E689 | Who Is Your Perfect Patient?

In this podcast episode, Doc Danny addresses the challenges of starting a physical therapy practice and offers advice on how to choose a niche if you are unsure where to focus. The early stages of starting a practice can be overwhelming, and Danny acknowledges the emotional difficulties that come with it.

During a recent coaching call, a participant raised the question of what to do if they don't know their niche. Danny suggests using an exercise called the "client avatar" to define your ideal client. This involves creating a detailed description of your ideal client, including their name, age, occupation, hobbies, values, and goals. By visualizing this ideal client, you can better understand their needs and tailor your services to meet them.

Doc Danny shares his own experience of focusing on a niche client named "Greg" – a 50-year-old male attorney who coaches kids' sports, enjoys staying active with friends, and aims to maintain better health than his peers. This example emphasizes the importance of specificity when defining your ideal client.

To effectively reach your ideal client, it is crucial to identify the places they frequent, such as gyms, doctors' offices, or organizations. By knowing where they spend their time, you can concentrate your marketing efforts in those areas, ensuring that your message reaches the right audience.

The podcast also emphasizes the need to separate yourself from competitors by having a clear niche. Many individuals make the mistake of trying to cater to everyone, but this lack of focus ultimately leads to a diluted message and difficulty in standing out. Danny shares a personal example of creating content that was targeted towards other therapists, rather than patients, and highlights the importance of aligning your content with the interests and needs of your ideal client.

Starting a practice can be emotionally challenging, and many people spend years contemplating it without taking action. The podcast suggests seeking the guidance of mentors, such as those offered through programs like the Clinical Rainmaker program, to help build confidence and navigate the early stages of practice development.

In summary, this podcast episode emphasizes the importance of clearly defining your ideal client through the client avatar exercise. By understanding the needs and preferences of your ideal client, you can tailor your marketing and content to attract more individuals who fit that profile. Additionally, having a clear niche helps you differentiate yourself from competitors, allowing you to stand out in the market.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: If you don't have a super defined niche, let's say you're like, Hey, I want to focus on youth athlete, baseball players. Cool. That's awesome. You're off to a better start, but you could still define that person. Not just define that person, but define their parents and their characteristics around that as well.

Get very detailed with this, write it out, keep it somewhere where you can reference back to it and just make sure that when you say, all right, I'm going to go do a workshop or an injury screen, or I'm going to go to this networking event. Is your avatar there? 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 Matay, and over the last 15 years I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession. I've been a staff, ut 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 I got a question for you. What do you do if you don't know what niche? You want to try to focus on with your practice? It's a good question. It's actually a question that I got Yesterday on one of our clinical rainmaker coaching calls I had a handful of clinicians that were on there that are in the starting or early phase of their practices and I think this is One of the hardest stages that you're going to go through, it's definitely emotionally the hardest stage, like mindset, you're, it's emotionally draining because, you don't, you just don't know that much and everything is either too amazing or too scary.

There's no like middle ground. It's hard to stay level headed very early on. With this program, with the clinical rainmaker program, the whole goal of it is to really help people start and grow to where they can leave leave their job and go all in on their practice. But it's a tough stage because it's it's emotionally challenging.

It's very, from a coaching standpoint, it's harder on that side than it is like the technical sort of details of things of what people should be doing on it from like a tactical standpoint, but. On the call, we had somebody that was starting and they're, they just didn't know, they're like, I don't know what niche I want to focus on.

And what I want to do is give you my advice. If you're struggling with this as well, in terms of what you should do, or maybe you're making a mistake of trying to be the go to person for everything, and you should probably take what I'm about to say and really go through this exercise.

And try to redirect your marketing efforts to really focus on this. Me, whenever I got out of the military, my niche I focused on was CrossFit which is a narrow enough niche for most people. But for some people they're a generalist. They've been general ortho sport, physical therapist in a high volume clinic for years.

And they see a varying degree of different people between post ops and Medicare. Active adults and youth athletes. And okay, you can do everything, but if you take, I'm your go to physical therapist to market, you're going to be white noise. You're just like everybody else.

What's different between you and, the clinic you used to work at. You're the same person. What, like what separates you, what makes you unique? Because that's what you have to really focus on when you're looking at. Marketing yourself when you're looking at breaking into a new area in particular.

And, the advice that I had for this clinician was to think about who their ideal customer is. And we call this the the client avatar exercise. This is something that we have everyone in the clinical rainmaker go through so they can define their ideal customer. And it's a really good exercise to where you're really trying to think on a more granular level.

Who is. My ideal person and what do they do? What do they, where do they hang out? What kind of information do they like to absorb and and very, detailed traits on it. So for instance for our practice, athletes potential before we sold it, we got really clear about who our avatar is.

And in fact, I'm sure the avatar is exactly the same, even today with the the clinician that runs the practice now. And at the time, our avatar, his name was Greg, right? So I recommend give the person a name and then get as detailed as you can about this person. So this was a, 50 year old male.

That's a, an attorney. He has two kids. He coaches their sports teams. He used to be an athlete. He's still very active. He values time more than money. He wants professional high level punctual care. He gets together with his buddies that he played sports with every year. And every year he sees them getting less and less.

Healthy and he doesn't want to be like them. He wants to be an outlier amongst his friends and and to enjoy being as physically active as he can be with the activities he likes to do for as long as he can possibly do them. That's the kind of person that we crush it with at that practice.

In fact, this is, might be very similar to what many of you crush it with, but then what you have to ask yourself is where do these people. Exist. What are the congregation points both digitally and physically where you find more Greggs? What type of professional organizations are they involved in?

What kind of gyms do they go to? What kind of trainers do they work with? What kind of physicians do they go to? These are the things that then can help you start to really narrow down your marketing in terms of Focusing on areas where your target audience is going to congregate. And if you don't even know who your target audience is, how do you know if you're focusing on the right things?

How do you know if you're creating the right content for somebody that you'd be spending all this time doing Instagram videos, but you're doing exercise videos that other physical therapists are watching to get ideas that they can do with their home exercise plans. But this may not be where your avatar is like spending their time and attention, trying to learn.

Anything, right? So you could be missing the marketing, a direction and all the effort you're putting in could could be leading to no new patients for you. And that's what I actually see. A lot of people do is they spin their wheels, they spin their wheels and all of a sudden they realize, Oh my gosh, I'm not even, this isn't resonating with the people I want to get in the door.

This happened to me. I wrote probably, I don't know, 20 blog posts before I realized, man, every blog post I write is. It's directed towards clinicians, not patients. It was too complex. It was citing articles. It was just like way too high level. And I wasn't getting any patients from anybody reading anything because it wasn't a, it was way too over their head.

Versus whenever I started to really narrow down my lens of what I was trying to teach people to make it more simplified to where, like I would explain to a patient in the office, all of a sudden my content started to. Work much better both videos blog posts Podcasts, things like that we're doing to try to drive new clients.

It started to change dramatically when I started to get my my marketing message clear based on who I realized I was trying to attract and that came from clarity around who I wanted to work with and the more you get clear on that the more those people are going to show up so if you don't have a Super defined.

It's let's say you're like, Hey, I want to focus on youth athlete, baseball players. Cool. That's awesome. You're off to a better start, but you could still define that person, not just define that person, but define their parents and their characteristics around that as well. Get very detailed with this, write it out, keep it somewhere where you can reference back to it and just make sure that when you say, all right, I'm going to go do a workshop or an injury screen, or I'm going to go to this networking event.

Yeah. Yeah. Is your avatar there in my case are Greg's there, are there Greg's there, people similar to who we're trying to get in our office, because if there are then cool, I'm going to say yes to that. And if they're not, then I'm going to probably not do that. I'm probably going to spend my time on something that I feel like would be more direct for the marketing avatar that I'm trying to appeal to.

So I hope this helps. I know the start is hard. I know the start is something that scares a lot of people, even thinking about starting. It's interesting when we talk to people on our business advisory calls, whenever they talk to our team, there's so many people that we get a chance to, that to have conversations with that are, they're like, yeah, I've been thinking about doing this for two years, and they planning and listening to podcasts like just like this. And there's yeah, I've been planning this. I've been thinking about this as a time. And there's always something that's. That stopped them for extended period of time, sometimes years, and it's usually just that they don't feel comfortable with something that is going to be uncomfortable no matter what.

And if you're listening to that, or if you're listening to this and this sounds like you, or you're just like, yeah, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about it. Yeah, you can think about it for the next few years. I'm telling you, it's still going to be hard. So going to be uncomfortable.

But if you start, at least you are working towards the progress. And the goal you have in the future versus making it worse, just thinking and trying to absorb more and more information about something that you really want to do, but you just haven't found the courage yet to actually do it.

And this is where something like our clinical rainmaker program fits really well is with, mentors that have already done what you're trying to do, with coaching, even me, like I don't jump on these coaching calls. With our clients and it's I can totally relate. I know what it feels like to be in these situations, even though we're far past where they are.

It doesn't necessarily mean that, like you can't help somebody have that that courage to go out and go have that marketing meeting where they might get turned down. And it's scary and I've been there and it's tough, but it's the hardest stage mentally. It's one of the reasons why. I think it's so important to have a a mentor, a coaching group is going to help you with that.

And if you fall into that camp or just starting, I highly recommend head to physicaltherapybiz. com. Check out our clinical Rainmaker program. It's the best. I think we have the best coaches on the planet. They're all actively running their own cash practices that are much, much bigger than damn near any other coach in the industry.

And they impart. Their knowledge from day to day work that they do with their staff and their team and their businesses into all the people that that we work with in that program as well that are, just trying to get to the point where they can leave their full time job or at least have a viable side hustle, but it's tough and it's just something that I think for a lot of people, understanding.

Who you're trying to market to makes it so much easier for you to really focus your efforts on the right things and not feel like you're just wasting your time, which a lot of people do. So I hope this helps you. I hope that clarifying your marketing really leads to the traction and the momentum that you need.

And if you're looking to get some help on this from people that have already done this hundreds of times over head of physical therapy, biz. com, check out what we're doing. We'd love to help you out as well.

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