E776 | The 30,000 Foot View Business Exercise
Dec 31, 2024
Start 2025 Strong: The 30,000-Foot Business Audit for Clinic Owners
As we kick off the new year, it’s the perfect time to take a step back and assess your business from a 30,000-foot view. Doc Danny from the PT Entrepreneur Podcast shares a simple yet powerful exercise to help clinic owners identify areas for growth and ensure their business is aligned for success.
This approach, inspired by his time at Baylor’s Army Physical Therapy program, encourages you to detach from the day-to-day grind and evaluate your business holistically. By focusing on three core areas—Marketing & Brand, Sales, and Product (Customer Experience & Outcomes)—you can make strategic improvements that drive sustainable growth.
Why the 30,000-Foot View Matters
Running a clinic isn’t just about being a great clinician; it’s about ensuring your business systems work cohesively. Misalignment between your marketing, sales, and product delivery creates inefficiencies that cost you time, money, and clients.
Doc Danny uses this exercise to identify drop-off points in a business, tighten processes, and create a consistent experience across all touchpoints. Here’s how you can apply it to your clinic.
Step 1: Audit Your Marketing & Brand
Your marketing is your business’s first impression. To ensure it resonates with your target audience:
- Website: Does it clearly convey who you help, how you help them, and your unique approach? Is the design professional and user-friendly?
- Social Media: Does your content reflect your clinic’s messaging and branding? Are you speaking directly to your ideal client?
- Local Marketing: Are you showing up where your ideal clients are, such as local races or community events?
Consistency is key. Your website, social media, and advertising should align in design, tone, and messaging to avoid confusing potential clients.
Step 2: Refine Your Sales Process
Once clients engage with your clinic, your sales process must build trust and provide clarity. Key elements include:
- Clarity: Ensure clients leave their first interaction (whether over the phone or in the clinic) understanding their problem, what’s causing it, and the path to resolution.
- Consistency: Audit your messaging across team members to avoid discrepancies that could erode trust.
- Alignment: Your sales conversations must match your marketing promises. For example, if you market quick solutions, but recommend long treatment plans, clients will feel misled.
By ensuring every team member delivers a consistent and clear message, you’ll boost conversion rates and client confidence.
Step 3: Optimize Your Product Delivery
Your product is the combination of the outcomes you deliver and the experience you create for your clients. While great outcomes are essential, customer experience often has a bigger impact on retention and referrals.
Focus on:
- Customer Experience: Be punctual, use clients’ names, and add personal touches like follow-up messages or branded swag.
- Outcomes: Ensure you’re competent in delivering the results your clients expect and celebrate their wins throughout the process.
A seamless experience paired with outstanding results creates loyal clients who become enthusiastic referrers.
Actionable Tips to Start Q1 Strong
Instead of trying to tackle everything at once, identify 2-3 areas to focus on each quarter. For example:
- Update your website to align with your ideal client’s needs.
- Audit your team’s evaluations to ensure consistency in messaging.
- Implement a simple practice like using clients’ names during every interaction.
Small, intentional improvements add up over time. By the end of the year, you’ll have made significant strides in your business.
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Podcast Transcript
 Hey, real quick, if you were serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country, and it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.
Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matta and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.
I've been a staff PT. I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist, I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices So if this sounds like something you want to do listen up because i'm here to help you What's going on?
Dr. Danny here with the pt entrepreneur podcast and it is the beginning of january It is a time where everybody is excited to achieve their goals, right? To start the year off you're seeing this in your clinics. You're seeing this in gyms all over the place, right? Everybody is giving up eating sugar and they're all training five days a week.
And we'll see, typically that doesn't last forever, but hopefully some people will continue with the things that they are trying to change for the long haul. That's the goal. And if you're looking at your business and most of us are, and we look forward to the beginning of the year because it's like, all right, cool.
It's like another chapter in the business. And another opportunity to take that next step forward, hopefully towards whatever the future vision of your business is. And one of the things that. That I typically will do and our team will look at not necessarily, in a clinic at this stage, but with our own businesses that are, education and marketing and supporting clinics is we'll do what we call like a 30, 000 foot view exercise.
And I'm going to walk you through what this looks like. And you can do this Just by yourself. You can do this with other team members. If you have, an office manager, if you have a key staff member if you have a business partner, if you want to look at these things, but there's really three things that we'll look at in this 30, 000 foot view exercise.
And this also, this, by the way, this comes from a phrase that I had Instructors, whenever I was at Baylor, this is the Army's physical therapy program, but I had one professor in particular who was Air Force and he would always say, step back, take a 30, 000 foot view of what's going on. So let's say you have a clinical, challenging case of some sorts and you're, it's hard when you're in it and you're like, you're so invested in the outcome that sometimes what you need to do is you need to take a step back and take like an elevated view of what's going on and really see, okay, what have you done?
What's, what maybe have you missed? What things can you check off as not being the contributing factors, whatever it is when we're solving these complex musculoskeletal issues. And so he'd always say, Hey, take a 30, 000 foot view. What do you think? And that means, all right, back up.
remove yourself from this and detach and look at this from an elevated position. This is the same thing with the business. And when we look at this 30, 000 foot exercise, there's three parts, right? So it's marketing and brand sales, and then what we'd consider product which is broken up into customer experience and outcomes.
And I'll get into the differences of those two here in a second. But when we look at this, the reason we break these up into. These three parts is one marketing brand is how people from the outside view your business, right? It's how you're positioning your business in the community, in, in the environment that you function in.
But then sales is when they get in your office, it's them deciding to make a decision of whether to solve a problem and work with you or not. And then the third part being product is the delivery of that decision that they make to work with you. But they all have to be, So this is why it's important to go through.
This is what you don't want is incongruency in message in marketing that then you say something different in sales within the clinic or within the administrative portion of the business where they're maybe communicating with people on the phone. And this is where it can get really hard is the more people that you added the business.
If it's just you're going to say all the same thing. You're going to have a lot of congruency, but it's just you, right? So obviously you can't have that big of a business just by yourself. So when you add other people to the equation, now it turns into the telephone game where, the message can get distorted somewhat as other people are conveying what they think is what they're supposed to be saying or doing based on the training that they've received from.
In most cases, you or team members that are part of your business, if it's bigger, right? So to take a look at this and to really sit down and make sure that all this stuff is congruent is important because it will make a big difference in how things overlap. And you'll have less of a drop off between these different points.
And that's really all that it comes down to, right? So if we look at a business, Any business you have to get, you have to get people in the door. You have to then fulfill whatever it is that you're doing, whether that's make them a hamburger it's get their back pain to go away, whatever it is.
And they, you have to get them in and you have to fulfill on that. And then the third part would be retention. How do you then sell them other things that are valuable to them? Recurring services, cross sell services or products, whatever it might be. But at the very beginning, it's, you can either get more people or you can have less drop off of more people that then go to then fulfill on whatever it is, the sales side is then selling.
So if you have these drop offs let's say you have, let's say you have 20 people that. That you are able to market to then come into the clinic and they come into the clinic and only 10 of them decide that they actually want to continue with a plan of care and just solve a problem, right?
So now you have a 50 percent drop off basically, or a 50 percent close percentage. If you want to look at it that way, which you could look at that one of two ways. Maybe that's good for you. Maybe it's not in our. Business models. That's very low. That's not good. But let's say, now you have basically 10 customers that are actually like solving a problem that are paying to have that problem solved that increase your lifetime value versus 20 people that you've marketed to that have come in, but only 10 have stuck around.
So the drop off point there could be, what if you could go from 10 people to 18 people and you go from a 50%. conversion to a 90 percent conversion with the same 20 people coming in. This is a really important area to look at. And that is the difference between your marketing, your branding and your sales.
Now, if we look at the backend of that and we say, okay, sales you're doing a good job. Let's say you're at 90% but of those, let's say 20 people that come in that want to solve a problem. Two of them decide to stick around. So now you have two of the 18 that have come in that decide, yep, I want to continue to do stuff with this company.
I like this company. That's a very low rate in terms of any sort of recurring sale that might happen, which is going to be huge for you if you're trying to actually grow clinical schedules. So that's another drop off point. That's more product, right? That's delivery. That's the actual service and the client experience that you're then.
Actually, delivering to somebody that doesn't even include if we were to add another component to that, the likelihood of a referral. And we'll get into that as well, because if you can have branding that is good marketing, that is good, that aligns with whoever you're trying to get in the clinic, you can carry that message over into the sales conversation, which is frankly just the evaluation where you're clarifying what's going on.
And then you can deliver a great product and a customer experience. And then that person then decides to stick around and refer their friends and family your way. You can grow a sizable clinic without having to get a massive number of new people into your business, which is always going to be the hardest part and the most expensive and time intensive.
Part of it. So if you're going to ramp that side of it up, wouldn't you want to make sure that the business itself was efficient in all these other drop off points? Like why work so hard on the front end to get 50 new patients in the door and only 25 of them are going to actually solve a problem.
And of those 25, two of them stick around and want to work with you longterm. Like when you rather get 20 people in 18 people, solve a problem. 12 of those people decide to stick around. The snowball effect of that, the compounding effect of that is massively different and you can do that with 20 new people versus 52 people.
And I see this mistake a lot when people are just, front end marketing. I got to get more sales. I got to get more leads. I got any more, whatever on the front end. And what they're missing is that they have a super inefficient business on the back end. This is actually, I would say the number one thing that we work with people in on in our mastermind, people come in and they are like, dude, I just need more new patients.
Okay, that might be the case. And in some cases that's exactly what they need. But I would say 90 percent of the time, what they need is to tighten up the rest of their business before they then go and they bust their ass, trying to get. 20 to 50 new patients in the door sometimes more between local digital marketing, referral based marketing, all these things they can do to actually drive new patient volume, but to fix the actual business first before you do that, because it is a huge waste of time, energy, money, and very frustrating to have this business that has, it's filling up, filling a bucket up with a bunch of holes in it.
And I know because when we started our first clinic when Ashley and I started our clinic. There were months where we would get just me by myself, 30 to 40 new patients, 30 to 40 new patients. And I would end up seeing max, maybe 120 visits a month with 30 to 40 new patients a month. Now that is a very inefficient business model versus if you look at where.
Like our business would be today that we work with, let's say they had 40 new patients. Those 40 new patients probably could be a clinic of five clinicians, right? Four to five clinicians, depending on how long those clinicians had been around. One clinician in my scenario, right? Just like burning through new evals with a very inefficient business on the back end or 40 new patients.
And you have five clinicians, you're talking about a seven figure business versus a, maybe 200, 000 a year business, right? It's five times bigger, the same initial input, which is the hardest constraint point for a lot of these businesses. They just don't know that they have these other problems.
So when you look at this exercise, I think it, getting these things right altogether is very hard. It's the reason why businesses are super tough because it's almost whack a mole one thing, you get one thing, and then the other thing needs to be improved. You get one thing, the other thing needs to improve. And this is actually what frustrates a lot of people and why they ignore it is because, it's tough. It's hard. It's a hard part of business. And and it's redundant and it's something you have to continue to work on, improve. And I promise you the best ministers in the world are.
Looking at these drop off points and they're fixing them on an ongoing basis. And it never stops. It doesn't stop in our businesses. It's not going to stop in your business. If you want it to continue to grow. And if you want to grow a really rock solid business, bomb proof business, like this is the way you have to look at it.
And you have to continue to make these small improvements over time to make sure that you're maintaining a high level of not just clinical excellence, but business excellence as well. So let's talk about marketing and branding. All right. Cause this is the entry point for where people are coming into your business.
And there's a few things that you can look at with this. And one of the, one of the easier things to do is to look at your website, look at your website and kind of want to look at a couple of things. Number one, does this website convey the message that you're trying to get a, get across to potential clients, right?
And especially the very first. Part of the website you look at, let's say you pulled up on a desktop. They call it being the part above the fold. So it's before you scroll down the part above it, what does it say? What does it look like? Does it look like something that your target market would resonate with?
So part of that is knowing who your ideal client is. But knowing who that is. And let's say this, let's say you work with runners. So you work with your avatar is like a 40 year old male runner. All right. You want to make sure that your website represents that you work with 40 year old male runners.
And that may not be the only person you work with, but that might be the person you're marketing to, because it's, it's really the primary avatar that you want to try to win that category to win in your area. So look at your website, make sure the messaging makes sense. Make sure the imagery makes sense.
Make sure it loads quickly, make sure it's not just like super slow. And that it's easy for people to understand what the next steps are. The next thing would be your social media. Does your social media convey the same messaging, the same branding, the same typography, if possible like the actual Font of the brand on the website that you have also in your social media.
You may think these are little things, but it makes a difference. And I promise you there's whole teams and bigger businesses that just focus on this stuff. So does it look similar? Does it have a similar brand feel? That's very important. It's consistency. And it doesn't, you don't have to have a huge team to do this.
By the way, it just takes a bit of effort and intentionality on your part to make sure that it looks similar. But does that then speak to the same person from a messaging marketing brand standpoint that you want to then work with on your website? Cause those are going to work twofold. Those are the most forward facing things you're going to have in your business.
The third thing would be digital marketing, right? So to goes along with this, if you're paying for any advertising, Google, Facebook, Instagram, whatever you're doing, do your ads represent your business in a way that is congruent with your website and your social media. Again, it's your avatar. It's your, brand is the colors.
It's a typography. All of the things you're saying is the messaging similar. These are the things you want to make sure are there with your digital advertising, as well as your website and your social media, because they're going to feed into each other. These three things all loop together. All right.
And a logo like brand kit. These are things that like you can get a logo made for very little. But you want to make sure that. You understand what those colors are and how those colors can be used on the website and can be used in social media posts and can be used in ads so that they are the same and they're not like vastly different looking brand schemes throughout the whole thing.
That is very incongruent. People will feel that and you'll get a lot of drop off from that as well. So this is essentially a 30, 000 foot audit of your digital footprint is what you're looking at. The other part of brand and local marketing is it is, or marketing is the local side of it. The things that you're doing in the.
in the community, the things that you're doing in your area. So whatever that might be, maybe in this scenario you sponsor, running 5Ks or 10Ks or whatever local races in your area. Cause your avatar is this 40 year old male runner, right? You want to show up in places where these people show up.
So if you work with 40 year old male runners, you shouldn't be doing. Local marketing at a CrossFit gym. Like it's just not going to be as congruent as you being at a running store or at a race, right? Like these are the things that you need to make sure that you are getting, similar and congruent versus diverting your efforts.
It would be no different than. If you were to put a post up on your social media about, CrossFit, whatever deadlift technique of some sort for high rep volume it would make no sense to the people that started following you because they care about running, right? So you'd be better off running something about foot strike patterns or tempo cadence or common knee injuries and simple things people can do to avoid those stuff like that.
That is congruent with the avatar that you have. So locally picking the right places to go, and there may be some overlap in gyms. I'm not saying that there's not, but like prioritizing the places where your avatar exists is really important. And when you're there making sure you're conveying the same messaging of what you are doing with people, the messaging you have both virtually on your website, social media.
Any ads that you have and you're conveying the same message verbally and with your branding locally as well, right? So do these things match up? This is a really easy sort of self audit you can look at for yourself. So when you're looking at your messaging, there's a couple of things you want to make sure you get right.
Okay. So who do you work with? We talked about understanding your avatar, making sure you're speaking to that person. What do you help them with? So what things do you actually help people with? This could be listing it. This could be case studies of people that you've worked with. Maybe it's somebody with plantar fasciitis that got back to running half marathons after this person thought that they wouldn't be able to run again.
There's just, these are true examples. And we work with a ton of runners with our clinic and I can't tell you people came in for things that are like, I'm just under real run again. And then all of a sudden they get back to running, right? A lot of people think that. And if you can speak to that and you can market that, you're going to get a lot more of those people in your office.
And the last thing I would say is your unique approach. So really thinking about your unique approach. And if you can even productize that and name it, this is a, this is like level two, right? So if you have this, let's say you work with runners again, and you have this, whatever return to running accelerator approach or whatever, like something that you can name that's specific to who you work with and the actual avatar that you're helping, that can also distinguish your brand over other people's because you're packaging a service in a way that feels productized and that can actually drive a lot of Marketing as well.
It feels more unique. It feels more consistent. It feels a bit more a bigger business would do something like that Even though it just takes you thinking about it and being able to be creative with what you're naming As far as your products and services are concerned So again, it's who you work with what you help them with and then your unique approach to get them there.
So that's marketing. That's brand. Look at all those things in your business. See if there's any incongruency. See if you're spending time in the wrong places locally and and start to move those things back to being in the center of what you're trying to achieve with the avatar you're trying to go after and stay in your lane.
Essentially. The second part of sales. Okay. So this is clarity and what's going on. And I've taught sales at this point, clinically, or just, clinical sales, whether it's in office over the phone, whatever it might be for almost a decade at this point. And one of the things that I've always found it was really interesting is that clinicians, they have 80 percent of this already.
Like a good clinician, I should say a good clinician has 80 percent of what In office sales looks like already. And it's because if you're a good clinician, people come in your office, not sure what's going on. They leave and they're very clear about what their problem is. How it, how it started, what's causing it and what they need to do in order to get back to the things that they're working on.
Unable to do right now, right? That's going to happen in a visit no matter whether you're an insurance Whether you're in the military like me where it's like a socialized medical environment or you own a performance based cash practice like we did. Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast I have a huge favor to ask of you If you are a long time listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast Please head over to itunes or spotify or wherever you podcast and please leave a rating and review This is actually very helpful for us to get this podcast in front of more clinicians And really help Then develop time and financial freedom.
So if you would do that, I'll greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast, it doesn't matter. That should be part of your visit as a, just check the box. You're a good clinician where people get squirrely is around the monetary side of things that it comes along with paying to work with the provider.
And that's a whole another conversation in terms of how you resolve that, because that can be different for different people. But the clarity of what's going on is the most important thing. So you must clarify what's going on. And if you're not doing that in general, like you really should. And really make sure that somebody can go home.
Let's say they have a significant other. Let's say they have a, whatever a friend, a sibling, and they can explain to that person what's going on in a way that they're, Their friend who's not a clinician or their significant other who's not a clinician would understand and be like, oh, okay, that makes sense So clarity is huge and clarity is 80 of whether somebody's going to actually decide to work with you or not All right.
So from there, it's what do they need to do? To resolve whatever's going on, right? So here we're clear on this. Okay, cool. To get to this step Here's what we have to do and that's essentially your prognosis and your plan of care What are what do they need to do? How long is this going to take? How much work is this going to be how much time can they expect right?
We know some of these things like these tendon injuries can take a long time Are you explaining these things? Are you being consistent when you're messaging with the things you're saying to get people in the door? And this is one of the biggest Issues areas that we see drop off. And here's what I mean by that.
Sometimes people will use marketing that is very incongruent with what they're saying in the office. Let's say that your incongruency is something like this in your marketing, you're talking about how you can solve everybody's problems in two visits. You're like, I'm so good at this in two visits.
I changed your life and get back to wherever you want. Okay. People see that. They're like, wow, I give this person a chance. They come in your office and all of a sudden you're trying to pitch everybody on a 10 visit package, right? But you're marketing that you can change everybody's life in two visits, right?
This is where there's incongruency. So now all of a sudden they're like this doesn't sound right. Am I getting bait and switched? What's going on? And you lose trust with people because of incongruency in marketing in your brand with what then you're saying in the office. Same thing happens, by the way, when your office manager answers the phone, your admin, anybody besides you, one of the other staff members talks to somebody.
Are they saying the same things that you would say they come across in your branding? And when you talk to somebody in a sales conversation, whether that's a front end sales conversation or in office, all of these are sales, by the way, it's all different types of sales, but is it similar to what you're saying in your brand messaging?
That's very important. And that might require you auditing. Phone calls of your office manager that might require you sitting in on evals with your staff members to make sure they are consistently saying the right things. This just happened recently. One of the people in our our advisory team that that we have for PT biz, Had some incongruencies and what they were saying in terms of how we structure one of the actual education programs that we have versus what we actually do.
And it came down to us auditing what was going on as far as conversations. And then. Hey, we need to correct this. Here's what we need to do different before it create a problem for us. And even in ongoing is something that you're going to have to do because people will just default to whatever is going to be successful for them or what they think is successful.
That doesn't necessarily mean that's what you want from a communication standpoint for your brand. So you're going to have to sit in and actually like audit these things. And if it's just you have to make sure that you're being consistent, right? And that's actually way easier than when you have than when you have staff.
So in the sales side of things. You have to make sure that your team understands, what the cost is, what like who they're working with. And then, what those different plans of care look like that these people understand what they will get. And that is consistent. Let's say you have, let's say that you have an offer that is Includes remote coaching with the PT work that they're doing.
So they come in the office, but you're also managing it remotely through, some app or whatever. So you want to make sure people understand that and that it's consistent, no matter what provider they have, like maybe one of your providers is not talking about that. And then the other one is, and you start to look at drop off rates or, the client experience side of things, and you realize one is maybe doing better than the other.
You have to make sure that the messaging is similar and consistent, and this requires. You spending time, with your staff and making sure that everything is consistent and similar, not necessarily robotic, but that they're checking the boxes of the things that are important for you during your sales process, right?
And you always, again, have to make sure that what you say in the office and what you're doing in the office aligns with your marketing. And vice versa. And you might find that you, there are certain things that you do in marketing that work in marketing, but they're bringing the wrong people in. And you might find some things that you're doing in sales that are not matching up with marketing that then need to be tweaked as well, because these feed each other and they give each other feedback.
So make sure that what you say in the office is consistent, what you're doing in marketing and that the messaging and the way it's being delivered, not just from one provider, but from multiple providers, if you have them, is consistent. Is the same that you're checking these key, areas of what's important that they should be addressing.
And as it is very consistent as the brand is concerned versus just one person is just doing their own thing and trying to find success at this idea of a lone wolf. We don't really want that. We want you to have a product ties. System that people can then get plugged into and be successful because it is a system not necessarily this That's just like this highly trained clinician that can come in and be successful in whatever like that's very hard to hire for You want to be able to have a system that people can be successful in and feel comfortable in that?
So that's sales. The third part would be your product. All right So if you feel marketing's on point sales in the office is consistent with that Cool. Now it comes down to product. Product is delivery of the service in this scenario, right? This is, these are service based businesses. So our product is the delivery of the service in most cases.
So there's two parts to this. There's your customer experience, and then there's your outcome. And you might think that all I need to do is just get people this fantastic outcome. And I'm good to go. Like I'm a great clinician. All I need to do is get a great outcome and I'm good to go. That's not really the case, right?
When we look at like business school research, when they look at. Product and they look at customer experience and outcome. Your pro your customer experience is actually just as important, if not more important than the actual outcome. So here's what I mean by that. Let's say you go somewhere and you get a really good cheeseburger, but the people are assholes is dirty.
They screw up orders, but the food is really good. Would you go back? Maybe. Are you going to tell anybody else about it? Probably not. Even if it's like fantastic, it's I can go somewhere else and probably get something similar. And if they have a better customer experience, then they're probably going to beat you, right?
That's just the way it works. If someone has similar outcomes to you as a clinician, which a lot of people do keep that in mind, you may think that you're some sort of elite ninja. There's a lot of elite ninja clinicians, a lot of them. And for good reason, like people work really hard at this.
They spend a lot of time, going to con ed courses. They're obsessed with outcomes. It's fantastic. These are the kinds of people that should be successful in in. Performance based clinics and cash based clinics or whatever like they are trying really hard So you're not that special in comparison to these other people that you think there's a lot of great clinicians so keep that in mind when you look at the customer experience side of it because This is the area where most people miss the mark and it's easier than clinician, you might as well get an improvement on the actual like customer experience side That's going to improve You Your business outcomes.
So we look at outcomes. It's essentially this achieving the goals that they set forth, right? So you helping them actually get the outcome that they want is important. To be able to do that also with positive reinforcement, to be able to highlight the wins that they have and to get them excited about it because it is a lot of delayed gratification and challenging.
And then for them to get back to the things they love to do, this is the outcome, right? This is it. Whatever you need to do in order to get them there, whatever they need to do, that's part of the outcome. The customer experience is how you make them feel. It's do they are you punctual?
Are you on time? Do you use their name? Do you have an individual communication? Are you just firing off random templated emails to everybody after a visit? Or are you individualizing communication to each person? Maybe you have some swag or something that makes them feel special. Like they're a part of something, right?
Like we used to give out Just t shirts that were comfortable that people would want to wear. And I would see them all over town. I recently got a text from two old patients that met in a lounge at at the Atlanta airport, both wearing their athlete's potential t shirts. And they sent sent a text, my way.
And they're like, Hey, we just met. And they just sat down and they had they basically lunch together waiting for their flights. And they were like, this person was awesome. So glad I got a chance to meet him. And they had their shirt on that's what I'm talking about in terms of the customer experience.
I've been like, how do you fricking engineer that in? You can't, except we've given out probably 5, 000 shirts in the Atlanta area to people that are active, people that are trying to stay active for as long as they possibly can. And many different sports, many different domains, right?
This happened to be somebody that was a essentially just plays a ton of sports. Also like a high level CrossFit athlete and somebody that is was a very high level ballerina and still is in that world. And, but is it really doesn't done a good job of keeping herself healthy for a long period of time.
And so there's a lot of similarities that they have and they get a chance to meet. And now That increases their experience with that business, which I don't even own anymore. Like that. And they're still texting me. And it's so cool to see stuff like that. As an example of your customer experience, just from something simple, like a shirt that's comfortable, they're going to want to wear.
They're wearing to the airport. All of a sudden they see each other. We've gotten pictures with people that are on vacation. They run into somebody with the same shirt on. So like little things like that make such a big difference in how people identify with your brand and the experience they have with that brand.
So something as simple as just giving shirts out that are comfortable is an easy way to have a win in your business. It may feel like a cost by the way, when you're doing it, but I promise you the dividends are going to pay for that are exponential. And the other thing you have to look at from your customer experience is what do you want them to tell other people about your business?
Because your, their experience with your company, they may say, I got it. I hate, I went there and I got back to running 10 Ks again. I didn't think I was ever going to be able to do that. That's cool. But if somebody says, yeah, I went there, I got back to running 10 Ks. But man, they're all over the place like it's a shit show.
They're always late they never got back to me. I wasn't able to get x y and z from them I wasn't sure who I was gonna see or whatever like that I got the outcome but You don't want to be in that category You want to be, Oh yeah, I got back to running 10 Ks and I love going in there.
Team's awesome. Such a positive place. The office manager, she makes a fantastic latte. Like it's awesome. You should totally go there. To the point where like we've had patients pay for other people's initial evaluations and if or not as you pay for them, offer to reimburse them for initial valuations if they didn't think that they were in the right place after coming to see us to that level.
That's the level at which. If your customer experience and outcomes together can drive referrals. What's that worth? There's no amount of marketing dollars that could give somebody that's going to make them go on a go go out on, on their own reputation like that in order to send somebody our way.
That's your customer experience. And that's your outcomes. Outcomes should be a check the box. If you don't feel like you're competent enough. To get outcomes for people. You probably shouldn't open your own clinic yet. That's just reality. You got to be competent as a provider and you've got to hire competent people or people that are competent enough that you can train to be excellent, but you have to work really hard and intentionally delivering a customer experience that people are going to love.
So what do you want them to say about you is huge. There's a few things that I think of that hopefully people talk about our businesses, trustworthy, professional, enjoyable to work with. Worthy of a recommendation. These are the things that I hope people think about businesses that we're involved in that they will think to Themself that's a very trustworthy enjoyable business to work with.
They're very professional. They do what they say they're going to do and I got great outcomes from that business, right? It's very worth you looking at working with this company if you are looking at improving x y and z Whatever it might be, right? What you don't want is somebody that is, they're probably not negatively going to talk about your business if you really are trying to do the right thing for them, but what they might do is just avoid talking about it.
They may not have, they may have very little to say about it. And that is the difference between somebody referring somebody and somebody not. It's a difference between somebody's probably not going to talk shit about your business unless you did something really bad, but they're definitely not going to go on, go out on a limb and say, Hey, you should go see them because that's their reputation.
And the reputation is a status thing. And status is something you can't buy. Like we all have friends who we trust. Like I have a friend, if I want to go take Ashley to a new restaurant or something, I'll ask him, Hey, where should I go, dude? Because he's heavily involved in the food and wine business in Atlanta.
He knows all these great places, right? Like I trust his opinion. But if he gives me a few bad recommendations. Like I'm going to stop asking him, right? He loses status with me as far as his current, he knows that. And he takes that very seriously because that is a status thing for him.
He is the person that people go to for those things. That is a hierarchy thing within the tribe. That is you can't buy, right? You can't buy status. So people's recommendation of where they might. Refer somebody, send somebody is heavily based on their experience and their outcomes.
And the only way they can get there is you got to get your marketing, your brand tightened up and the sales tightened up so that then you can get them the amazing outcome that they deserve. Give them a great customer experience that you can then deliver to them. And then they're going to rave about you to all their friends and their family.
Now if you can do all of these things. In a congruent manner, you're going to be light years ahead of most clinics that we work with that's, they come into work with us because they're not really able to connect all these dots. It does take a lot of time and effort to do and it takes a lot of continual work to make sure that your team as it grows in particular is congruent and similar.
In terms of the messaging, the marketing, the brand representation, the sales process, all of that together. So when you look at a 30,000 foot view of your business, what you wanna look at is what are the few areas like, think of two or three areas that you can really start to improve. 'cause you may find like a dozen things that you need to work on.
And that's very hard to do. And as you're looking in Q1 of 2025, if you can say to yourself, okay. Here's three areas of our business that we're going to move the needle on that directly would improve the business. If we're looking at this from a top down level, from a 30, 000 foot view. So maybe it's okay.
Our website sucks. It doesn't convey the messaging that we want at all. We're going to work on updating that and making sure that's congruent. All right. On the sales process, I'm going to sit in and I'm going to audit. initial evaluations for all of my providers. I'm going to, I'm going to do one initial evaluation every single week and audit those and sit down and have a meeting with them about the things that are going really well and the things that we can adjust within an evaluation.
And the third thing is everybody is going to use everybody's name who comes in. The office, right? And we can do this pretty easily because we have EMRs that show everybody's names, right? Your office manager, whoever's the front desk, if you have one should be using this person's name when they come in your obviously your staff member that's working with that person should use that person's name.
You should know everybody's name if you're the owner of the business. And again, you can look on your EMR and you can see it and then start to use it in the office. And I promise you something simple like that across the board, if everybody is using that person's name, it is shockingly effective in terms of improving your customer experience.
So those are three little things you might find that you can do in Q1 to just chip away at, to improve the top down 30, 000 foot view exercise that we just talked about. In your business. And if you can do those three, get those dialed in, and then you build on that the following quarter, then maybe you choose another three there, or maybe it's even two, whatever.
But let's say you just did two, a quarter, two, two different areas, a quarter, you decided to improve by the end of the year, you have eight, you've improved eight areas of your business, dramatic difference in a year. And then, you do it again the next year and the next year and the next year, and my, my clinic that we started or the clinic that Ashley and I started, it just had its 10 year anniversary June of this past summer.
And this is a business that it could be decades that it's around and yours can as well. Like the problems that you solve are not going anywhere. The need is there. The profession has people that want to work in clinics like this they're solid businesses, they're profitable businesses.
They're enjoyable to run. You get really great outcomes with people who truly help them achieve goals that they have. Like that is a meaningful thing to actually help people and see it, like work with a business that actually helps people. It's fantastic. So if you want to.
Grow a business that can last for decades instead of being like most business owners that don't even make it to five years in, you've got to look at this as a continual improvement project and really take your business very seriously. So I hope this exercise helps you if you're trying to. Really get on top of your business this year.
If you're trying to get, take your business to the place that you want to take it to, but maybe don't know how, maybe you don't know the things that I just went over. Maybe you don't know where to start with some of this stuff. It's something that, for you, you might want to look at getting a coach, getting help.
On the business side of things, this is something that has been massive return on investment for me in many different ways within my own businesses, I'm obviously quite biased because physical therapy biz is a company that does that with, cash and hybrid based clinic owners. But if you're listening to this and you're like, man, this was very helpful, just imagine what it's like to work with our team, like we.
people grow fantastic businesses to make them grow and build in a way that is sustainable. That is it doesn't feel like you are, running a hundred miles an hour in all these different directions and trying to just put out multiple fires. That's what most businesses are.
But when you get things dialed in and you learn how to be a good business owner, not just a good clinician, the, Stress level in your life is going to change dramatically. Your income is going to change. Your impact on your community is going to change. And you may just not know how to be a great business owner.
That's totally fair. You didn't go to school for that. Neither did I. And for the last decade, that's all that I've worked on. And that's it, right? I am not a great clinician anymore because I can't be great at multiple things, right? I am not a good clinician at all. I don't even treat patients anymore because for me, this is all that we focus on.
And if you want to improve your business owner skills to where you're even average there and still a great clinician, like you have to put the work in to learn people, processes, sales, marketing, finance, leadership, how to actually hire people, how to retain people, how to build your business the right way.
And we have tons of systems that we can plug in and coaches that can help you actually grow that business. So if this is something that you realize you need help with, and you want to start off 2025 the right way. Head to physicaltherapybiz. com. Take a look at what we offer. You can pick a time to jump on a call with one of our advisors and we'll take a deep dive on your business.
And this is this isn't a a sales call necessarily. This is a deep dive in your business. We actually go through and audit your business in real time with you. And we're looking for what areas do you need to work on in your business? Very similar to what I talked about here. We want to know your numbers.
We want to know what your goals are. We want to know what you've already tried to implement, what you're working on. And you'll get it. You'll get a clear idea of exactly what you're doing. It ranked across like a benchmark that we have based on the hundreds of clinics that we actively work with so that, Oh, dang, I suck at evil.
I are at a converting evals. I'm really bad on the sales side. Oh man, leadership side is an area I need to improve. There's all these different buckets that we'll go through and you'll have a very clear, objective idea of what's going on in your business today. That alone may be the best way you can start off 2025.
Even if we don't work together, like it's that valuable. So if that makes sense to you, if that sounds like something you need help with head of physical theory, biz. com, pick a time to chat with one of our advisors, we'll take you through our our assessment, which is, something that we have.
Developed in house again, based off all the data that we have from the hundreds of clinics that we are currently work with and hundreds We've already worked with successfully and really help them grow their clinic and see how you benchmark against them and see where you stack up and and if this is something that's not the right time for you.
That's totally cool, too Take this podcast, use it as an exercise to go through your business, find two to three things this quarter and start chipping away at those. If you just do that, it'll be a huge win for you.
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