Grow Your Practice Podcast

Today are going to talk about automation. It is a huge buzzword within private practice physical therapy right now and I think that there are some misunderstandings about it and exactly what it can do for us as private practice owners. Quick question, how would you like it if you had 250 people email you and say, “I’m in pain right now.” It would be pretty remarkable, right? That would be a lot of conversations to have. Even if you converted 1 out of every 50, you would at least have 5 patients on your schedule right now just by responding to them and having a positive conversation about what is going on for them. A lot of the times when we are thinking about automation, Facebook marketing, or email marketing, there is this misconception that the software or the program is going to do everything for us. I'm here to tell you that that is dead wrong. Automation simply starts the conversation. However, it is really up to us to put the work in to close those leads: To have an engaging conversation with those potential patients Convert them over to our physical therapy services Convert them to our physical therapy products as well.

It will mainly be useful to you if you’re looking to sell your business in 2 to 5 years. It can also be something to think about if you’re just “toying” with the idea of selling your private practice. I got in touch with Paul Welk, an attorney over at Tucker and Arnesberg, on what private practice owners should start looking at if they want to exit. He shared with me the following 15 selling points 1. EBIDTA First thing to look at is your EBIDTA. This stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization. It’s really a fancy way for accountants to describe your profitability. How much profit does your practice make a year? There’s a lot of technical information out there on EBIDTA, and there’s no way to do the topic justice in this article. 2. Multiple The very next thing to think about is a multiple.The concept of a multiple is simple, you can think of it like this: Value of Business = EBIDTA (annual profit) x Multiple. This multiple varies across industries. However in private practice it’s determined by the size of your business. A smaller practice with an EBIDTA of $100,000 a year, may have a multiple of 3. 3. Willingness To Remain If you as an owner just wants to sell and leave, then this reduces the value of your business. Especially if you’re doing a lot of patient care. This is because you have intrinsic value to the business. So if you’re doing the bulk of patient care and you aren’t willing to remain, then you’re going to have difficulty justifying the value of your business. 4. Number of Locations 5. Desirability of Location 6. Diversity of Referral Sources This is something we talk a lot about here at Breakthrough PT Marketing. If you rely upon one orthopedic surgeon for referrals, then it isn’t good for the value of your business. If however physicians only make up a quarter of your referrals, and you have over 200 referral sources, then your business is of much more value to a buyer. 7. Accounts Receivable and Aging This is really about billing. If you have a lot of money owed to you, and it’s old, let’s say it was due 120 days ago, then this will harm the value of your practice. If however you are paid promptly and any money due is less than 30 days, then this will improve the value of your business. 8. Owner Reputation This is self explanatory. The higher your reputation, the more valuable your business. 9. Staff If you have a high staff turnover, and you’re hiring a new PT every 2 months, then it’s going to harm your value. Put yourself into the shoes of the buyer. Which would you rather have? A high turnover staff, or a stable staff who are good at their job, have integrity and are reliable? 10. Non-Competes. 11. Years in Business 12. Profitability and Trending. 13. Payer Mix. 14. Growth Opportunity 15. EMR Platform For the full description visit: http://breakthroughptmarketing.com/15-ways-to-increase-the-value-of-your-practice-in-2-to-5-years/

Does PQRS seem like a major headache to you? Just more paperwork without any bump? Let’s look at it a different way. Here I Go With Another Sales Funnel Example Anytime that we are using direct-response marketing or content marketing and we are attracting people in… there is basically a 6 step process that we want to be thinking about our businesses. Step #1 is Lead Magnet. So this is…you have seen me do this where I’m offering a free video or a book or a free report something like that. Very low value, low time commitment, low ask and they get it for free. That just allows us to have an ongoing conversation with that person. Step #2 is Trip Wire. That is something with a little more commitment. Still something that is low-barrier and inexpensive…like a consultation or whatever. It kind of ramps them up…it gives that person a soft landing into our Core Service, it changes our relationship with time from prospect into buyer. Then #3 is Core Service. That is the 97001, 110, 140 if we are billing insurance. Or if we are playing the “cash pay only” deal, then it is whatever we charge per visit. Then Step #4 is Cash Pay, which is back-end services that we have. Step #5 is Return Path and Step #6 is Referrals PQRS Magic: Turning a Pain Into an Opportunity. Something magical happens now with PQRS and new Medicare regulations where we have to go through and track 9 different things. What we have to do on that first Medicare visit is ask the patient to step on the scale. We have the height chart and we look it up and 75% of the time we are saying, “Hey, your BMI is over 30. You need to handle this.” At least for us in the beginning, we were thinking “Wow, this is a really awkward situation. We are Physical Therapists. We are not nutritionists. We don’t have in-house…our 8,000 square feet is packed with PT. We don’t have anybody else in-house, so we need to refer out. This is a real pain in the neck.”

Are you dictating to your staff? Or are you empowering them? The difference can make a huge difference in your work environment. Two Types of Management, Two Radically Different Outcomes Recently I was reading a book, Smarter, Better, Faster by Charles Duhigg. It is an awesome book if you haven’t read it. In it, he talks about 5 different types of management. Two of them our the Authoritarian and the Trust/Empower style. I heard somebody else in the physical therapy space talking about the importance of us to give scripts to our staff. While I agree that it is good for us to be constantly testing what we say to patients and move in the right direction, I think it is a lot more important that we look at the type of management and we decipher that and decide on the type of management that we want to have for long term stability of our private practice. Rather than just handing scripts to our staff. Personally, I don’t want employees that regurgitate everything I say to do. I don’t want robots. I want staff that thinks. When we tell staff EXACTLY what to say, it does a couple of things that are really, really negative. Number one is it puts more stress, again, on the PT. So unless you are going out and you are buying scripts (ridiculous by the way), and handing them to your staff. That doesn’t really make sense to me. Its an authoritarian and it doesn’t work for me. Because again, it puts more stress on the PT and makes them more reliant on us. If you are like most practice owners and are implementing systems or automating things, we want to get away from that where everything is reliant on us. Our answer to everything being reliant on us is for us to dictate what our staff is going to say. Not good.

Why are you in PT? To help patients, provide for your family, maybe something different? Hear How I Learned The Most Valuable Button Of My Career So about 5 years ago, I went to a business event here in Harrisburg. There was a guy who was a syndicated newspaper columnist. His name was Jeffrey Gitomer....He's had 7 different books on the New York Times bestseller list for business and sales including The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Red Book of Sales. Biggest takeaway? He said we all can can have a voice. It is basically the gold rush of media and now we all have a chance. We are at the dawn of the information age. Just because things are snowballing really, really fast and now we have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Snapchat... and a lot of different social media platforms. The most important, the most valuable lesson that I got out of that event with Jeffrey Gitomer was this: Hit record. Once I started doing that and I committed to doing that, it changed my life. Here is what I'm going to tell you: I'm not a polished speaker. I'm partially balding and my hair is graying. My teeth are crooked because I didn’t wear my retainers when I was 14 years old. There are a lot of problems wrong with me but I’ll tell you this... there is nothing that I'm doing that you couldn’t do.

How effectively are you targeting patient list with promotions? Are you looking to attract more patients while decreasing your ad spend? Let’s find or target the segment of our past patient lists that respond to our mailings and then focus our ad spend on them. Now this is where the Recency principle comes into play: The first and easiest way segment your past patients is based off of how long they’ve been on the list…or how recent of a customer they are A simple exercise is to find out people that respond to your ad and then go back and plot on a timeline and see when those people were patients. What you should find is that the actual respondents to your promotions are typically going to be newer patients. They are more recent on the timeline. If somebody came to you for physical therapy, let’s say it was 10 years ago, they are less likely to respond than somebody who came to you 3 months ago. That is the Recency Principle in action. You can use that. So we can go back and find the cut off point on our timeline for the higher responding patients. For my example, we will eliminate maybe 2,000 names. So now you are only mailing 3,000. But these are 3,000 that are the most likely to respond…they are more targeted. Always remember a buyer is a buyer.

Problem: How To Attract Seniors But Not Medicare Solution: A simple, yet effective formula that you can use in your ad to not only attract who you want to attract, but also to repel who you want to repel. Anyways, I got this question from Practice Owner Hina Sheth asking… “We are a cash-based practice that does not take Medicare. From the pics and posts it seems like many of the workshops that are successful are attracting seniors. Any tips to attract patients that are not Medicare?” That’s a really good question…all of us want more patients but we also want patients that can pay us (since some of us don’t accept Medicare) Killer Marketing member Dave Wilderman responded to Hina and said… “Same problem with me, Hina. I did not designate an age range in my first attempt at a newspaper insert. I got 27 responses, 25 of whom were Medicare. So my next ad I just put at the top ‘If you are between the ages of 35 and 64, this workshop will specifically benefit you.’ It goes in the Sunday paper on Easter so we will see what kind of response I get.” DAVE NAILED IT. Dave played off of what we talked about in last week’s blog, which was how can I attract seniors… It is the same exact principles except the facts are changed a little bit here. Facts Can Change. Principles Always Stay The Same.

The question: How do I attract seniors to my practice for physical therapy? First off, I think this can be a really loaded question, but I am going to break it down for you using a very simple principle that you can use in marketing your private practice going forward. Whether you want Direct Access, Out-of-Network or Cash Pay, whatever that may be relative to seniors, this is how you want to look at it… The first thing that we are going to do is take a look at is something that I’ve blogged about in the past… Dan Kennedy’s triangle of Market-Message-Media Match. We need to define the market, then we need to craft the message to that market. Finally, we need to deliver that message using the correct media for that particular market.