How To Transition From PT To Effective Executive with Kevin Kostka, DPT

 

Transitioning from one profession to another takes a lot of courage, preparation, and experience. Kevin Kostka, DPT, PES is a great example of someone who has excelled in the different aspects of professional growth and successfully transitioning to the next phase – from a high-achieving student (four college degrees) to specialized physical therapist (co-wrote a book) to successful PT owner (five clinics and counting). Each transition requires learning new skills, but becoming a successful business owner can be especially difficult for PTs since they typically have no prior business training. Therefore, as Kevin shows, it’s imperative to invest time, money, and energy into developing a business owner’s mindset, learning what tools are necessary to be successful, and what actions are most. Like many of us, Kevin also learned a little bit through the school of hard knocks, but hopefully you won’t have to if you intentionally transition into your ownership role.

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How To Transition From PT To Effective Executive with Kevin Kostka, DPT

I’m excited to bring on Kevin Kostka out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Kevin is the owner of multiple clinics out in Tennessee, but I’m excited to bring him on because he’s an example of someone who maximizes his potential in the different arenas of his professional career. What I mean by that is here’s a guy who’s gone to college and attained four university degrees, maximized his initial foray into physical therapy’s clinician to the point where he co-wrote a book and did a few studies. When it came to starting his own practice, here’s something that was new to him. Like the rest of us, he spent years studying and then went to physical therapy school and spent all his time and money on physical therapy and becoming a clinician. Now he’s up against something where he didn’t have any education, nor any background as a business owner.

Unbeknownst to him, he used the formula that is he reached out, he stepped out and he networked. He got some coach in consulting. He got out of practicing every day so he could work on his business and he networked with other physical therapists and business owners. His story, although not unique, is impressive because he spent a lot of effort and energy to teach himself while also following the formula. It’s our responsibility as business owners to teach ourselves, to invest in ourselves. To spend the time, money and energy that it takes to actually become the leaders of our companies. I’m excited to bring Kevin to you as a great example of what to do in order to become effective executives. Let’s get into the interview.

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I’ve got Dr. Kevin Kostka out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is the owner of Summit Physical Therapy and the VPO of Next Level Physical Therapy. I’m excited to bring him on. He’s a partner with Travis Robbins who I had on in Next Level Physical Therapy. I’m excited to bring him on because I think we got an important topic. First of all, thanks for coming on, Kevin. I appreciate it.

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. Hopefully, we can help some other private practice owners out there.

I know it’s going to be great. I’m sure you’ve got a ton of great information to share. Knowing your story and knowing how successful you are at this time, do you mind backtracking and sharing a little bit about where you started, where you came from on a professional path?

It was probably back in high school when I decided that I wanted to be a physical therapist. I always thought I wanted to own my own physical therapy company. As I was going through my high school career, I was going to different orthopedic clinics. I was going to hospital-based clinics, neuro clinics, these clinics trying to find if that was actually something that I wanted to do. Of course in high school, you got a lot of people out there that try to tell you that it’s too hard to get into physical therapy school and that’s something that you can’t do.

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That pushed me even more to want to pursue physical therapy. I honed in and along my journey in college, I was able to get four degrees along that way. I was able to get a lot of my college credits in high school. I was good enough that my high school allowed me to get quite a few credits. I did one year on a scholarship and then the very next year I got to apply for PT school and they let twenty of us in out of 400 or 500 people. I began that particular journey going through PT school. We moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, which is northeastern Tennessee. My wife had a harder time finding a job than I did. That’s where her family’s from. We moved up there and I had a great learning opportunity. I worked with an orthopedic clinic up there. I got to work alongside fellowship trained MDs.

One of them actually took me under his wing and he was a shoulder and elbow specialist. That was something that I was interested in because nobody was interested in the shoulder at that point in the game. I was like, “I’ll take those patients.” He took me in and I’d wait after work for them and we’d work out together, we’d chat and then developed a relationship from there. Since I was inside that type of environment, he would ask me to come over and he’d show me what particular X-rays looked like. He taught me to read radiographs, showed me some MRs and taught me to read MRs. We started getting closer and closer.

We wrote a book together and then started writing a couple of papers together. I was a new grad, but still one of the highest producers there. I went to the director at that time. I was like, “I’m killing it here.” This was back in the early 2000s. I made peanuts as an undergrad. I was like, “I feel like I’m producing the most here. I’ve got a lot of value. I feel like I’m doing some good things with the doctors here.” I’m looking for a raise and trying to present it. Of course you’re young, you’re naive and you think you know it all. He was like, “It’s like you’re going to have to start your own practice to make money like you’re talking about.” I’m like, “I’m going to turn him a four-week notice.” I turned in my four-week notice then came back to Chattanooga.

Can I go back a little bit simply because I think there might be a little bit of a question there? One of the things I tell people to do is to network. You took advantage of a relationship there with a physician and that was beyond your typical marketing approach. Was there something specific that you did to create that relationship with a doctor that he would take you under his wing like that? What feedback or what insight could you give us maybe recommendations for physical therapists to develop those types of relationships with their local physicians?

I was eager to learn. I wanted to learn more than anything. When I would try to write notes to him on my progress notes or my evals, of course because he’s right across the hallway there. I’d walk the patients there and that was the benefit of working in a physician-owned clinic at the time. I tried to coach patients on what to say when they would go back to the doctor as well. I would always ask the doctor after work or if I did see him, I’d always ask him, “What did you think about Mrs. Jones? What’d you think about Sally? Is there anything else I can do differently?” That’s how it came about. I was getting results with his patients, so I’d ask him about particular techniques and ask him about particular tests and how to do some special tests. From a professional standpoint, that’s how it started. It was more about a personal relationship that I would build with them talking about his kids or ask him what it was that he liked and that he was interested in. That’s the direction that I would go with my conversations.

I think there’s some carryover there, a couple of those aspects. Not everyone works in a physician-owned physical therapy clinic where they can have that easy access to a physician. However you hear about some physical therapists who take the time to go with their patients to the follow-up appointment or maybe take the time to ask the physician about a patient if it’s not at the appointment or some other time. I shadowed physicians. I loved shadowing my orthopedic physicians especially to see how they do things. Their evals are so quick and easy because they have to be. I’m like, “I wish my evals were like that.” Take advantage of the opportunity to be curious. Simply ask questions, be a part of it. What can I do better? What can I do differently? What do you like? Make it not all about, “This is what we provide,” rather, “What can I do to help? What can I do to improve? What would you like to see?” Coming at it from a different perspective is something that we can learn from your experience.

You show that humility and you’re selfless in that aspect. When you know that your purpose is to help people and you have a genuine interest in that and doing what you can to be able to improve yourself every day, then you’ll take any approach. It came naturally to me. If I had an hour that somebody didn’t show up, then I was walking next door and doing what you did, trying to shadow. I would block off the schedule for two or three hours if I could, “Do you mind if I come and shadow you during the clinic?” As crazy as it sounds, but a lot of orthopedic surgeons, they don’t like the clinic. They like surgery. That’s where I wanted to be too. They’re in a good mood because they’re in surgery. When I was there in surgery with him, he was like, “You need to go see this guy.” He would communicate back to, “This tissue wasn’t that great. We need to go slow with them external rotation. Let’s only take them 30 degrees,” or “Can you see on screen when I’m arranging this shoulder right here? It was only going to flexion to 90 degrees. Now you can see the stress that’s going right here.” It was a great communication tool.

When I was in the clinic, he would pick up the phone, call me and say, “You’re going to see Sally on Tuesday and this is what I want for the first two weeks until she sees me for that ten to fourteen-day follow up.” Having that open line of communication and that’s what I brought back to Chattanooga. I found those orthopods that had similar interests that I did and try to develop those relationships based on those interests and getting into surgery with them, giving them my contact information and telling them what I had experienced in the past. Those are hopefully some takeaways.

You eventually opened up your own clinic and it was smooth sailing from then on out.

The silly thing that we did is in 2007 is when I quit. In 2007 when the housing bubble had burst, that’s when I decided to open up my own practice. I didn’t know. We have this perfect opportunity inside a fitness club. It’s not like a gym or anything like that. It’s a fitness club, a high-end facility and we’re like, “We want to do this on the side of the space right here.” We went to the owner. At that point, the money that they wanted, it was well out of reach for us. I’m going to go to a bank in 2007 and ask for some money. They’re like, “I’m not going to loan you any money.” Me and my business partner, we had to come up with a creative idea to start stacking some cash so that we could open a brick and mortar.

Our creative idea was to do house calls. I utilized the mindset when I was in Knoxville of getting to know the doctors and buddying up with them. I was lucky enough to come in contact with an orthopedic surgeon that had done a fellowship and a rotation and knew the doctor that I had worked with specifically. We became buddies and talked to each other since he worked with him in his clinic a little bit, shadowing them and I got to see a lot of his patients. It was like a concierge for other business owners or people that own other franchises. Those were the people that I got that didn’t necessarily have time to go into a clinic. I actually would go to them.

I started from there. My business partner was in the home health line and so we started getting into assisted living facilities and offering our services there. We were delivering a good product, a better product and that was being delivered to those facilities at the time and getting good results and staying in constant communication with the MDs and the directors of nursing inside those facilities. Within a year, we had an LLC and we filed all the legal paperwork. We started in 2007, but legally it was 2008 under the Summit name and we got it protected somehow.

Now you’re up to five clinics in the area.

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As of September 2019, we have five orthopedic clinics. We’re working on one more clinic that should be open on December 2019. We still have that home health product line that we’re able to offer. We still offer house calls for certain people that can’t make it into the clinic.

You’ve made the transition. You were well-regarded as a physical therapist. I’m sure you were awesome. You transitioned over into becoming a real business owner. I’m sure it was a gradual transition. You take on patients full-time, you’re running the business on the weekends and at nights and that kind of stuff. What helped you make that switch? We’ll go into a little bit more about what it takes to become effective as a leader, but what did you do to make that transition from a full-time physical therapist to the owner, leader and manager a smoother transition?

As we started to grow in 2007, 2008, we’re starting to hire more people. Our head is down and we’re treating patients, we’re trying to figure out payroll. We’re trying to figure out getting people’s time off covered. We’re trying to figure out all kinds of things. All the arrows are coming right at us. As all those arrows are pointing at us, you’re getting overwhelmed. You’re out here working seven days a week. You’re working from 6:00 in the morning until 8:00 or 9:00 at night and it becomes very overwhelming. It was hard to cope with that.

We decided to hire a practice manager. We’re like, “That’s our answer.” We can go in, we can treat all these people, we’ll have somebody else doing it. Of course, we didn’t know what we were doing. We thought this person knew what they were doing. We kept our head down. “How are things going?” “Things are going great. We’re doing awesome.” We didn’t keep statistics at the time. We didn’t know. They don’t teach you that stuff in PT. You treat one person an hour and you do this and it’s going to be great. You’re going to change healthcare. It didn’t work that way. The only thing that we could figure out is we had to start keeping numbers. We had to start keeping metrics to figure out exactly what was going on. That practice manager didn’t necessarily work out. We figured out that we had to start pulling out of practice to be able to start working on the business instead of inside the business.

I think a lot of people in your situation, you think you bring on a practice manager and you’re thinking that you’re delegating, but what you’re doing is abdicating any responsibility. There’s the fallacy that, “I’ll give it to this person and they’ll manage it as I would.” What needs to happen is they need to come underneath you to run the practice. You need to manage them now even more closely because they don’t care about it as much as you do, honestly. It’s tough because we have to go through hard times like that. I’ve talked to other practice owners that go through one, two, or three practice managers before they finally figured out, “My job is to oversee the practice manager, actually, not for them to run the clinic. I’m still the owner.” You never get rid of that responsibility.

Dan and myself, we figured that out very slowly as money was leaking left and right and we weren’t collecting and so that was that person’s responsibility, but we didn’t have any systems in place. We started pulling out slowly and our responsibilities were to get better organized, to create systems, to create policies and to create procedures as we started to grow because we were delivering a product and a lot of people liked the product. They were getting better and they were happy. They wanted to refer to friends and family and they wanted to come back and see us again. As our visit started to climb, we were hiring more people, but we didn’t have those processes in place. We were leaking money and leaking things everywhere. We created those policies and those systems. We created those procedures and then we started to better organize our business. As we started to organize it into different divisions and different departments, the arrows started to go away from us as opposed to all the arrows coming at us.

 

Were there certain tools or resources that you used, whether it was certain books that you followed or consultants or coaches that you used to help you along the way?

We definitely hired consultants. We read a lot. For about a year and a half we studied and had coaches and consultants try to help us from a business standpoint. The next year and a half, we started studying marketing because that’s something else you don’t learn in school, in the physical therapy world at least. To me, I think those are two key aspects that you have to have a good grip on before you start your own practice.

Were there any books that stood out to you that started changing your mindset or giving you some direction?

I probably read 50 books and I try to read as much as I can. Can I say that there’s one? No. You start with a Dale Carnegie or something like that and you start reading How to Win Friends & Influence People. That one will snowball into another book and then that one will snowball into something else. You go from this personal development world and then you go into this next little stage of, “There are some business books out there. Now there are these mindset books. Now that you’ve got all this mindset, you’ve got these leadership books.” It all continues to snowball. I would hate to leave one book out and not be able to tell the context behind why I started that. When somebody starts reading that book from there and they’re like, “What? That doesn’t make any sense. How does that apply to me?”

It’s obvious what you did. You’re a smart guy and not unlike other physical therapists who are a high achiever. We haven’t spent the time and money on our business education. We spent plenty of time and money on becoming a great physical therapist, but comparatively we have no business knowledge whatsoever. It’s imperative that we take the time and spend the money and invest in our business education. That’s what my business partner and I considered. Some of the learning that we had ended up costing us tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars if you look at it over the years. Because we lost money, those were hard lessons to learn and that’s not the way you should get an education about business.

When you invest in a coach, when you spend the time to study the books, when you get consultants, you name it, that’s part of my mantra. Reach out, step out, network, step out of treating full-time, invest in your business education. Reach out to someone to get some help and guide you along the way because you need that education to become a business owner. I’m excited to talk to you a little bit about this because not only you become a business owner, but you have to become an executive. You have to know what you’re doing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m getting a sense that maybe it’s hard for physical therapists to transition over to becoming an executive into that administrative role because maybe they don’t know what that even looks like. We’ve been physical therapists for so many years. What am I going to do with my day? How am I going to be “productive” if I’m not seeing patients all day?

That was a mindset shift that I had to go through because I felt like I had to be inside the clinic to be able to help people. What I realized and what other people helped me realize is that I can only see so many people in a day. If I’m able to implement, get better organized and start to implement these procedures, then I can actually help more people. Because now I can have therapist A and therapist B inside the clinic. I can only see ten, fifteen people a day, whatever it may be. If I’m able to set up good systems and be able to deliver good products, now I can have two therapists in there that can see ten to fifteen people a day. Now I’ve helped more and then I can open up another, duplicate that same facility here and duplicate it over on another side of town and then duplicate it on another side of town. You have to have those systems in place to be able to do that. That’s the mind shift that you have to go through. It’s a team. You had to start to develop that culture and you have to have that leadership to be able to do that.

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What are the first couple of steps you recommend for someone who is pulling out of treating full-time? Honestly, they say, “I finally have a full day, or maybe I have two half days. I’ve got two five-hour segments where I can do some executive work, some admin work.” What would you recommend to them to be most effective at that time?

This is something I helped Travis Robbins do. As you start to gradiently work yourself out, start with two hours, work to get to four hours. As you start to do that, a lot of the owners at that time are like, “Now what do I do?” They start twiddling their thumbs. It’s about becoming better organized. Start trying to create these different divisions within your organization. What happens when that patient first walks in the door? Create a system based on that so you can take that system and do it at clinic B and do that at clinic C. What we tried to do is hone in on that. My business partner, as we started to create these divisions, he actually took the first three divisions, the next three divisions that we came up with. I started handling the operations, quality control, continuing education and external marketing. He took over the finance, the personnel and the statistics piece of it. He handled that. I handled the other piece and then we started honing in on the different pieces of that particular division.

It reminds me, I had Jerry Durham on. I like what you said about starting with where the patient comes in the door. Maybe going through the patient life cycle, it would be easy to start if someone’s considering, “What do I do?” It’s funny because if you were like me when I first had those initial hours, I would start catching up on my notes or paying bills. I could pay bills and track down new contracts for different vendors all day long. It’s a waste of time and it’s not getting you where you need to go. What Jerry Durham explained so well is going through the patient life cycle. What are they seeing, what are they doing, what are they hearing as soon as they walk in the door, or even before that? I should back up, what did the initial phone call sound like? Write it all out.

Now you’re starting to develop a culture and the culture is how we do things at the clinic. As you start, you want your patients to be treated a certain way. You want them to see certain things. You want them to hear certain things. Starting from the first phone call when they’re saying, “Do you take my insurance?” Is your front desk person saying, “We’re not sure,” and they hang up the phone? You don’t want that. Let’s start developing a script and how that looks through the plan of care. After the fact, what does the billing and collections look like? How are you going to reengage them three or six months after discharge? That goes into marketing.

I think the benefit behind looking at the different divisions like you’re talking about is the patient goes through those different divisions. They’re going to come across the personnel. For lack of a better term, they’re going to become a statistic, but they’re going to get care. They’re going to be marketed to after the fact and it becomes a full circle. There’s a benefit to sitting down to break down the different divisions that are responsible for different parts of the company running well and see what does the patient get to see at each point? How are we going to put them through that cycle to make it a successful encounter with each patient?

There are two things that I want to dovetail off of that. When you said you would do your finances or you’d catch up on notes, it dovetails back to one of the books that I read a long time ago, The One Thing. You get them back to the one thing and what’s the one thing that I can do right now that’s going to make the rest of my day that much easier? It brings you back to that mindset. You create your checklist and you go through that checklist. “I got that one thing done. I needed to create this system for when I need to create the verbiage for what we do when we answer the telephone. I want to create this whole cycle that starts here.” It goes to this point and this is the algorithm that it goes through. If she answers yes, if she answers no, this is how it goes. My ultimate goal is to get them on the schedule. You’ve got to take it to get those arrows pointing away from you and part of the executive or part of the director, part of the VP, whatever level you’re at. It’s all about implementing that particular system. It’s making sure that person then becomes accountable and responsible.

 

They know what that end product, it’s to get that patient on the schedule. You’re exactly right, that’s where the metric comes from. The metrics don’t necessarily have to come from patient care. It can come from my office coordinator at the front desk, how many phone calls she’s handled that day and how many people actually converted to patients based off of that. It’s making sure that they’re accountable and responsible for that and they have a statistic to measure their final product there.

How long do you think it took you guys to do your initial setup, systems and processes? It takes some time. I want to say it was Paul Keller that wrote that or something like that. Anyways, it’s a great book. If you can knock out that one thing, the first part of your day, it doesn’t matter what you do for the rest of the day. You’ve already been successful. Knock out the one thing as soon as possible. How long did it take you to feel like you had a decent system in place?

It took us two and a half, three years to go through all of this. For our organizing board, it probably took us about a year, a year and a half to create it, get it up on the wall, people look at it and be like, “What in the world are these guys doing?” I would even look at it during lunchtime and be like, “How in the world were you going to get this accomplished?” You take it day by day. You take it one day at a time, hour by hour, as we would do with patient care. I would never look at the end of the day. I would just look at it hour by hour and roll with the punches. I was going to be there until 5:00 or 6:00 anyway. When I look at the organizing board, I knew that as I would take it day by day and try to break it down as slow as I could and gradiently implement things so that people didn’t think I was crazy. I do it as slow and as possible as I could so that people could get a good handle on what exactly it was.

It wasn’t until we started having meetings where we separate everybody out. We had different meetings for the marketing team, for the rehab team, for our office coordinators and we had people above them so we can finally debug some of these systems that we created. Once you start debugging and then you start changing them, that’s whenever the magic starts happening. People take ownership over them because they are their ideas, they’re no longer my ideas. Our ideas don’t fly too well. They have to be somebody else’s ideas. It’s all about the executive or the owner or whatever role you’re playing within your organization. It’s all about your ability to be able to communicate that to your juniors in a sense where they want to do it. You’ve promoted it enough to so that it makes sense to them and they can see the greater good of it. It’s a win-win for everybody.

The thing I like about your story is you recognized the issue you had with the initial manager that you brought on, the practice manager. The first thing that came to mind is, “I need to know my statistics.” One part of what you need to do on a regular basis as an effective executive is to look at your statistics. Nothing should come as a surprise eventually as you start nailing this down. Start figuring out systems, processes, and procedures and writing them down. That’s a lot of grind for me, especially creating content. I hate it, but that’s where the rubber meets the road. The benefit can come when if by chance you have any rock star talent on your team, is to have them write down their processes and procedures.

That might be hard for them, but it’s telling them, “Just take fifteen minutes and give me an idea of how you answer the phone,” If they’re good at converting patients onto the schedule book or, “You’re good at getting behind the doctor’s front desk and talking to the physicians. Can you write down what you do?” The onus isn’t so much on you all the time, but you can take what they’ve got, massage it, manage it, and then once it’s written down, then you can implement it into the next person. Because there’s going to be staff turnover, you can implement that and train on the next person. You essentially start working your way out of a job.

I had a wife of a very busy PT call me and she’s like, “I don’t see my husband anymore. He’s a great physical therapist, but he is busy all the time and we can’t get on top of our business.” A lot of us as physical therapists take it for granted that we treat patients well. I think there’s a lot of responsibility for us to write down what we do to be successful physical therapists and get patients to come back and get high retention, completed plan cares, lower cancellation rates and that stuff. A big onus is on us to write down what we’re successful at as physical therapists so that we can turn that over to someone else and put the time into the executive stuff.

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I love hearing you duplicate all this stuff because that’s exactly what we did. We would ask our office coordinator, “You do that well. Can you write down how you answered that phone and how you handle that objection? Can you write this down for our PTs?” We would do the same thing. It’s constantly living and breathing your organization. It’s constantly changing. As you know and a lot of the readers probably know as well, change is inevitable. You have to embrace it and make sure that you’re okay with change. If something isn’t working, then change it. That’s where those statistics come in. All we’re doing with those statistics is making sure that what we are doing is working or if it isn’t working and we’re going downtrend, then we need to make sure we change something up. It’s all about communication and having that conversation about what everything looks like from the metrics because those are your answers.

I’ve got a ton of stuff going through my head, but I want to ask, did you have a lot of fallout as you started implementing the structure? Did you have a lot of kickback from the employees?

Of course, because we didn’t know how to lead. We didn’t know how to do any of that stuff initially. We started reading about culture and we started trying to develop a culture within our organization based off of values that we felt were important. Of course, we didn’t come up with the values. We had the other people within our organization come up with the values. You can check out our website and check out our values. We have all the different definitions and different quotes behind what we feel like from a communication standpoint to a willingness standpoint, integrity, all that type of stuff. That’s how you start to develop that culture. When you’re in your grassroots company and you’re homegrown within your city, then those values can start to seep out into the community and you can start doing community projects. That’s when the team starts pulling together. When you close all five clinics down and you have 30 people show up to the soup kitchen and we’re all dispersed into different teams and are helping to make lunches for the homeless or trying to go in and fix up one of the rooms that they stay in. That’s when the team starts coming together and it’s all about letting the other people come up with it.

What I think you’re a great example of as you started figuring out, “We need to become executives.” It’s statistics, systems and values. I’m sure a lot is going on behind the scenes. You’re hiring the right people, you’re running through some people who are resistant to structure and they’re like, “Don’t tell me what to do.” You start gaining some traction to a point where now there’s still some stuff that comes up, but I don’t have to spend as much time pushing all the buttons anymore. Now I’m developing a leadership team that is bought into the culture and I can trust to do the work. You’re still managing by statistics. You’re still watching the stats on a weekly basis and people that have to be held accountable to them, but now you’re pulling yourself up the organization board to the point where your growth is almost dependent upon the team. You guys have some leadership and you’re going to have a vision. I didn’t say anything about it, but everyone should have a vision. You have an ideal scene. Now, the team is pushing towards that. You’re all rowing in the right direction. It’s not surprising now to hear that you had your fifth clinic open. You’ve got another one open. Growth is inevitable at that point.

It’s a matter of me and Dan getting out of the way. I think that the more we get in there and start tinkering and messing with stuff, the more things will start to slow down. Now that we have our executive team in place, we have our executive meetings every month, then those meetings trickle down and we have that culture. We have the executive team making a lot of those decisions on policy and changing the policy. We don’t have to necessarily do a lot except for look for new opportunities that are out there through the networking, which you mentioned, through the network that you are doing at this point in the game. That’s what happened to us.

Our Chamber of Commerce here voted us the small business of the year for a medium-sized business. That’s when things started exploding, “Will you put a clinic beside me?” You get phone calls all the time. From an executive standpoint, we got to put systems in place to, “What does that new clinic look like?” We’ve got a checklist for that. What are we doing with the contractor? What are we doing with the PT equipment? We have checklists for all that. Where do we want to put it? When is a good time to do this? You’ve got to learn the hard way sometimes too and not grow too fast because then you get in trouble with available capital.

 

Now you’re developing processes and procedures on a higher level. I’m sure you’re looking at demographics. When you’re looking to open up a clinic, you have a general idea how much cash and on hand to not only open the clinic but sustain you for a period of time and then it all becomes systematized. At that point, you really can’t hold back the growth. It’s impressive.

The only thing that’s going to slow you down is money.

What has been your most successful action in developing leaders underneath you? I want to get your two cents. You didn’t jump from all of a sudden starting to run your clinic a couple of days a week to all of a sudden not seeing patients five days a week. What were some specific tips that you provide people to grow their leadership team?

To me, it’s a mindset. It’s always trying to improve yourself on a personal level as well as on a professional level. Always trying to read and trying to apply what you are reading to the situations and the scenarios that you’re in. Once you start getting these ideas, it’s all about executing on these ideas. In order to be able to do that, it’s about communication. You’ve got to figure out a good communication method to persuade and presuade the way that you word these ideas so that becomes their idea, more so than it is your idea. There are certain questions that we go through to try to figure and try to lead those people in that direction, facing the facts. If we don’t do this now, then what will happen or what could happen? There’s a whole process that we actually teach in our mastermind on how to do that from an executive standpoint to implement a new program or to implement a new policy.

I had Travis on and you guys are starting another mastermind group with Next Level Physical Therapy. I’m sure people can go to that website if they want to learn more about the mastermind like you’re talking about and some of the principles that we discussed. Thanks for sharing. I appreciate it, Kevin. It was great to talk to you and hear about your story. Are there any words of advice, anything you want to share?

I’m a personal growth guy, so I’m always looking to try to do better than I did the day before. As physical therapists and as private practice owners, the best way that we can help other people is actually making other people in our organizations responsible and accountable for their particular position and working together as that team. Another quote from another great book, “If you can get everybody going in the right direction, then you’re unstoppable.” Being great leaders and learning how to do that is something that I love to see our profession continue to evolve with.

You’re a great example of someone who has taken the time and effort to develop as an executive. Maybe that wasn’t your idea when you wanted to open up your own clinic back in the day, but you got to understand if you’re going to own a clinic, you’ve got to put in the time, the education, and spend the money in your education to become a successful owner. When you do so, then you can become a greater influence in your community than as a solo practitioner.

You can’t be a know-it-all. There are people that have been out there. Before we got on here, I was asking you questions and you’re giving me ideas. It’s all about helping one another so that you can continue to grow as a person and grow as a professional.

You’re doing great work. I appreciate your time with me, Kevin. Thank you for coming on.

Thanks, Nathan.

Important Links:

• Kevin Kostka
• How to Win Friends & Influence People
• Summit Physical Therapy
• Next Level Physical Therapy

About Kevin Kostka, DPT