E755 | How To Increase Your In Office Sales

The Challenge: Pricing Personal Care Services

For many physical therapists, the satisfaction of helping others can make it difficult to charge appropriately for their expertise. Unlike fields like engineering or law—where the relationship between work and compensation is more straightforward—physical therapists often struggle to balance their desire to help people with the financial realities of running a sustainable business.

Doc Danny explains how this emotional connection to patient care often creates mental blocks around pricing. New clinicians, in particular, grapple with the fear that charging too much could deter potential clients, leading them to undervalue their services.

Shifting Your Mindset Around Pricing

A key step to overcoming these challenges is reframing how clinicians view their value. Doc Danny emphasizes that providing high-quality care is both a personal mission and a professional service deserving of fair compensation. Recognizing the worth of your expertise allows you to confidently communicate your value to potential clients.

It's not about being “salesy”—it’s about understanding that helping people and running a sustainable business go hand in hand. This mindset shift is essential for thriving in a cash-based or hybrid clinic model.

Building a Sustainable Practice

Doc Danny offers actionable strategies for bridging the gap between personal fulfillment and business acumen. For clinicians seeking to establish or grow their cash-based practices, it's crucial to align their passion for care with sound business principles.

Key strategies include:

• Confident Communication: Clearly convey the value of your services to clients.
• Mindset Shift: Embrace that charging appropriately supports both your clients and your business.
• Sustainable Practices: Balance personal satisfaction with the practicalities of running a clinic.

You don't have to try to convince them. You should be able to convince them with a thorough exam, a a clear idea of what's going on, clarity through education and through objective assessments, and actually like them being able to see that there's a clear path forward with somebody that seems to know exactly what's going on with their body.

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Danny: 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'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 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 to date 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, what's going on?

Dr. Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast and today we're talking about how you can sell with more conviction You and be more successful with selling your services within your cash based or hybrid clinic. And for those of you that are listening to this, that are newer into business, this is probably going to be the thing that helps you the most, as far as an area that you can work on because what I see is newer clinicians that are newer to business, I should say they really struggle with this usually, and the ability to sell what you're doing At the price point that it deserves is a tough thing to learn.

And it's something that everybody that I've ever worked with that I've ever met that has clinics like this, they struggle with it. And here's why, what we do is personally very rewarding to ourselves. Like we personally get a lot of of reward from helping people. Get out of pain and back to activities that they love to do.

And it feels really good. It feels great to be able to help other people. Now we would do it for free if we didn't have a mortgage and have to buy groceries and life expenses and all that. So this feeling of personal satisfaction associated with it makes us feel Bad in some ways when we charge people money for what we do.

I feel like it's easier to disassociate yourself from let's say you're like an engineer and you're building a building So you have a billable hour rate or whatever You're a lawyer and you're working on some sort of like big Case or something like that and you have a billable hours you put in the work towards that.

It's not as it's not as personal and there may be cases where it is You know, with like smaller practices, but it's not as personal as somebody that has back pain and they're, they're trying to get back to whatever activity that they like to do. So it can be this conflict, this internal conflict of you feeling bad for charging for what you do.

And it's important for these people to be able to, not be in pain and be able to be physically active and you get a lot of personal satisfaction from helping them with it. So what happens is we start to get a little bit squirrely whenever We talk about money and when you have to tell somebody what it costs to work with you you can do so in a manner that feels weird to them because you feel uncomfortable talking about what you charge.

And until you get some reps doing this, you're probably going to be pretty bad at it. Um, and you need the practice, like you need the reps in order to actually. Get better at this because it's not like this goes away, not only that, but then you have to deal with the same problem with staff members that you have that are that are also, they're recommending and implementing plans of care with people.

So there's a couple things that I would say to keep in mind to help with this. Number one, everybody's bad at this to start with, right? Everybody sucks at this. I was terrible at this. In fact, I didn't even have any sort of plans of care that I would offer anybody. It would be just a single session.

And the first plan of care option we have for people was a three visit package. And I really didn't even sell that much because it created so much anxiety for me to talk to people about what I was, what they would have to pay me in order to work with me for three sessions in the, Pay up front for that, that I just rarely even, I rarely even did it, and this was like, I don't know, a year and a half into business before I even started doing that.

It was really hard for me. I had a lot of anxiety around it. I had a lot of weird dynamics with money and how I felt about money and I always felt really, I honestly, I felt really bad. I felt really bad about. Charging people for the things that I just got I felt were so important for them to understand, and if you feel this way, it just means that you're a good person and you want to help people and The reality is like money is just transference of trust and really someone describes me one time It's like a transfer of energy, right?

So you put all this energy. Let's say you're a lawyer And you put all this energy into this case you're working on. And so you get paid for the work that you're doing, you get paid for the energy you're putting into something else. And then you get a chance to take that and transfer that to somebody else for something that you find value in.

So for us, the energy that we put in is in helping people. Get the outcomes that they want to return to activities or to improve in areas that they want to improve in. And and we put time and energy into that. And so like people give us money for that because they see value in it and they transfer the work that they've done somewhere else to then us.

And it's no different than just it's a modern day bartering system, basically. Like we, we have this representation of work and effort and value associated with a dollar. But before that it was gold to blooms and it was salt and it was shells and it was all kinds of other things that people would trade with each other because, it's a more efficient than I'll help you with your back.

If you come over and you build, you fix my door or something, right? Like people still do that to some degree. It doesn't really work all that. Out that well, cause it's hard to to have even exchanges and that's why we have money, right? So just realize that if you can take money out of the equation in terms of just like the physical representation of it, but just realize that what you're talking about is just a transference of value.

It's a transference of energy that they've gotten from something that they do. And they're, either willing or unwilling to put that into what you do based on whether what they want is. Is important enough to them. That's it. So if you can separate yourself and be agnostic from the money and you can just say You know, hey, here's what I see you're you've had back pain for a decade You've tried x y and z on our exam today.

Here's what we found, we see this and this Here's the path forward for you based on my experience of what I think you need to do To get the outcome that you're looking for and I feel very confident We can help you with that because i've helped numerous people just like you do the same thing.

We just need to You Give it this much time. These main sessions with me work on these skills and you should be able to get back to all these things that you want to do and understand how to take care of your body, for the long haul, it costs X amount of money. What do you think? And like you need to deliver your your, your, not even called a sales pitch, but it's basically what it is, your sales pitch as a prognosis of what's going on.

You're just defining what the problem is and you're giving them your plan of how you're going to solve it. And it's up to them to decide whether they want to commit to that or not. So that sort of conviction that I guess a separation from the actual money side of it. It, what it does, it's interesting from the other person's perspective, because what it does is it is just very succinct.

It's very direct. It's very professional and it's up to them to make a decision, right? Versus what I see a lot of people do is, and this, I did the same thing was we'll talk people. We'll talk to them about why it's valuable. This is what my recommendation is. And here's why, oh, and here's all the reasons why you should do it.

Oh, it's a you're one on one with me and I give customized plan and we do this and that, and then, this is included or whatever. And it's dude, if you're really good at what you do you have to try to sell somebody on it? Or can you just be confident that this is what they need to do.

And then they can make a decision about that. On their behalf, right? And we give away the power that we have as medical professionals When we do that you sound like a salesperson. You don't sound like a Medical professional you don't have to try to convince them. You should be able to convince them with a thorough exam a a clear Idea of what's going on, clarity through education and through objective assessments and actually like them being able to see that there's a clear path forward with somebody that seems to know exactly what's going on with their body.

That is what is going to sell somebody on working with you or not. It's not. How you try to talk them into it on your sales pitch and stop that shit. It's not working be succinct. Let them make a decision. And the best way to do that is to realize just how valuable it is. What you do actually is to other people and we can forget that because we think everybody knows what to do if their knee Hurts or everybody knows what to do if they sprain their ankle or whatever And they don't know that and i'll give you one one more great example, and then we'll finish it there and I always Find myself when I go to like other entrepreneur groups or business development groups that I've been in over the years It's hard for me to just to find to people like what I do, right?

So I just introduced myself as a physical therapist and and every time I do that and I can be in a room of people that like I can help them with many things in the business side like You know as far as sales and marketing is concerned or finance or leadership and hiring or all kinds of stuff that i've had a lot of experience with and I Do day to day currently, but soon as they find out I'm a physical therapist, they want to know why their knee hurts.

They want to know, Hey, what can I do about this? Or, Hey, my son has this shoulder issue. What do you think about that? And the. To them, the most valuable information is how they can be healthy, how their family can be healthy. And this concept of health as wealth is a real thing. The wealthiest people I've ever been around are, they are obsessed with trying to be healthy and feel good.

And oftentimes they've treated themselves terrible for a long period of time. So the idea that what you do is not worth much is crazy. It's worth a lot because most people don't know what to do with their body. And if you can help them with that, it's incredibly valuable to them. But if you don't feel that way, if you don't think that, if you don't think, man, this is a steel, what I'm charging is a freaking steel.

I, if you don't feel that. Then they're not going to feel that and it's as simple as that. It's nonverbal. It's the way you feel about it. It's the way that you communicate with your words and your body language. And when you look uncomfortable, they feel uncomfortable because they don't know why you're uncomfortable.

They just know it feels uncomfortable. Now, why did all of a sudden you went from being this, um, confident clinician to all of a sudden now it's you're acting weird. You're squirming all over the place. And you're. You're just like rambling, like, why are you acting like this?

Something just got really strange and it completely shifts their likelihood of wanting to work with you. And as strange as that sounds, and it's so ass backwards because you might be just completely, just feel uncomfortable and you're still a great clinician. You can absolutely help them. But the the likelihood of them working with you after that shift happens, where you start to lose your credibility, lose your ability to, be that subject matter expert in the room.

Because you feel uncomfortable about money, you're going to lose people because of that. You're going to have less people want to commit to working with you. So you've got to play this through in your mind. You've got to start working on this and you have to start realizing what you do is incredibly valuable.

And as soon as you start realizing that and really conveying that with your verbiage as well as your non verbal language, You're going to close a lot more people in the office.

Hey, Peach Entrepreneurs. We have big, exciting news. A new program that we just came out with. It 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.

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