The Three Stages of Physical Therapy Business Growth

 

Lessons from the brightest minds in physical therapy business

Earlier this week, I spent some time in beautiful San Diego coaching and consulting my elite mastermind group; some of the sharpest private practice owners in the country. In this blog post, I’ll share some of the biggest lessons that emerged from my group this past weekend. These lessons can take your physical therapy business to the next level. Here’s a quick video I made in my hotel room to give you a quick summary of the lessons from the weekend.

Depending on what stage of your practice you are in, your priorities could be:

  • Marketing
  • Operations
  • Exit strategy / Ascension plan

In most cases, you’ll find yourself in one of the three stages of a physical therapy business.

As you evolve as a private practice owner, there will be some decisive shifts in your mindset, which will determine your priorities and govern your business decisions.

This is the ‘big picture’ view of your practice, an insight that will help you identify your priorities and help you move from one stage to the next. I’m trying to help you see the the forest instead of getting lost in the trees.

Now, you may be at a stage in your practice where you are looking for new patients or trying to create systems. Chances are that you may be a little disorganized and are looking for a turnkey solution where you can consistently generate new referrals and new patients from internal patient referrals or external (physician) referrals.

When a practice is growing, one of the biggest priority is to get new patients. If you are looking for new patients, you want to schedule a strategy call with us to determine the best ways to get new patients in your practice.

As you grow, you will reach a stage where you have more patients than you can handle, but now you need staff, which comes with it’s own set of challenges:

  • You need to find the right people
  • You need to nurture the right people
  • You need to eliminate toxic influences in your clinic if and when they happen

As you grow, you involve more people in your clinic. As one of my mastermind clients said,

“You can’t grow a clinic without bodies.”

As I said, we have a bunch of brilliant people in our group and what emerged from the group is that you reach a stage where you have more patients than you can handle (since you have all the referral generation systems dialed in). You then get to a point where the priority becomes the recruitment of the right people. Once you get the right people, the mindset of the physical therapy business owner takes one more decisive shift.

“I have the right people, I have enough patients, now I want to set up a couple more clinics or I may even want to sell my clinics.” So you know when you’ve been in practice for several years, you’ll reach a point where you’ll say, “You know what, maybe, just maybe it’s time sell my practice. I want to exit. I want to be more of a CEO. Maybe I just want to sell and retire and do something else and just hang out in beautiful places like San Diego.”

So the moral of the story is look at your life and look at your practice as it fits in your life and depending on what stage of your practice you’re in, you could either be thinking

“I need new patients”

“I need to hire more staff”

“I want to sell my practice”

Keep in mind that as you hire more staff, you need to master the art of managing the staff, motivating them, setting structures in place so they stay with you and become a good influence. You need to be very quick about identifying and eliminating toxic behavior in your staff as quickly as possible.

Once you get through this stage and have the right staff and right systems in place, the ultimate validation of your success as a physical therapy business owner is where you get a crazy offer from someone to buy your practice or you simply merge with another company, since there is a lot of consolidation going on in physical therapy businesses.

Moral of the story -Always keep your eyes and ears open for the most cutting edge information, educate yourself and surround yourself with people who are at the same stage or at a more advanced stage than you are.  Maintain precise financial documentation of your practice, preferably with a third party accountant who can be independently verified by potential buyers if and when the time comes for you to sell your practice.

So, as your practice evolves, you’ll go through 3 different stages:

  • Strategic marketing (pre-emptive instead of reactive) to get new patients
  • Identification and recruitment of the right staff members therapists to keep up with the patient volume
  • Planning and preparation to sell your practice

The big question for you is – what stage of physical therapy business am I in?

Join us for the #1 Rated Physical Therapy Business Conference in the Country.

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