What Are You Doing to Market Your Practice?

What Are You Doing to Market Your Practice?

Quick heads-up for all the private practice owners who are tuning in. If you've been tuning in for a while, you know that it took me at least ten years of grinding in my own clinics before I finally figured out how to scale and sell my four practices for seven figures and about three times the national average. The biggest shift was not some secret marketing hack. It was how I thought about profit, systems, and actually my role as the owner.

That's exactly what we're going to be working on together with you at the High Performance Practice Conference this fall in San Antonio, Texas. From October 15th through 17th, Adam Robin and I are hosting a three-day hands-on event for PT, OT, speech, mental health, PEDs, pelvic floor, and medical practice owners who want to build clinics that are profitable, scalable, and, best of all, do not depend on them 24/7.

We'll dig into simple profit and KPI frameworks, real leadership and culture work, and practical systems you can take home and plug in with your team. If you're doing roughly 6 to 7 low figures a year and you want your clinic to feel more like a real business and less like a job/cage, I'd love to see you there. Frankly, I'd love to see you bring your leadership teams as well because we will have breakout sessions for them too. You can get all the details and grab your seat at the link in the show notes. Let's get into this episode.

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The deal, and then we're going to share the other deal.

Let's do it.

Are you picking up what I'm putting down?

Always.

That was a little bit of Adam talk. What's that for everyone?

We're on, we're going.

We are live, and you know what? This is the second live show I've done.

I just saw that in the Facebook group. You did a live earlier with Jess, is that right? Jess Turney?

Yes, to me.

What were you guys talking about?

Man, we talked about a lot of just business. We talked a lot about the importance of basically getting out of the hustle mentality and more into the, like, "Let's diagnose the key constraint in the business and let's work on the systems." She's a whiz.

Let's deal with the stuff that's actually holding us back.

We should be in the Facebook group.

Welcome everybody to the show, Facebook Live experience. We're talking about marketing. We have not talked about marketing in a while. The original topic was going to be about marketing to physicians. As soon as I saw Adam's face, I thought, “Maybe we need to expand this.” You were not too excited about that topic in and of itself.

Let me give you the breakdown. Find the physicians, go to the walk-in, and meet them. That's how you market.

Visit them often.

Do it a lot.



There you go.

Come tune in next week, and we'll see you. We've got all kinds of great things. We've got so many sophisticated systems.

Diagnosing Your Clinic's Real Growth Bottleneck

That's exactly it. It's interesting because there are a lot of people who are out there like, "I'm going to get you more patients. I'm going to get you more patients." We're going to talk about the four buckets of marketing. That is a big part of the business, but I know there are plenty of clinics out there that are not hurting for new patients. That's not their constraint. You've talked to more owners than I have. Are you still seeing "I need more new patients" as a major issue?

I have not felt that as a concern. No.

Isn't it interesting? More people are like, "Dude, I'm not making money. I cannot find a therapist." That's really it. Those two things. Those are the constraints. We need to talk about marketing because marketing should be a part of your business. It is. If you're really, truly trying to live out your purpose, then treating more patients the way you treat them helps you fulfill that purpose to an even greater extent. If you're not growing, you're contracting. There are all these things I could bring up.

Even to the point where at our conference, I'll be interested to see how many of our speakers, and we're still firming up the lineup, but how many speakers are talking about how to get more patients. Our conference is a highly profitable practice. How to gain more profit, freedom, and purpose in your business and plug. It's October 15th through 17th. Go to PPOClubEvents.com and check it out. Register there. There are discounts for bringing your team members and discounts for bringing your spouses. Make sure you sign up and get involved.

It's going to be in San Antonio, at a beautiful hotel, and I'm really excited about it. I love San Antonio and the Riverwalk, and the barbecue is really good, but I plan on October 15th through 17th. In San Antonio, go to PPOClubEvents.com. Marketing is not one of the major topics. Think about me being a clinic owner back in the day in Arizona. There are a lot of physical therapy clinics around. Marketing was essential. We had to get out. We had to make our name known.

When it comes to marketing to physicians, yeah, I was proud that I had cell phone numbers and direct relationships with the physicians' offices. They knew who they were referring to. We could talk to them. We could talk to them about issues that they might have and whatnot. That does not seem to be a bottleneck for a lot of owners nowadays. People have an idea. The general population has an idea of what physical therapy is and what it does for them.

Orthopedic surgeons tend to refer to physical therapy. Many times, they do not care too much. In some instances, they're part of the hospital system, and patients might be sent within the hospital system to the hospital-owned physical therapy clinics, and I hate to see some of that, and we'll talk about it. It does not seem to be an issue in general. I'm downplaying all this, but our topic is going to be about marketing.

Using Marketing As Your Best Recruiting Leverage

We've got to figure out how to talk about it some. Sometimes, yes. Marketing is very universal. I'm always scared because I like to run my mouth, and I do not want to claim to be an expert in anything. I'm a student. I'm learning about marketing, but I feel like it's a skill that can be applied to a lot of different things. If you could market, you could probably recruit. You could put on an event, or you could, there are a lot of things that you can do. It's an important skill set to learn because it will become a bottleneck for you.

If you decide to grow, keep your business open for another ten years or so, at some point it will become a bottleneck for you because everything becomes a cycle over a long enough trajectory. Whether the market shifts, whether you decide to shift your model and add cash-pay services, or whether you decide to open up another location across town, you have to figure out how to get that. Maybe you're a PT, and you're like, "I want to hire an OT. I do not know how to do that." Here's another one.

Let me say you're recruiting this therapist, and they're about 3 or 4 years out of school, and they're just burnout and they're looking for that next exciting thing. Maybe they want to get a pelvic floor certification where you're like, "Guess what? Maybe I can get them the certification and market it for them." It can be a recruiting tool. Where it's like, "Not only can we support you with that, but like we know how to help you market, and we can push you on social and like help you become the pelvic floor guru." It's like, because we're good at business, we know how to market. We can apply that as a leverage tool in a lot of ways. Think about it like that.

I like that you brought it up like that because when we're talking about marketing, usually the first thing that comes to mind is that we're marketing for new patients. We need more new patients to come in the door. As I said, that could be the case in some instances. In some areas of the country, there are seasonalities, which means you need to rev up the marketing engine a little bit so that you can maximize production of your providers.

Let me cover that quickly, and maybe we can see how that extrapolates across other things, because I agree with you. Knowing how to market is a huge benefit to finding the right next provider. That's all marketing, just like it is for a new patient. The buckets are very much the same. You can interchange some words, but the buckets are very similar. We could market for workshops. Could market for new specialties that we bring on board, etc.

Tapping The Goldmine of Past Patient Lists

Marketing in general, but the four buckets that we always fall back on are current patients, marketing through them to get new patients, past patients to either restart physical therapy episodes again, or find patients through them. Third, marketing through physicians. Fourth, marketing to the community, either via in-person events or social media efforts, etc., Google, Facebook ads, that kind of stuff. SEO, you name it. Those are the four buckets. I'll just ask you. I know you have a marketing machine going right now. Where do you currently land within those four buckets with your marketing as it goes?

It depends on where you're at as a practice.

If you're a brand-new practice, you're going to really focus on buckets 3 and 4.

If you're brand new, let's just consider. Let's approach this from a place of needing to figure out how to get something new off the ground. Let me say I added a new provider to my team. I need to figure out how to fill them up.

Let's do that.

If you know how to fill schedules, and you believe in that skill set, and you have a team that can do it, you're more likely to take that bet. I have confidence in my ability to move that forward, move that ball forward. Your current and past patients are always going to be the cheapest and most reliable in the easiest marketing buckets that you have. That's worth mentioning. If you have to start somewhere and you have limited resources, like you do not have a lot of money. You do not have a lot of time. I would start there.

Email campaigns, text campaigns. When they come to the clinic, do you know anyone else who's in pain?

It's really like the KPI, if you will, is really how many enrollment conversations I can have in a day with my current and past patient list. The more of those conversations that you seek out, and you insert yourself into, the more likely you are going to convert them into, you're going to find people who need your service.

You've got to understand that the conversion rate on that list, that's a huge list. If you're getting off the ground, not so much. You're still focusing on buckets 3 and 4. If you've been around for a year or two, you have a list that's consistently growing. It's significantly longer than the physician referral list. It's significantly cheaper than buying ads and has a greater conversion rate because these people know, like, and trust you already.

Correct. I'd say starting there is really important. It's just figuring out a way to position your energy on having those enrollment conversations. It's almost a sales process. It's the process of letting people know that you exist and getting them back into the clinic when it's appropriate.

Building An Enrollment Script Role-Play System

I've found that when we start the conversation can be very easy. We would role-play with our providers and team members, not just the providers, but also the front desk, which was incentivized to get new patients. The techs were incentivized to get new patients, and it was not very easy for them. Once we role-played and went through that for a few weeks and showed them, helped them generate their own verbiage to start up those conversations, they became easier conversations, and it became an SOP. It became a system. This is part of our program. If those KPIs that we tracked start falling off, we need to start training again. It was a constant effort, but that is all as part of marketing.

You just call and check on the people you care about.

They usually really appreciate that.

It does not have to be anything more than that. You do not have to make it weird. Do not put so much pressure on yourself. Just call, like, have fun and care a lot, and ask how they're doing, and try to find ways to add value to that patient. Like, "You already know ways that you can add value." If you're a physical therapist, maybe you're really great with shoulders, orthopedics, and low back pain. It's like, "How about you call all the back pain patients that we've had and see how they're doing.”

It does not have to be any weirder than that. Just invite them back if it makes sense. If you could do that 50 or 60 times a week, if you do it over and over, if you apply volume and consistency, over time, you will create momentum. You will create lead flow. Once you master that skill and you're like, "Man, I know how to have enrollment conversations," then you can start teaching your team how to do that. Having role-plays and those types of things. You can even bonus or incentivize somehow with your, with them around that. That's all it is.

You want to start off with current and past patients. That's the easiest, cheapest way to move forward. You're doing some of that in your clinic, assuming. Is it a low-level, consistent effort of this engine going on?

It will step on that pedal whenever we need to. If we recognize that schedules are declining for whatever reason, because of life. We will say, "I got an idea. Let's kick up the machine a little bit. How about that?" We'll do that stuff. The numbers will come back up, and we're like, “Let’s have fun.”

All of this is predicated upon just tracking some numbers. I had the diagnostics business in Alaska, where we did EMGs. I knew that if I sent out a monthly newsletter, I could keep my numbers up where I needed them to be. Months when I did not do it were the months that would fall off. If I needed to kickstart some things, I would add a fax to the local doctor's offices that said, "We've got openings this time this week. If you've got someone who needs an EMG ASAP, we can set them up on these days."

Calendaring Your Outreach To Beat Marketing Inconsistency

Those are like what you said. My two-step process, because those people are not necessarily. They do not usually have friends who need EMGs. You need an EMG when you need an EMG, and then it's one and done. That was the metric that I could track, and that was my marketing system, and that worked for me. Knowing your metrics and making sure it's part of your system, I knew what day I was to create content for the newsletter. When that newsletter is supposed to go out, I figure those days out, put them in my calendar, and make it a consistent system. It worked.

That's a really important piece of this. Marketing is not that confusing. It's surprisingly simple. We tend to, just like with most things, we tend to overcomplicate it. Really, when you boil it all down, it's just work. It's just work being done consistently over time. Send the facts and make the call. I'm saying that from somebody who I do not necessarily find myself to be a super talented individual. I've got some talents, but what I'm really good at is, like, I do not stop. You know what I mean? I just do not give up. I've built several businesses that way. If you just consistently show up for long enough, you're marketing, and that's, that's enough a lot of times.

Let's go back to what you were brought up on, the scenario. We're getting things off the ground, whether someone is trying to increase their patient volume, or a new niche, or a program, or a new clinic. We can always dip into the current past patient list, but if it were a little bit newer, maybe we would not have that stuff. Where do you recommend they go at that point?

Finding Niche Influencers Outside Hospital Walls

That is a great question. It's going to depend on what you enjoy doing and what you're good at. For me, where I typically will graduate, gravitate towards if I want to be number one, find all of the key influencers in the community that have decision-making authority that are influencers. You call them physicians. You can also call them chiropractors, nurse practitioners, superintendents, and people who are leaders, ideally like the types of people that you want to treat.

What you're saying is you need to know what kind of patient you're targeting for marketing. A lot of the time in a therapy clinic, it might be a physician, but if you're marketing for a workshop, I do not know. Maybe the physician's not the place to go. Maybe the gym is the influencer. Maybe it's some personal trainers. Maybe it's some local fitness trainers who have a CrossFit box, or you name it. It does not have to be physicians. Just know that you have a specific avatar of the ideal patient that you want to see. Where are their watering holes? Where are they going to come in line with what you're marketing? Is that what you're saying?

That's a very good way of saying exactly what I'm trying to say. Getting really clear on who it is you're trying to help. What their pain points are. What are the things that motivate them to make decisions about their health? Who in the community has influence on that decision-making process? If you know that, you can start to craft a message or an offer or language that can speak a little bit more directly to them. I'm trying not to make this more complex. Do not overcomplicate this.

It was my audio patient, and they were coming across my stuff.

It's like back pain. Your messaging could be like, "You got back pain? That could be it. Is your back stiff in the morning? Yes. I can help you." It does not have to be. It's the simple consistency that really helps. You can speak to the people who have influence over those people with back pain, craft some messaging that might resonate with that audience, and then tell the world about it. Tell the world about it.

I would recommend getting out in the community, building those relationships with those key influencers. The same principle that you applied to your current and past patients. How many conversations can I have to create change? How many influencer conversations can I have to create change? Social media and technology make it a lot easier. It’s very easy to get in front of people. Post relevant content about your ideal client and what you do, then create some type of compelling offer for them to consider you as an option.

I'll share a couple of examples. One of our clients has a mental health practice, and he likes working with members of the Christian faith. In this situation, his influencers are going to be pastors. How can I get in front of pastors who might be having some weekly support groups or something? How can I get in front of them and be a part of the support groups and support the support groups? What kind of materials are they looking for that I can be a part of? In his realm, those would be influencers.

In the obvious orthopedic realm, you're going to talk about physicians. I had a conversation with Angie McGilvrey a few weeks ago, a couple of months ago. I interviewed her a couple of times, down in South Florida. Their clinic got wiped out by a hurricane. They had to restart all over again. They're like, "We want to do what we want to do. We have an opportunity to have a clean, fresh start. Our ideal avatar is a 30-year-old female athlete, like a CrossFit athlete. That's what we're going to set up our business for, and that's what we're going to market for." They were heavily into social media and highlighting the athletes that they worked with.

They would go to the CrossFit events with a table and an awning, and they would go to the gyms, and they would bring their ultrasound units so they could show athletes what was wrong with their soft tissue, and that was their focus. Now they built out this brand-new facility in South Florida that they bought. They built it themselves. It's perfectly set up. It's got the racks as you would see in a CrossFit gym, and it's set up for athletes. You know what? Those 30-year-old females, a lot of them are married. A lot of them have kids. Who makes the medical decisions in the family? The moms.

Moms do. Caretakers.

If they have a child who has an injury, they're going to say, "I'm going to Angie's place. We're going to go to Angie's place. This is where you're going." In that situation, they again didn't focus on the physician so much as on where their ideal avatar was as a client.

They just stuck to it. Just stick to that messaging. Show up and stick to that messaging. You get one, and then you get 2, then you get 3, then you get 5, and you get 7, and that flywheel starts to turn. That's a perfect example.

I'll take it to another extreme. My friend in Virginia forgot D Mike Bills. They spend almost 30 to 45 minutes a week with their team role-playing. This is set in their schedule. For 3 to 45 minutes a week, ask patients for referrals. That's built into their system. I shared the story on the show when things were shutting down over COVID, and people were relying on physician referrals so much. Those tended to drop because people were not going to see their physicians. They were not going out in the community.



He's like, "We only get like 10% or 11% of our patients from physician referrals. The rest of them are from word of mouth." Current and past patients. We didn't affect this at all. That was their focus. There are a lot of ways to do this marketing. You can go the traditional route, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm just trying to open up your minds to think there are other ways to do this that do not have to be traditional. If you know your avatar, your ideal client, another way of saying avatar, if you know your ideal client, then you can find where they're at in better ways.

That pretty much sums it up. It's one of those things where you do not want to oversimplify it, but in my opinion, I do not think it's really much more than that. If you wanted to get a little more tactical, in my opinion, there are probably some pretty relevant tools that you might need to put together just a decent marketing plan. Number one, obviously, you're going to need some type of video or camera capturing device. You could use an iPhone. With the ability to do very light video editing or some graphic design. Somebody's got to do that. It could be like, you could hire a virtual assistant for that.

You could go to Upwork and be like, "Can I hire you for five hours a week to just do this stuff?" It could be very simple. That's a key piece. Your cadence as the marketing director of your company would be to have a block of time on your calendar every week. It does not have to be. Let me assume you're trying to do some social media stuff. It does not have to be a lot of time. It needs to be enough time for you to stop and say, "Who is my ideal patient? What message do I have for them today?" Capture that.

It does not have to be any more complicated than grabbing the voice memo app on your phone, hitting record, and starting to talk to them and saying, "Sherry, I know you got some back pain. It's stiff in the morning, isn't it? It's hard. You know what? I know you're trying to do your laundry, and every time you do the laundry, you pick up your laundry, you pick up your towel, and it hurts. You feel that pain down your leg. You know what I'm talking about, Sherry," and just have fun with it. The cool thing about it is, like, now you've got a full transcript of your message that you can just throw into your favorite AI tool.

You can craft emails from that. You can craft social media posts from that. You can craft scripts, phone call scripts, or whatever it is that you're interested in. You can distribute that to your people. You need that as a tool. You might also need a CRM or a social media posting schedule, which is a bunch of systems. Just some things to think about. If you wake up tomorrow and you're like, "I want to start marketing tomorrow." You're going to need a cadence and a rhythm for doing it. Have a schedule, have a block of scheduled time with specific deliverables that need to be delivered at a regular cadence and then posted or fulfilled on a regular cadence.

As you said, try to make it as simple as possible, but consistency and a calendar during your marketing efforts are imperative. Even if it's like, "Every Christmas we take XYZ around to the referring physicians." Set that up in January for December of that year and make sure it's on the calendar. If we do something for July 4th, same thing, all the way down the line.

Just really quickly, because I know you've experienced this yourself. There are plenty of owners out there. They're like, "I've really gotten crushed because all of the physicians are now employees or have been bought by hospital systems, and they're trying to keep all their referrals within the system." How are you, or have you navigated that?

Surviving Market Shifts Through Fast Strategic Pivots

I would say that number one, stop making excuses. That's number one. Let's start there. I do not feel sorry for you. You've got to toughen up a little bit, and you're probably giving them a little bit too much credit. They do not have as much control as you think they do. There are things you can do. You just have to do it better than them. Now they're going to have some control, but a very easy thing to do is to double down on the way that you impact the community and the way that you leverage the community.

Have better relationships with and build referral partnerships with the people who can actually support you. It does not necessarily have to be people, physicians in the hospital, but you need to double down on there, double down on that. Do the workshops, show up at the career, like at the community events, like do those things consistently and be better at that. That's number one. Number two, social media. Depending on where you're at, I'm not necessarily somebody who's a big proponent of dumping a bunch of money into Facebook ads or into Google ads, but it could be a relevant tool for you.

You may be someone who should consider spending a little money on Facebook ads or Google ads to drive traffic to your practice. Most States have direct access. That's another tool that hospital systems are not going to compete with you on. There are lanes where you can play. It's just about finding which lane you need to play. The strategy that I would not use is to try to market to the hospital system and convince them to give you referrals. I would not use that as the strategy. That's probably the worst strategy.

That's right.

Anything other than that, I would quadruple down on. Is that helpful?

I think so. I've watched you since 2020, maybe in 2019, and you've gone through the phases. I remember when you first came on coaching with me. You had a bus station bench. You might have had a billboard. I know you're doing ads in the local paper. I do not know if you ever got to radio ads or not.

I did a newspaper ad one time.

Billboard or sponsor, a bench or something like that?

I did a billboard at the clinic. I did that for like a year.

I remember you also had hospital systems coming in. I remember you were worried about that and how they're still coming in. They're still coming in. They're infiltrating even in your small towns. You've had to navigate accordingly. You're speaking from experience here.

It's just playing the game. You know what I mean? Listen, there are plenty of things that I can do better. One of the things that I have learned from marketing and businesses that we've had, especially this, is a great tie into what we're trying to build at the conference, and it's those who pivot who will survive. It's so incredibly important for you to continue to learn and to get better. If your goal is to seek comfort and stability, you're playing the wrong game. You're just playing. You're going to get crushed.

You have to learn new skills, be creative, come at a different angle, and try to get an edge over here. Each clinic location is going to be different, with different roles. You have to learn how to navigate that and to apply different skills. I would just say, the ultimate skill is your ability to stay at the top of the organization as much as possible so that you can continue to learn and grow as an entrepreneur and apply the appropriate strategy at the appropriate time. Whether that's hiring or whatever.

It's also training other leaders to do it, to offload some of this as well. If you're truly going to sit at the top of your organization and run it, you might need to hire a director of marketing or someone who's doing it full-time, part-time, ten hours a week, you name it. You have to oversee them and make sure that they're supposed to be doing. You have to learn that skill set, overseeing them and what's expected of that marketing department that you're overseeing. These are all skills that need to be developed over time.

Totally. You can totally do it. You can totally figure out how to create movement in that marketing department, but it's going to take a lot of clarity from you as the owner on what the priority is, what outcomes you're trying to create. You've got to create discipline. We've got to have the marketing meeting every two weeks or whatever it is. Measure your stats, make decisions, challenge yourself, and stay true to that. Stay true to that. It's surprisingly simple.

I will back up and say that whenever I encounter practice owners and entrepreneurs in general who are struggling, who are really, like, floundering, it's usually those who have these blinders on, and they cannot get their heads out of the water. They're in this emotional habitual pattern of behavior, and they're just treating patients and hoping that one day they'll crawl out. It's not until you decide that, like, “I've got to create a little bit of space and think about this a little bit better. Maybe I have to pivot and say no to a patient and learn a different skill and use my calendar as a guide to manage my priorities.”

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