E801 | How One Patient Interaction Changed My Business

Why Discharging Too Early Is Costing You Clients, Revenue, and Impact

When I started my practice, I was obsessed with one number: my average visit rate.

At the time, I thought I was doing something amazing by helping people get better in just 2–3 visits. I even bragged about it. “If you see me more than three times,” I’d say, “you’re above my average.” I believed this made me more valuable. More efficient. More effective.

Turns out, I was dead wrong.

The Patient Who Changed Everything

About two months into opening my clinic, I had a woman in her early 50s referred to me. She was training hard—running serious mileage—and had a foot issue. I saw her three times, got her out of pain, gave her a robust home program, and sent her on her way.

A couple of weeks later, she popped back on my schedule.

This time, it was her hip.

I helped her with that—again in just a few visits—and discharged her.

Two weeks later… boom. She’s back again. This time it’s her knee.

At this point, I was actually annoyed. “She’s skewing my visit numbers,” I thought. I even told her, “We help people solve problems, but we’re not really a maintenance clinic.”

That’s when she stopped me and said, “Danny… I’m a 50-year-old woman trying to run a marathon in every state. I want you to be part of that journey—to help me stay ahead of injuries so I can actually reach that goal. Are you interested in doing that?”

I felt like a child being corrected by their mom.

And I needed it.

From Pain Relief to Performance

That conversation was the turning point. I realized I had carried over a mindset from the military—where there was no time or staff to help people before injuries happened. It was all reactive.

But in my own practice? I could do whatever I wanted.

And what I wanted was to help people win—not just recover.

That runner didn’t need a discharge. She needed a partner. A coach. A guide who could help her stay healthy while pursuing something truly difficult and meaningful.

And I almost missed the opportunity to be that person.

Ask the Right Question

Here’s the simple shift that changes everything:

👉 Don’t just fix the pain. Ask, “What do you want to do next?”

What’s the goal they haven’t achieved yet?
What’s the race, hike, adventure, or milestone they dream about?
What physical challenge lights them up—but feels just out of reach?

Most people have never been asked that in a healthcare setting. You can be the first.

The Result? Happy Clients, Recurring Revenue, and Real Impact

Since making that shift, I’ve helped clients:

• Train to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro

• Row across the Atlantic Ocean solo (yes, really)

• Hike across Ireland with their spouse in retirement

• Stay pain-free while chasing new personal bests in races, lifts, or lifetime goals

And the business? It’s grown. Clients stick around. Revenue is predictable. But more than that—we get to be part of something bigger than just getting rid of pain.

We help people do the things they never thought possible.

Don’t Wait for a Wake-Up Call

You don’t need a client to sit you down like I did.

Just start asking:

• “What physical goal are you training for?”

• “Is there anything you’ve always wanted to do physically but haven’t yet?”

• “Now that you’re out of pain, what’s next?”

When you ask better questions, you get better clients—and a business that’s built on transformation, not transactions.

Ready to Help People Beyond Pain?

This isn’t just about more visits. It’s about more value. More impact. More fun.

Be the person in your community who helps people feel strong, capable, and excited about what they can do.

👉 Want help building a business around performance care?
Book a free strategy call at physicaltherapybiz.com

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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: Look, when I was treating full-time, I can count on one hand how many times I ate lunch and didn't catch up on documentation during that time. We wanna help you get your lunch back, and we're gonna do that with an AI tool that we created called Claire. Now Claire is a documentation AI scribe that we built and specifically trained to be able to document physical therapy notes very accurately, very quickly, and.

Be able to function in the background while you are focusing on the human being the patient in front of you. This is one of the best ways to take away mundane activities that none of us like to do, and free your time up to focus on the people in front of you, as well as free up time for you to do other things in life that you want to do.

Way more than write your notes. So if you wanna try this for free, you can head to meet claire.ai. That's meet M-E-E-T-C-L-A-I-R e.ai. Get signed up for 10 free notes that you can test this out. See how it works, see how much time it's gonna save you and get your lunch back. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skillset 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's Danny Matta, and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession. I've been a staff, ut I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And to date my company physical therapist has helped over a thousand clinicians start, grow, and scale their own cash practices.

So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up 'cause I'm here to help you. Hey, what's going on, doc? Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and if you're watching this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching On our channel, we're gonna be putting out more and more information like this in a platform that I use all the time.

And now we're starting to put the podcast up there as well. So if you're listening to this and you're a long time listener and you wanna watch the podcast, you wanna see. What I look like and all my weird hand movements as I talk to my hands, like a true, Italian does. You can watch it there and for those of you who wanna listen to this while you're doing yard work or driving to work, cool, you can still watch it and listen to it on anywhere that you listen to podcasts.

But today. I wanna tell you a story. It's story time. Okay? And this is something that comes from, really early, early stages in running our practice. And a lesson that I learned from one of my patients about the value of working with people ongoing and not necessarily just solving injury problems.

Because one of the biggest mistakes that I see. With new clinicians in, in, in starting their business, they have never, they've never had never worked in a model that allowed them to work and see people in a proactive manner is that they don't know what to do or they don't know that people find value in what you do outside of helping them resolve an injury.

So about two months into starting my practice. I had someone referred my way from another patient, and this was an interesting lady. This lady was in her early fifties and she was trying to run a marathon in every single state in the country. And she was about a third of the way through, she had about 15 to 20 states that she had that she'd already run a marathon in.

And as you can imagine, that's a pretty hard thing to do. She was running. There know a few marathons every single year. Not only that, but having to travel to all kinds of different places. And sometimes they're real small towns and but it was a big goal of hers. She wanted to run a marathon in every single state.

So when I saw her, I. I saw her for a a foot problem that she had. So she was having some, like running related foot issues from all the training that she was putting in and all the miles that she was logging, and as I helped her with this issue I was really proud of my average visit rate, which at the time was like 2.6 visits per person.

I track it like really closely. And this was something that I would tell people too. I was like, Hey. If you see me three visits, it's above my average. Like I expect to see you a couple and you're good thinking this is like how I could prove the most value to people was literally get you better as fast as humanly possible.

And in actuality, what I was doing was condensing what I should have been doing, giving them way too much homework to do and trying to do as much hands-on work as I possibly could in the period of time when they were there. So I was trying to squeeze probably eight visits worth of work down into two to three, and.

This runner in particular whenever I finished up with her, I saw her three times for this foot problem she had and I said, okay, cool. I'm gonna send you the homework I want you to do over the next six weeks. Just a lot of like progressive exercises for her to do. Lemme know if you have another problem pop up 'cause you're turning for one of your races.

Thanks for coming in to work with me. Two weeks later she shows back on my schedule, right? So people could self schedule with the software we used when we first started. And she popped up on my schedule and I said, oh, hey, how's it going? What's going on? And she said, Hey my foot feels better, but I, I wanna see if you could take a look at my hip.

So her hip had been giving her problems, hadn't really brought it up to me when she was in the office, I hadn't even asked, right? So hugs mistake on my part. So I said, all right, cool. I take a look at it. Start helping her address her hip. I see her two or three times for her hip. Give her this extensive homework plan again to do and send her on her way.

So two weeks after I discharged her, the second time she shows back in my office shows back up and she said, Hey I'm hoping you can help me address a little. I got a little nagging issue in my knee. I just want to get some work done on it. As I'm training now at this point, this is the second time I've discharged her.

Third time she's come back. Our second time she's come back on her own for what was really like a very minor thing. And at the time I was very concerned with my average visit rate because what I told everybody, I don't want anybody messing it up, and she's skewing my numbers at this point.

She'd been in, this is probably her eighth time coming in, which most people would say. That's great, right? You have a, you have ongoing business and you have people that want to come back. But I didn't know anything about business and I actually told her, I, I said, Hey we help people solve problems.

I don't want to necessarily be a part of ongoing, like maintenance work. I viewed it as a bad word. This isn't like a maintenance clinic. Like we solve real problems and I remember. Her sitting there and she used my first name, like I was a child like my mom. And she was like, listen Danny, I'm a 50-year-old woman that's trying to run a marathon in every single state, and that's a lot of work and it's hard on my body.

I would like you to be a part of that process so that I don't get hurt really bad, so I can proactively work towards this goal. Are you interested in doing that? And I remember sitting there thinking to myself. A I'm an idiot. Yes. That sounds awesome. I would love to be a part of her achieving this goal.

And, I just felt like I was missing something. I didn't know why I was so adamant about discharging somebody. Instead of the dream of being able to help somebody proactively, achieve these physical goals that are really cool. And and a big accomplishment for this person.

And my view is paradigm shift started to change where instead of saying, let's get these people in and out as fast as we possibly can, it's let's solve this problem. But I always want to ask the question, what else do you want to do? What other things would you like to do physically? What?

What would you like to train for? What would you like to accomplish? What haven't you done yet that this injury has maybe been stopping you from being able to do and to be in that position is so cool. It's so cool. Not just for me as a clinician, but for the other person sitting there. Think about this.

How many people have ever asked somebody or been asked, Hey, what physical goals do you have? What do you wanna accomplish? What would you like to do that's new and novel and something you can be proud of? Nobody's asking people that in their office, but I promise you this, if you get somebody out of pain and back to a a blank, state where they, they can do whatever they want, they can build to whatever they want from there, and they feel confident that they physically are capable of doing things and they have somebody as an advocate in their corner to quarterback their health and wellness and help them achieve those goals.

Now you open a whole new world up to those people, a whole new world. That's an amazing place to be. And for you as a business owner and a clinician. It puts you in a place where you have ongoing recurring revenue and truly happy clients that are not solving pain problems anymore. They're working towards physical goals, and you are helping them achieve these massive leaps forward in both their health and wellness, but also in their ability to achieve things in their life.

And we know that as we get older. It's harder and harder for us to experience new things. It's harder and harder for us to achieve things that, make us feel like we put the work in and we have these accomplishments to show for it, and we feel proud of ourself and we feel like we're making progress.

But those are the things that help us feel young. Those are the things that help us, not just get sedentary and stuck in a rut and doing the same crap over and over again. It's our ability to ask people these questions of Hey, what. What would you want to do? Hey, you're not in pain anymore.

You're getting stronger. Is there anything physically you've wanted to do? Is there anything you think would be a cool challenge? Is it like, let's just think for a second. Like what goals would you want to have and actually let them, think through that. You help them think through that you like to run.

Oh, have you ever heard of a Ragnar race? You ever thought about doing that? And you get a team to do that and now you gotta look. Look at trail running and all these things that maybe we have to build up more strength for, or whatever. You can help them actually. Get to the, these different goals that maybe they never even thought were possible.

And that's such a fun place to be. And it took a, a very direct conversation from a client, and I'm so glad that she, I'm so glad that she was able to sit me down like a child and talk to me the way that she did, and help me realize that I was just discharging people, because that's the world I came from.

I came from the army where there's no way in hell I'm doing maintenance, performance based work with people. I, we barely have enough providers to do injury work with people, so we couldn't do that. That, that, that's not, that's nothing that I ever even thought was on the table for a physical therapist in the setting that I was coming out of.

But in, in my own practice, it's, you can do whatever you want. And it's way more fun to be on the performance side. And be able to say, Hey, what do you want to do? And then we've had all kinds of stuff, Hey, I wanna climb Mountain Kilimanjaro. Hey, I wanna row across the Atlantic Ocean in a single man boat.

True fucking story, by the way. We helped somebody do that, which was wild. And he did it. That was nuts. Hey my wife and I just retired. We want to hike across Ireland together. Can you help us with that? These are things that I've actually helped clients do by asking them the question. What do you want to do?

You're not hurt anymore. What would you like to do with your vehicle in life, with your body? Let's figure that out. And that's a fun place to be. That's a great place for you to be as a business owner. So make sure you're asking them that question. Make sure you're not leaving, not just visits on the table, you're not leaving revenue on the table, you're leaving the ability to impact somebody's life in a incredibly significant way.

On the table because you're not asking them questions about what do they wanna do now that they're not inhibited by pain and stuck in a state where they feel very frustrated and now they can do what they want. They just need to have the creativity, the prompting, the support to be able to think that they can do it, and then go for it.

And that's where we fit really well. So thanks so much for listening. Hope this helps. Make sure you're asking your patients. Don't have to get sat down by somebody like my patient did, to explain to you why it's important, and build us into part of your process as you're getting people better so you can help them achieve really cool long-term physical goals.

So thanks for watching and listening. Check you next time.

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