E688 | The 3 Areas You Should Outsource In Your Business

In this episode of the podcast, we delve into the topic of outsourcing for physical therapy entrepreneurs. We explore the three key areas that should be outsourced as soon as possible to maximize productivity and success.

The first area we discuss is administrative tasks. These mundane and time-consuming tasks, such as scheduling appointments, managing calendars, and submitting bills, can take up a significant amount of mental bandwidth. We highlight the benefits of outsourcing these tasks to a virtual assistant or eventually a full-time office manager. By offloading administrative duties, entrepreneurs can focus their time and energy on more important aspects of their business, such as acquiring new patients, providing exceptional service, and implementing growth strategies.

Next, we emphasize the importance of outsourcing bookkeeping. Unless entrepreneurs are professional bookkeepers themselves, attempting to handle this aspect of their business can lead to mistakes and consume valuable time each month. We suggest hiring a bookkeeper for a modest monthly fee to ensure accuracy and alleviate the stress of tax filings and potential audits. Professional bookkeepers are specialized and efficient in their work, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on other critical tasks while enjoying peace of mind knowing their financial records are in capable hands.

The third and final area we explore is digital marketing. Many entrepreneurs struggle with the complexities of effective digital marketing, and attempting to handle it themselves can be overwhelming. We stress the significance of finding a reputable agency that specializes in the physical therapy industry and offers flat-rate pricing. It is essential to choose an agency that will take on the actual work rather than simply offering advice. We caution against ineffective agencies that provide generic templates or charge exorbitant fees for basic tasks. By outsourcing digital marketing tasks to a reliable agency, entrepreneurs can save valuable time, potentially 10 or more hours per week, which can then be redirected towards higher-value work.

In conclusion, this episode highlights the numerous advantages of outsourcing administrative, bookkeeping, and digital marketing tasks. By doing so, physical therapy entrepreneurs can experience a significant return on investment by freeing up their valuable time. We stress the importance of carefully selecting the right outsourcing partners to ensure the best results for their businesses.

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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 Mattei 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

What's going on? Dr. Danny here with the pt entrepreneur podcast And today we're talking about three things that you should be outsourcing as soon as you can and really in this order so one of the things that we do As entrepreneurs is we try to Learn about everything And oftentimes we have to early on, you don't have a choice.

You have to learn how to market. You have to learn how to sell. You have to learn how to set your business up and you have to learn about your finances and all these things. And it's a good idea to learn everything for a couple of reasons. You have to be able to train other people, but you also have to be able to find people that you can outsource things to that are going to be good at what they do and not take advantage of of you as a business owner.

And the very first thing that people should look to outsource. Is really administrative tasks. This could be as simple as a virtual assistant. It could be a local virtual person, like someone that's local, that is just not working in your office, that's part time. It could be a sibling. It could be a family member.

It could be in an old patient but getting somebody to help you with some of the tedious administrative work that you have to do, for instance scheduling, rescheduling, submitting super bills. Just like managing your calendar your inbox, helping with those things, that's going to help you free up mental bandwidth and time to really focus on the main thing you should be focusing on, which is get more people in the door, deliver an amazing service, get them to tell all their friends and family.

And grow organically, grow your practice in the, the early stages. So getting that administrative help, I waited too long until, my wife basically was like, okay, I'm going to help you out because you obviously suck at these things and I'm going to be much better at them. And obviously she was, which was a huge help, but not everybody has that.

So being able to find somebody to help. Outsource these administrative tasks, these basic things that you're doing, that are, I talk about them as like 20 tasks. Like what 20 tasks, 20 per hour tasks can you outsource to somebody else when you should be doing 200 an hour tasks, right? Seeing a patient doing a marketing, a meetup workshop, injury screen, whatever, even like content for your site or social media, it can drive new people your way.

All these things are far more priority. But we don't look at them that way because we look at administrative. Support as a cost, which it is, but it's really, they're a force multiplier. They give you your time back and that time you're getting back. It's valuable. It's so valuable. It's finite and you can spend that on far more valuable things.

So that's number one. Number two is bookkeeping. You should not be doing your own bookkeeping unless I guess you're a bookkeeper. But even then you should probably outsource it to somebody that can do it in far less time than it's taking you. And do a far better job. And it's also one of those things that as soon as you, as soon as you give it up, like I remember I did our books for the first year and a half.

And whenever we outsourced it, it was just like, so nice. It was such an, such a weight off of me. It was like the thing every week I would have to look at. And every month I would have to go through and reconcile everything and make sure everything added up. And, I don't have an accounting background.

You may think, Oh it can't be that hard. And it's. I guess it's not like calculus, but it is tedious and you don't want to make a mistake on these things because this is, these are things that you can get financially in trouble for rivalry or taxes. And if you get audited, you're going to have to defend that.

So the second thing that, and this is a close second to the first one that you should outsource is somebody doing your books. Cause if it was taking me eight to 10 hours a month. To do my books, right? For me to hire somebody for 300 bucks, 400 bucks a month. Maybe less, if you're depending on where you live, but let's just say three, three to 400 as a rough estimate from what we see for just somebody doing your books, like a bookkeeper per month, and that's taken you.

Let's say that's taking you 10 hours a month. If you're somewhat efficient now all of a sudden that's a 30, 40 an hour, fee that you're being charged on your time for you to do it yourself versus to hand it off to somebody else. Who's also going to do a far better job and make sure that everything is clean and in the right place and categorized correctly.

And they can hand that off to your CPA, which is going to save them a bunch of time when they do your taxes. So this is like trading out 30 tasks for. 200 task, right? So this arbitrage of time and money is really important to keep in mind because that's where you can start to get your time back.

That's where you can start to make that spread difference between what you can make and what you're paying to have somebody else do. And it's not just, it's just not, it's not just a patient either. Keep this in mind. Let's say that you got somebody else to do your books for you. And you saved yourself 10 hours a month, but you can get a single additional, more a single additional patient for that.

But in that 10 hours a month, that's 10 hours where you're working out in the month. That's 10 hours where you're hanging out with your family or friends. That's 10 hours where you're taking care of your mental health, where you're doing these other things that are so important. It's hard to put a price tag on that.

Like what's an hour what is it what's an hour of hanging out with your family at a Parkworth. And not having to worry about whether your books are done what's that worth? I have no idea. It'd be very hard to quantify that, but it's worth a lot. And as soon as I did that, as soon as I outsourced that, I was like, I'll never ever do that again.

It's just not something I'm interested in. I'm gonna let somebody else do it. That's better at it than me for literally a great exchange, negligible amount per month for you to get a ton of mental bandwidth and time back. The last thing, and this is really whenever you're you're growing and trying to grow schedules.

For more than just yourself. And that is marketing, digital marketing in particular. I got burned by two marketing companies early on. One was a recommendation from a friend that owned a business and it, but it was a big national marketing company. And this is a big red flag, by the way. Don't go with a big company like that.

Here's why if they work with every business under the sun. They're not going to be very good at working with your business. So they'll do these general search engine optimization Campaigns, they'll do all these Google ads usually For you to these, custom pages that they're building and what you're gonna end up with is a bunch of non Unqualified people that are reaching out to you a bunch of spam they'll point to it and say, Oh, look at all this activity.

We got to your business, but it's literally all trash. It's not good. And it's because they don't understand the specifics of what your business does or what you're talking about. And it's just literally a template that they overlay all these businesses they work with. And most of the time they don't know whether it's working or not.

I tracked the hell out of this shit. Every dollar that we, invested in marketing, I was tracking it because I wanted to make sure that it was working and it did not work well. The second group that we went with, they did more. Which is more in line with what I think is what we should do.

And it is a content more sort of a content based strategy where you're building automations around things that people are interested in building your email list, optimizing your website being able to run ads to more specific terms that people are searching, leveraging your.

Customer list on a semi regular basis to do reactivation campaigns. And this company actually did a pretty good job, except for the fact that it was. Absolute, like they were nickel and diamond us for everything. And it was such a complex software. It was called infusion soft. The nickname for this is actually confusion soft because it's so complex.

They actually changed the name to keep, which is, I think like a watered down version of it. But basically I couldn't even understand how to use this software. Neither could anybody on our team. And we're not dummies like technologically we're decent. When it comes to software, this was freaking difficult to try to use that we would have to outsource everything, even sending like a newsletter, like a weekly newsletter.

And then they would charge us like 250 bucks every week to send like a newsletter out that they've, I'm sure only took them a couple of clicks. So we quickly realized like, yes, maybe this is the direction we want to go. But this company is really the way they're set up to charge us was really. Not mutually beneficial.

Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a longtime listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast and please leave a rating and review. This is actually very helpful for us to get this podcast in front of more clinicians and really help them develop time and financial freedom.

So if you do that, I'll greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast. Look for somebody that's going to do something that's a flat rate. Number one, if you're going to outsource, make sure it's a flat rate. Make sure they're not doing a percentage of ad spend. That's very common that people will do that.

And all it does is incentivize them to spend more money on ads unless your goal is to really scale like if you're talking about like really high end agencies that are working with people that have ad budgets of at a minimum 20, 30, 000 a month, they specialize in things like that. And in that case, that's very normal to see that.

But if you have a small ad budget and they're like, adding something on top for that, you just got to look for these little, ways in which they sneak in additional costs. Look for something that's flat rate something that's literally, transparent and also someone that understands your industry.

And from there, it's do you need to learn digital marketing? You should understand, basic copywriting, what you want a page to look like, what your messaging is to your audience. But if you can find somebody that understands how to do this and outsource it to them, you're going to save a ton.

A ton of time. So when you look at the outcome, it, can you find somebody that's better at it than you that understands your industry, that's going to save you a bunch of time and frankly, get you a better outcome. If you can find those four things, it's a home run. This is the last thing I would say for people that they should really.

Outsource normally, you really need to be probably above 20, 000 a month in revenue. That's like the minimum and up from there. But if you have a list of people that are, let's call it like maybe 500 300 to 500 clients, and you can even do a good job of just internally marketing, usually just that alone, you can make the cost of outsourcing marketing back without including any sort of ads or other things that they might be doing from a lead gen standpoint, literally just from being better at internally And there's levels to this stuff.

Some people are just way better at it than others. And some people are way better at different niches than others. Some people are great in the gym space and people are great with dentists. Some people are great with restaurants. You want to look for. A group that is going to not do it with you.

This is, there's a difference between done with you. Hey, I'm going to show you how to do this, but you're going to still be in charge of doing this. I don't actually view that as getting much. You're not really getting your time back. You're still having to manage it. And you might want to go that route cause maybe it's something you're interested in.

And you want to learn more about the digital marketing side of things. That's fair. If you're interested in that, then I think find something that's like a done with you where you're learning how to do it. And someone's like kind of mentoring you on how to do that. But if you're just trying to grow a practice and you want somebody to get you more new patients consistently, and you don't want to have to deal with the digital marketing side or the content marketing, or, Reactivation marketing side of your business, then you need to outsource it and somebody to do it for you.

It should save you time Like a great example would be like jeremy dupont with patch that what we've seen with that with clients that we have sent his way They're saving on average 10 hours a week 40 hours a month 40 hours a month that they're saving on internal marketing and Digital digital advertising that they're not having to do 40 hours a month is a freaking entire work week So as you start to look at these things You got to keep in mind that you're trying to buy your time back or you're trying to exchange dollars For hours where you can make more money than what you're exchanging it for if you can get 20 30 40 dollars an hour exchange For what you're getting back in return and you can generate 200, take it all day.

Would you give somebody 20 for then somebody else to give you 200? That's basically the exchange. So these are the three big things that you got to think about outsourcing relatively relatively quickly. Like I said, first one administrative, you want to go ahead and make sure that you are getting some admin help, at least part time virtual assistant.

It could be a couple of hundred bucks a month because you may not need him for that much. And so maybe somebody you can grow into to maybe even, Hey, a full time office manager, front desk person. And that's going to be a few thousand dollars a month. Obviously, probably anywhere between 30 and maybe 60, 70, 000 a month, depending on how qualified they are and what they're doing and how many people they're managing and all that.

But early on, it could be a couple of hundred bucks, a couple hundred bucks. Get your time back. Stop sending out super bills. Stop rescheduling people, get somebody to help manage your inbox and your calendar. It's a great exchange. Then bookkeeper. The first two are complete no brainers.

There's no reason you should be doing your own books. It's Dump, like you're going to make more mistakes. It's going to take you longer. Just let somebody else do it. They're better at it. There's lots of little math nerds out there that love doing this stuff and keeping everything organized and they're going to do a much better job.

And it's really not that expensive. Again, it's a couple hundred bucks a month to get a ton of peace of mind to make sure that you're accounting for your business the correct way before it gets sent to your CPA for, for your tax returns, which there's potentially a chance of audit. And you want to make sure all that stuff is done correctly.

The last thing. Is marketing outsource your marketing, especially when it comes to digital marketing and leveraging, technology to help you with marketing It's hard to learn it takes a long time, but just make sure you do it with somebody that is reputable somebody that understands your industry and that is charging a flat fee not a percentage based on whatever They're charged whatever they're billing I guess as far as the ad spend that they're depending on your behalf look for a flat rate, flat rates, always going to be better and more transparent.

I think it's just a more even relationship to do it that way. Those are three things in order. If you're trying to get, through different growth stages, you're trying to get time back. These are the easiest places to get time back the best ROI to try to get your time back. Just make sure that, you find the right people.

That's probably the biggest thing is just don't blindly just trust anybody. Make sure you get some sort of. Recommendations, you make sure that they work with people similar to you. They have a success track record. And that they're not just great marketers themselves that are just getting you into their service and they suck at fulfilling it.

So thanks again for listening as always. And we'll catch you next week. 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.

We get you crystal clear on the number of people you're going 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 you can take to go from part time to full time. You can pick the one that's the best for you based on your current situation.

Then we share with you the sales and systems that we use within our mastermind. That you need to have as well. If you want to 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 want to take the small business association, a one day business plan.

It's going to help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and when you're going to do it to take action. If you're interested in signing up for this challenge, it's totally free. Head to physicaltherapybiz. com. Forward slash challenge get signed up there. Please. Enjoy. We put a lot of energy into this.

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