PT Business Builder

This is part of what we're doing currently. We are working on setting up some automation within your practice. Some automated things to gain past patients that maybe have completed their plan of care they're likely to return, they dropped off, they're likely to return.

I'm going to kind of compare and contrast. I'm not going to go into too much detail right now on the MailChimp end and on the Zapier end.

It literally takes 7, 8, 10 hours for me to show you how to do it and probably even longer for me to remember how to do it because honestly, I'm going to try to do it. 

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/do-you-really-want-more-new-patients/

Everything's going to come together. I'm going to unveil the thing that we have been working on for the last seven-plus years.

Finally, this is over seven years of work. I'll kind of tell you a little bit of backstory. So what happened was how we got here (and if you hear anything, I'm sorry, we're still under quarantine).

 I started out about 10 years ago, with these feelings, and I had just started with my EMR. It was working, but it wasn't the life that I wanted to lead.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/whats-coming-next/

Today, Nate is coming on with us. He's going to talk about Paubox.

This is something that he and I have discussed at length. And this is what I particularly use for my software, but there are people out there that aren't using my software, but need something like this and don't even know that they need something like this.

Nate actually approached me a couple of days ago and said about trying to help some people through this because as a single person, it's really not something that you can just go out and grab. It's very costly to implement it and to make it part of your process. And a lot of people don't even realize why they need it.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/h-nathan-hoffman/

Today, what we're talking about, how much money are you willing to lose so you can save money?

It sounds counterintuitive, but it was one of the most important business lessons I've ever learned. My father told me this over and over again and it took years for it to sink in.

We make choices all the time. I only was looking at the saving side, like I would look at something, "Oh, I can save money by doing this." But if it's costing you something on the other end, you might be saving money but you're investing more time.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/how-much-money-are-you-willing-to-lose-so-you-can-save-money

Today we have a very special guest, Jared Cooper. 

Jared, I was on your podcast, I don't know how long ago it was, I was on his podcast and he had some great stuff, some great content that I thought really, really would benefit everyone in the group.

I wanted to make sure that we got him in here and we finally did that.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/building-your-practices-blueprint-with-jared-cooper/

So today, we have a very special guest. Christine Walker is coming on. 

Well, she's kind of branching out, you're still doing your thing. But you know, you're not just doing websites, you're kind of rolling out this as a little bit even more than the website top.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/new-patient-funnel-with-christine-walker/

Today, we're having Brad Cote on. We met like about two weeks ago. I don't even know he exists.

He's got so much awesome stuff. I must have been living in a bubble but I didn't even know the guy existed. He has got some great systems, he is really helping a lot of PTs. So I wanted to have him on.

So we're all PTs or in physical therapy in general. I wanted to have him on so he could help all the therapists in the group grow their practice.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/brad-cote-on-patient-retention-and-marketing/

Dave and I are going to talk a little bit about Telehealth.

We actually already talked about this before, and he started sharing some of the things that he was working on with me and I'm like, “Hey, would you mind sharing this with other people? I think that this will help a ton of people that are out there.”

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/telehealth-talk-with-dave-townsend/

Ray Berardinelli: Today we have Asha Gummadi here. Asha has a program called Therex Portal. It started out as a therapeutic exercise thing, but now it has kind of moved. You've also added telehealth into your platform here, and you're going to kind of walk us through that and kind of show us exactly how that works, correct? 

Asha Gummadi: That's right, Ray. Thank you for having me, my friend. And yes, we started off as a therapeutic exercise platform, which is multilingual. And then, we also saw the need for clinician shortage and telehealth to be addressed. 

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/telehealth-with-asha-gummadi/

Today, Jerry and I are talking about word-of-mouth series here. This is the biggest thing in your practice. This is the biggest leverage point that there is in your practice. This is how you can add more money to your practice that you can’t do in anything else.

We will start with identifying your customer, identifying who you want in your practice, and the steps that you see to make that happen to make sure that you're identifying the right people and bringing the right people into your practice. 

The reason I wanted to have you on is because, honestly, I learned most of this from you. I figured, why not give it to them from the mouth of the horse?

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/jerry-durham-today/

“When do you ask for reviews in the welcome series? How do you frame the email? And are you asking for Google only?”

It depends, right? That should be the answer.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/google-reviews-how-to-become-an-automated-master-of-them/

What we're doing is we're going to start doing word-of-mouth series. I've been kind of talking about this, hidden around about this, asking a lot of questions about this.

What we're going to try to do is help you cultivate that word-of-mouth. Cultivating this word-of-mouth is a real process. There's a lot that goes into this. And there's a lot of things you can use.

I'll teach you the three ways to go about doing that -- the ways that you can where you can go about getting those reviews, getting the people that are interested to refer people like them. I'll teach you all the systems, all the tricks, all the tips on how to do this.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/time-and-effort-on-pt-business-growth-focused-on-wrong-place/

Hello Physical Therapy Business Builders. I am so pumped for this one today.

Today I'm going to have Mr. Greg Todd as our guest. I am so excited. Greg has made an impact on me and many others.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/interview-with-greg-todd/

Today, what I want to talk about the biggest thing that I have learned in recent years has been something that I read in a book a long time ago. I read old books from the 1700s and 1800s or might even have been older than that.

I can't even remember who was the author - I think it might have been Marcus Realist - but anyway, he was talking about growth and how it happens.

The biggest thing for me and for you all as well, let me start here: for a long time in my life, I blamed a lot of people for everything that happened. I had this habit when something would go wrong, I would look for somebody else to pawn the blame off on could have been me.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/want-huge-growth-both-personally-and-professionally/

Today, I want to talk about marketing. 

Everybody looks at marketing and they think that the best places to do marketing are through Facebook, Google, Instagram, or through all of these new channels. Still, some people are doing old stuff: TV ads, radio ads, and print, and all of these are really missing the boat. 

Talking about your leads and ads, working on Facebook ads, Google ads, and all of these leads are necessary. Don't get me wrong: it's necessary. But you're looking at the wrong place, like if you're looking to do the most effective thing, you can't grow your business.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/are-you-marketing-on-fb-or-google/

Finally, going live here with Dave Kittle from the Cash-based Physical Therapy (PT) One-on-one Forum. Dave and I have known each other for about two and a half years.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/interview-with-dave-kittle/

Welcome to the Physical Therapy Business Builder show where we think EMR s**ks. We think that systems and software should actually grow your PT practice and improve your life, not consume it. Here, the only measure of success is a PT business that gives you the time that you want and the financial freedom to enjoy that time.

Today, what I want to talk about is word-of-mouth marketing. This is something, if you ask anyone, anywhere, the number one way. This is something that everyone will tell you flat out, if you've had a business, if you have an established business, the number one referral source that you have is your word-of-mouth marketing.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/word-of-mouth-marketing/

I just wanted to hop on here and talk about what I'm hoping for from this group. Something that I want to talk about that, not that anybody did anything wrong, not that anything happened. Let's just always make sure that we're here lifting one another up. But now, we don't always need to be right. 

So what I want to talk about was the crab bucket effect. This is something that I learned from my wife’s graduation from nursing school years ago. I'd love to hear what you guys think about this person that was at my wife's commencement speech for nursing school. She started talking about the crab bucket effect in nursing school. 

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/dont-get-caught-in-crab-bucket/

Hello! I'm so excited to finally going to get the Facebook Group boss, Mike Chua, on. For those of you who haven't seen this out there, Mike has two Facebook groups: one with 30,000 people and another group with over 10,000 people.

He is the admin of those two groups. If anybody has ever tried to grow a Facebook group, you know how difficult it is to get people on here.

There's captain. I was just saying about you being the admin of two groups, how you were able to get into those groups just by coming in and just serving the population.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/interview-with-facebook-group-boss-mike-chua-part-2/

Hello everyone! I'm so freaking excited right now to have this next guy on. He is absolutely an incredible Facebook boss: Dr. Mike Chua.

Mike has two Facebook groups. One has over 30,000 members and his other group has over 10,000 members. If you want to learn how to grow a Facebook group, this is the guy.

If you want to learn how to connect with your people on Facebook and how to build a group of people that you want to sell to, want to become your patients, or want to join with you, Mike Chua is the guy.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/interview-with-facebook-group-boss-mike-chua-part-1/

I had one of those days - the ones where I get to work. You get all this stuff, like, I'm going to get this done, I'm going to get this done, and get this done. You have everything listed out.

You start working and then one thing pops up and another thing pops up. And at the end of the day, you turn around, look, and feel like you did not get anything done. I mean, I know I’ve got a lot of work done, but I feel like I haven't got anything done.

I feel like I haven't got anything done. I made some progress and a bunch of stuff. But I feel like I didn't get much done. I worked hard all day long. I don't have a ton to show for it.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/having-one-of-those-unproductive-days/

I am here with Chad Madden. I first learned about direct response marketing from him. He was kind of aware with this whole thing and I learned about workshops from him.

He's the Godfather of Physical Therapy workshops because that's where I learned about and I never heard of anybody doing workshops. My practice was in a little bit of in transition and everything had changed.

When I started killer marketing, I really learned about the workshop for the first time and something that really changed my practice. Everything kind of changed for me when we started to implement a lot of the stuff we were teaching. And I learned a lot of it from you.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/learning-from-godfather-of-pt-workshops-chad-madden/

Today, what I want to talk about is workshops.

The big thing with workshops is how to sequence things, how to get people there. Some things when you're getting ready to run a workshop. When you're getting ready to run your workshop, don't try to wing it. It's a bad idea. I tried it, it didn't go well.

You've got to practice this thing. Just don't wing it.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/thing-you-need-to-run-amazing-pt-workshop/

We're talking about the front desk drop offs and how the first call relates to that. We're going to dive into this and the metrics of it. I think that the metrics are inadequate, and I've discussed this a number of times on the metrics and but we'll dive into that here.

First, the role of the front desk and drop off. The front desk is where your drop off starts. Your cancellation, no-show rate, and where all of our KPIs, they all start in that initial phone call. That's our first contact on as we've discussed before, and even goes further than that.

It goes in your messaging. You got to be targeting the right people.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/interview-with-jerry-durham/

Our topic for today is the sequencing for your workshop.

How are you getting people to show up at your workshops? You can't close on, buddy. If there's no butts in the seats, there's a number of ways that people can do it.

Number one, you can do direct mail. You can send past patients, or you can get an old and new list, and send mail out to local people to try to reach out and engage them.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/sequencing-for-your-leads/

The one thing that I wish someone had told me along time ago is the fact that your customers or patients are interchangeable. Your patients are your customers.

What they think matters more than anything. What they experience really matters. What they think about you is absolutely everything.

The realization of this brings about a number of things. Number one, you have to measure what they think.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/one-thing-you-need-to-grow-your-pt-practice/

What we want to talk about is when you work your workshops, you want to identify the right workshop to do for your practice.

A lot of things go into this, and if you don't identify the right team for your practice, your workshop can flop before they ever even get started.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/picking-the-right-workshop/

I have really messed up in my practice. When I started my practice, things were going really well. Then I messed up. I wasn't paying attention to the numbers. I didn't care, like things didn't matter. 

Then all the sudden changes happened. Everything fell out from underneath me. My practice went from killing it to not doing so good. I messed up, and I did this for years. I didn't pay any attention to anything. 

Then after years of not doing so well, I started to take a look. The one thing that hit me was that the most important thing is what the patient thinks. I started looking at my numbers, and I started seeing cancellations and no shows -- but that wasn't the big thing.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/lesson-that-can-take-pt-practice-from-good-to-great/

We're going to discuss emails today. What I want to talk about is your email open rates going down, and they're continually dropping. It doesn't matter how good the copy is, the medium is dying.

We all see it in your email boxes - you’re unsubscribing, you're putting things to the bottom. There are things and stuff that you can do to improve this.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/news-email-marketing-dying-more-and-more-every-day/

Today, what I want to talk about is something that we kind of touched on a little bit previously. We really need to go into a little more detail about our metrics.

The metrics that we're measuring aren't the real metrics that we should be measuring. We're looking at our metrics the wrong way. Our metrics are current metrics.

Everybody looks at their KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. But the key KPIs aren't really indicative of what's going on. Your KPIs are showing you that there's an issue. That's all you can really gain from them. Later, it's like dying. It's just indicative that there is a problem.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/real-metrics-we-should-be-measuring/

What I want to talk about today is the hierarchical structure in business. Honestly, a lot of us look at what we're doing, and we tend to look at it wrong. We have a hierarchical structure for our business. I’ll use a pyramid description here.

First off, we're a business. This is first and foremost what we are. Then, we are a service-based business. Above that, we are in health care. We help people who work on the human body.

Service-based, because primarily what we provide to people are services. Some of us provide goods, but the primary thing that we provide is services to people. We're in health care, and we work on the human body and people's health. Finally, we are PT, OT, SLP, or whatever you are.

This is the hierarchical structure of our business.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/improvements-from-bottom-of-hierarchical-structure-in-pt-business/

I want to share some thoughts on staffing issues. My software requires people to implement new systems, and any business growth requires a system change. 

A lot of times people get blow back on this. I talked to a ton of people that think it's easy. No. It is insane of you to think that they're just going to implement something new that's going to take them more work more time, more effort, with nothing in it for them.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/implementing-new-system-pt-business/

(The following are based on my interview with Mobile PT Coach David Bayliff.)

I've been a therapist now for 25 years. I worked in the outpatient clinic setting for 19 years. One day, about Year 17 and a half into it, I'm in the clinic amongst a bunch of chaos. I'm sitting there - at the time, I was 45 - and I said, “I did not want to be a 50-year old staff clinician.”

You just don't see 50 staff clinicians. There are either directors, entrepreneurs, or whatever. And I knew I wasn't going to be a director at the company as well.

I'm over a client, working on them. I'm looking out at the dance floor at three or four other clients that are out there who are going to be needing my hands on pretty soon. I know that my fresh rotator cuff repair - that is passive range of motion only - is weighing on me.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/interview-mobile-pt-coach/

There's a way that you can double your practice in 12 months. Wherever you are now, you can double your numbers in 12 months. What I'm going to talk about today is your eval no show rate.

According to WebPT stats, 11% of your people are actually eval no show. They'll go on a schedule, but they never come for that first visit. They go away.

This is why your first phone call and your front end script is so huge. Your follow-ups after that first phone call are huge. If we can cut that 11% in half, we can get 5% of the 89% remaining. It's 6.1%.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/trick-to-double-pt-business-in-a-year/

I wanted to tell you guys a story about viral physical therapy marketing, or viral marketing in general. This story illustrates this principle and how it works.

It's about the founders of PayPal. I don't know how much everybody knows about PayPal, but when PayPal started, they were trying to get out there. There were other people before them that did exactly what PayPal did.

PayPal knew that they needed to go viral and needed to beat other people who were already there and already established to the punch. So when they were founded, PayPal offered everybody that joined a $10 credit.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/principles-of-viral-marketing-in-pt-and-how-it-works/

A lot of people talk about viral marketing in relation to social media. It's not a social media phenomenon. It's been happening for a long, long time. Many businesses out there have gone viral. Many products have gone viral.

Everything from the pet rock to the iPhone and Facebook went viral. Facebook didn't go viral because of social media. It was one of the first social media platforms, but it still went viral.

Today, I'm going to talk about the example of the iPhone. What happens is I bought and got the first iPhone way back in 2007. It came out at the end of June of 2007 and I think I got mine in July 2007.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/wants-to-take-their-pt-practice-viral/

I always thought that my business growth was going to come from new patients. I spent a lot of time trying to attract new patients -  doing ads, Facebook ads, newspaper ads, getting out to the community, going and talking to doctors, going to senior centers, and trying to get new people.

It worked, but it didn't work that well.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/reaching-pt-practice-growth-goals/

This is what I can offer you. I love doing the sequencing. I love figuring out this process and I'm going to give you everything that I figured out and tested. There's a number of things you need.

You need a ringless call to voicemail messaging system, like Slydial. My software, the Aetas, does all these, but you can do with other stuff. Slydial will do it. You'll need a Zapier integration to make that work.

Then you will need some text messaging and email. You can get those from Infusionsoft. There's a number of different products out there that you can get to do this, but the sequencing is where the magic happens.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/magic-of-sequencing-in-your-pt-business/

Today, what I really want to talk about is your marketing. Everybody gets enamored with the front end marketing. We need new patients. But do you really need it?

We PTs did some recent research in 2018. As per research, there are 75% of patients who don’t complete their plan of care. This is a huge number. That means three-quarters of the people who you bring in the front door do not complete their plan of care. They don’t stay or finish. It can’t be that good if they left.

A high percentage of our patients do not complete their plan of care and yet, our main focus is on the front end marketing. Another interesting stat about this is that 80% of your business, whether PT or not, comes from 20% of your past customers.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/get-new-patients-for-your-pt-business/

 I just want to hop on you and share something that I’ve learned and hopefully, it can help somebody else. I had mixed results at our exhibitor in Breakthrough Physical Therapy Marketing. It surely was slightly smaller this time and things are a little bit slower.

In the best conversations that I had, I was wondering what I'm doing right and what I’m doing wrong. I had dinner with a friend of mine, David Bayliff. We sat down and we talked. He was telling me about what he was working on.

He’s going to speak at the SSPT live which is an awesome event. He told me that he wasn’t sure what he was going to talk about. Then he started telling me his story and I realized that that’s what he’s supposed to talk about as that’s what is going to reach and help people.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/reflecting-on-a-great-trip-and-how-it-can-help-your-pt-business/

 This is total tech-nerd stuff. For those of you who know me, I'm completely total tech-nerd. I’m the idea guy behind building our software. I love to see technology, how I can make it work and how I can make work better, and what I can do to make things work a little more smooth and easy with the tech.

I found this really cool thing years ago. There’s a couple of them out there. Probably the most popular one is called Slydial. There’s a number of different kinds of services for this, with some of them paid and some are free.

Basically, the idea is that your phone doesn’t ring. It shows up as a missed call with a voicemail on your phone. This tech allows you to bypass your phone so you don’t even have to interface with the person. What you can do is actually pre-record the message and have this go out. You can have triggers set to make the message go out.

https://ptbusinessbuilder.com/make-your-pt-business-life-easier/

 Today, I want to share some thoughts with you regarding your mindset.

One of the things that really sticks with me is about one of my favorite books telling a story about a guy with the last name of Barnes. Most people probably don’t even remember him. He was the right-hand man of Edison. All of Edison’s stuff states, “Invented by Edison, installed by Barnes”.

The story of Barnes started whenever he was penniless. He had absolutely nothing. He went blind-baggage. We don’t know what that even means anymore. He traveled with the livestock, crates, and stuff on the train. He was in this car where the doors and windows are shut.

He goes the whole way without anything. He barely had the money to buy a ticket. He shows up at Edison’s doorstep. Edison was famous at this point. He said, “I’m here to see Edison.” They finally let him through because he wouldn’t go away. He told them that he would wait.

He goes in and sees Edison. The guy had nothing. He smells bad and was horrible. He went in to Edison and said, “I’ve come here to work with you.” He didn’t say that he was there to work for him. He told him that he was there to work with him.

 Today, I want to share with you some of the things on how to write an email. Whenever you are writing your email or ad copy, there’s a couple of things that you want to keep in mind.

First, when you are writing your email copy, you want to avoid the words “we” and “I”. The personal pronoun “I” is the most commonly used word in the English language. If you’re writing something to somebody else and you want to engage them and create a relationship with that person, you do not want to use the word “I”. In particular, “we” is almost just as bad.

You want to use “you” and “your”. You want to talk in terms of the other person always and forever. Everything needs to come from their perspective. In the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, this is one of the things discussed there.

 One of the things that I really want to talk about is the process for drop offs. I started out not knowing what’s going on at my practice. They were just happening.

I look at the numbers and I thought “What is going on? How are we going to get these people back in?”

Then, I kind of called in one of my mentors. I’d been watching him on his Facebook Lives and he was talking about systems and processes.  About the patient’s experiences with everything that they were doing.

One of the things that I’ve learned from him is that I need processes to implement this. 

 Today, what I want to talk to you about how physical therapists or occupational therapists losing tough patients. Sometimes, you can never fix this problem totally. You're going to lose people, there's nothing you can do about it and people are going to leave. 

There's a couple of tips to getting ahead of the problem. So you’re losing that tough patient. Sometimes, the problem happens, it's something bad, and people just drop off. Sometimes, people are just idiots and not nice people. It happens. That's just the way things go.

I'm sure everybody's lost patients. I'm sure if you're in this profession, you've lost patients.

 Just wanted to hop on here and let everybody know I’ve talked a lot about NET PROMOTER SCORE or NPS. We're going to talk about Net Promoter Score and how you should be using it in your practice. 

What is a net promoter score?

I find fewer people know what it is. Net promoter score is actually something that a guy from Harvard came up with. There are a whole bunch of research on and basically what the Net Promoter says is just one question: how likely are you to refer a friend or family member to us? 

You've seen this question before. Everybody uses it all over the place and even if you don't know what it is, you now have at least seen it and you're familiar with it. Basically, what we do is we look at the segment of people in the groups with this net promoter score. 

A 9 or 10 score from a person means that he/she really, really likes us and can be considered as a net promoter. Net promoters will go out and they're going to talk about you and your business, and tell other people about you because that's what they do.

You will get their responses based on the net promoter score. Say it's a 10, then that person loves you and they're going to talk about you. At 7 or 8, they are not real sure about you -- these people may like you and use you but they're not going to run around telling everybody how great you are. On the other end, if you get a 6 or below, this person really doesn't like you.