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The Typical Private Practice Physical Therapist Marketing Plan and How It Should Be Typically what happens in most practices is that they have a certain patient volume or ceiling that they consider is all they can treat because of the current staff situation. The patient volume looks like this:
A. Business is down, so you have to go out and build relationships and meet with doctors and in general leave the office. If you are effective the patient volume will go up. B. Now since you are also a physical therapist and likely have a patient load to treat, you can’t go out and continue to build the patient volume. Now remember, we do physical therapy and not chiropractic, therefore we do actually discharge our patients and consequently the patient volume drops and back you go doing “A” again. Another interesting thing is that this rollercoaster pattern is so typical that most practice owners will wait entirely too long, when the statistics are on a major uptrend, to hire additional staff. They are usually so certain that the patient volume will go down because it always does. They don’t know why but it always does. Let me share with you why your patient volume will go down just as it seems you have hit your peak. When you start hitting the ceiling of patient volume or tolerance level, there will be a counter-effort to your expansion. It starts out with the ‘anti-new patient dance’ at the front desk where the staff PTs hop around and complain to the receptionist saying things like – “I can’t fit that patient in!” or perhaps say something to the patient such as, “You are doing well; perhaps we should only see you once a week….” Another common reason many practice owners do not continue to ride the upward trend of their practice is because they commonly have no idea what makes the new patients increase in the practice. Often there is a lack of recognition of direct causation of their expansion and rollercoaster statistics are explained away with comments like, “The winter is always busy” or “Most of the doctors are on vacation right now” or worse, “When is it ever going to slow down around here … this place is a zoo!” As time goes on, the practice statistics take on an appearance of going up and down, up and down, up and down over a period of years. How you may appear to your staff is something like this: As an executive you are usually uncertain as to what drives in new patients, but then, sometimes by fluke you do something and it punches the numbers up. You then decide to have a staff meeting. You tell your staff that we are all very busy, so it is time we look for another therapist, and they (quietly) say to themselves, “Loser, what kind of executive are you not to predict that we needed to be recruiting for another PT much sooner than this!” The group might say “Hurrah!” but they know that they can’t wait another 8-10 weeks for you to find another PT and continue to expand the practice. And so the group pressure NOT TO EXPAND holds the practice down. Since many practice owners may be commonly used to the rollercoaster practice and were not completely certain as to why the statistics went up to begin with, they are not surprised to see them fall. Therefore at the next staff meeting these “executives” tell their staff that the booming patient visits must have been a fluke, while trying to sound like a genius. Yet all it was that kept the stats from rising was the group pressure holding it down. Have you ever been on the physical therapist side of this dilemma and not the owner? What if you could know at least 8-10 weeks before you had to have a new hire and you spoke in that same staff meeting and said, “Based upon our marketing plan and the trend on our statistics it is likely that in 8-10 weeks we are going to need another PT on board. Let’s get a mailing list of PTs from an 8 county area and start NOW promoting for PTs.” Wouldn’t your group think that you were an actual genius? They would definitely think you were an administrative genius if you told the staff at a staff meeting 8 weeks later, “We have a new PT coming on board in 2 weeks. His name is John Smith. I know that you guys have been pushing very hard but can you just hang in there 2 more weeks?” Here is something interesting… If you are just starting a new PT practice and you are the first staff member as the owner/PT, the office manager/reception/administration/collections is the second person you hire, and typically the third person you hire is a PTA. The third person you hired in this scenario is your first mistake in private practice. Ideally, the third person you should hire is someone who drives in business into the organization, doing whatever is necessary. Typically, it is an omitted step. So how does it manifest itself in most practices? What happens is, the numbers are down, and the PT/owner has to go run out and try getting referrals. So whom do you go see? Do you see the doctor who likes you, and is sending you a lot of business or the person who is sending you a couple guys? You go see the one who is sending you the most business already. You get the scenario of a large practice depending on four or five doctors! 60% of the people who attend this course have lost a major referral source within the last 6 months, or there is a threat of one. So what we want to do is put together a system where you can have people come to your door without you going to theirs. Basically, any doctor who is not referring to you does not like you. While this may or may not be actually true, if you think like this you have a chance. To do anything else makes you the effect and not cause. When you assign the cause somewhere else, you can’t do anything about it, but be the effect right? Take on the viewpoint that they don’t like you, and that if they did like you, they would refer. If a lot of doctors who had their own practice knew that you were the best in town you would at least get all their VIPs. That’s not bad right? Building a stable and expanding practice is all about capturing territory – how broad and far can you go to get people to come to you? All you’ve got to do is to get doctors to like you. Doctors who do not refer you business DO NOT LIKE YOU! Plain and simple. They might actually not know you at all, only dislike you slightly or maybe even hate you - but we are going to assume they just don’t like you. Take a look at it. The doctors who refer a lot of business to you do like you and you going out and meeting with doctors and feeding them are simply ways to get them to like you more. But, there is a better way to become well known and well thought of... Sign up for The New Patient Course today! |
