Vinod Somareddy, PT of Reddy Care Physical & Occupational Therapy in NYC, is a hugely successful PT owner of many years and has seen many challenges, but it took the COVID pandemic for him to reconsider how he marketed his clinic and serve his patients better. On today’s podcast, he joins Nathan Shields to share how he has since made some strategic changes and investments that have turned his practice to be better positioned for future growth. Tune in to learn how you, too, can market your business better post-COVID.
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Listen to the podcast here:
Marketing Better Post-COVID With Vinod Somareddy, PT
I’ve got a returning guest. He is one of my very first guests. He’s super successful and works out of New York but lives in Florida. If you didn’t read the previous episode with Vinod Somareddy, I recommend you go back and do that. It was titled Owning Your Business From 1,176 Miles Away. I’m glad to have the Vinod because he’s in the heart of New York City going through the pandemic and coming back out of it. Vinod, thanks for coming back. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me back. The last time was amazing and you did such a great job. I still get a lot of great feedback from people that talk to me about reading the blog and how I run a practice from a distance and all that. It’s great to have that recognition and I attribute it all to you.
I know you’ve continued to grow your practice. For those who want to learn about history, go back and read the episode and what got him to where he’s at. Brings us up to speed a little bit. Share with those people who don’t know about you a little bit about your practice, what you do, and then we can get into the topic.
I’ve been practicing since 2000. We started the practice in 2003 and we started off with a smaller outpatient facility. We grew to two and we do a considerable amount of our services in the home setting. We are a private practice outpatient provider in the home setting and we’ve grown quite a bit. When I started the practice, it was myself, like many of us have done. Now we service most of the Tristate area here in New York, Long Island, Suffolk, Queens, Nassau County, the Bronx, New York City, and Brooklyn. We’re about 80 PT and OT therapists in total as a company. I feel like I get a chance to touch base with almost every one of them on a monthly basis. I do a lot of cool things with the staff, even though sometimes most of it’s on the phone, especially now with all the COVID stuff going.
Do you go that far? Do you have some one-on-one conversations with the majority of the providers and team?
To me, we’ve been pushing hard organization-wide clinically to make sure that we’re utilizing our clinical decision-making minds in developing good goals for our patients. It sounds silly. It’s old school but looking at our goals and how we’re driving the course of patient’s therapy so that they get the best outcomes in the most efficient time. Also, the therapists are involved in every step of the way in a decision-making process. A lot of that comes into compliance training. A lot of that comes into knowing when you document being thoughtful about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, why are you doing it. Allowing the patient to have a good experience because you’re driving the treatment. It’s not just, “Joe, you’re going to come in, you’re going to do this. You’re going to do that.” It’s more you’re going to be thoughtful. We look at the whole course of therapy from every session going forward. It’s been a fun thing for me to communicate about with what the staff, the PTs and the OTs. Thankfully, they’ve been very reciprocative in calling, asking and text messaging me. The team feels small in many ways, although it’s 80 therapists and staff. It seems like I know a little bit about every single person at all times and what they’re doing. It’s interesting.
If I talk to owners and those that I coach, maybe at the most they’ll have 5 to 8 providers and the support staff and whatnot. They’re like, “It’s been months and years since I’m supposed to do the last one-on-one performance reviews with my providers and staff.” Listening to this and I’m like, “They have no excuse. Here’s a guy that’s got 80 providers on it and he’s touching base with them regularly.” What made that switch for you to say, “I need to do this,” or “It’s important to my team that I touch base with them more?”
I’ll add, we do Google Chats and Google Meetings. We do a lot of it. We have a couple of a bunch of guys on at the same time. It’s very interactive. To answer your question directly, it was COVID. I was touching base with a lot of the therapists before that and doing different things. Once COVID hit, it was such a drastic change that you needed to speak to all of your staff on such a frequent basis to reassure them and let them know where things were going and what was going to happen. There are so many factors involved from business laws to Personal Protection Equipment, PPEs, to do I treat this patient? What if the patient is positive? There’s a bunch of different things that are happening.
Our practices on the borderline of Suffolk and Nassau County in a town called Great Neck, it’s about no more than 10 or 15 minutes away from East Elmhurst Hospital, which was the cluster epicenter. It was ground zero. It was a lot of nervousness. As an owner, as a company, you get close to your people. People don’t know. People are looking for you to give direction and feed them information, especially when they’re going to people’s homes and servicing them in their homes. In the clinic, nobody’s showing up. There’s not much to say about that. When you start talking to patients that are in their homes, they are safe and they’re secure. I could go on and on about it, but that was the way it started.
Changing the mentality of your marketing message from PT clinic-centered to patient & physician-centered will improve affinity & engagement. Click To TweetI have to commend you simply because you took on the leadership mantle. It sounds like that your focus was on communication. Whether it was bad news or good news, you’ve at least stayed in touch and let them know, “This is what I’m seeing. This is what I’m doing about it. These are my next steps.” Am I jumping too far ahead or is that what you were doing?
No, that’s a great summary. What’s important about communication is what you communicate naturally. It sounds intuitive to say that, but if you’re calling a guy up and letting them know that everything’s going to be okay and continue to see your patients, it’s not going to be good enough. You’ve got to give them a report. “We’re going to have our masks delivered on this date. We’re going to start our no-touch thermometers coming in here. There’s a delay on this. This is not coming in.” What do you do if it doesn’t come? How do you navigate through it? “You shouldn’t see that patient. You shouldn’t go in.” There was critical decision-making that occurred in every discussion we had led by me, but driven by the clinician and their decisions to what they’re going to do with their patient.
Hence, what I was talking about is that we’ve shifted a lot now into driving the clinician into the decision-making process. It’s not something that’s different than what we normally do, but when you start to look at everything that’s happened, you start to think about what you’re doing a lot more differently and more specifically. It gave us an opportunity to have these better discussions. “What if we have a patient that has this condition? If their health is poor, do we go and see them? It might give them COVID. If they have a terminal illness or they’re on therapy, but they have a respiratory condition, do we risk it? Do we want to go there? They’re very secure, but do we want to do it?” We had a lot of these discussions around things like that and other things too.
Whether they were in their homes or whether they were patients who were coming into the clinic and they were seeing them there, it sounds like you were focused on making their care more intentional with each visit and not looking at the 6 to 12 visit-plan as a whole. You are saying, “Each visit intentionally, what are you going to do to provide the most value and consider everything about the whole scope of that patient as you providing care before you even get into the visit itself?” It sounds like you were focused on being more intentional.
To add to that, the patient’s concern was their safety. When your concern is your safety, then your concern can’t be what you’re doing for your health. If you’re going to be worried about your safety, but you run a nutrition program, are you worried about your nutrition program or your safety? Which one is your priority? We have to make sure that we handle the problem of safety as a senior point. We moved into making sure we can deliver services well and safely.
As you were going through COVID and the pandemic, since you were so close to everything, patients aren’t coming in, what was your mindset as an owner? Not necessarily about patient care, but as a business owner. What was your mindset day-to-day to get you through it successfully?
I learned this conveniently not too long ago and it’s a simple thing. The statement was along the lines of, “Never be surprised at anything.” Every day that I open my laptop in the morning and read my emails, I would be bombarded with things that I would normally be shocked and paralyzed with. Patients calling in, asking questions and canceling, or therapists calling in saying that they might’ve possibly run into a family member or a person that might have had COVID. You name it. Aside from seeing the number of visits in your business going down like roller coaster every day, you also are concerned about the wellbeing of your staff, your community, and your people. You’re listening to the news and you try to make sense of what to do. I took that attitude of I’m not going to be surprised at anything that comes up. I’m going to be as prepared as I can be. I started attacking it. I was reaching out to people who I knew that worked in China. I started reaching out to a lot of different sources of individuals to try to find resources to help us through this time.
When you say attacking it, you’re saying like attacking your fears, the main problems, and what was keeping you from moving forward? Is that what you mean?
It’s attacking complacency that’s set in stone. You have these moments that extend out along through days where you can’t do anything, because if you do something, it may be wrong. It may not even be wrong, but it may not be the most effective thing to do because you might be running around in circles. You’re not doing something effective. I wasn’t banking on a loan to save my business. I wasn’t holding tight to the news, for example. I was like, “I’ve got to do something,” and not be stuck in a concept or an idea.
As you’re saying that, I can imagine that your focus was on action and whatever that took to move the business forward, not relying on some outside source and not necessarily pushing pause. You’re saying, “Now is not the time to push pause. There are things that need to get done and need to move forward. Patients still need to be seen. There are a lot of livelihoods that are on the line here. I need to act.” You took that as an opportunity when you say attack it, it was a matter of acting each time.
I know we’ll talk a little bit about marketing at some point here, but that was a big part of it. I didn’t lay my marketing team off. I kept them. We had a great strategy. I can go over what we did right from day one. We were rocking that out.
Tell me about that. When we spoke prior to this interview, you said you’re doing a lot of stuff differently when it comes to marketing. Let’s get into it. What kind of things are you talking about?
When it comes to COVID, we realized immediately that people didn’t want to hear from us. They were too encumbered with things that they were dealing with every single day with their patients. I’m talking about referral sources, things shutting down and things not being available. We identified the channels of communication. Emails were one of them for patients and also for referral sources. Google ad network, the Google ads in general, many people shut those things down, and rightfully so. I do understand why they would do that. If there’s always an opportunity to deliver a message, there’s always an opportunity to make sure that people understand what your message is and what the timing of the message is. If your message is, “Go out and see patients freely,” and set day to COVID, that’s the wrong message.
We structured our messages to make sure that we were letting people know that we were being super safe and we were restricting different things. We gave them a very clear-cut roadmap of what we were doing through our communications that they would be able to receive. We’re not going to send them a flyer. We’re not going to send them a letter. We’re not going to even call some of them because some of the people are not working. What we found is two areas that worked the best was calls and emails. We got a lot of calls out to different people. I started getting a lot of great discussions with physicians that were discussions that we had over our cell phones. It wasn’t a formal meeting. It was talking about what they’re doing, what we’re doing. I ended up getting a number of their cell phones and we got to be friends.
You’re not alone in that. I know a number of owners across the country that they had providers sit down and call patient after patient. It wasn’t necessarily like, “How is your knee doing?” It’s like, “How are you doing? Are you okay?” If they had some personal information that they could discuss, ”How’s your daughter? How’s your husband? Is there anything that you need?” I’ve known some owners that went out and got groceries for people because they’re afraid to go out the door. Number one, it’s huge that you found the communication channels where people were open and receptive. Number two, I love how you adapted the message accordingly. To speak to your point, did you ever simply close your doors or your door was always open no matter the number of patients that walked in?
Our doors were always open no matter the number of patients that came in and it got low.
Give us an idea. If you’re willing to share, what are you used to in your outpatient setting and what did it go down to?
We’re in probably the low 2,000 sessions a week number. We dropped down to probably in the low 500s a week.
It’s 25% of your typical activity?
Never be surprised at anything, but be as prepared as you can be. Click To TweetThat was where it was probably a low point. The clinics themselves were worse off than the home sessions. To add to what you said before, Nate, our message to our patients was straightforward. We want to be thoughtful and caring about their needs and how they’re doing, but we also delivered a message that physical therapy and occupational therapy, and this is based on information that came out from the CDC. Being an essential business, we made sure our message was very clear that we are here for a specific purpose to help you in what we do and we’re going to do it safely. We want to be with you. We want to treat you. Get going, get moving.
A large majority of those patients didn’t do therapy. That’s what happened. There were a great number of them that called us. We spoke to them week after week that, “I want to wait a week. I want to wait a few more days.” They came in. I had stories of patients of ours that didn’t get to go fairly often. Another guy had a stroke on a Friday night. He didn’t want to go to the hospital so he stayed at home. He had a stroke. He stayed at home during the initial acute episode of the stroke. We always were trying to encourage patients to be thoughtful of their health along with being ready to do some stuff with us.
I saw some of your LinkedIn posts. You took your clinics to a different level. I’ve shared this with other PT owners, but you had big pieces of plexiglass now in between the treatment tables? You’ve got a huge filtration system that filters the air quickly and safely. It filters out all the viruses and whatnot in the air. That’s 1 or 2 for each clinic. You’ve taken it to another level, but you’re sharing that on your social media. I’m sure you’re sharing that in emails and phone calls because patients are calling. Are you sharing a lot of that information, “This is what we’re doing to protect your health?”
I’ll say it this way. When we opened our practices and we start treating patients, you’re a therapist, I’m a therapist. There isn’t a lot that distinguishes us as therapists. You might be better at treating certain conditions and I might be better on and on. When you have a moment like this in time, and we had this happen to us also for Hurricane Sandy back in 2013. I won’t forget that. I had to go to a conference in Las Vegas before Hurricane Sandy. It was a PTS conference. I was flying in and the day I landed, the hurricane was going to be there the next day or something like that. I got in.
My point is that we went through this before. When you have a moment in time where the chips are against you, it’s when your marketing is the most vibrant. You have an opportunity to catch people’s attention. You have an opportunity to show people what distinguishes you versus other people. You want to go way above the top and show people that, “This is your concern. This is what we’re doing. If there’s something better that needs to be done, we’re going to be the first one that’s willing to do it.” Andrew Cuomo is our governor in New York State. He’s been talking about air purifier systems in malls and these kinds of things.
He’s talking about it and I had my system before he talked about it. When people come to my office and see it, and then they listen to him, it makes us look like we’re ahead of our game, but we’re very thoughtful for our patients. If you want to be invigorated by your business, have patients in droves tell you how caring, how thoughtful, how appreciative they are for what you’re doing. We don’t hear complaints ever. Before, you get your cranky patient. You get your emails, “Dr. Somareddy, I’ve been to your facility. It’s fantastic, but it would be great if you had an extra roll of toilet paper on it.” I’m making it up.
You’d hear these things. You’re like, “Where’s this coming from?” Not that I needed to be invigorated, but the amount of appreciation, it’s invigorated me to be doing what I’m doing right now. As a healthcare provider providing people the service that they need and we see it every day with people telling us thank you. If we had a call with a patient, she’s like, “I’m waiting for my doctor to see my doctor. I’m so excited and looking at your social media, I see what you guys are doing. It’s so nice. I can’t wait to come in because I’m going to feel so good knowing that when I get my script, I can start therapy and I’m going to get better.” This is what you want a patient to say scripted if you’re going to coach your therapist. They’re saying it on their own. It’s no BS. That’s the stuff you get. It’s a great lesson. If you do those marketing things, you’re on top of your game and you take an opportunity and you roll with it, there are some great things that can happen. I’m sure there are a lot of practice owners that have done it.
The important thing to note there is that you took the time. Not only did you take the time to focus your energies on this, but then move forward. As a leader, you’re guiding the ship. You’re looking forward. That’s evidenced by the air filtration that you’ve got and now they’re bringing it up. You’re looking forward and guiding the ship moving forward. “What can we do better? What can we do next to give the patients what they want?” What they want at this time in your setting is a feeling of safety like, “I can get my therapy and know that they are doing everything they can to minimize the possibility that I get infected.” That’s part of your marketing strategy and that’s part of your marketing communication. You’re speaking to what they want and what they need obviously and making action. That’s why you’re attacking things in that regard. Has that changed in your mindset with your marketing going forward? Are you committing to doing things differently because you’ve gone through this process?
I’ll start off by saying that these moments in time that occurs is an imprint in people’s minds, in patients’ minds and staff members, in your mind. When that patient comes to you a few years from now, and somebody mentions the word COVID, New York, they’re going to remember their experience to that moment of time that had happened and what they were doing then. Part of what they’re doing then was coming to us. It’s almost a mental image that’s implanted in the person’s mental strata so that way they understand that time. That’s where marketing needs to go.
We talk about marketing, you’d have memorable experiences. You need to have things that shock people. They need to have experiences that are so magical. You hear all these different things that people like Disney have done well with. I know this is completely different from COVID. To answer your question directly, our message that we’re going to go forward is to move from, “We’re a great provider. We’ve done all these things,” to “Here’s a patient status report.” Your patient has come in our marketing reps, for example. We’ve implemented something called patient status reports where when a patient is seen by a doctor, the first thing they do is refer the patient to you as an evaluation. They trust you. They like you. Ten or fifteen visits go by, the doctor doesn’t know anything about what’s going on with a patient.
A lot of therapists will say, “I send them the email. They signed a plan of care.” Are they doing administrative tasks? Do they know anything about your patient? What we start to implement is we didn’t want to lose the sale at the eval. What I mean by that is that you get them sold, they refer your patient, and then they never hear about the patient until they’re getting some reports. We want to go to the physician and let them know, “We got the email. Thank you. We’re going to show you the status of this patient along the way,” to let them know they’re doing well.
They’re doing well. They’re okay. They’re in therapy. Some doctors want to know that the patient who has been recommended is going to therapy. They’re there. The physicians want to look good and they want to know the patient is doing better or doing well. Two of the most important things for the physician. They don’t want to look like they made a bad referral, a mistake sending it to you and it looks bad on them. The patient is getting better. We want to focus our reps, our people that are in the field that are going out on delivering this message to the doctors. We’ll continue to emphasize the things that it’s most needed for patient care. Before it became the air purifier and the isolation barriers, which we have in the clinic and people can go to the website and see that the biggest challenge for us was getting the PPEs.
I was on the phone with my friend who’s working with China. We’re talking every day for hours and figuring out when are the delivery dates, getting backlog. We had PPEs before some of the hospitals did. We donated a couple of hundred masks to the biggest hospital and the biggest employer in New York, Northwell Health, in the middle of the pandemic. They came by with a truck and picked it up because we had it. We want to help out and give the donation out to some of these key people because they were frontline workers. We did do that. That was a prideful moment for us, for me because I was working hard to get the mask. You get to be like, “I’m not going to let go of this ever.” You’ve got to help the community. You’ve got to do something. Anyway, I want to share that part because that was initially the problem. They were moving from PPEs, isolation, filtration to better and more thoughtful about the experience patients are going to have and the referral source.
You’ve shifted maybe a mentality that we provide great therapy to now maybe we’re a support in the system. We’re more supportive of the patients. We’re even more supportive of the providers and taking a different mentality that you’re not necessarily the hero in the story, but you’re the guide and the supporter to help things move along. For some reason, it brings me back to Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. It’s a great book. When a patient considers themselves in their own story, in their own reality, they look at themselves as the hero. They’re not necessarily looking at the PT to say they’re the hero. They want a guide to help them become the hero of their own story.
It seems like in a way you’ve changed that position in your marketing from being the hero, the place that provides great therapy, to the place that says, “If you come to see us, you can be safe. We’ll get you to where you want to be and you will be the hero of your story.” That’s what’s coming to my mind maybe because that’s top of mind. I’ve read that book. It goes to show that you’ve changed your mindset in your messaging and your marketing approach rather significantly because of the pandemic.
There are a lot of factors that go into people’s decisions now. A patient’s decision is what they want to do. We don’t know all those factors yet. Every state is different. Everything is different. You don’t know. You can tell right away people are becoming more attentive. This is this discussion I had with my therapist. I said, “Before, when a patient would come in for their eighth visit and they’re feeling good, you might say to them, ‘Come in three more times. Let’s get you brushed up on a couple of things. Let’s see if there are any issues.’ The patient says, ‘No problem.’” Now it’s a little different. They may not do that. They may say, “It’s good enough. Let’s move along.” It depends on the person. Our therapists have to be able to know that their decisions and how they execute their decisions are going to have a dramatic impact on the patient’s decisions. It’s always been that way. We have to be mindful of that happening in order to be able to provide better service. If you can’t think with that mental element, then what do you create that makes your facility better for that patient or those kinds of patients?
When you're on top of your game and take an opportunity and roll with it, great things can happen. Click To TweetFocusing on each visit as an important and valuable time and place for that patient. How can you provide even more value by having the right mindset and being more intentional about what they’re doing?
To add to that at one point, the fact that you take a patient’s temperature every time they come in as a point of doing something different than you did before, that’s one step toward caring for a person. You’re already doing that. You’re already establishing better care for your patient. I do think that physical therapy offices after this pandemic will have better retention of their own patients. I’m assuming that everybody’s doing that because you basically have to. If you don’t take people’s temperature when they walk in, you can run into some potential troubles. Doing that extra step, the masks, the whole thing, it shows your patients that you are thoughtful about what’s going on in society and the public as a public health crisis. As much as it’s a terrible thing, it’s an opportunity for us to show patients that we’re able to respond as healthcare providers. This is a little bit of what you’re talking about before with not being the hero.
To prove the point, you went down to 25% of productivity and you bounced back 70% or 75%?
We’re up a little bit higher than that now. We’re moving along quickly. The smaller clinic is doing better. The bigger clinic is not doing as well. It takes some time, but it’s been good. It’s been a lot of work.
The thing that I’ve stressed about is that people not push pause during this pandemic but rather reset. Take the time to maybe consider what you’re doing and how it needs to be changed. You did that. Do you feel you were forced because of the conditions to look at what you were doing or did you intentionally sit down and say, “How can we do things differently to make the most of this?”
For every person, it’s got to happen that way. I looked back in January, February 2020, we were cruising along and doing what we were doing. Some of the changes we’ve made now, as far as improving our infrastructure and improving our systems in place, are monumental things.
We’ve talked about marketing, but you’ve changed some of the stuff you’ve done systematically in your business because you’ve made some changes.
One of the things I’ll say about that is we’ve always been a big proponent of having people do specific functions. It makes sense to have a technician be an expert at a specific function, but this has been a good opportunity for our staff to learn how to do other things. It’s not that they’re going to do those other things on a forever basis, but the more educated they become, the more available they become to help in and do things, the more they feel they’re valuable. There’s a part of this time where for certain people who enjoy working at your facility or enjoyed being with a company, they want to feel valuable. If it does come again, they don’t want to lose that job that they’ve worked 8 to 10 years to be in and they like. That’s a part of what you see is people are more willing to learn a bit more, do some things, work within efficiencies to help find better ways. We talked about it early on. I said, “This is something that may come up again. It may not be COVID, it might be something else, but how are we going to respond then?” We know how to respond. We know what to do. That was a big deal.
You did a lot of training with your teams?
It’s a lot of phone calls. There were those days where I put in almost 25,000 steps walking around on the phone, talking, having meetings and going over questions. I won’t forget those days. I had a great dinner though. I definitely eat a lot of food at the end of the day. I’m starving from walking around all day long.
How are you feeling about things moving forward? Are you starting to feel more comfortable, excited about the future?
I’m very excited about the future. It’s a shock thing where you get into a moment of shock. You wake up in the morning and you are willing to be shocked, but not willing to be shocked again. You know what happened and you don’t want to go through it. When you see what the patients are saying and you see where the progress we’ve made, it validates the importance of us as healthcare providers and physical and occupational therapists. That feels good because when COVID first hit, I don’t know about PTs but I sat back and said, “Where is my value going to be in all of this?” It’s an easy answer if you’re a PT. People need help. You know all the reasons why you’re valuable. There’s a part of it where you’re like, “If I can’t treat a patient face-to-face anymore, then I’ve got to do telehealth. How much of that am I going to do? Am I going to be good at it? What’s going to make me different?” You think about all this stuff.
Any other thoughts that you want to share for people as they’re ramping up and coming back out of it? Any advice or input that you want to share?
I would say number one, don’t be afraid to go out, interact with physicians and groups out there. They’re being protective, but they also need to know that as a company, as a whole, that we’re out there. We’re treating. We’re open. We’re doing things. We want to interact with them. It’s a great opportunity now where people are a little bit slower to have some good, meaningful discussions with people.
You found the physicians are open to communication, even by cell phone, like you were saying.
Some physicians are particular about how they interact with you, but they also know that they want to work with somebody who’s willing to communicate with them. That’s a big thing. Another suggestion is that we’ve dialed in communication like we mentioned with our staff. Talking to guys, being involved and getting them to understand some of the key fundamentals in physical therapy practice. I’m talking about compliance, documentation, learning to do things that we tend to forget about. When things like this happen or even don’t focus on, you get an opportunity to make sure that they have the basics well and that bodes itself into clinical care.
We rarely take the time and only if we remember to do it, spend time on compliance, documentation, maybe doing some chart audits to see if things are in line. It’s things that we’re supposed to be doing that we tend to put it off to the side until things have slowed down. They slowed down. It’s a good time.
The weaknesses in your infrastructure and in your practice will be the things that slow you down as you come out of this.
It’s a great opportunity when those things expose themselves, not to rush past them, but take the time to fix them. Do something about it. Attack it like that mindset that you had.
One last thing, another thing we did with a couple of our guys was we promoted them. They went through this whole pandemic, put on a lot of work and a lot of time. They were on the front lines with our company, working weekends, evenings, being such a resource for not just their fellow staff members, but their patients. It was a great opportunity for them to learn what it is to be challenged in a role. They had that opportunity. A couple of guys did it well and they’ve now been promoted or they’re in the process of being promoted. It offers an opportunity to see where a person’s experience through something like this helps build their character, their ability, and now they can use it to help continue growth without it being a problem.
Did you find that you’re able to find those people that were most aligned with your business and make some changes in that regard?
We always know who’s doing what. I hate to say it this way, but it did weed out people that know where they’re going to go. You know also with that they’re going to do something with the team. It’s a great opportunity to see where their experience could be compounded with their willingness to do something, to expand them, put them in a better role or put them in a promoted role and help grow. There are some guys that are on the down-low kicking butt throughout the whole process. You’re talking about who you want to promote. Also, somebody throws that guy’s name out. You’re like, “I didn’t think about that guy, but that guy is awesome.” He jumps ahead of other people because it was one of those things where he quietly did everything, easy to work with, and did all the things you need to do. He may not have the resume of twenty years or something, but he’s a guy that you can rely on.
It’s cool that a situation like this can highlight the people that are rock stars within your business, and then allow you to also see the other people that need to be ushered out the door and find a better position, something that aligns better for them. It’s cool that we have this opportunity to do that and to take advantage of it. Good luck continuing to move forward. Hopefully, no spikes come up. Things smoothly move forward in each phase for you especially there in New York City. If people wanted to get in touch with you, are you open to that? Can you share your contact info?
My email address is Vinod@ReddyCare.net. I have no issues with people calling me on my cell phone. It’s (516) 351-6848. I’m sure I’ll get calls from the world, thanks to you, Nate, because everybody listens to you.
I’d recommend people check out your website. If people checked out your website, they could see some of the steps that you’ve taken to protect the patients. I know you’ve got pictures of the filtration system, the security glass and whatnot. I highly recommend they check that out.
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What I want to say here at the end is simply that I recommend you check out Vinod’s website, ReddyCare.net. Check out some of the safety measures that they have put in place. Maybe there’s an opportunity for you to see what you can do in your clinic, whether it’s the dividers or the filtration device or something like that. Maybe get an idea of what they’re doing that sets them apart and makes patients comfortable coming to see them if you’re in such a situation that patients are still concerned. Once again, thank you to Vinod for taking the time. Hopefully, you gained a lot of great insight from his experience. By all means, check out his previous episode as well because he’s got a great backstory and plenty of great information to share.
Important Links:
- Vinod Somareddy
- Owning Your Business From 1,176 Miles Away – previous episode
- Building a StoryBrand
- Vinod@ReddyCare.net
- https://www.ReddyCare.net/
About Vinod Somareddy, PT
Dr. Vinod Somareddy, PT, DPT, is the founder and president of Reddy Care Physical & Occupational Therapy with locations in Farmingdale and Great Neck, New York. Started in 2003, Dr. Somareddy built his practice under the guiding principles of providing quality care that fosters a patient-centered culture committed to improving the lives of everyone who comes through the door.
As the eldest son in the family, Dr. Somareddy decided to honor his father’s own dedication to patient care, naming his practice after him. Dr. Somareddy’s father, nicknamed “Reddy,” worked as a nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, where he garnered a reputation for his knowledge, perseverance, and compassionate patient care. Dr. Somareddy knows his success stems from his father’s influence, and he built a team that puts the patient’s needs above all else.
Dr. Somareddy earned his degree at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. Dedicated to his profession, he is an active member of the American Physical Therapy Association and participates in many educational programs, lecturing on clinical and administrative topics.
In his spare time. Dr. Somareddy enjoys playing sports and watching baseball, traveling, exercising, and broadening his skills in business management.
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