E758 | A Simple 6 Figure Reactivation Plan Any Clinic Can Run

Boosting Cash Flow with an "Open Enrollment" Campaign

For cash-based physical therapy clinics, the holiday season can bring a drop in business. People focus on gifts and travel, often sidelining therapy visits. To counter this, Dr. Danny started running an "Open Enrollment" campaign in 2016—a marketing push that helps boost cash flow, keep patients engaged, and increase predictability in revenue. Here’s how you can do the same to manage cash flow and ensure year-end stability for your clinic.

Why Open Enrollment?

Dr. Danny’s initial inspiration came from healthcare’s open enrollment period, a time when people enroll in health plans. It sounds official, adds credibility, and taps into a mindset of self-investment. The campaign targets existing clients, offering them package deals to encourage continued or renewed engagement.

The Impact of Reactivation Campaigns

Running an open enrollment reactivation campaign can be transformative:

1. Generate Recurring Revenue – Sell more to existing clients by offering ongoing services.
2. Manage Cash Flow – Secure revenue before holiday lulls.
3. Reduce Marketing Costs – Since you’re targeting existing clients, there’s no cost to acquire new ones.

Building Your Campaign

1. Keep It Simple:

   • Offer something like a 10-visit package with 2 additional sessions free, or a similar incentive.
   • Avoid complex bundles. Consistency and simplicity yield higher returns than intricate offers.

2. Personalize Outreach:

   • Review your client list and tailor emails based on individual goals. Mention specific goals, such as helping them train for a specific event.
   • Personalization increases conversion. Rather than a general email, an individualized message makes clients feel valued and more likely to engage.

3. Create Scarcity:

   • Frame the offer as limited in availability (e.g., "Let me earmark one of these packages for you before it opens to the public next week").
   • This sense of exclusivity and scarcity boosts urgency and prompts quicker decision-making.

Timing Matters

October is optimal for open enrollment, just before holiday shopping ramps up. Timing it too close to Thanksgiving or December means competing with holiday expenses. Spring is another excellent time for this campaign, ideally a month before spring break.

Measuring Success and Team Incentives

For clinics with multiple staff, make this a team effort. Set clear targets, like selling a specific number of packages, and offer rewards if those targets are met. Incentives such as a week off around Christmas or a team outing can motivate everyone to contribute actively to the campaign’s success.

Going Beyond Manual Outreach

If your client list is extensive, automation tools can help maintain a personal touch without requiring extensive manual effort. You can set up segmented emails that adapt based on client behavior, ensuring each message resonates personally.

Wrapping Up: The Long-Term Benefits

Open enrollment not only helps you navigate slow seasons; it creates consistency in revenue and fosters client loyalty. Building predictable revenue models reduces stress and makes your clinic’s future more secure. For a comprehensive look at your clinic’s performance and growth opportunities, consider working with an advisor. Dr. Danny’s team at Physical Therapy Biz can benchmark your clinic’s standing, helping you find areas for improvement and accelerate growth.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Hey, real quick, if you're 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 Matei, 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, cause I'm here to help you.

What's going on? Doc Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast. And today I want to talk about. Open enrollment. This is something that many of you have probably heard of. It's actually, I think it's what the government health care system, the healthcare. gov program when you can sign up for individual health care is called.

But it is a marketing campaign that I started doing. In 2016 as a way to get clients and patients that I've already worked with to come back in and work with me on, something else. And the reason I called it open enrollment originally was because it sounded like health care. It sounds, it's exactly what was going on with my client.

Ourself, my family, we had to, get our own insurance through the healthcare. gov system. And it sounded pretty official. So that's what we called it. And this is something that we've now had, quite a few iterations, almost 10 years of iterations with, and something that we basically have everybody that we work with do around this time of the year to have a reactivation campaign in place as part of their annual marketing plan.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna break down what open enrollment is. How you can do something similar in your own practice and really the most simplified way to get some results with this and maybe Why you would even want to do this? So first of all, let's just talk about ways in which You can scale a practice.

So one is more new patients, which we know is as far as acquiring new customers, especially early on, it's, it is a constraint for everybody because you don't really have a brand. You don't have a reputation for most parts. So acquiring new customers is tough. It's really what separates people that are going to make it or not with their own brand.

But the other thing, other ways you can grow are you can charge more, which is, obviously some people can do so they can raise their prices. They can more optimally price. Many people are underpriced. Or you can sell more to your current clients, right? And give them a reason to stick around, whether for services or ongoing services, or maybe help them achieve a goal that, They are trying to achieve physically and you can help them, to do that.

That's the reason why they'll stick around and that really helps with your recurring revenue. When we look at reactivation campaigns, they really are an opportunity to do the third variation of that, which is to sell more to the people that you work with and really help them, with whatever it is that they're trying to continue to participate in or with a training for.

So when we look at why this is something that That I started doing and why the timing it comes down to cashflow. So the first two Christmases Christmas seasons. So I started my clinic in 2014 and I started in the summer. So it was June and we did really well. Like we, we thought we were just, business geniuses until about the end of November.

And then all of a sudden we thought we were going to go out of business, right? This is legitimately my wife and I thought. I started looking at other jobs that I could get like part time like hospital jobs. Luckily, I was too lazy to actually apply for anything. And what we ended up happening was we just didn't realize that the holidays get really slow when you have a, service based business like this, like a cash based clinic.

And we didn't realize, okay, everybody just travels and they're prioritizing buying. presence versus buying physical therapy visits. So that happened the like six months into our business. And as the second year came around, we thought, okay, this is probably just a fluke.

Maybe it's not going to be as noticeable of a drop and it totally was right. So we had a big drop at the end of November through the end of December. So basically a month and it sucked. Like it, it's, it doesn't feel good to not have any business or not much business coming in our revenue probably dropped 40, 50 percent in that month in comparison to what our average month would be.

And so third year comes along 2016, we decided, all right we can, what can we do about this? And I had started learning a bit more about business and I decided, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna run this reactivation campaign. I had read a book by a marketer, I can't remember the name of it right now.

But the book was great. And one of the things that they talked about in this marketing book was what I explained to you. So sell more, you can get more new patients or new clients, or you can You can charge more, right? So I decided, okay, I'm going to do some sort of reactivation campaign. And here's exactly what I did.

I told people that I was running a open enrollment special offer. And for one week in October they could get a, at the time, It was a six pack of visits. They get a six pack of visits for the cost of a three pack, right? That's what I started with. I had a three, six and a 10 and mostly sold threes because I was so bad at sales, but I decided, okay, you need a six pack for the cost of a three.

So it's basically a 50 percent reduction in cost. And I sold. Something like 25, 000 to 30, 000 worth of these packages, which was a lot. It was a lot of people, way more people than I thought. And what happened was we basically had an extra month of cash flow that we stacked on top of where we were at in October leading into the holidays.

Because what I wanted I didn't want that revenue because I needed the revenue necessarily to pay my own salary. I wanted it so that when we had these sort of swings in how busy our schedules were we didn't feel like we were cash poor by the end of end of December. So this is just a variation of cashflow management. Now you can save up throughout the year and make sure your cash reserves are in a good spot. But if you want to bolster your cash reserves and give people a reason to come back in and generate revenue, At on the low end, we see people have like barely even try have mediocre success and generate an additional 10, 000 in, in revenue.

And on the high end, the highest we've ever seen is about 250, 000 in revenue from one open enrollment campaign. Now they can get very intricate. I'm not going to get into sort of all the intricate details and things you can do with it I'm going to talk about the simplest way to start to initiate one of these campaigns timing is important for these because october in particular is a good time to do it You don't want to get too close to thanksgiving And definitely not December because then you're competing with Santa.

You'll lose that like 10 times. So you want to be a little bit earlier. You want to do this in October. September can be a little hit or miss because people are coming they're getting back into their school schedules. They're probably paying off their summer vacations, but October seems to be the right month to do this for sort of maximum impact and timing.

So when you do this now, I don't recommend that you do a three, a six visit for the price of a three visit. What we see right now is it's super simple, right? It's a lot of people just run a campaign that is a 10 visit pack and they get an extra two. So you get 12 for the price of a 10 pack.

That's enough for most people to be able to have a really good response. So you don't have to, you don't have to make it complex and we've made it Incredibly complex. We've added on, programming memberships as a bonus and like physical, like shirts and other things that we've done to like stack value.

And honestly, it's just not worth it. It's just more important to keep it super simple and be consistent with it. Cause what happens is you do this year one, people are aware of it. It's not going to, be typically like, the greatest response in comparison to if you run this a few years in a row, but in the second year, people are aware of it from the first year.

And by year two and three, they start actually looking forward to that. And you'll get people asking you like what week is open enrollment this year. And we used to get that a lot. And that's when we knew we were onto something that was like a really consistent marketing campaign that really, remember this, like a cost of acquiring a client is already happened.

These are people you've already worked with. So it's free as far as acquisition cost is concerned, which is, Way better than the marketing time or effort and money you may have to spend to get a new customer. And if people already know they can trust you, so you don't have to build that rapport.

You can just go right into solving a problem with them. And and it's great to work with them for long term problems, right? If they're trying to, if they're trying to, You run a long race if they're trying to, compete in something and they're wanting to actually physically be capable of doing that and we can be a partner with them in that process.

Great. Some people, it's literally just like they want accountability on a monthly basis and they come in once a month. We work on whatever seems to be. Needing some attention or we talk to them about something they have Some concerns about or that they're working on trying to improve and there's coaching involved and for a lot of people that's what they want, right?

So it just depends but you're giving people an option to prepay to work with you basically for you know This 12 is however they use those and they may split it with the family They may use it themselves may spread it out once a month They may use it all within a few months leading up to an event or something like that But they're basically getting a slight discount For something that they're going to pay up front for in a time when it helps us Improve our cashflow leading into the holidays, which makes the holidays, frankly, better for everybody in our company, because we're not stressing as much about that sort of downtime.

And we know that Q1, January, February, March is usually really busy. So it really picks up during that time. So simple 12 for the price of a 10 pack, really simple, easy way to do it. People can do a lot of other things and we've done a lot of things and continue to do A lot of different variations and Jeremy DuPont with patch marketing does really cool stuff with the automations that they have, that they build out with the software that they use and even ads.

You can run run ads in conjunction with ads, but that's like way different, complexity level. If you're just getting started with this, here's my recommendation. Go through the list of people that you've worked with and individualize an email to whoever it is you've worked with that you would like to offer.

a opportunity to work with you with this open enrollment package. Give them a reason why and make it specific to them. So if let's say I'm working with somebody named Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a longtime listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to the 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 helped them develop time and financial freedom. So if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast. I want to say I know Ken is a cyclist and he's training for these races throughout the year.

And I can say, Hey Ken, I hope you're doing well. How's the whatever, thing that we worked on. I know you're an avid cyclist. You're training for these for races. We have a really cool offer coming up next week. And it's a 10 visit package. And we add additional two, so you get 12 for the price of a 10 visit package.

I thought of you because I know you're constantly training and you're trying to stay in shape to do these races. I'd love to be able to help you along the way so that we can get you these races healthy and you can perform as best you can. If you're interested, let me know. I can earmark one for you before we open it up to the public next week.

So what I just said there is actually really important. So if you. Give somebody a it's almost like you're doing them a favor sort of frame. Then the likelihood that they're going to take you up on that is actually a lot higher, right? So if I just said let me know if you'd like to get one of these packages, that's fine.

But if you say, let me know if you would like me to earmark one of these for you or set one aside for you, we'll open up the public next week and we have X amount. Now I've added scarcity. I've added a reason why to take action because people will, they'll drag their feet on any decision. You just now help them make a decision of whether they want to do this or not.

And the reality is it's true. We would pre sell like we would only have a certain number of these initially because we didn't have enough staff to be able to fulfill like we would have 20 that we could do right? So 20 and we'd usually have At least 10 to 15 of those sold before we even opened it up And then by the time we open it up the rest of them would sell out really fast So we would put some scarcity legit scarcity on that and they would sell out faster, right?

So that's the easiest thing to do But you got to personalize it to that individual if you just send out a blanket email to everybody on your list That you've worked with and you let them know. Hey, there's open enrollment. This is what You know, it looks like, let us know if you want one and you don't individually personalize that to somebody, the likelihood of conversion goes way down.

The next step too, you can always drive them to just have a conversation with you if they have any questions about it, right? So they don't have to necessarily make a decision. They could just have a quick chat with you. Maybe they have a couple of questions about where they can share it with their spouse or something like that.

Cool. We can answer that. They decide whether it's the right fit or not and that's the end of it, right? So you're basically selling into, let us know if you have any questions or if you want us to set one aside for you, let us know and we can do that. So go through your list and pick out the people you think are the right fit.

And then individually, it can be a similar message, but individually put elements in there that are specific to them, versus if somebody said to me I'm not a cyclist, but if somebody reached out to me and said, Hey, Danny, I guess package. That is great for cyclists that are trained for races.

I think you'd be a good fit for you. I'm like buying that at all. This doesn't sound like me at all. Like this is completely misses the mark as far as individualization. And it makes me feel less taken care of as a client, right? You want to have some personalization. To the messaging that you bring to anybody that you're trying to work with in a variation like this, and you should know something about these people.

In fact, you have notes on these people. It's not that hard, right? You literally go back in. Maybe you remember just who they are because you have enjoyed working with them so much. Great. If not look at your documentation and it's easy to pull from that. You can pull little things that they've said to you, about the things they'd like to do or things that they're working on.

And you can put those into an email. I would rather you send 50. Personalized emails, then blast 500 people with a blanket email. You'll get a far higher conversion off of 15 individualized emails than you will off of a blanket conversion. Now, if you have a big list, this is where getting, somebody involved like a Jeremy DuPont's group with patch can make a lot of sense because they can layer in individualization to automate automations that feels individualized.

More so without you having to basically go through because let's say you have 3, 000 people you've worked with It should be really hard for you to Go through 3, 000 people and individualized messages to all those folks So what you might have is a small subset of people that you individualize and you're maybe talking to in person and then you have segmented lists that are sending these things out with prompts and they're automatically going to change based on behaviors that people have.

This is where it can get really effective and intricate. And as an example, I was just talking to the guy that we sold our practice to I took him and one of the staff members and Ashley and I took him, one of the staff members that's at at the PT clinic that we sold to the Falcons game, which they lost, which is a bummer.

But anyway, we were talking about open enrollment while we're sitting there. Yeah. And their goal is gonna be 50 no, 68 packages, 68 packages for this open enrollment. And it's for October. And they're already at they're probably 80 percent of where they want to be and they have 10 days left.

But do the math on this for a second. 58 packages times this is a 2, 000 offer is over 100, 000 in revenue from one campaign, right? Which potentially could be, even more. These are just targets that they're setting based on, whatever their goals are. But think about adding that.

to your, it's not 58, 78, sorry, 78 packages. So basically 150 grand is where they're at. And think about adding that in a month or a week and what that does for the cashflow of your business. Now, obviously like those visits gets paid, get paid out and they get chipped away at, as those get fulfilled. But the cash position that puts you in is such a better spot.

As long as you're fiscally responsible with that don't run an open enrollment campaign, generate 150 grand, and then go buy it like a BMW SUV. And that's a bad idea. That's a depreciating asset versus you being able to say, cool. This is cash reserves for us to then, we're going to reinvest in our people in education or technology that we're going to add in or other services, or we have a cash position in case, we want to take advantage of an opportunity, which we always recommend people have three to six months of cash on hand because it puts you in such a better position.

So this can help you get there with a relatively simple campaign. So there's a few keys to this and we'll leave it at this and you can go and test this yourself. That's my recommendation. If you're not doing something like this. Then I recommend that you give it a shot. If you're hearing this kind of late and it's like November, December, then my advice to you is wait until like March because that's another decent time to run this.

And it has to do with like school years. And it, it depends when your spring break is. I wouldn't do it the month of spring break. I would do it a month before spring break. So yeah. If your spring break is in March, then I would look at like February. And if your spring break is in April, then I would look at March.

So that's the second sort of timeline that you can use to run one of these, but I would recommend that you go and test this out. So here's the keys, right? Number one, keep it simple. Make it something really simple, like 12 is for the price of a 10 pack, something like that. It works really well. Make sure that you make it direct individualized and that you're not automating it, especially if you have a small list of people like reach out to everybody individually, make it specific to them and then some variation of scarcity on it.

So set a target that you want to have for your clinic whatever that is, and then try to hit that goal. All right. And if you go over it, great. And if you have limitations based on capacity of the staff that you have. Make sure you stick to that timeline. Don't put yourself in a bad sort of logistical position because you can't fulfill on those visits if you're selling like way too many, and I know that may sound counterintuitive but unless you don't have, unless you have somebody that you can hire relatively soon, like you, you don't want to have a bad customer experience because of that. So think about like how many you can fulfill on what you want to set your number at, set it, and then try to hit that number.

And the last thing I would say. If you do this a couple times, then you can start to add in things that are incentives, right? And this can make it more fun, and I'll give you a couple examples. One year, if we hit our number, then we took everybody out to dinner, right? I've heard people that, if they hit a number, then they do something really cool with their staff.

Like as far as a staff retreat is concerned or there's like a bonus, like monetary bonus or something like that associated with it. One thing that I know one of the clinics that we were talking with that is doing this year is if. They hit their number of open enrollment packages they want to sell, then everybody gets the week of Christmas off without having to take any of their leave.

So Christmas is on like a Wednesday. So they get, Monday through Friday without having to take any vacation if everybody hits the bonus. So now everybody's like, All over it this like they're so incentivized To hit these numbers because they get a whole week off from work and honestly during a pretty down time for the clinic.

Like it's a great. It's actually a really smart idea so not gonna be that busy Anyway, might as well take that time off They don't have to take any of their vacation and then they can you know They can enjoy that time with their family if they hit this this package number and they all work together on it and it's great because you get the whole team working together on a common goal So that's it.

That's open enrollment You Like improve your cash position and keep it simple and just do it and try to build things like this in every single year that you have Some predictability in your revenue coming in because one of the I think one of the biggest challenges especially early on is it can feel like It almost feels like you're just you don't know What your next month is going to look like Or, the next quarter is going to look like it can, it feels like you're just guessing and you have no predictability and saying Oh, okay.

We have this marketing initiative coming up. We have this campaign coming up. We know seasonally. It looks like this. We know if we invest this much in ads, we can expect to have this much of return. Like predictability in your marketing is what's going to take a lot of stress off the plate for you. Like that, not knowing what your clinic is going to look like is super, super stressful.

It's not something that I enjoyed whenever I ran my clinic. And as we started to build in more things that created predictability Via actual marketing plans and understanding, advertising and investing in our own business. It makes it much better to run a business like that. So if you don't know those things, this is something we can help you with.

Obviously head to physical therapy biz. com. Take a look at what we do. If it makes sense to you, jump on a call with one of our advisors and here's what's going to happen. Our advisors will take you through an assessment that we've created that's specifically for you. Cash and hybrid based clinics.

And we look at your clinic and benchmark you compared to the hundreds of clinics that we actually work with to let you know what you're doing well at and what you are deficient at and what things you should work on. So regardless of whether there's a fit for us to work with you to help you achieve those or not, you're going to leave with a lot of really solid information about where your business is.

And. In comparison to hundreds of other clinics all across the country, all different demographics that you can use as relevant information for how your clinic is doing and things that you are either need to improve, or maybe you don't need to spend a lot of time on. And if it makes sense, that we may be able to help you try to achieve what you're trying to do faster with, maybe less mistakes and save you some time, energy and money.

Then we can tell you all about that if there's a, a mutual fit. And if not, then cool. Then you have, you leave with a really clear idea of where your business is In an assessment that is incredibly thorough, detailed, and it's information that, would be really hard for you to try to figure out on your own because you don't have access to hundreds of clinics like we do.

And we can share that with you and benchmark yourself across that those other businesses, which is really helpful to know where you stand. If that makes sense, head to physicaltherapybiz. com. Request to jump on discovery call with our advisors and we'll take a look at your business. So as always, thanks so much for listening to the podcast and I'll catch you next week.

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