E535 | Why You Need To Be A Human Body Consultant

Back when I first started Athletes' Potential, I had to learn how to tell people what I did. People generally thought physical therapy was just something their grandma would go through after a hip replacement. We all know it is much more than that, and you must be good at communicating this to people if you want to be successful. We are human body consultants that help people move better, get out of pain, and back to the activities they love. Enjoy! 

• A physical therapist and strength coach had a baby...
• Solving problems
• Asking your patients the right questions

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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 communication. 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 be 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 like it. So here's the question.

How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna 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 Mate, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Doc Danny here, the PT Entrepreneur podcast, and today we are talking about why I think you really need to focus on being a human body consultant. And I'll give you a quick backstory on this. So when I was just starting athletes potential I was trying to explain what I did.

To, to people. And I would say physical therapy. And ultimately people would say, oh yeah, my grandma's going through physical therapy. She's had a hip replacement. That's cool. But that wasn't really what I did. That wasn't what I was doing. And the traditional assumption of the profession is, khaki pants.

Tennis shoes and mobilizing grandma's hip. And that wasn't what I did. So I would tell people what I thought was pretty good. I say, yeah, I help people move better, get outta pain and get back to the activities that they like, and I was at a dinner party and I remember I said that, and a lady goes, oh, so you're like a massage therapist and a chiropractor mixed together and And I was like, yeah, like something like that.

And that didn't really work either. And then I was teaching up at a special operations group up at Fort Bragg, and it was a group of PJs that are their Air Force. Basically souped up Air Force medics. They're the people that go in if, like a pilot crashes, behind enemy lines and they do a number of other things, but they're highly specialized.

They take two years to train. In fact, I think it takes longer to become a PJ than it does to become a Navy seal. And they're not the most well known. Of special operation community but really badass group of people. And I was sitting there and one of those PJs at lunch when we were eating, he was talking about how frustrating it was to try to talk to his family, to tell his family what he does.

And he said he's yeah, they think I'm like a glorified like ambulance driver or E M T. And I started laughing, just cuz it's like I was kinda having a similar problem and I told him, I go, yeah man, I, I try to tell people what I do and. They don't know. And he goes, dude, it's easy.

You're a human body consultant. And I remember him, him saying that, and it was just like such a simple thing, right? It was like, oh yeah, you're right. I am. And he goes, yeah, you're up here talking to us about, movement and breathing and sleep and like we were getting into all kinds of different stuff.

And it's not as simple as just physical therapy. And I think for many of you listening to this, You probably can relate to this because, you are you're different in terms of your skillset. It varies. I even I used to tell people, this is actually like the worst thing to tell people.

I would say they'd be like, Hey, what do you do, for a living? And I would say imagine a physical therapist and a strength coach got together. They had sex and had a baby, and that baby would be me. And as I say it out loud, I realize just how terrible of an explanation that is to even tell somebody.

But at the time, I was trying to figure out what to say and that's like the worst thing to say. By the way, don't ever say that at a dinner party or in a networking group. It will confuse people and they probably be less likely to wanna work with you. But that's what it was. I was functioning in the gray area of like in between.

Performance and rehab and meshing those worlds together in a way. And as I, thought more about this and I had this conversation, it became clear to me that what we really do is consult on the human body with people. We are consultants. Now, we may have some skills that we can do, whether it be, with our hands or.

Whatever diagnostically and clinical reasoning and program design and whatever, no one understands that shit. All they want is they want their problem solved. But as we look at these variables associated with it, I think this is where if you're listening to this and you are not doing these things, I think you're leaving a lot on the table for people.

Now take us to the grain of salt from a guy that hasn't seen patients in a year and a half, but I. I, I just know for me, when I worked with people and I did for, over a decade, like it's not as simple as just my knee hurts. There's so many other variables there, and anybody that is, has the time to have conversations with people is gonna realize the same thing.

And there's typically four main areas that are gonna be leading to these problems that need to be addressed, so movement is a big one. We all typically focus on that. You then you have sleep. Nutrition and stress management. And it, and this is not something new to me that I didn't come up with this necessarily.

If you really look across the, the health and wellness industry, I think the smartest people all come to the same conclusion that these variables are all important and that they interact with each other. And you could throw community in there as a fifth one. I've heard people say that I typically didn't address that with folks.

I typically stuck to these four and. It's, I'm not saying that you need to be a sleep expert by any means, but I am saying you should understand the basics of how people can improve sleep and things that they need to address or change in order to improve their sleep. I'll give you a really good example of why.

This is just something that you can't skip these areas, right? So I had a guy that came in to see me and he was, he had chronic chronic knee issue and he was a like competitive CrossFitter master's athlete. Not like going to like the games, but overall like competitive, like regionally.

And he had been dealing with this knee issue for. Who knows how long, like years. And so I started talking to him and he'd done all this stuff, right? Tons of shit. And he had a whoop band on, which helps me a ton. If I see somebody with a whoop, I'm like, show me your, gimme your phone. Let me look at your data.

And as I was looking at his data, his sleep was terrible. It was really bad. He wasn't getting much deep sleep at all. And he said he struggled with sleep. Pretty much for years. So I started talking to him about it and I said cool man. What's tell me about your routine. Because a lot of times it's like simple things with people's routines.

They're just they're messed up, they're messing up their sleep. And he would train later in the day and around his training, he would drink like 40 plus ounces of this whey protein, sugar drink that he would use as his like. Intra training slash recovery drink. So he's drinking like 40 ounces of fluid at seven, between seven and about eight 30.

And then he would go to bed around like nine 30. So he would have all his fluid in his body and he'd wake up multiple times during the night to go pee. And I'm like, dude. This has to change, right? Either move your training up or don't drink so much damn water, like drink that earlier in the day and and let's try that variable and let's just see what happens and.

Literally, this is all it took for him to go from waking up multiple times during the night to sleeping through the night done. That's it. That was it. And his issues start, started to resolve as we started to work through stuff. But this is definitely a variable in conjunction with that because we know, great quality sleep is gonna help with healing.

It's, and it's so important for other areas too. So what I'm getting at is, as you look at what you do, being a consultant for the human body has a lot of value. You help people solve problems that to us may seem fairly straightforward but to them they have no idea. No idea. Another example, I talked to a, a la a, an old patient of ours, actually, I hadn't seen her in years.

And she, it people will bring up like craziest shit with you as you already know. So we're at this music festival and she's telling me about having blood in her stool and and I was like, oh shit, okay. How long has it been going on? What have you, what are you doing?

And she's been taking NSAIDs, like she's been taking like Motrin basically every day, just proactively for years and. Me having a simple conversation with her, I'm like, that's not good. You probably need to get a stop doing that and b, you need to go get this checked out.

And and she did and it turns out, yeah, she had an ulcer because she is taking long-term, NSAIDs and she thought that was totally fine. She thought it was totally normal to do that cuz her grandma told her that or something. So people just don't know this stuff. And we have a unique skillset.

Especially if you're willing to dive into some of the basic primary care musculoskeletal skills that. Frankly, we all say we want, we all say we, we want to have more direct access. We want to be able to have more autonomy. You have to also parlay that with the understanding of basic red flags, yellow flags, primary care stuff as part of your skillset, as part of your consulting skillset.

And then you need to know about sleep, and you need to know about nutrition, and you need to know about stress management, and you need to know about movement and the injuries that you're dealing with. You do not need to be an expert in all of these things. You need to have a basic layer of understanding.

And I get this from my brother-in-law who was a consultant at a big four company for years. He would come in and he got assigned to the mergers and acquisitions team at pwc. His background though, was in data analytics. He has a master's degree in like statistics and data analysis, and so he's n never.

Bought, sold, merged a company before, right? But he understands problem solving and he's smart. And so they would put him on these different teams. He would show up with a basic understanding of what's going on. He would figure out like what things they needed to work on, and then he would go and learn, and he would start learning and improving in those areas to where he was just competent enough to be able to help facilitate solving this problem.

And then he would do it again on the next project, which could be completely different company. So you don't need to have the world's deepest knowledge on sleep. But you need, do need to understand that, people sleep a little bit better if it's colder, and if they don't look at screens before they go to bed, and if they, have a movement practice and they wind down and if it's really dark, it's better, right?

Like simple things that people can start to adjust in their day-to-day. And instead of them just looking at you as. You help them with their knee pain. It's like somebody once told this to me, and I think this is a good way to think about it. He goes you're basically quarterbacking my health and wellness and this is somebody that I would see on an ongoing basis and.

Sometimes we would just like talk about stuff that was going on that he needed to address or to adjust and help him understand some of the basics of some of the health changes he was trying to make. And I would link him up with a personal trainer in this example cause he was trying to lose a pretty significant amount of weight.

So I helped vet a personal trainer for him and I would coordinate with that personal trainer about some of the things that he needed to work on or some of the things that we were working on. And it helped modify some of the. The programming in certain cases. So think of yourself as that central point of of care for somebody and that makes you significantly more valuable, significantly more of a.

An asset to somebody far less disposable than just a physical therapist, just a massage therapist, just a chiropractor, just a whatever you are you're their human body consultant. You're the person that they trust to go back to. They'll call you before they call anybody else. That's where you want to be, and you have to earn that though.

You have to earn that through a a gamut of skills and knowledge that you acquire over. Extended period of time as you are learning more and more about the human body and being fascinated with getting as great of outcomes as you possibly can. Think of yourself that way. Position yourself that way.

Use messaging with people that way, that will make more sense to them. Far more sense than the things that I tried. Because it is something that people are aware of. It's a profession. It's a, it's a. It's a word people understand. They understand consultant. You're just doing that for their body and for their health and wellness.

And we do have a unique opportunity and skillset set to do that to where we can help solve these problems, but yet know when we need to get other people involved at the same time because we don't know everything. But you may not need a sleep study. If you're drinking 40 ounces of water before you go to bed and pissing all night, like nobody needs to go to a sleep site to figure that out.

They just need to say, oh, okay, let's adjust this one variable and let's see what happens. Bam, all of a sudden problem solved. Like you just saved that person a massive amount of time, energy, and money. Keep that in perspective for a second. Like this guy, I saved him from having to go do a sleep study.

Go do all kinds of other appointments and visits and stuff just because he was drinking too much water before he went to bed. Like it can be that simple if you asked the right questions and you have a basic understanding of these variables. So I hope that makes sense to you. I'm not gonna get on my clinical soapbox too much cuz.

Honestly, it's not really my lane. I can tell you where this worked for us and how it worked for me. And this is just where I've seen success and consistency, both on the clinical side as far as outcomes are concerned, but also as far as just like the understanding of what my business does or did, and.

Which, which can be hard to describe because you're not necessarily the traditional, physical therapy practice or whatever your clinical background is, probably not traditionally, whatever that is. So explaining that to people can be a little bit difficult. So anyway, hopefully this helps you.

It helped me. And as always, guys, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next week.

Hey, Pete, entrepreneurs. We have big, exciting news, a new program that we just came out with That is our PT Biz part-time to full-time, five day challenge. Over the course of five days, we get you crystal clear on exactly how much money you need to replace by getting you. Ultra clear on how much you're actually spending.

We get you crystal clear on the number of people you're getting to see, and the average visit rate you're going to need to have in order to replace your income to be able to go full-time. We go through three different strategies that you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you can pick the one that's the best for you based on your current situation.

Then we share with you the sales and marketing systems that we use within our mastermind that you need to have as well. If you wanna go full-time in your own practice. And then finally we help you create a one. Page business plan. That's right. Not these 15 day business plans. You wanna take the Small Business Association, a one day business plan that's gonna help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and when you're gonna do it.

To take action if you're interested and sign up for this challenge is totally free. Head to physical therapy biz.com/challenge. Get signed up there. Please enjoy. We put a lot of energy into this. It's totally free. It's something I think is gonna help you tremendously, as long as you're willing to do the work.

If you're doing the work and you're getting. Information put down and getting yourself ready to take action in a very organized way, you will have success, which is what we want. So head to physical therapy biz.com/challenge and get signed up today. 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 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 4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country.

I do live trainings in there with Yves Gege every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside of that group.So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.