E413 | How Should You Charge For Personal Training In Your Cash-Based Practice

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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 communi. That we have with those clients, instead of losing an email in the inbox or missing a text and, and then you're, it's very hard to dig yourself outta that hole because they feel like you're not very responsive, you know, with them.

And for us, it's made a really, 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. 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. 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.

Hey, what's going on guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast. And real quick before we get into this, I want to chat about something that I had a few conversations with our mastermind members, um, that are going through some growth in their business. I want to, uh, give you a, a little nugget on, um, a way to think about.

Your time and how to allocate what you're using your time towards. Um, but before we do that, I wanted to go ahead and update you guys on our mastermind event in September. So in September we're gonna be in Dallas at a big ranch. We're renting outside of Dallas. It's gonna be awesome. We've got the COO of the ready state.

Coming in as our guest presenter, Juliet Tourette. She is one incredible lady, legitimately survived a hippo attack. That's not a, uh, fake story. That's real. Um, she's gonna go into that a little bit at the, uh, the event. I can't make this stuff up. She's one of the coolest people that I know. I'm excited for her to share her business knowledge as well while we're there.

So, If you have a cash-based practice and you're looking to grow it past yourself, head to physical therapy biz.com/apply, uh, and chat with one of our, our team members and see if you're a good fit for our mastermind event. Event before we. Head to Dallas. We'll stop taking, um, applications will stop taking, uh, potential new people in August.

So we have plenty of time to assimilate everybody into our community of over a hundred business owners now that will be there as well. It's gonna be awesome. We're excited to be able to get everybody back together in a much more safe environment, uh, as well. So if you're interested, head over to physical therapy biz.com/apply and go ahead and answer a couple questions and we'll get you on a call with one of our team members as soon as we can Now.

The question that I wanted to, uh, answer and address and go through for you guys is what do you do if you work with people as a physical therapist and you also work with them as a personal trainer? This is a really, uh, common scenario that we find ourself in, especially early on in, in your business. Cuz you might just take anything you can get right?

You might say, yeah, I'll train people for a hundred bucks an hour, for sure. That's actually more than you're gonna be making at another clinic, right? So you're like, hell yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll, uh, work with people for a hundred bucks an hour as their personal trainer and they're thinking to themself, this is sweet.

I get the, a doctorate, you know, level trained person that can help me modify things in a, in a way that most trainers cannot. Um, that I've, you know, that I've, I've worked with maybe on the, the rehab side has gotten me out of pain and now I've got all this trust in this person and they're gonna be, my personal trainer's gonna be awesome.

Well, That's all finding good. And, and maybe that's what you need to do initially, but the problem is, well, what if your PT rate is $200 an hour as a physical therapist and your personal training rate is a hundred? What do you do? You've kind of dug yourself a hole and you're, you're kind of stuck there.

Well, um, the scenario we tend to see, there's, there's a couple things that you can really look at. Number one, you can't do that. You can't stay like that. Uh, cuz you're essentially losing a hundred dollars every time you see somebody has a personal training client. And, you know, you're, you're more profitable on the physical therapy side, so you have kind of two options from the way that we look at it.

Well, I guess three. Uh, you could hire somebody to come in as a personal trainer and you could punt them over to that person. Um, and now you have a, uh, a passive, um, ongoing stream via. Personal training that's being fulfilled by somebody else, that's an option. And you can leave your price point where it's at, you can raise your prices to be equivalent.

And an hour is just an hour with you. Um, you know, people that we work with do that. They definitely see less people on the personal training sign, but it's still equivalent to what they want to be able to make per hour and really what they should make. Because I think the question is, do you think that your time is less valuable if you are training someone?

Versus working with them as a physical therapist. And where, when does that, when do you cross that line? Like, when is this, now you're training somebody and not necessarily doing physical therapy on somebody anymore. Like I, I, I worked with a, um, a clinic out in. In California and they would do a lot of frc, sort of like mobility, um, slow controlled work with people and you know, you wouldn't have known if this was PT or training or whatever, but it was all the same to them.

And they had people coming in, you know, one to three times a week for a very long time. Their stick rate was super high to. You know, these, uh, these sessions and it was really, um, it was a really cool business model. Um, but for them, they just decided to keep it all the same, right? So whether it's pt, whether it's, you know, movement, training, whatever, it's, it's an hours an hour with them.

And that's just the way, yeah, that's just the way it was. It's what it costs. Um, so you could do that, that would be your, your option Number two, your third option would be, To take people that are, um, looking to do personal training with you and put them into a small group of, you know, three to four people, uh, probably, uh, at, at the most, maybe more.

But then, you know, you're gonna have a hard time modifying for the people that we work with. You know, they definitely are coming off of some things that are gonna be limiting them. They're a little more challenging to work with. So three to four people split that cost across. Everybody. And in fact, this is actually the option that I prefer over the other ones.

Actually, I like the first one more. Then the second one, but I like the third one more than the other ones. And the reason why is I think that your average visit rate, you know, if you lump this in with it, would go up significantly. And we've seen this with people that are doing semi-private training, uh, with folks.

So you get three or four people that are all willing to kind of split up, um, you know, that hour. And let's say you're charging 75 bucks per person instead of $200 for that person to do a one-on-one, the price is better for them. It's a better experience cause they get to be there with other people.

Misery loves company, somebody else to talk to. You don't have to carry the conversation the entire time, but you have four people at that, that's $300 for the hour. Versus if you're working with one person, it's 200 and you can still help them, you know, with the training side of things. Um, you can have a better price point, better experience with them having a couple other people around and.

Now you're sort of leveraging your time in a better way. Even better. What if you can have another clinician come on and do the same thing? Now all of a sudden, their average visit rate goes up, which dictates what we can. You know, provide from a salary standpoint, which is awesome, uh, meaning we can pay them more, the business is healthier, more profitable, and you have an ongoing recurring revenue stream within the business.

So I do like the training side of things. Some of us, like, you know, for us, we did a lot of digital training, uh, during COVID in particular, we did a lot of that. Um, we still have a coach that does quite a bit of that. Um, you know, and many of our, our clinics that we work with, they are really hybridizing some of this in terms.

Training people in these small groups as well as their personal tr or their physical therapy side, uh, of things. So I think it's a really, you know, good solution overall. If you're running into these problems and you're training people and you're a, a, you know, a physical therapist as well, and you're working with them on that side, You gotta admin at a minimum, make your time worth what your time is worth.

Uh, it's equivalent, you know, it's, it's not like you're providing less value in that other hour. So you, you just have to make it the same. Um, and at a minimum I would look at, at that, I would look at also bringing somebody else in to fulfill if you don't wanna do that, right? So have somebody else fulfill, pay them, you know, what market value is for that.

And then, um, you know, Send people their way. That's the hardest part. Marketing, selling, fulfilling is, uh, infinitely, you know, something you can find people to do. Um, and then if you like the small group size, you have the space for it. I would look at that. The numbers are, are nice on it. Um, if you have the population, you can move people over to it.

It's a great way to get them to stick around. The, the numbers on it are, are pretty high. You know, the average duration of time people stay, and these like semi-private groups, uh, depending on how the business is run, can be anywhere between like two to three years. Pretty, pretty high versus. Group training, like think of like a CrossFit gym or Orange Theory.

They're gonna be closer to like six, seven months on average, uh, before they, they leave. So the turnover's way higher, uh, in these big group training models versus the smaller ones. Um, and a great way to like really help these people long term. If you have this hybrid skillset where you understand the strength conditioning movement side of things and you, you know, you wanna help them long term, there's so many, so much gains they're gonna make from that, uh, in comparison to us doing more passive things and helping them on the pain side.

Um, you know, like we can really, really help them long term that way as well. So anyway, hopefully that helps. Uh, I'm sure there's more of you out there than just these couple folks I was talking to that are running into this or thinking about this. Um, but um, these are the solutions that we're seeing for that.

So hopefully one of those helps you. And as always, guys, thanks so much, so much for listening to the podcast and we'll catch you next.

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 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 Eve Gigi every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside 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 name.