E803 | How To Get More Word Of Mouth Referrals

The Most Overlooked Growth System in Your Clinic

If you’re a service-based business owner—especially in the cash-based or hybrid PT space—you’ve probably heard how important referrals are.

You might even think, “Yeah, referrals are great... but they just kind of happen when people like us, right?”

Wrong.

Referrals don’t just happen. The best clinics engineer them.

In this breakdown, Damon Tate (founder of Physical Therapy Biz) outlines exactly how to build a simple, consistent referral system that actually works—without needing a big marketing budget or a sales background.

Let’s get into it.

Step 1: Make Your Burrito Taste Good

Yes, we said burrito.

Before you can earn referrals, you need two things:

• Solid outcomes (you get people better)

• A great experience (they feel good throughout the process)

If you only deliver results—but your place smells weird, you’re always late, and no one remembers their name—they won’t refer people. And if the experience is great but they’re still in pain? Same outcome: no referral.

It’s not either/or. You need both.

Think of it like a burrito. You could have slick marketing and a flashy wrapper, but if it doesn’t taste good, no one’s coming back. Make your burrito awesome.

Step 2: Ask the Damn Question

Most clinicians never ask for referrals. They hope for them. Big mistake.

You need to ask—but ask at the right moment. That moment is when the client hits a milestone:

“I haven’t been able to run in years, and I just ran pain-free for the first time!”

That’s your cue.

A simple script:

“That’s amazing! I’m so pumped for you. This is exactly why we do what we do. Do you know anyone else like you who’s been struggling with [insert thing they overcame]? We’d love to help them too. We’re a small business, and word of mouth is everything to us.”

Keep it human. Keep it real. Then shut up and let them answer.

Step 3: Build a Referral Flywheel

If you want to step it up, create a simple incentive program that rewards both sides.

Here’s one Damon recommends:

• The friend gets a free evaluation

• The referrer gets a free visit if the friend buys a plan of care

That’s it.

Do this consistently, not once. Over time, that trickle of 1-2 referrals per month becomes 5–10+—all from people who already trust you because someone they know vouched for you.

Remember: referrals are tied to social capital. When someone refers a friend, they’re sticking their neck out. They only do it when they know you’ll deliver.

Final Thoughts

Want your clinic to grow faster without chasing every lead on Google or paying for ads? Build a referral system.

It starts with what you do every day—deliver a killer outcome and make people feel like VIPs.

Then you ask.

Then you reward.

And if you do this well, your clinic becomes the kind that grows month after month—without chasing.

Need help setting up your systems?

We help cash-based and hybrid clinics dial in their marketing, referrals, sales, and operations—so they can scale faster and work less.

👉 Book a free strategy call
🚀 Try Clare AI for free → MeetClaire.ai

Do you enjoy the podcast?  If so, leave us a 5-star review on iTunes and tell a friend to do the same!

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, we know burnout in our profession is a problem, and one of the bigger contributing factors to burnout is the amount of documentation and paperwork we have to do just to be able to do our job, and we're now able to help offset a lot of the time that you spend writing your notes through ai. We created a tool called Claire and Claire listens in the background while you work with your patients and it writes your notes for you.

How awesome is that? It is literally a game changer. It's gonna save you what we see four to eight hours a week in our testing and our training as we've actually built this up and train this specifically for physical therapists. That's a lot of time. That's a lot of time. You could be working out. It's a lot of time you could be hanging with your family.

That's a lot of time that you could be seeing more patients if you need more productivity. Um, it's huge and it gets you a ton of time back doing something that we know nobody really wants to do, but we have to do in order to cover our own butts as clinicians. So if you want to test this out. Get 10 free notes, uh, to see how this works for you in your clinic.

Go to meet claire.ai, sign up and get 10 free notes to test it out and see how we can help save you 40 hours a week as well. 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 boutique. 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 therapy biz 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. Danny Matta here, founder of Physical Therapy Bizz. I have started. Grown scaled autopiloted and even helped over a thousand clinicians start, grow, and sell their own, uh, cash based and hybrid clinics all across the country.

And what I wanna share with you is something that I. It's probably one of the most overlooked parts of these businesses in order to get more of the right people in the door, and that is getting referrals. Now, a lot of service-based businesses, like the businesses that we work with and the businesses that we have owned, they are heavily dependent on referrals, but.

They hope that they're gonna get referrals. They don't have a system to get referrals, and they don't have any predictability around that, which is something they want to help you with today to help working towards having predictability. I. And the referrals you're gonna have come in. And these are frankly, the best patients that you can have.

The best clients you can have. We call 'em patients obviously as physical therapists, but many businesses that are service, service-based businesses re rely on the exact same, uh, necessary goals of driving referrals. Right. And that's because these are people that are less price sensitive. They already kind of.

You know, have been vetted by their, their friends. They're gonna have similar, similar characteristics to people that have already come in. You know, they're, they're running in similar circles. It's the best people that you can get to come into your office and some businesses run off just purely referrals alone, right?

Um, now I think you can be a lot more sophisticated than that and have multiple ways in which you're acquiring customers. So this is one really good one and one of the, the easiest things that people can do. To really get started, number one is to have a fantastic service and result. Now, I know that sounds, um, obvious, but the truth is, if you are getting a lot of referrals without doing the other things I'm gonna talk about, that means that you have a fantastic.

Service. That means you're delivering a fantastic experience and frankly, you need both. So on one side, we have your outcomes, your results, right? What, what are, what are people? Are they getting what they want? And on the other side, it's how did they feel throughout the whole process? Did you make them feel special?

Did you, you know, create an environment that had a fantastic customer experience? We know both these things are actually incredibly important and just as important for the referral process as as each other. Because if you get a fantastic result, uh, people didn't like enjoy the experience, the, you, you, you were late.

You never used their name. Like the, your, your place smelled weird, but they, their back pain went away. They're not gonna necessarily maybe talk bad about your business, so they're probably not gonna tell people to go there. And if they do, then they have to apologize. Be like, look. The place smells weird, but they cured my back pain.

So just so you know. Right. And like, that's not a good place to be versus if you just have a great experience and they're like, man, these people are awesome. Like my back pain's still there, but, but like, they're great people. I love 'em. Um, they're not gonna refer anybody to you either, right? You need both.

And if you have both. The likelihood of a referral, it goes up exponentially. So start there and, and if you are not getting referrals from your clients already, that means that you're not delivering either good enough outcomes or a good enough experience, and you need to start there because no matter how much you do these other things that I'm gonna talk about.

If you don't have the core of that, it's not gonna work that well. Imagine you had a burrito that didn't taste great, you got fantastic marketing around that burrito, but it's a hell of a lot harder to sell than if the burrito's awesome, right? So make your burrito awesome. The second thing is you have to make sure that you ask people for referrals.

Now, this is, I. This is, um, pretty obvious, but you'd be shocked how many people don't ever ask anybody for a referral. Like they don't prompt them in any way. And the best time to do this is when they've had a, some sort of breakthrough, some sort of exponential improvement in their symptoms, you know, and they're just like, oh my gosh.

For years, I haven't been able to do this, this, and this. And I finally did it yesterday without any pain. This is incredible. This is a miracle. That's when you want to say, that's awesome. Like, I'm so excited for you. This is what we're doing. You know why we do what we do. This is what we love to see. I. You know, and I, I have to ask you if, if, if you know anybody else like yourself that's struggling with getting back to whatever it is, X, y, and z, playing tennis again, running again, whatever it is, um, but, but the thing that you're struggling with, if you know anybody like yourself, because there's a lot of people out there like you, that don't think they can get back to this thing.

Uh, we're a small business. We have a really small marketing budget, and we really rely heavily on getting our clients amazing outcomes and then them sending people that they know our way so we can help them as well. So if, if you know anybody that you think we could help as well. I would greatly appreciate it if you would pass their name along, or if you even want, you can connect us via text and I can chat with 'em and see if they're a good fit to come in as well.

Like, that's, that's all you have to do is, is literally ask for the referral and do so at a time when they have a, a big improvement in something or they've hit a big goal and they're excited and they want to tell people about you. They wanna spew on everybody how awesome you are. You wanna just nudge them a little bit to, uh, to do that.

The last thing, if you want to get more complex with this. Is you can implement a, uh, referral program, and there's lots of different variations that you can do with these. One example would be you could offer your clients to, uh, give a, uh, a friend or family member, someone they're referring a free evaluation with your company, right?

So say like, Hey, if you know anybody. And it is a referral from you. I would love to be able to do an evaluation for them for free. And if they decide that they wanna solve this problem and they buy a plan of care with us, then we'll give you a visit for free as well. So your friend gets something free.

If it converts and it's good for the business, then their, then the referer gets something free as well. And that can be a really simple, effective way to incentivize people to come in. And you have to be consistent with this because what you'll notice is. If you just do this, um, sporadically, it won't be all that effective.

But if you do this consistently every single month, you start to snowball these new patient referrals from maybe one to three to like five to 10 plus in a month, all coming from, you know, the patients that you've seen previously and. If you're doing an incentive-based program, the people that are the biggest referrers to your practice, they get more and more, you know, free sessions with you to come in and continue to spend time in the business and being treated really well.

So that's something that can work, uh, really, really well and be very effective for clinics that wanna keep it really simple as far as referral programs are concerned. So, to re to review, and there's three big things. Number one, you gotta have a fan, fantastic outcome. You have to have fantastic customer experience.

They're both just as important as each other. Do not neglect it. And most of us focus just on outcomes, which is cool 'cause that's what we went to school for. You know, we went to school to learn how to help people get, you know, over injuries and back to things they like to do. You didn't go to school to become a customer experience expert, but I'm telling you, think about your, your, your facility.

Think about how you interact with people. Think about the way you speak with them, how punctual you are, how you follow up with 'em. Do they have clarity? Uh, do they enjoy the time there like. Things that make them enjoy their time with you, increase the likelihood they wanna tell people about it. Because a referral is social capital.

You're giving up, you're giving up social capital. If you're wrong, then you get knocked down a little bit. Social status of of, of a trusted person. If you're right, then you go up a little bit and people don't wanna lose that. 'cause you can't buy that. You have to earn that. So keep in mind, like people don't just refer people for no reason.

You know, the the second thing ask. You gotta ask them. It's so easy. It's so important. Get over it. I know you feel uncomfortable asking for things, but. Hey, I tell you what's uncomfortable is having a business that doesn't go very well, that's super uncomfortable, so get over it and ask people for referrals.

And the last thing is structure. A simple referral program if you wanna do that, to be able to incentivize them to send somebody your way and for them to get something as well if it goes well for the business. So that's it. Make sure you're asking for referrals. It's a huge part of a business that turns into this flywheel of people sending you more people.

And many business can grow an entire, you know, multi clinician, uh, practice. Just off of this, if you wanna be a bit more. Effective with your marketing, you wanna be a bit more sophisticated. Head of physical therapy biz.com. Take a look at what we're doing. We help people get their sales or marketing their, their people, processes, finance operations together in these businesses all across the country.

We'd love to have an opportunity to help you with your business as well. You can see how, who we've helped, what we do, our process, and if it makes sense to you, grab a time to talk to one of our advisors. We can dig into your business and see what you're doing well, what you need to work on, and what it might look like to help you get there faster.

So thanks for watching. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.

Hey, peach 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 signing up for this challenge, it's 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, doing the work 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.