Do you want to make 2017 the year you double your Physical Therapy patient flow, automate your practice and finally achieve time freedom?
If so, then you have to begin by asking yourself some difficult questions…
In the previous blog post, How To Make 2017 Your Best Year Ever in Private Practice Physical Therapy, you saw a video where we took a look at where you were at over the last 12 months and where your business is at now.
Now I want to take a look forward to where you want to be 12 months from now.
Watch this video to see what I am talking about:
I’ve been thinking a lot about making 2017 my best PT practice year ever…
And in this post what works for me (and the hundreds of successful PT practice owners I work with) and I’d like to share it with you, so we can crush this year together!
To begin I want to start off with a helpful exercise called the Dan Sullivan question that’s straight out of a book called The Dan Sullivan Question …shocking 🙂
The Dan Sullivan Question
Real quick, let me first tell you who Dan Sullivan is.
Almost every business entrepreneur or guru that’s out there right now has coaches themselves.
The one that I hear most often cited is Dan Sullivan
Dan wrote this short little book — literally like a 30 minute read — that gives you some really, really powerful stuff. (You can grab a copy here)
His question single-handedly helps you distill everything you need to do to set and achieve the highest leverage goals for your year. The question reads like this…
The Question That Must Be Answered…
If we were having this discussion 12 months from now and you were looking back over those 12 months, what has to have happened in your life, both personally and professionally, for you to feel happy with your progress? Specifically, what concerns do you now have that need to be eliminated? What opportunities need to be captured? What strengths need to be maximized?
If you’re willing to write down where you want to be 12 months from now, you’re way ahead of the rest of the pack and there’s a much better chance that you’ll actually achieve it once you write it down.
One of My Biggest Secrets: Revealed
It’s one of the big secrets that I’ve realized over and over again and I’m going to give you an example.
My wife and I had a dream from the time that we got married that we always wanted to have a farm and we wanted to raise our family on a farm.
When we first got married, we lived in a condo. We had our oldest son there and that’s where I was living when we opened my private practice years ago. As our family expanded, we bought a single family home and went from just one child to four little boys.
We then had our four bedroom house. I think we must have been there eight and a half years and had looked at hundreds of other homes and just couldn’t find what we were looking for.
So, I finally said to my wife “hey, there’s this little exercise that I use in business all the time… why don’t you and I go through this together and we’ll do the same thing here?” Steph agreed to do the exercise and it unfolded a little like this…
We laid out a checklist of 73 different things that we were looking for in our dream house.
We wanted..
- things like a paddock so we could have horses
- a body of water
- conveniently located to the business and our families
- four or five bedrooms
- something like an 1800s farmhouse
- a barn
- an area for gardening… maybe a south-facing hill
There were things that we were looking for that were really basic.
Anyhow, once we wrote that down, it was less than a month later that we got a call from a friend…
She told us that her friend was selling her farm and asked us if we wanted to take a look at it.
Steph and I went through the list of the 73 things that were exactly what we wanted in a home.
This farm had like 68 of the 73.
It was really, really cool.
We ended up buying that property and we’ve done a lot of upgrades in that house, but we were finally able to realize our dream house once we got it in writing.
Years of struggling to find it.. actively looking for about six years of the eight and a half that we were in the previous home… We knew that this was what we were looking for, we just couldn’t find it.
Once we wrote it down on paper, it finally came to life. It’s the same thing with anything else.
How Do You Apply This to Your Practice?
Now let’s take a look at what this means for you and your practice
Ideally, 12 months from now, for you to feel happy with the progress that you’ve made over the last 12 months..
I need you to answer the following questions:
- How many hours a week are you treating in the clinic?
- How many hours a week are you working?
- Are you taking work home with you or do you separate the two?
- Do you feel less stress than you feel today?
- Do you have a good relationship with your family and spouse?
- What does your team look like?
- Do you have staff that are bringing solutions to you or do you have staff that are bringing problems to you?
- Do you want to have more therapists 12 months from now or are you just a one-person PT shop?
- Do you have a receptionist coming in to help you? A billing person maybe? What does that look like?
- How much money do you want to make
There are no right or wrong answers… Remind yourself of that as you’re making progress towards success.
You get to define exactly what it is that is real to you. Huge growth and 50% or 20% year over year growth isn’t for everybody, but you get to define what the ideal situation is in your life.
Financially, you get to define what that is as well. How much money do you want to make that is possible with where you’re at now?
And most of us tend to limit what our cap is. So, what does that look like?
You want to think about where you’re at financially. Ask yourself these questions:
- Are you struggling payday to payday or month to month to make ends meet?
- Feeling the stress of payroll or maybe you have abundant reserve money?
- Maybe you’re more profitable than you’ve ever been before and you feel really comfortable and happy going to work.
You get to define exactly what that looks like.
There are no right or wrong answers… Remind yourself of that as you’re making progress towards success.
Another huge thing, at least for me in private practice, has always been about figuring out marketing.
I’ll give you an example of a goal we had over the last 12 months.
What we’ve noticed in our area is that we have to become less and less reliant on physician referrals.
Back in 2007 or 2008, we had a highest ever amount of physician referrals ever. 154 in one month for one office!
Well, over the course of the last seven or eight years, we’ve actually dwindled down because of hospitals employing more than 80% of the physicians in my immediate area.
We’re actually down to averaging about 15 referrals a month from physicians.
So we’ve had to replace that.
By the way, we’re bigger, better, and more profitable than ever before.
So after losing all those physician referrals, what did we replace them with?
Well, we had a conscious effort over the last 12 months to replace it with patients returning for additional care. We’re crushing it there and that’s really cool.
Our group’s doing a great job with internal marketing and referrals from our past patient base.
We also wanted to expand what we’re doing in the general public and with attracting direct access patients, so we set goals specific for that.. and then we went out achieved them. We were able to set the actions in place.. which I’m going to talk about in my next blog.
What Else Can You Do?
So some things to think about there. You’re going to want to pick up a copy of Killer Marketing Secrets, if you don’t have it already, and go through chapter 2.
Basically take the time, take an hour, take two hours, three hours, whatever it is, with the key people in your organization.
I also recommend doing it with your spouse or significant other. Ask them what the next 12 months look like to them.
- Where are we going?
- What does this look like?
- What’s our dream farmhouse or dream house look like?
- What does our dream practice look like?
So that when you achieve it, you can say hey, we defined where we wanted to go and we’re there. We did it.
It’s a really cool exercise.
Make sure you get that done before taking a look at my next blog post. I plan on talking about a system where you can find people who are already where you want to be.
We want you to learn what they’re doing – copy what they’re doing.
You and I are private practice owners, so we want to look for private practice owners that are where we want to be.
This exercise helps us learn exactly what that is. We need to learn what they did to get there so we can go out and take a huge shortcut.
And just one last time I’d like to stress how important it is to follow all of the steps.. write these things down!
Myself and many other private practice owners are living proof that these methods can help us build our dream practices.
So let’s start making 2017 our best year ever! 🙂
To your private practice success,
Chad
P.S. Want my full guide to making 2017 your best year ever? We’ve had over 900 downloads of it and your can grab your FREE PT Marketing Checklist & Free Training by clicking here.
I reveal strategies that will help you double your patient flow, automate your practice and create ultimate time freedom in the new year
