Vinod is one of my favorite PT friends – he’s determined, focused, and gets what he wants, which shows in his ability to live in Florida while actively owning his PT practices in New York. He’s the epitome of what we strive for and tout in the Physical Therapy Owners Club. Success? Check. Stability? Check. Freedom? Double check. Having an uncle who is a vascular surgeon that did very well for himself in having his own practice and having the skill set on a physical therapy technique that he felt could create a big impact pushed Vinod Somareddy to exceed himself and be successful as a private practice owner. After listening to the episode, you’ll see what I’m talking about. He ramped up his clinic quickly with the guidance of Measurable Solutions (now Fortis Business Solutions) and learned along the way how to organize his company, hire the right people, and manage by statistics to ensure his company is reaching its goals. Check out his path and what he’s learned along the way by joining the club today.
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I’ve got a special guest, Vinod Somareddy. Vinod is someone that I’ve always looked up to and thought that if I ever did this podcast, he was one person in particular that I needed to interview. Vinod owns a successful growing thriving practices in New York, yet for the past number of years has lived in Florida. He owns, manages and directs clinic from a major distance from Florida, the clinics exist in New York. I think it’s a dream that a lot of physical therapy clinic owners either have or never even considered because they probably didn’t think it was possible. Vinod does it and does it really well. I think you’re going to appreciate the insight of Vinod. He’ll open up your mind regarding possibilities. I want you to pay close attention where he talks about statistics and as they relate to time. A really powerful insight that I think might come across as obvious but is really helpful if we really understood and implemented that. Vinod even told me that that’s something that he’s leaned on and understood the last few months or just recently. You can speed up your learning process and learn from Vinod after taking so much of his insight and wisdom.
He also makes reference to measurable solutions during the course of the interview. Measurable solutions no longer exist and I believe it’s now for this business solutions. Nonetheless, that was a major force in his growth and was the consultant that help really grow his practice and structure his practice going forward. You’re going to gain a lot of great insight and wisdom from Vinod. I hope you enjoy it.
Listen to the podcast here:
Own Your Own Clinic From 1,176 Miles Away with Dr. Vinod Somareddy
Thanks for taking some time to be with me, Vinod. You’ve got a great story that I want to share with my audience, especially considering the lifestyle that you’re living as a physical therapy on this time. Could you go back a little bit and just bring us up to speed on your story? What got you into physical therapy in the first place and specifically physical therapy ownership?
Thanks for having me on this podcast, Nathan. I appreciate it. The main thing for me is when I got into physical therapy, I was looking at getting into medicine while I was in high school. Our high school had a great sports medicine program, kinesiology program, which is different for many public high schools to have that program. I got interested in the subject of the human anatomy. I played sports and they got me an opportunity to volunteer in a physical therapy office during one of the courses, which was an internship. It was about a 30-hour internship.
I got to choose between chiropractor, physical therapy, or a medical office. I went to all three of them and the physical therapy office was the one that I enjoyed the most. Interaction with the patients was great. It was alive. It was an action-packed environment. People were always doing things and patients that were getting rehab were happy. They felt like they were being moved in a direction of health and well-being. From the 30 hours I was there, I saw some people come in with crutches and leave walking or have a lot of pain and tell these great stories; I enjoyed that appreciation and gratification.
I worked hard to get into PT school. I was basically a C+ student in high school and I started off my first year and a half in college at about a 2.4 GPA, which is basically a C+ student at that time. I had to work hard for the last two and a half years to get myself into a better condition grade-wise, and I did. I did well. It gave me confidence that I can do something which was needed. I needed that to subsequently become a private practice owner, a physical therapy business owner. I went to physical therapy school. When I came out of school, I started working at a facility and got great experience. I thought it was wonderful, but I always had the passion and dream to have my own practice.
That’s one of the things that I enjoyed, that volunteer experience that I saw. It was a HealthSouth-owned clinic, but the way they operate is the one director there ran it like it was his own, and it was great. I felt like running it and treating patients and being involved with that space, commanding the whole space at that time, was an awesome experience. I always had this idea of wanting to be in private practice. I felt that I could have an impact in my area. I thought that the physical therapy in the area was good. It was a growing area in New York. I thought that I could have a good impact in what I was doing as a physical therapist. As a private practice owner, I have some good ideas. I thought that my idea is to put in place and to create a good company.
[Tweet “I made sure that when they went back to the doctor, they were happy with what I did.”]
Were you always drawn to business ownership of some kind or other, or did you feel like, “I could do this better if I just did it myself? I’ve got some ideas that I want to put out there into the world.”
My family didn’t have a business background at all. I do have one particular uncle of mine who is a vascular surgeon that did very well for himself in having his own practice. That was something that was encouraged for me to do in getting into the space. Then there was also the skill set that I had. I studied a physical therapy technique very early on after I graduated. I felt that technique itself could create a big impact. There’s a combination of both, to be honest, that I felt like you’re putting something new into this space but also felt like if I was going to exceed myself and be successful, I probably would have to do it under those terms as a private practice owner.
Can I ask what the technique was?
It was Jones Counterstrain.
You eventually decided to strike out on your own. How many years out of out of school were you?
I was out of school about a year and a half.
That’s pretty quick out of school, it seems.
I definitely grew up a lot slower than I should have. If I could have grown up a little faster, I probably would have made a lot less mistakes that I did make.
Tell me a little bit about that. You decided to get into practice on your own, strike out, hang out your own shingle, so to say. How long did you work in that space on your own? Did you see some immediate success? Was it slow going was or did you ramp up pretty quickly? Tell me about the general experience.
I had the fortune of ramping up fairly quickly because I had gone prior to Medical Solutions and did the new patient course there. Basically, that helped get me going early on. I also have utilized some of the different relationships that I had established with my father who’s a nurse in the area for 30 years. He knew a lot of different physicians in the area, so I got to meet them with a good amount of goodwill because he had taken care of a lot of their patients. It was a good ability to generally state that I’m a physical therapist and I’m sure they communicated that. I didn’t get many referrals from a lot of those guys, but there were definitely connections I made from those guys that got me referrals. I could say that that was definitely a big part of it to get me going.
What would you say are some of your most successful marketing actions just getting started to get those new patients in the door?
When we did the new patient course, a lot of that was some direct mailing that we did. That created a good base. It established a base for us as far as being open and being there. At that time, we didn’t have as much as a game that we have now, the internet and social media and so forth. It was a little bit more face to face; a lot of face-to-face meetings when patients came. When they called, they were in the office as soon as possible. We’ve got them in quick. We delivered. I gave them great sessions, great treatments and got them better. I made sure that when they went back to the doctor, they were happy with what I did. I didn’t pump them up and tell him to say these different things.
I was the real deal. I just got them to understand what they’re going through. I gave the credibility that we were a company or I was a practitioner that knew what they needed. I could validate physical therapy as a service for those patients. I ended up getting a lot of referrals from different people like the ENT, the pulmonologists and internal medicine doctors. They could see the benefit of physical therapy not only because I could sell it well, but I did give them the benefit of getting well through what I was doing with them. The patients will go back and say, “I’m walking better. I have less pain,” and the doctors are a bit like, “I didn’t expect to hear that but it’s great that you’re feeling better.” That was a good part of it.
You ramped up fairly quickly and the direct mailers were helpful in gaining some new patients. That’s a great problem to have. Were there other challenges that came up that maybe you didn’t foresee? What was the biggest challenge for you, if you recall?
Every problem came up, that’s for sure. One of the biggest challenges for me was being a forward-thinker at that time. We started to establish some of the marketing that we did, but then we were behind in other areas. For example, our billing, our documentation and our compliance were so behind because I didn’t have the creativity. I’d have the time to think about how to establish those things going forward and that all caught up to us at some point. Every one of those factors caught up to us at some point, either we weren’t getting paid or we had a small audit and the audit came back where it wasn’t favorable.
We were like, “Why are we getting audited? What’s happening here?” It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a couple of charts and it was a one-time thing. When you’re doing something and you think you’re doing well and you’re not looking at every area and then somebody is asking questions in the area and you don’t know about it or you’re not prepared for it, it shocks you a little bit. I didn’t know very much about a hiring and HR rules. Every one of these areas came up eventually to hit us in the face to some degree. We advanced through those hurdles and we improved and we are where we are today. It was tough during those times. It definitely took some hair off my hairline.
We could go down so many roads as you bring those issues up, but the overarching question is at the time, were you treating full time and then having to deal with these issues on the side? If you weren’t treating full time, how did you pull yourself out of treating full time so that you could be the forward-thinker that you’re talking about so you can address the issues that came up like that?
Going back to Medical Solutions, they gave a clear indicator to me that I need to move out of being a clinician to being a forward-thinker. I didn’t initially start treating a lot of patients. I was getting anywhere between 75 to 100 patients a week. It’s up to 140 some weeks because I didn’t have a therapist. I was there Saturday, Sunday. I was there until 11:00 PM many nights. The patient would be there with me until 10 PM. It’s New York. They’re awesome people that can hang. I was usually in the office at 6:30, the first patient at 7:00. About 7:00, the coffee’s through. I was done around 10:30 most days. The best day was Saturday because I could get out at 4:00 instead of getting out at 11:00.
It was hard. I definitely built that up. I hired and we went through a number of different people because we didn’t know how to hire so well. At some point, I hired enough good people that I was able to cut back my hours four days a week, including Saturdays and Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’d be like an admin day. Those admin days were tough because you’re recouping from your long Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. I was still working the long shift on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We had patients coming in and we were working it. The best part about that is that I learned a lot and I didn’t go in it light. I wanted it as hardcore as possible. I learned a lot through the process.
One thing I know about you is that you’re focused and determined and that you’re going to push through those issues. Was it hard for you though? I can imagine for some physical therapists, at least in my experience personally and some of the therapists I talked to you, was it hard for you to step away from treating or was that an end goal for you all the time?
I don’t know if it was end goal to step away completely from treating. It definitely wasn’t. It wasn’t that hard, to be honest, at the time because I was seeing so many patients in such a short period of time for a good two years that I realized that if I didn’t get away from this that I could do nothing else. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t have any kids. We had a small little apartment about 500 square feet. We had a small apartment near the office and that’s all I did. I ate, I slept, I came to the office and drank coffee. My wife was at the office too. Our lives became enmeshed with this and I figured that at some point we have to have children, at some point we’ve got to do something. I’ve got to go to the gym. It became the only option basically for me.
From what you’re saying, it sounds like you took a step by step approach. You gradually worked yourself out of treating six days a week to three days a week and including some admin time. Eventually, you started backing off the treatment time little by little. With the issues that you came up against, you needed that admin time to address those things. What was your most successful action and during that time to address those issues and overcome them to the point where you could step away and address them and that it’d be handled for the long-term and not just overcoming that particular situation that you were up against?
The most successful action was having my wife there. She’s my wife, but she’s also a great administrator. She knew how to administer some of the vital components of the business like the billing. Development of that area takes time. You don’t know that area well. There aren’t robust consultants that can come into your clinic and say, “After your EMR or your billing method in New York in this geographic location, these are the codes for Medicare. These are the plans to get the credential with. These are the regulations and this is the way you’re going to bill.”
That part of it is very difficult and we wanted to keep the billing in house. We knew that if we gave it off initially that we would never learn it. We would never be in charge of the income line to our business, the bloodline of our business. The most important thing that we did was we learned through trial and error to have that. I could focus on treatment, I could focus on the marketing and she could focus on that part of it. Initially, the most successful action was hiring. It continued to be a successful action, hiring high-level administrators to take on sub-components of those areas. They are refined and good at doing it.
I imagine her being an administrator. Finding good people, was there any secret sauce to that? I know you went through a lot of trial and error, but did you land on something that hit for you to find good people?
Having somebody do the interviews, that wasn’t me; my wife did it. We have somebody else do it afterwards. It gives a different perspective to the prospective employee, and it gives you a different perspective from the individual interviewing the person. It’s a simple thing of having another individual conduct the interview and getting a perspective from a two-way communication. As far as the secret sauce goes in regards to hiring people, it’s cliché but finding the things that marry the two people together and not marrying them up for a short enough time that it makes no sense.
For example, if somebody is going to go back to school, then great. If they’re going to go back to school for three years, it makes sense. If it’s one year, it doesn’t make as much sense to invest in time with them. Let’s say, you are hiring a physical therapist. The therapist comes in and they just want to do something differently than what you could offer. The natural flow of that definitely is important. You have to be able to ask the right questions. You’ve got to be prepared. That’s part of what I look back that I could have done differently. When we did do it well, it showed well as being prepared for the interview. When you go in there, you know what you want and you can ask the key questions.
Nathan, I’m sure you’ve done it yourself. You’re trying to do a patient or you’re doing a meeting, and then the interviewee comes in and you want to meet them. You sit down in the chair, you look at their resume quick and then you’re in your discussion. That’s not being prepared. Being prepared is looking at who the person is, getting the information about their phone screen, looking at all of the components, preparing your questions based on it, and being thoughtful for the person’s time when they come in and getting your answers. That was some of the best hires we’ve done was the ability for us to seek out and gather as much information. If you want to call it intel because it is a sales component. At the end of the day, it’s either you want to buy it or not, or they want to buy you or not. You have to get as much intel as possible.
[Tweet “We’re in a business of people. We’re dealing with people. It is a worthwhile investment.”]
I noticed from my experience as well, once you recognize what you were looking for better and knew what questions to ask, once you were a little bit more solid and had a good foundation of what employee worked well within your group and then match that up against the intel that you received regarding that person, then you could ask the right questions. Then maybe not being afraid to ask more detailed questions like, “You’re going back to school.” Some people might lay off that question at the interview process but you need to dig it a little bit deeper like, “When are you going back to school and what’s it for? Is that in line with my company?”
One thing that we get a little bit softer about is invading people’s privacy. You’ve got to follow the HR rules and you’ve got to make sure that you’re doing it professionally, but you have to be able to gather information to make good decisions, not just for yourself but for them as well because their time is valuable. Sometimes they come in and they just don’t fit and you know it. When they do come in and they do fit, then it becomes a different game because now you have to make sure that they are going to be part of your group and part of your culture for a period of time. That’s a business we’re in. We’re in a business of people. We don’t sell things on the internet as a main source of our income or our business. We’re dealing with people. It is a worthwhile investment.
If you want to provide us a little bit of social proof, and if you’re willing to share maybe some of your stats and how well your company is doing and how well it’s grown over the last few years. After sharing a little bit of that social proof, can you give us some insight in what allows you to then own from the distance that you’re at?
When we engaged with Medical Solutions and then we continue to use all of their work, it gave us an opportunity to look at how do we scale this business? How do we make this organizational chart into more of an actual functioning organizational chart? That has always been one of the tenets of our process to put in good people on those seats on that chart. That started to lead us to proper hiring and proper positioning. We’ve done 5,000 four years in a row, so we’ve had good growth in the last three to four years.
When we first started in 2004, we were a startup scratch practice and we’ve grown to over 1,500 patient visits a week. Many of those are done in our home setting. We have two clinics that are fairly robust in size. We haven’t done the smaller clinic model as much. We have pretty good-sized clinics. We employ between 75 and 80 staff at this point. During the course of developing all of that, we went through the organic development phases of how to create that model. We hired very early on a CEO and that position has continued to grow and develop. When you have somebody who’s there, a CEO or high-level executive, they will have to grow from a practice that’s doing 500 visits a week, for example, to 1,000. That’s going to be a different book.
Part of the challenge and what we’ve done and what I continue to do as a leader of an organization is make sure that I’m forward thinking enough. That way we can grow and scale through what we have in as far as processes go without having to add on potentially an investor or potentially make some different lateral moves. We’ve tried to do it organically and grow it. From a stat perspective, those are basically our numbers. We haven’t even hit the stride with some of the things we’ve done. Some of the home health stuff is fairly new. We haven’t done any occupational therapy yet. It’s been about four and a half years we’ve been doing that out of the fifteen years we’ve been in business. It’s grown tremendously for us in our geographic area.
There are a lot of reasons for that being in the Denton, New York area. We haven’t done occupational therapy. We haven’t done speech therapy. We haven’t ventured into those areas, but once we do that’s going to help our growth quite a bit. At this point, our model hasn’t been multiple partners; I’ve been the sole owner of it. I’m not adverse to bringing in high quality equity shareholders into the company that are current staff, and so forth. We want to make sure they’re developed and they’re substantial so they could bring a lot of value.
One thing that caught my attention was that you brought up a CEO. I know from just knowing your story that you brought him up from within, and that was earlier on. Did you say around the 500 visits per week mark that you brought up that CEO and started training him and developing him and whatnot, is that right?
It was around 350 to 400 visits that we did that. I want to add one point, Nathan, calling him the CEO at the time was a very noble thing to do. It was a pretty large jump for what the company needed. Most CEOs in companies of that size are going to be the owners. We made a move to reflect on what you said, to help develop a great person and help them, through the course of development, become a better CEO and challenge him to be better over the growth period of time which is the name of the game, and we’ve done that. That’s been a nice thing that worked out for us. Just to comment on it for any of your audience, it could be somebody that could be an administrative person that may not be CEO. They might be a vice president of operations or something like that. Your point is we did take somebody internally and stepped him up into a higher level. They now have the responsibility and the accountability to be somebody. They could see the vision that I put forth, which is not always an easy thing for people to see. A lot of credit to Alex for doing that and it’s been that way.
I don’t think that’s a typical story. At that stage where you’re maybe 300 to 400 visits a week that you take somebody and move them that high in the organization, there had to be something within him that you recognized. Because knowing Alex, I believe he was just one of your techs.
He had come in as a receptionist into the company. There are two parts of the story. One is that ever since I’ve been little, I was always the kid that wanted to eat the bigger piece of the cake or thought I could hit the ball further than anybody else even though I’m half their age. Some of it was delusional, but I also think it’s an attribute in my personality to go after something and be in that mindset. I saw that Alex had that too. He had some of those components in him which is a risky proposition for him. I wouldn’t say it’s risky. It’s just a challenging proposition for him to take on a responsibility that big and grow. He’s got to see that at 2,000 visits or 5,000 a week that his role is going to be very different from 300 or 400 visits a week. The fact that he was able to look at the goal and see that, it gave me an inclination. I was kicking the horse. I’ve been kicking the horse since I was two years old trying to push. So far there haven’t been that many scratches on my body, but I definitely have some.
At this time, how have you set up your company so that you could manage from a distance? What allows you to do that? I would imagine, for most owners, that’s not even on their radar to own from the distance that you’re at. What allows you to do that outside of Alex himself? Alex is an integral part, but what leads to that success?
I’ll break it down. Philosophically, I always felt that in order for a business owner to have every bit of the knowledge and information about his business, he should be able to run it from a distance. If you’re pretty confident, you could find things at a distance that are right, wrong, however you want to look at it, and be able to engage into that area and make it better. Philosophically, I thought that was very vital for us to do even if I was in New York and not going in every day. I felt that I needed to do that philosophically. The only philosophical point of view people get is that you could just do whatever you want to do, and it’s not like you have to go to work.
At the age of 42 and what we have in front of us, we can do a lot more. It’s a philosophical point of view. What I did well for the company is before I left, I made sure that some of the key vital things were in place, namely in the marketing area, finding a service like our home care service, which I didn’t know at the time was going to be as successful, but finding something that I knew that if I left had good wheels to run without me pushing the back of the car all day long. A lot of owners have that problem. It is a very viable issue if you’re not set up in a way where your clinics, if you have multiple clinics, are geographically set up well where there is good marketing team or there’s good influence in the area. There needs to be a bit more of that driver. We were able to do well with that. Our marketing person is fantastic. She’s my sister-in-law on top of it, but we have a very unique relationship because she treats me very much and she gives me a lot of accountability as the owner, as a boss. She’s done a fantastic job.
A big part of me was looking at the thing too and saying, “If I could move and run it from a distance, how is it going to be? What vital things need to be in place?” One of them is having somebody like a CEO who is able to be there and make decisions that are survival decisions for the organization, and then having key components in place where you drop new patients or you’re going to drop a new staff member. I’ve always gone to the simple philosophy in our business. If you look at it, all we did is we’ve got a patient come in the door, then we hired somebody to treat them and then we sent them on their way. Then we did it again. We hired to be with us as the owners and then we hired others. It’s marketing, HR, marketing, HR, marketing, HR. If you could keep it that simple and look at it from that point, then you could build the organization behind those pillars.
You have these two pillars at the top on each end of it laterally, and then below it that looks like a triangle flipped upside down, you have your organization. People put a lot of emphasis on organization, people put a lot of emphasis on hiring good people, but the simplicity is when a patient walks in the door after you’ve done the marketing, the people that received them which is the HR component of it sets the pace. I felt we had that good with. Alex. We had a good play there. That helped us to do that and for me to make that move.
[Tweet “The only way to create efficiency is through minimizing the subject of time.”]
I like the simplicity of it, how you break it down like that. If you have your marketing dialed in and then are also able to manage the operations side of it, that’s pretty much it. Billing’s a large component and you figured that out. Some people might recommend you offload it. It’s better in-house and that’s what you do as well, but to each their own. Nonetheless, if you can maintain those numbers and keep the patients happy, that’s a lot of it. Just getting them in the door and keeping them happy and treating them right, that’s basically what we do, right?
Yeah, for sure. To comment to what you’re saying, I am very involved in those two areas. I’m very involved in all the areas, to be honest. Sometimes you have to be involved with development, growth, looking at options and looking at different things. I got interested in both HR and marketing. You know me and we’ve talked about these things along the way. The reason for it is because that’s what we are as an organization. Most physical therapy companies are companies that are able to bring people in who most likely don’t know they need physical therapy at least to the degree that they think. That’s almost an irrefutable argument because even most physicians don’t even know what we can do. Then of course there’s the subject of hiring good people to help those people that are coming in with those problems. It’s a whole team of people. I got interested in that subject.
To go back to what allows you to run from a distance, it’s something that a lot of business owners could take even if they didn’t run their organizations from a distance, and that is what would it take for me? What do I need to know? What keys statistics do I need to know on a daily basis in order for me to understand the overall health of my company? If the company is poor, then what substances do I need to know and look into to make sure that that area is going right? I like your mindset.
What I’m saying is if you’re physically running from distance, but before you moved, correct me if I’m wrong, you looked at things and just said, “What do I need to know in order to do make this move?” A lot of other physical therapy clinic owners, even if they didn’t move, could benefit from the same exercise. What do I need to know and how do I hold people accountable to those statistics to make sure everything’s going well without me being physically present? If they did that exercise, they’ll see a great benefit or a much more simplicity to what they’re actually doing.
People don’t understand the subject of metrics and stats. The subject of metrics and stats boils down to time. If you take ten new patients and you bring them in in a week, it’s still ten new patients or the stat. If there are ten new patients in the last four minutes, it’s a completely different stat. We have our morning meetings and we go over with a production team. It’s all the directors in our company, our CEO, our lead marketing person. We have those calls in the morning. It’s now, now, now on the staff. It’s not, “It looks good for this week. What more can we get?” What we’re trying to do is we try to create efficiency within the organization. The only way to create efficiency is through minimizing the subject of time. The only way to measure that is statistics through the utilization of time as a measurement of those statistics.
I find people will get fairly reasonable. When I say reasonable, they’ll become like almost lackadaisical about metrics and say, “We had fifteen new patients last week. Fantastic,” but how fast is your verification people getting it through to get them scheduled? You’re telling me that your therapists are still seeing 50 patients a week. That doesn’t make sense. You start to look at the metrics. To comment on your metric point, you have to be very aware of all the metrics in your company. You have to look at it from a point of view of how much it affects it on a time basis.
That’s incredibly valuable because not only can the employees become a little bit lackadaisical, but if you’re the leader and you’re simply accepting the stat and saying, “That’s great,” then they’ll follow at your pace. It’s never too much as an owner to expect more out of your employees. If there’s one fault that we’ve consistently fall into as owners is that we are accepting of what they’re doing but not pushing for more and expecting more out of our teams. That lends to what you’re talking about. We did that. How can we do that more efficiently? How can we be more productive in the shorter amount of time? It’s valuable as owners that we consider that aspect of time.
It also leads us down the road of dealing with and continuing to employ people that may not be the right fit for the company. They may not be ultimately the individual that’s going to take you and your area to the level you want to go, so you ended up sacrificing your own goals.
One question I like to ask all of my owners is what advice would you give your younger self as you’re just starting off your practice back in your younger days or even before you opened up? What advice would you give yourself? What golden nugget of information?
The best advice I can give myself going back is to become a better study in a good way of understanding people and human behavior. There are a lot of different studies out there and a lot of wrong things out there that don’t help people understand people. Just understanding the rules of HR, understanding how to do things properly and look at situations that come up with staff and how to hire good people, how to find the attributes in people, that’s more of what I would have done better. Learning and focusing in early on would have led to potentially more knowledge, not that things could’ve been different.
It all leads up to your journey and how you course your life and your business in turn, but that area for sure is a great place to become knowledgeable. Our company, we’ve used the Hubbard Management System throughout and that’s been a very workable science for us as far as the system goes and in methodology. We’re happy with that. Learning a bit more about that earlier on probably would have saved me a lot of money and a lot of upset, but otherwise I’m pretty happy I went through that journey though. I needed to do that myself as a person too.
Hiring good people is a bane of most ownership, finding the right people. A lot of times you think, “I need a body, and if I could just throw a warm body at this then it should be able to work out well.” You learn pretty quickly and through the school of hard knocks that it doesn’t work out that way. One last thing, what’s your endgame? One thing that’s different about your practice is that some of your therapists go out and treat inside the home and it’s outpatient home therapy, but what are your goals going forward?
A very important goal for me in this lifetime of doing what I’m doing is I want to build a great company. We have a lot of things going for ourselves to do that. It’s a very high-dense area. We have 5 million people that are just in three counties that our two practices border. I’d like to see us continue to grow and get up toward 5,000 to 6,000 a week, to practice with good solid C-level employees that are there who could run the company and you can look at it and say we are doing a large enough impact on the community as far as treating patients and delivering care.
It’s notable not necessarily for myself but it’s just more notable to say that we’re having a pretty big impact in the community with what we do. That could be from a level of the people in our community. Now with social media and the reach we can have, there are many other ways of doing that. For patients, from hands-to- body care or treatment, that would be a good number for us to do every week. It would help a lot of people to a couple of hundred new patients a week. That would make me feel we’re having a substantial impact. That’s the goal from a metrics perspective. That’s a goal that we’ve always been shooting for. We’re not that far away. We’re a quarter of the way there.
I’m sure you’re going to make it too. You’ve got the systems in place and you’ve got some incredible people on your staff. It’s just a matter of time. That time component is something that you’re always pushing, so I’m sure you’ll get there sooner rather than later.
Thanks. I appreciate that.
Thanks for your time, Vinod. It was great talking to you. I appreciate your insight and experience that you shared. There are many aspects from this interview that will be helpful to the audience.
Thanks for your time and thanks for interviewing me.
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About Vinod Somareddy
For over 30 years, Dr. Vinod Somareddy’s father, a nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, treated patients on the Pulmonary floor. He developed a reputation for his knowledge, perseverance and compassion for his patients. Physicians recognized his hard work and developed a high level of trust and confidence in him, and he was eventually nicknamed “Reddy” by everyone he worked with.
Dr. Vinod Somareddy, the family’s eldest child, became a Doctor of Physical Therapy. In 2003, after searching for a practice location, he decided to honor his father’s lifelong dedication to patient care by naming his Physical Therapy practice Reddy-Care Physical Therapy. Founded on guiding principles of quality care and patient management, his team of professionals have fostered a patient-centered culture committed to improving the lives of every patient they touch. Their success stems from hiring the right therapists – those who have demonstrated academic and clinical excellence, and those who have demonstrated their ability in servicing patients’ needs promptly and thoroughly.
Vinod’s belief in organizational expansion and growth has lead to prioritizing patient outcomes, care, and the use of staff development as a means of effective management. Aside from being an active participant among educational programs, Vinod is an active member of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). Improvement, promotion and contribution to the profession of physical therapy are essential for its progress and goals, and Vinod knows that these tenets are essential to achieving the organizations’ future goals. Vinod enjoys lecturing on these matters, along with clinical topics to tie in the importance of technical skill and administrative responsibility.
In his spare time, Vinod enjoys playing and watching baseball, traveling, exercising, broadening his musical horizons, and studying.
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