfully, that I was probably the one holding us back. I had no real control of my company or the employees who worked for me. My idea of a financial plan was to pay all of the bills every month and pray that something would be left over. I was struggling to survive, but I was the one losing. I had spent thousands upon thousands of dollars over the years learning to be a good therapist, but I had spent virtually nothing on learning how to run a physical therapy business. My business was controlling me! Measurable Solutions gave me a glimpse of what potential my practice had. For the first time in many years I actually felt like someone was on my side.

I could not envision myself leaving Clearwater after the New Patient Course without signing up for additional training. I was hungry for every course I could get and I decided then and there that I was going to go for it. I had spent 10 years paying off student loans and another 14 years paying off bank loans after purchasing my practice. In the past 10 months I have paid for all of the training at Measurable Solutions and have money in the bank to spare. I, now, see a light at the end of the tunnel. I now see how I can run my business without even being there. My employees are happier and more productive and I am working fewer hours per week than I have in 14 years. How much is that worth?

Implementation of what I learned at Measurable Solutions has given me the ability to maintain control of my practice without constantly needing to produce to keep us afloat. I have learned how to give my employees responsibility and I have learned how to confront them when they fail to get the job done. As a result, they know that I trust them and that I expect only the best from them. Now, I have lots of free time to think about expansion and the future of this practice.

The New Patient Course and the Executive Training program at Measurable Solutions has given me more than just lots of new patients; it has given me my life back. To any therapist who believes that the courses are too expensive or the commitment too great, consider the costs associated with continuing what you are doing now. How’s that working for you? Do you see a day when you can walk away from your practice and retire? Do you foresee a time when you can run your practice for extended periods of time without being there? Until you learn how to control your practice, your practice will control you. Remember, you have spent many years and tens of thousands of dollars learning to become a PT. Doesn’t it make sense that you would want to spend a little extra to make sure you are successful in business as well?

During This Difficult Economy I Am Still Hiring And Growing

By Dr. Lisa J. Allen, BioMechanic Physical Therapy

Let me tell you a story.

I wanted to open my own practice, but while running a small practice for a large corporation and seeing how hard it is to make ends meet, I was afraid. I met Measurable Solutions in the exhibition hall of an APTA meeting. I wasn’t ready, but they called and mailed and called until I finally decided to have a look. I have never looked back. After seeing other PT’s skyrocketing graphs on the wall at Measurable Solutions I decided that that was what I wanted. With them by my side I knew I could not fail. Not only did I not fail, my practice took off like a rocket!

I had successfully opened two start-up clinics for two different corporations. Let’s compare my growth using the New Patient course versus my growth marketing “some other way.” In the first case we hired a second PT after 2 years, in the second case we hired a second PT after 1 year. In both cases the CEO’s were happy with the rate of growth. The corporation in the latter example should know what is good since they have experience with over 300 small clinics nationwide, right? Well they ain’t seen nothing. Had they known what Measurable Solutions knows and had implemented their physical therapy marketing program or at least had known what type of results were possible, the corporate heads would never have been pleased with my results!!

Flash forward to opening my own clinic using the New Patient course. I hired my second PT in 3 months! My third PT after 7 months! Now during “this difficult economy” I am still hiring and growing. I love how my own personal economy is indifferent to the nation!

It is great how Measurable Solutions is always there when I have a question or problem. They have the experience to know what is happening, the tools to handle it, and the guts to speak up and give strong advice.

If you mean what you say, and you want to open a clinic for yourself or just get your current clinic rocking, then look no further, you have found the solution.

My best wishes to you and yours for a prosperous PT practice and lots of happy patients.

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