E739 | Hiring New Grads vs Experienced Clinicians

Hiring New Grads vs. Experienced Clinicians: What’s Best for Your PT Practice?

When it comes to building a successful physical therapy practice, one of the most critical decisions you’ll face is who to hire. Do you bring on a fresh-out-of-school new graduate or opt for a seasoned clinician with years of experience? Dr. Danny tackles this very question in a recent episode of the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, offering insights that can help you make the best choice for your practice.

The Pros and Cons of Hiring New Graduate PTs

Advantages:

• Energy and Fresh Perspectives: New grads often bring enthusiasm and the latest knowledge from PT school, which can inject fresh energy into your practice.
• Moldability: They’re generally more open to learning and adapting to your specific treatment philosophy and practice culture.
• Cost: New graduates typically come at a lower salary, which can be beneficial if you're a growing practice watching your bottom line.

Disadvantages:

• Training Requirements: New grads often need extensive training and mentoring, which can be time-consuming and costly.
• Limited Clinical Skills: Without much hands-on experience, they may struggle with complex cases or managing a full caseload initially.
• Patient Management: New graduates may lack the confidence and experience in handling challenging patient interactions or high-demand scenarios.

The Pros and Cons of Hiring Experienced Clinicians

Advantages:

• Clinical Expertise: Experienced clinicians bring a wealth of knowledge and hands-on skills, allowing them to handle a wide range of patient cases efficiently.
• Independence: They typically require less oversight and can hit the ground running, freeing up your time to focus on other aspects of the business.
• Patient Trust: Patients often feel more comfortable and confident in the care of a seasoned therapist, which can enhance patient retention and satisfaction.

Disadvantages:

• Cost: Seasoned clinicians usually demand higher salaries, which can strain your budget, especially if you’re a smaller or newer practice.
• Set Ways: Experienced therapists might be less flexible in adapting to your practice’s specific protocols or treatment approaches.
• Growth Potential: While they bring a lot of expertise, seasoned clinicians might not be as interested in ongoing learning or integrating new techniques as new grads.

Key Considerations for Your Practice

• Training and Mentorship: Do you have the time and resources to invest in a new graduate, or do you need someone who can be autonomous from day one?
• Clinical Needs: What types of patients does your practice serve? Complex cases might require a seasoned clinician, while a new grad might be perfect for a more routine caseload.
• Financial Impact: Consider the long-term financial implications of each option, not just in salary but also in terms of training costs and the potential revenue each type of therapist can generate.
• Cultural Fit: Think about which type of hire will best align with your practice culture and goals for growth.

Growth Potential and Fit

Hiring the right clinician for your practice isn’t just about filling a position—it’s about setting your business up for success. Whether you choose a new grad or a seasoned clinician, it’s essential to align your hiring decisions with your practice’s specific needs and growth stage.

Dr. Danny’s candid discussion in this episode is a must-listen for practice owners who want to make informed, strategic hiring decisions. Whether you’re a seasoned practice owner or just starting, this episode is packed with practical advice to optimize your hiring strategies.

Stay Tuned for More

For those looking to dive even deeper, keep an eye out for an upcoming YouTube video on the PT Biz channel, where Dr. Danny will expand on this topic. He’ll cover finance, pricing, and the nuances of building a cash-based physical therapy practice—resources that can further guide you in making the best hiring choices for your business.

Why It Matters

The clinicians you hire directly impact your practice’s success and growth. By understanding the pros and cons of hiring new grads versus experienced clinicians, you can make informed decisions that enhance both your business and clinical outcomes.

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Ready to elevate your practice? Book a call at the link below with one of our expert consultants today and start your journey to delivering unparalleled physical therapy.

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 because i'm here to help you

Hey, dr. Danny here the pt entrepreneur podcast and today we're going over hiring new grads versus seasoned clinicians This is something that is actually going to be a youtube video On the PT Biz YouTube channel as well. You can head there. If you want to check it out, we're going to be putting a lot more educational resource resources on there, especially with trainings where we actually draw things out, show examples of numbers in particular, especially we're looking at finance or if we're looking at price points and selling and the things that we have to get into as far as actually understanding the nuts and bolts of a business.

So we're going to be spending a lot more time doing that. Putting trainings out there so you can learn more about how to effectively start and grow your cash based practice. This is going to be a bit of a shorter training, but really important looking at new grads versus experienced clinicians, the pros and cons of both.

I've hired both and I'm going to go over, where I see the best fits for these, what might be a fit for you based on the type of practice you have or where the stage of the business that you're in and how you can really effectively make the right decisions about who to hire. So hope you like this one.

And as always, thank you so much for listening. Hey, my name's Zane Mattei. I'm the founder of. P T biz, a company that helps cash based practices start and scale all over the country. And one of the things that we run into, which is a good problem to have is hiring. So today I'm gonna talk about hiring the types of hires that you might be looking for in the pros of cons and pros and cons of both those, which would be.

Your season clinicians versus your new grad hires, right? So this is really the challenge that many practices face, which is how do you find really good people? And that's really any service based business which today we're going to talk about is the two variations of people that we see that you can add to your practice.

It can add a lot of value in different ways. And the context in which you may want to hire one over the other, in many cases, dependent on your situation. So the two options that we typically have are either, do I hire a brand new physical therapist, a new grad PT, or do I go for a more seasoned clinician that has some years under their belt?

And there's pros and cons to both of these. In fact, I've hired both. I think that the true answer, what's the best option is a mixture of both. The TLDR of this is I think both working together is actually a fantastic option. If you have the ability to, scale to that point. Which hopefully that you do the more people you hire, honestly, the safer the businesses, if you have one hire, you have one staff clinician and that person leaves, that's 50 percent of your workforce is gone, right?

Like you're the only one left and I've been there and that sucks. And it's a huge momentum, stall that you have, where it just stops all the progress you have in the business. Getting the point where you have multiple hires is really important, but that first hire can be challenging.

So with the first hire, many of you are probably going to lean more towards hiring. A newer graduate. And the reason why is most people that have cash based practices, they're a little bit more on the newer clinician side themselves. I'm not saying that everyone is, you may be listening to this and be like, Hey man, I have 20 years of experience.

What are you talking about? And that, that is, that definitely is a is a subset of the profession that is going into more of a cash based model. But what we see is the average age of somebody that is starting or scaling one of these businesses is a little bit on the younger side as a clinician.

So if you hire somebody that's a bit older than you, as your first hire, That can be a challenge as, as far as leadership is concerned. If you hire a new grad, there's a few advantages to that. Number one, they're going to cost less, right? So they don't have as much experience. They don't demand as much salary and compensation.

Also they may be more willing to take a chance on what would be considered a startup, a small business that maybe has less consistency, less Insulation from economic changes versus a big corporate owned practice that you could look at as being a safer bet. So you're going to get somebody that's willing to take a bit more of a chance on themselves, lower compensation.

They don't have bad habits. They haven't really picked up bad habits in clinical rotations. So you're able to like actually train them into the. The skills that you want to see, the things that you prioritize and that you find valuable, which can be really great, you know, especially considering they tend to be a better culture fit because they don't have any bad habits from other cultures.

It's not like they're going to come in and say in my last clinic, I did things this way. That doesn't happen because they don't have a last clinic, right? They have clinical mentorship and rotations and that's about it. So new grads in a lot of ways, Can be a really beneficial first hire, especially if you're a younger clinician yourself, the negative of hiring a new grad is they tend to be a lot more transient.

The likelihood that they're sticking around for more than two to three years is pretty low mainly because they want to see what else is out there. Even if you create the best opportunity for them, they don't really have anything to compare that to. The other thing too, is that, the ability for you to retain staff for let's call it five plus years.

It definitely increases the likelihood that increases with a seasoned clinician because they do have comparison of what a good setting and a bad setting looks like. And also it's not like they don't have as much of the grasses greener approach of, what's next, what's the next thing.

There may be a little bit less of a ambition there associated with that, which has pros and cons. The new grad is typically going to move on. They're also going to take longer to train up to get them to a point where you feel like they're a representation of what you want your brand to be.

So if you're trying to build into what we consider like a clinical excellence model, like you want to be known as the go to clinic for whatever the niche is that you focus on, if you're hiring new grads, like people see that as not necessarily. An advantage, right? You may have to spend more time mentoring them.

You may have to spend more time building up their clinical skill sets, even though, they might be okay, but okay, is not necessarily the gold standard for what you're going to want to provide. So that can be a negative that can take longer. There's more turnover with them. And it can look at it can look like it's watering down your sort of clinical expertise.

If you're hiring people that are brand new out of school, on the flip side, if you look at a seasoned clinician. The cons for them are they're going to cost more, they're going to require more benefits as well. So it's not just pay, but also compensation. And the pro and con of this is they're usually a little bit, more established in their life.

They may be married, have kids have a mortgage. All these things are actually great for stability which is great for your practice. If you can provide a really great job for somebody with upward mobility and opportunities and a great culture, you can actually retain clinicians for a very long time, especially clinicians that are coming out of a high volume setting because they know the pain of that.

They know the challenges of. 15 to 20 people a day on their schedule, the documentation of that, the insurance regulations that they have to deal with. And you get to take all that away from them and just say, Hey, you have an opportunity to use your skillset the way that it deserves. We want to take away as much as we possibly can from nonclinical relationship, value productive hours.

Like we want you to focus on these people and get great outcomes. And they want to do that. Like great clinicians want to, you Be great clinicians and function environment where they don't feel hindered by some of these other things. So you can get somebody that is somewhat frustrated in one environment, put them into a culture and a setting that's so much better for themselves and their clinical skill set.

And they're just so happy, it's just like a great setting for them. So turnover is lower. They're going to stick around longer. You're gonna have to pay them more and you may not be able to if you're, let's say you're going from the stage of just a solo provider to then bring in one person on.

And, you may literally have to make a choice of, who can you afford to bring on. As you build your caseload up if you have great cash reserves and you're very profitable, then you can make a decision of which of those two that you would want. And again, sometimes the challenge though, with these senior clinicians, these more seasoned clinicians is they can be tough to lead, especially if you're younger than them.

And that's just the reality, right? It's just hiring people that have more experience in you. That can be an interesting dynamic. If you're not a very strong leader and very competent, Then they're not going to want to be led by you, is a good way to put it. So that can be a bit of a challenge.

So if you're younger, typically the new grad route is where people go. If you feel confident in your clinical skillset, you've run other clinics, you're a bit more seasoned yourself. You can really hire whichever of the two are the best fit for you. Ultimately, though, for me, I like a mixture of the two, and here's why.

When you hire a new grad, there's a lot of great energy that comes with that. There's a lot of positivity, and there's new ideas, and this is somebody that has just left school, so they're like the most up to date on research, and trends, and technology, and things that are changing. And a more seasoned clinician has a lot more reps under their belt, but they're a bit more distant from that world.

And what you need is mentorship for that younger clinician, and you need somebody to be mentored. by, this more senior clinician, which typically great clinicians enjoy mentoring other clinicians. So the combination of the two can work really well at scale. If you have a few seasoned clinicians, a few younger clinicians, you don't have to be the one mentoring everybody.

And you can pass that off to somebody that would love to do that, as part of their job. And they end up trending more towards a player coach, I guess is a good way to put it. Where they're still treating patients. And that's primarily what they're doing, but they also can take the lead on, helping develop the skillset of of a newer grad or somebody that is a less seasoned clinician.

And oftentimes they love doing that. So it's good for them. It's good for the other, younger clinician and it's good for you because you now create this culture of excellence where everybody's helping each other and they're learning from each other. So in a perfect world, I would hire both. If you have to decide, early on, which one you go for, there's pros and cons to both.

It really depends on your setting, your context, but just understand if you hire a young clinician, the likelihood that you're going to have turnover is higher. If you hire a more seasoned clinician, the likelihood that you're going to have a harder time get them to gain them to buy into your culture is also going to be a little bit higher.

So there's pros and cons depending on what you're looking for, what you can afford with the profitability of your practice and ultimately what your long term goals are. But in the end, if you can get both, I think it's a perfect fit. It's a great way to really build a strong culture in your practice and for you to really build a team of excellence going forward with your cash based practice, you don't forget.

Hopefully this helps. I know if you're at the stage of hiring, that's a difficult stage, especially if it's just you. But congrats on getting there. That's a hard thing to do. And that first hire is honestly the hardest hire. And once you get past the past, that first one, every hire after that is going to become so much easier.

If you're looking for some help actually getting through these stages effectively and making sure that you're bringing people on the right way, you're interviewing them, you're paying them correctly and not messing up your comp models. Check out physicaltherapybiz. com. This is what we do. On a day in and day out basis.

We've literally helped over a thousand clinicians get started in scale to practice. We'd love to help you as well, but head to physicaltherapybiz. com. See if it's a fit for you as well. As always, thanks for watching. See you in the next one.

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