E507 | How Many New Patients Do You Actually Need?

One of the top problems we see in growing a cash-based practice is a lack of new patients coming in. Today, I wanted to cover some interesting data that I found on how many new patients you actually need to grow your business. Enjoy!

• It's not as many as you think
• What are your patients doing after their plan of care
• Are you doing a bad job of delivering your service

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So one of the best ways to improve your customer experience, which we know will dramatically improve your business, is to have clear lines of communication with your clients. And that's something that can be really hard with these multiple channels between email and text. And what you really need is to centralize that in one place.

And that's something that we've been able to do as we switched over to PT everywhere within our client's accounts. We can actually message right back and forth with them. They can manage their home exercise plan within there, and it allows us to really compartmentalize the communi. That we have with those clients, instead of losing an email in the inbox or missing a text and then you're, it's very hard to dig yourself outta that hole because they feel like you're not very responsive, with them.

And for us, it's made a really big difference. It helps make our staff more efficient. It helps us not miss things as much with the volume of people that we're working with. And it's a really smart way of really compartmentalizing your communication with your clients so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the channels.

You have communication with family and friends and things like that. So I think it'd. Huge for your practice to centralize it the way we have. Head over to pt everywhere.com. Check out what our friends are doing over there. I think it's really cool and I think you really. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't want to work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's up guys? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we're talking. Just how many new patients you actually need to be able to grow a cash-based practice. It's interesting. I found this data fairly interesting, although I like numbers and I nerd out on some of the data on these businesses and these practices and making decisions based off of off of that.

And what I found was interesting as we started looking at new patient volume. This is, Definitely one of the top sort of three problems that we see with practices at least what they think their main problems are. I don't think I've ever met a single business owner that didn't want more new business.

I think it's just in general, that's just how you grow, right? But when we look at like how many people you actually need per provider, it's really not as much as people think. And a lot of this, lemme put I'll caveat this by saying, assuming that you're running your business the right way as far as operations.

And this is something that, and I've talked to a handful of people that are just, digital marketing agency owners and they get very frustrated when they get people, new leads and stuff like that. And then, but like the lifetime value is low. So that it. It's not really worth them advertising because the ROI isn't as good versus a business that's run the right way, that has long term perspective of lifetime value.

So how much each client is worth to you, long term, at least semi learn long term with these businesses that are newer. It's hard to say how much is somebody worth you, over. The next 10, 20 years, you have your business. I don't know how long you'll have it, but if you look at something like Starbucks, like the lifetime value of somebody at Starbucks is like $7,500.

Think about that for a second. So the lifetime value of somebody at Starbucks is like almost eight grand in coffee. And whatever else they have, cake pops, like that's a lot of frigging coffee and cake pops. But they know that people will keep coming back over a long period of time.

They've been around for a long time. So for them, when they look at cost to acquire people as far as marketing goes they can put a lot of money towards marketing cuz they know they're gonna make that back over a long period of time with lifetime value. So when we look at these businesses, if you're focusing on.

Delivering plan of care, having ongoing services in different ways that are ongoing recurring revenue based services within your business model. That's gonna really help. You need less people, less new people than a business that is just seeing somebody two or three times and then they're they're discharging them, right?

You're gonna need a lot of people to have a functional business with that business model. So the number that we've seen is roughly. New patients is kinda between nine and 10 new patients per provider to grow and sustain the practice. And what's interesting is that's really nine to 10 for newer clinicians that you bring on, and it really depends on how many people stick around your schedule.

As you've been, in, in business longer. Some people. If they look at their schedules and they, let's say they've been in practice for a year or two, half their half of their caseload is recurring or reoccurring visits. So they actually need half as many new people. So they may only need four or five to have a a full schedule, somebody new.

Now they're gonna need closer to nine 10. And then that will start to snowball if they're doing the right things or they have a lot of recurring visits as well. So when you look to grow your. You want to be above 10 business if you can if you're by yourself to really start to grow that.

But what you'll notice is if you're doing the right things and people are sticking around, you're gonna start to have it challenges with getting them on your schedule quickly. If you're getting about 10 new patients a month. So a lot of it depends on what people are doing after, your initial plan of care, if they're sticking around to work with you on a proactive basis, or if you have some sort of ongoing performance services you're doing or something like that that really creates schedule density is what we call it.

So the density of your schedule. So how much of your schedule is filled up with non. New evaluation visits, and especially if you look two to three weeks out at your schedule, you can really start to see how dense does that schedule look over a couple week period to see if you're tracking as far as building your schedule goes.

And when you go to hire that first person, what you're gonna notice is you can drop your initial visits down. Maybe you're only seeing four or five people, and now if you're just getting 10 people in, you're slid. Four or five people over to the new provider. But that's not enough to build their schedule to where they're really gonna be pretty busy full-time.

Now, if there's two of you, you really need to be closer to 15 new visits a month. If it's two providers and one of those providers has a schedule that is that is pretty filled up, now we go to that third person. Let's say that your first provider's done a good job of getting people to do recurring visits and build their schedule density up.

Let's say each of you only needs five, but that new person needs 10. Now you need 20 new patient visits for three providers, and one of those providers would be the owner who's probably not seeing a full schedule at that point. So now you're looking at 20 for this sort of, Two and a half, two and three quarters, schedule between the three people to really get to a point where it's stable.

And the schedules are dense and they're busy. Your providers are busy, so the number's not astounding by any meet. And that number will will go up with the need of new people based on your, how, good or bad, you. With keeping people around. So the worse you are at keeping people around, the more new patients you need to try to find each month, the better you are keeping people around the less you need to see.

One of the best examples of this was a practice I did some early consulting with is out in California and they had two providers that were Just maxed out. Like I was basically helping them build some systems to hire. And they basically just they didn't really have any infrastructure in place to bring anybody else on.

They were both just co-owners and they were just running, gunning and just doing whatever to grow their business. But what they did a really good job of was keeping Bill around. They were frc style providers, so doing a lot of like movement coaching and people that they worked with would just.

Between one and three days a week to do movement coaching forever, it seemed so they may only have had, six new patients a month, but they were both, maxed out schedules and, and doing. Probably $25,000 a month each, right? So they're probably 50 grand in gross revenue between the two of 'em.

And they were getting like six new patients a month. So keep that in mind. Much better game to play than the game of try to find, 20 new patients per person. So you gotta try to find 40 new patients to have that same amount of revenue. That's a lot harder game to play, so keep that in mind.

So you don't need that many. I hope this number helps. If you're, above, below that this is a good number to, try to shoot for. If you have more new vi, new visits than that and your schedule is not necessarily building, that means that you're doing a bad job of deliver. Your service and or creating opportunities for people to have recurring visits.

If you are well below that, then you need to do a better job of marketing to get more people in the door to build that up, especially in preparation to hire now, a solid number to q4 to try to build to be able to sustain another provider. So hope this helps sharing a little information from.

All the data from, the close to, 225 practices we're working with actively right now on a day-to-day basis interacting with them. So this is something that comes from all that. So hopefully this helps. This is just a little bit of shared data that it should help you make decisions and know if you're on the right track.

So guys, as always, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.

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Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about.

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