E723 | The Importance Of The Second Sale

In this episode, Dr. Danny discusses the concept of the "second sale" in physical therapy practice and why it is crucial for building long-term patient relationships and a successful business model. He shares his own experience of focusing on quick discharges of patients in the past, which led to constantly needing new leads and not building lasting connections with clients.

Dr. Danny explains that successful clinics focus not just on the initial patient intake, but also on providing ongoing value and secondary offerings to patients. Data from his mastermind program shows that 50% of patients should move on to a "second package" or secondary service, which helps reduce the need for a high volume of new leads each month.

By selling secondary packages and services, practitioners can help patients achieve their broader health and fitness goals, creating a more meaningful and beneficial impact on their lives. This approach not only benefits the patient but also creates a more stable and scalable business model for the practice, with a saturated schedule of loyal, long-term clients.

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Podcast Transcript

 Danny: But what we find is if you can get your numbers to where 50 percent of the people that you work with are moving over to some sort of secondary sale, you can cut the number of new people that you need to find per provider. Almost in half. So instead of needing, eight to 10, then you're looking at, you need four to five.

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 is Danny Matta. 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, cause 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 the second package or the second sale that you make within your practice with a. Client or patient and the importance of this. And this is something that comes off the back of our virtual event. We had a presentation that really was about looking at the metrics around a lifetime value and the effect that has on your practice.

So I don't know about you, but when you're looking at lead gen on a monthly basis, I would prefer to have to generate fewer new patients than a lot more. And. For me, I remember the first year that we were in practice, the first full year that we were in practice I averaged 25 new patients per month over the course of that year.

Now that is a lot of new patients for one provider. And I'll preface by saying it was just me. He, we didn't have any other providers. It was just me. So 25 new patients a month by myself. And I never, I would say the most visits that I saw towards the end of that year was about a hundred. I saw around a hundred visits a month towards the the end of that year.

So the math on that, it's not great, right? Like I wasn't seeing people for many visits many people I would see two to three times and then I would discharge them. There was no resale of anything. There was no ongoing service of anything that I could offer them or that I thought I could offer them.

I basically was just like helping them get out of pain and then I would discharge them with a whole bunch of homework exercises to do. This is what a lot of people do when they first get started, mainly because. You can feel some discomfort with selling what you're doing to people. You can feel pressure around having to get results and maybe you feel bad about charging people for what you're doing.

I know I struggled with all those things, right? I felt I don't want this person to have to choose between buying groceries and coming back from another visit for me with me, so I'm just gonna discharge 'em, and here's six weeks of homework you need to do to make sure that this result sticks.

So we could probably agree that is. Not the best way to get long term results for people. And frankly, a terrible business model. So when I look at lead gen for that, like me being able to draw up that many new people was a lot of work because I was doing all of it, with local. Marketing local marketing, education events, digital.

We had some, blogging and stuff like that we're doing. We're doing some YouTube videos, but a lot of it was coming from me teaching a ton locally. But when we look at the metrics of this, a clinic that does a bad job on the back end with a second sale, I should say, which I'll get into in a second.

We see that they need somewhere between eight and 10 new patients per month, per provider to grow their schedule to where it's going to be stabilized. And where they're at 85 percent or so schedule saturation. I was seeing 25 people. A month by myself with those numbers, I should have been able to have three full time PTs.

So me and two other full time PTs with a lead gen that I was doing just by myself, but I wasn't because I was discharging people way too early. And my average visit rate was way, way too low. I didn't even know what lifetime value was. I had no idea what continuity was or retention or customer success or any of these things.

I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I had come out of a world where I was lucky. If I saw somebody once every three to four weeks, so that's just the military model, right? I was a eval and reaval Machine, I didn't get to treat anybody didn't get to do any of their exercise with them.

I didn't get to see what was going on and progress them I had three to four weeks where I had to program something out. And if I was wrong and I put the wrong things in there, they would come back and we would have lost three weeks to a month. So I had to get really good at managing people remotely.

And that's what I started to do and really see people way too few times. So when we look at these updated metrics that we now have access to, and really the combined data of 250 businesses that we work with within our mastermind program. It's really cool to see that the clinics that are scaling the fastest they're doing the best job of not just the front end, but also the backend giving people something of value that they want to stick around for and being able to sell them into what we consider like a second package.

So the second package, the people will look at this as like a membership just to buy another package and then chip away at it to work on whatever they want to work on. Whatever you do, it doesn't there's a little nuances there that make a difference. But for this scenario, something on the backend has to be there.

But what we find is if you can get your numbers to where 50 percent of the people that you work with are moving over to some sort of secondary sale, you can cut. The number of new people that you need to find per provider almost in half. So instead of needing, eight to 10, then you're looking at, you need four to five in order to have a full schedule develop because it's snowballs.

So let's say you have 10 people you see the first month. If five of those people are buying another sort of program that they want to work on with you, then that's five people And however many visits that is over the course of the month coming from each of those five, it starts to snowball and saturate your schedule somewhat.

And then the next month, the same hap, same thing happens in the next month, the same thing happens. And over and over again, until you're six to 12 months in and over half your schedule is people that you're already working with and you're working with them in a long term capacity. So now when you bring that next provider in, you only need to find four or five people per month for that that provider that's been there that has a good schedule density.

And as you bring a new provider in, you can start to shunt and redirect new. Patients onto their schedule to help grow their schedule and build it up and then rinse and repeat that is a much Easier path to where you're trying to go with your business than trying to find 25 new patients per person Per month, which is what I was doing whenever I first started.

You think about it for a schedule where with four full time PTs, you have to find a hundred new patients every single month. That is a massive amount of new patients in a cash based practice. Very hard to do. A lot of cash based practices at scale, they're going to be somewhere between 30 and 60 new patients a month.

And a lot of it depends on what they do on the backend, but the far better game to play. Is not crushing on the front end like I did with 25 new patients and then nothing on the back end. That is an amateur move. You're missing out on stability, long term lifetime value development. And more than anything, you're missing out on the opportunity to help people really change their physical, mental health.

Health, change their goals that they have to achieve things that they didn't think they could do from a health and wellness standpoint and to create really a massive impact on them for years and years as you help them improve in so many other areas and help keep them healthy to actually be able to do the things that they want to do.

Like the value of being able to be independent and be able to say, if a friend asks you, Hey, do you want to play pickleball on Saturday morning, and you physically are capable of doing that? Or they say, do you want to go on a hike? Or they ask you if you want to play a game of pickup basketball, or your kid asks you if you want to go throw the football around with them, or if you want to run routes with them and you cover each other, like the ability to say yes to those things without having to worry about.

Am I gonna be able to physically do this to not have to say no to people that is very valuable And that's something that a lot of people want to do And not go to a place where they're being reactive or the health care system does not Reward this by the way, and it's ass backwards. We fucking know that this is not the right way Hey, wait till you get hurt then come and see me.

That's dumb. That's so stupid. That's our health care system That's the way that it is incentivized. Hey get cancer then come in and see me You know, it's like they're trying to change to where they're becoming more proactive, but it's hard with a third party insurance system. They don't want to pay for those things.

They don't see as much value in them, so they won't, but it doesn't mean people don't want that. It doesn't mean people aren't looking for those things. Just look at the development of. The whole body scans that they're doing for, looking for early stage cancer now, like they're popping up all over the place.

I met somebody in a business group that I'm in and he's opening basically one of these every other month in different cities and States and it's growing like a weed and he has a ton of interest in them and they're not cheap. They're like 2000 bucks to get an image done that is looking at, your body in great detail.

And I don't even know if it's that valid just yet. I think it's a lot of false positives, but yet. He's booked out like crazy because people are looking for proactive solutions to health care problems That's a great place for you to be so when you get somebody in the door Make sure you're having conversations with them about all the other things you can help them with once their injury is resolved, which is The first step of this, that's the first sort of plan that you work through with them.

The second plan is what are we trying to accomplish? What goals do you have physically? What do we need to work towards? What are the things that, what are the other things that are, hindering you somewhat that we can now prioritize? There's a lot of stuff we can help people with. You just got to make sure that you let them know that you can help them.

Long term. And if you can do that, the end result is going to be great for them. It's going to be far better for your business. And it's going to really take the pressure off the lead gen side. As you scale your business up, where you go from having to find, let's call it 10 new people per month per provider down to five.

And that's a heck of a lot better place to be as a business owner where you don't have to feel like you have to scramble as much to fill people's schedules because they're discharging everybody so quickly and you're on this sort of hamster wheel of having to get new patients, get them in a place where you can help them longterm.

Make sure you're positioning the second plan. They're going to work on with people along the way, and then fulfill on that, deliver an amazing service and get them the outcome that they want.

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 that 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 marketing 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 And sign 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. It's totally free It's something I think is going to help you tremendously As long as you're willing to do the work if you're doing the work you're getting a Information put down and getting yourself ready to take action in a very organized way, you will have success, which is what we want to head to physicaltherapybiz.com forward slash challenge and get signed up today.