Steve Line, PT has spent plenty of time and $$ on all of the different marketing tactics over the years, and has made his share of mistakes along the way. Based on his experiences he shares his insight on the basics of marketing and the need to understand the different audiences and messages that are needed for a successful marketing strategy. What worked five years ago doesn’t work now. In fact, the marketing strategy that worked in 2019 definitely isn’t as successful in 2020. Thus, it’s important to get back to basics and reassess our audiences and message. Join in as he discusses all of these on the show with Nathan Shields.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
The Basics Of Marketing – The Buckets, Budgets And More With Steve Line, PT
I have Steve Line, a physical therapist, owner and President of Columbus Physical Therapy out of Nebraska. I got Steve on because he wrote an article in Impact Magazine about marketing and covered some basics that are important to visit and revisit over and over again. I’ve done so with my clients after reading his article and discussing some of the basics that he mentioned. Steve, I appreciate you coming on. Thank you.
I appreciate the opportunity, Nathan. This is a great show. I’ve enjoyed your previous episodes.
Tell the audience a little bit about you, where you come from, what brought you to where you are, a little bit of your professional experience and where you’re at now.
I have been a therapist and an owner for many years. I wasn’t a staff therapist very long and then I was thrown into the fire. I grew up in Kansas as a kid and went to Nebraska to PT school and everything. I’ve been in Columbus, Nebraska since 1998. What brought me to this point was I’ve always wanted to be an owner. I had the first love of Biology and the part of Physical Therapy that the patient care part that drew us all to it but there was always part of you that wanted to be an owner to lead the operation. I had a particular interest in customer service. A lot of that was grounded in some of the part-time jobs I had as a child. Through high school, I worked at a grocery store then I got to college and got more jobs that were customer service oriented. I was in a grocery store bartending, various things that had to do with dealing with the public. I could see the parallels and the weaving of this thread of, “We’re all the same,” but it doesn’t matter if it’s a patient or if it’s any consumer, we need to reach them at that level.
You’ve been a business owner for many years now so congratulations. Do you have one clinic or have you grown to multiple clinics by this time?
We’ve got three locations.
In your article, you talked about some of the basics. I was intrigued by the title itself, it’s called Marketing Like an Engineer. I know where you’re going with that after reading the article but let’s start with some of the basics. You talked about marketing buckets to start off with. I think when PT owners look at marketing, they look at everything. Marketing is marketing but it’s important to recognize that there are some distinct areas that you want to focus on and allocate monies and have completely different action items in those different buckets than you would with the other buckets. Lay it out to us. What did you define as the four buckets there?
It’s reverse engineering. At the end of the day, we want to have patients. What makes up the new patients that come into our practice? Time and time again, I measured it over a lot of years and kept coming up with these same four general areas. This isn’t anything that I created on my own because now that I’ve talked with other clinic owners, they’re coming up with the same stuff. It’s common knowledge to some degree but we haven’t talked about it. The four buckets starting out former patients or your patients in general. Those are the people that you’re working with. Those should be your most loyal fans, the people that return to you, that is the most valuable of all of them.
I know I’m speaking to any therapist that is big into quality care and those issues certainly are patient bucket is number one. You want to put as much emphasis on energy. A lot of it is an investment of emotion and relationship into these people. You don’t have to necessarily spend a lot of money to invest in that level of marketing. It’s probably the cheapest of all the marketing buckets. You do a great job whether you build a relationship with them, give them great service and send them out the door with a great taste in their mouth or the experience that they had with you. It doesn’t take a whole lot to get them back into your doors if they had a problem again. We got to stay in touch with them. That’s one of the things we do there.
You’re talking about not current patients but also past patients. That is huge. That’s outside of the local community. That’s your largest pool of potential there. As you said, it doesn’t take as much money. There are other things that cost significantly more but it could get you more bang for the buck as you spend more time fully. With the current patients that are in your clinic, there are ways that you can improve engagement and their experience like you alluded to win them over. There’s a huge pool of multiples that have been to you in the past that know, like and trust you that can put some added energy into them as well that can repeat returns.
Get on the reactivation but that’s the first main bucket. I tend to count the next three as patient referrals being a branch off of patients. If you can have your loyal, raving fans then if you can get them to send friends and family, not only bring themselves back in but bring someone with them. Now, you’ve expanded the ROI of that particular bucket and then moving on to physician referrals or professional referrals. Not necessarily be physicians alone but any professional that can send you a referral like, “I know this group. They do a great job. I recommend you go there.” The final bucket is your general public. Now, you’re casting the net out into capturing people with different messages across all of those buckets.
Look at money as energy and push it toward the things that are going to keep your venture going. Click To TweetCorrect me if I’m wrong but from my experience, the amount of money you have to allocate to those different buckets increases with the way we’ve progressed thus far. Patients and past patients are relatively cheap. Getting patient referrals again shouldn’t cost you a lot. Maybe a little bit of incentive might be in play for patients and past patients to bring family and friends over. Maybe spend a little bit more to get in front of the physicians. Maybe it’s a newsletter, an occasional gift, lunch or something like that. You have to be mindful but it does take a little bit more and to reach out to the community, you got to spend a lot of money to net out.
A lot of that money comes into the various avenues and platforms you have to use to reach them. You have to do every door direct mail, however, you’re putting on an event some of these things can get costly and in a hurry. Not to deter anybody from like, “I don’t want to mess with that bucket.” I’m going to leave that bucket alone. The general public bucket can expand and explode your clinic but you have to do it correctly. I’ve learned a lot from Chad Madden, Shaun Kirk and a lot of different people that train in marketing systems. Having that specific message and knowing who you’re targeting particularly is critical.
I want to get into that but before we do, since we’re talking about budgets, I love the story that you shared about the marketing budget that got out of whack in your early years. If you want, you can go ahead and share that but let’s talk a little bit about budgets and what people might need to allocate for marketing because as I’m talking to some of my coaching clients, they’ll ask, “I want to do this thing or the other. What do you think?” I said, “How much money do you have to spend?” That’s what everyone is going to ask you. A marketing expert is going to say, “How much are you spending?” That is a deer in the headlight question for every PT owner I’ve come across. They’re like, “I don’t know, how much should I spend?” They don’t know. Talk to us a little bit about some marketing budgets.
It isn’t just marketing budgets. The same question could be posed if I wanted to get into a new location and I have a new lease, I want to build a building or whatever, it’s like, “How much do you have to spend? How much is the clinic going to cost you? Is it going to be beyond what is feasible within your operation?” I’ve stood on the shoulders of many great mentors like all of us have and learned how to allocate it on a formulated basis so that no matter what, every dollar that comes in or X amount of cents, gets given out to labor, payroll cost, benefits, marketing, rent and utilities.
After a while, you start seeing some similarities on that to how much percent is appropriate. Give or take, in some regions, you’re going to have to pay a little more to get a therapist so your labor cost goes up a little bit. Marketing in general, we always try to keep it generally around that 10%. We have gone in our start-up clinics when we’re trying to get out there and push it off the ground and get it to launch 14% to 15% but it doesn’t stay there. Once we start growing, you’d get those patients within, as long as you’ve got a good customer service and a reactivation system in place, you’re staying in touch and keep a relationship there. You then can start lowering those costs overall and get it down to 10% and start reactivating the cheaper but the lower hanging fruit in marketing and that’s your form of patients.
That’s a surprise to some physical therapists because if they were to do the calculations, they’d find their marketing spend in the past has been somewhere in the 1% to 3% or less range but if they want to achieve the goals that they want to achieve, they got to recognize that they should allocate somewhere in the 5% to 10% range and more if they’re starting up something new. That can be a hard pill to swallow for some physical therapists thinking, “I need to spend that much.” Maybe you don’t. If you’re happy where you’re at and you’re not necessarily focused on growth, maybe you need to be closer to the 2% to 5% range to maintain and continue going forward. If you have any illusions for growth, you’re going to need to expect to pay more in marketing and that’s where you start. How much do you have to spend? A lot of times, it depends on how you’re going to spend it.
I try to look at all of it. It’s an investment. I use the term ROI a lot around the clinic and everybody on the leadership team knows what I’m talking about but it’s like, “I would like to do X, Y and Z program or campaign. I want to try this. What do you think?” I’m like, “I don’t know. What’s it going to get you? I don’t know. I just want to try it.” I’m like, “We need to spend a little time and project out and think about, not, ‘We don’t know,’ none of us have a crystal ball but we should have a pretty close estimation of where we’re going to land, what we’re targeting to understand how to get that.” When we’re talking costs, 10% is an investment not only to grow your practice but keep your practice stable and keep it where it is because competition never stops and costs never stop growing and reimbursement never stops decreasing. You get caught between those three and you’re squeezed. You need to always be pushing funds and energy, look at money and resources as energy, push it toward the things that are going to continue you and keep your venture going. That’s probably another way of how to look at it if they’re freaked out about the growth part.
That goes to like, “After I know what my budget is, how do I allocate that money?” That’s where you were leading the discussion. Let’s come back to that. It’s like, “Who’s your demographic?” If you don’t know who your target audience is then you’re not going to know where to allocate your marketing monies because you want to be where they’re living.
You want to know your community and that takes time. Nobody pops into a town and knows everything about it but you want to learn what’s your median range of ages? What is the household income level? What type of community is this? Is it white-collar or blue-collar? Is it farming, agriculture or manufacturing? Is it all tech? It could be all of it mixed into one. You need to know if you’re targeting particular people of influence. Have they been well-educated? It’s the same thing that political pollsters use. They are trying to identify who is that avatar within the community, that individual, that face, that nameless person because that generally reaches across to all of them.
We have a manufacturing, a heavy community in our first location. Our second is all agrarian, an agriculture is driven which is a smaller community. The third community that we have is a practice in is a combination of all. It is manufacturing, it got some retail, it got some white-collar related people there and it got a little bit of a mix. On the physicians, we have to target them differently too. We keep going. It’s a piecemealing of all these buckets figuring out.
In each bucket, the message is going to be completely different but when you’re looking at your avatar in the community bucket, what comes to mind for me is a podcast that I listened to is Paul Gough’s earlier podcasts. He’s in England and people have the choice to go to the state-sponsored clinics but he’s not part of that program. People have to pay cash to come to see him. His target market when it comes to marketing is the 55-year-old female kids or older. They have a little bit more income because they’re upper-middle-class. Simply that alone can influence your marketing message. You’re talking to females. How are you going to talk to females? How are you going to talk to older women who have a bit more money that can pay cash out of pocket versus going to the state-sponsored clinic?
That alone is we’ll generate a different message than the message that you’re going to create for your past patients. There’s a different message if you’re going to focus on orthopedic physicians versus internal medicine. Honing that message to your target audience doesn’t exclude the rest of the audience that you’re reaching out to but it will capture their attention more so and bring you the type of patients that you want to see.
It’s as simple as this. When you are talking to a friend or a family member, you’ve known them your whole life, your level of understanding of that person is so much greater. You can talk pretty generically and more loosely and then hone in on specifically what they’re interested in. Case in point, you have patients that are into baking, crocheting, hunting, fishing, football or welding or whatever it is and you learn those things. You can’t keep records on everything but you do need to have some sort of semblance of, “This is what this guy or this girl was into,” then when you’re sending out some personal related messages or the phone call systems that we do, “How are your grandkids doing? The last time we talked X, Y and Z.”
There is no better way to connect. You can’t do that when you’re talking to somebody you’ve never met before. Right in there are the basics of the message change. You’re trying to target, what is important to them and what means something to them? In our particular case and a lot of cases, we’re looking at middle-aged females, like you said and they’re the family, consumer decision-makers. They decide when grocery day is and what they’re going to buy for groceries. They decide where their kids are going to go to school. They’re going to decide for certain where their health care is going to be done. That is who you’re targeting.
That’s good to know because although your interest might be in high school athletes, you got to recognize that they don’t carry the purse strings. It’s the parents that they got that. The majority of the time, it’s the mother that you’ve got to influence.
Always target the decision-maker.
I interviewed Angie McGilvrey down in Florida. They’ve got a number of practices and we were talking about social media advertising. She’s been very successful with that. She posts regularly on the different social media channels but her target audience is going to be the female athlete who’s probably in CrossFit and their 20s or 30s. She’s got it mapped out. She knows who her avatar is down exactly. She tailors that social media message to those people and thus, has been successful with her social media campaigns. Know that message and know who you want to work with. Angie used to take all comers and the majority of it is in Florida and Medicare. Since they had a reset, which happened to be a hurricane a number of years ago, they decided to change their message to focus on the patients that they wanted to see. Now, the demographics of their patients are completely different because they tailor the message.
We’ve never felt that we could wholesale, go and choose one group like the 30 to 40 female athlete or what have you. We still target all comers. We do it differently through different strategies to try to get them all. We’re in a low populated area so we have to squeeze as much as we can out of what’s available though.
Are you a little bit more rural?
We are.
You got to be the country doctor, essentially. They’re not bringing you their animals.
Haven’t yet anyway.
Never assume that everybody knows what you do. Nobody thinks about physical therapy, ever. Click To TweetThat can be some of the more difficult marketing that you do when you’re reaching out to the public.
It is. In that article I wrote, I used some references from Dan Kennedy in marketing and they get the Marketing Results Triangle, taking, targeting and tying in together the message, the market and the media for the group that you’re going after. Once upon a time, you could say social media, internet, email, all those things and don’t work for Medicare people but that’s not true anymore. As grandmas are all on Facebook now, you can now open up some of those avenues that once were viewed as well, you can only reach them with newspaper ads and mail. What worked many years ago now is moving and evolving and you have to keep moving with that.
We’re at the end of 2020 and what worked at the end of 2019, now post-pandemic is different. You’ve got to recognize, if you don’t have any energy, time and money put into the direct to community marketing bucket then you’re going to be in a lot of trouble because that physician bucket is shrinking because maybe not in your community but I know in some of the larger metropolises they can’t go in and see doctors anymore.
I don’t want to say it’s completely gone, but the only way we can ever reach those guys is we tried to do everything systematically so it isn’t just licking and sticking. We try it once and see how it goes but making sure that our notes always read a certain way, particularly to the doctor because we know what they all generally want. They don’t want three-page notes sent to them on progress. They want them as simple and short as possible. I still see at times therapists on the bigger ones. We are already missing them if you want to try to influence them. That’s one piece but then always making sure that we do a quick phone call, “So-and-so is coming over to see you. We want to make sure that there’s a note that’s already been faxed. Have a great day.” It’s trying to provide customer service to them as well. The last thing is we do an in-between progress call having our therapist make a call to the doc’s office saying, “I want to touch base to let you know how so-and-so is doing. That is all. Thank you.” That’s all the way you can make those touches when you can’t see them face to face. They don’t want you in there and I don’t want to be in there.
When you consider the direct to community type of marketing, that’s new territory for many owners. Either they haven’t used social media, don’t know how to use social media or they haven’t used mass market mailers, media posts, the radio, TV or anything like that. The post-pandemic forced their hands if they want to make some connections and growth. They might say, “I don’t know what to do.” Start with, who are you marketing to? If you’re thinking about the decision-maker is being the housewife, the majority of the time then where are they living? That might guide you to where you need to be in social media.
That’s an easy one from a mailing standpoint. You can do a target grid search on every door, direct mail, if you want to hit X amount people in certain age groups and so on and so forth, you can get that down to a fine point. Our mailers, once upon a time, wasn’t an effective marketing campaign but it dropped off a lot as far as our effectiveness with it. Particularly if you’re marketing the same old, “Come in for a free consult,” some sort of a new tripwire that connects them. That works well with us still but if you’re sending something that says, “Do you have back pain? Call us today,” you’re better off using some other strategy than that. It’s going to be costly.
The one thing that therapists always make the mistake with is we assume everybody knows what we do. Everybody’s thinking of physical therapy every day of their life. Nobody is thinking about physical therapy ever. Let me break everyone’s bubble now with that. I learned that early on and that was probably a saving grace for me. I focused on, “These are consumers, these aren’t patients.” That may ruffle some feathers with some PTs but if you start changing that mindset and knowing that that individual is being competed with by General Motors, by their utility bill, by their kid’s college tuition, by all these other things that are drawing their time and money and energy, you’re going to go in there and say, “If you’ve got back pain, call us today because we give great quality care,” you’re not going to reach them. You have to do something more targeted to get them to reach out and call. One of the things that Chad Madden did is using a digital product, eBooks, things of that nature like, “If you have a low back pain, come and get your free low back pain workbook, learn how to treat yourself.” That speaks to some people. Things that bring them out and get them reaching to you. You’re trying to attract people to you.
The important thing to recognize and you’ve alluded to it essentially, is that you do something and then you’ve got to assess the effectiveness of it. That’s why you’re changing the message on your direct mailers every so often. Recognizing that, “We sent out these three mailers. We’ve spent three months on social media,” which seems to be about the time it takes to gain some traction on some of these. Maybe you can share your experience.
It takes time.
People think that if I send out the social media posts, things should be ringing off the hook like, “I’ve increased my Google Ad spend for the past three weeks. Why aren’t we getting more new patients?” It takes time. At that point, that’s important to figure out exactly what was the ROI or the Return On Investment.
Whatever you do, if you’re doing social media for three months, make sure that we’re measuring. Is it working? Make some adjustments as necessary. Marketing is conversational. You’re talking with someone and you keep saying the same thing over and over to them. They’re going to be like, “Something’s wrong with this guy. I’m not reaching them. They’re not connecting with me.” Your conversation has to adjust to whoever you’re talking to in-person. Marketing is going to change in whoever you’re talking to out there. The things that they want to hear is what you want to try to reach them with. As you know, there are only many things, what are the results and the benefits and then try to overcome those barriers of, “How much time is it going to take? How hard is it going to be? How much is it going to cost?” Those are the pieces of sales that you’ll have to work on to overcome when people do finally reach for you.
It’s interesting, as more people have been doing social media posts and some of my clients have noted so much of the focus of the content can be like, “Here are some stretches for low back pain. Here’s the anatomy of a shoulder that you need to consider,” and I’m not convinced that’s what gets people engaged. Honestly, one of my patients said, “I get more engagement from posting a beautiful sunset than I do from any of that other how-to stuff in social media.” I’m like, “I probably wouldn’t click on any of those things either and might give a thumbs up to a nice sunset too.” We got to consider that not everyone wants to know your how-tos and what- fors.
They don’t want to know that. They want to know, “I have a problem. What are you going to do for it?” If they have shoulder pain or back pain that’s been bothering them for a long time, at some point, you send the right message out, “Are you sick and tired of this back pain?” That’s different than we treat back pain as not emotional. It’s factual. There’s no feeling from it. Marketing has to derive a feeling. It has to create any emotion because that’s what motivates us to move, to go do something. You have to target that. Knowing where most individuals are at in their feelings about their problem, makes a big difference in how you tailor your message to them.
If you’re in a running community and those are the people that you want to see are the roles, you’re not talking to them about sitting at a desk and how that causes neck pain. You got to target the message appropriately and give it some time to take traction. I’m not convinced that it’s a home run out there to get new patients in the door but it’s a repetitive single in the baseball analogy that usually gets some tractions.
It’s always a small ball. It is the things of how much marketing have I done over the years and all the while, my marketing was great, my front desk personnel was terrible? You got people ringing in but unless you’re taking the phone call, you’re trusting that individual to hook them and say, “Come on in. Are you having pain? You need to go see your doctor first.” That is what we know. That works against your general public marketing. When you want the general public to reach to you and then when they do, you say, “Go somewhere else.” That’s wrong. It isn’t just marketing. It’s knowing how to handle all the other components that come with it.
It’s customer service, at that point. That’s what you were talking to at the beginning. I remember talking to one of the founders of Keet Health. If you can focus and improve the customer experience, that will triple your marketing efforts because those people will think about that, especially in the different buckets. It’s going to improve the patient compliance and they’re coming back if you can improve the customer experience. It’s going to more likely help them refer family and friends to come to as well so it’s going to help that bucket. If you focus on the customer experience, patients are going to go back to the physicians in that bucket and say, “I love this place and you ought to send all your patients there.” On the backend, if you’re reaching out to the community and they have a poor experience on that initial call, you just wasted your marketing dollar at that point. It is so much that it comes back to customer service and the effectiveness of our marketing can be submarined if the customer service isn’t there.
It’s got to be credible. If you say that you deliver the feel-good experience, which is what our brand name is. Our tagline on everything is the feel-good experience. Meaning, we do focus on not only making them feel good physically but emotionally, spiritually, making that connection with them, giving them a great experience all the way through. When they do call in and say, “You got to go somewhere else first,” and treat them like, “You’ve been here before,” we related to whatever then you’ve blown it. You got to make sure that that is incredible all the way through that you perform and behave as your marketing is.
Trusting somebody to do that naturally is a fault.
You got to train it in.
They don’t say whatever comes off the top of their head that they think sounds good, you have a script for them like, “This is what you say when a new patient comes in. This is what you say if they walk in the door versus if they say, ‘I heard about you on the radio or I got this flyer in the mail,’ and then you say, ‘Great,’ then you say this.” That’s trained over and over and its role played. That training can be taken into many different sections of the customer experience. It’s not just front desk training, that’s training that can occur at any point in the customer service experience, providers, technicians and billers. You name it.
You’re leading off into my last project here. I’ve been working on a book. I created a system many years ago and I’m getting around to putting together an actual book for it. It’s called the Feel-Good Experience: How to Grow Your Practice with Five-Star Customer Service. It covers all of the psychology of the human being, our needs, wants, the certainties and the things that we’re looking for, all of us. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, what gender, nationality or any of it. There are certain commonalities that we all are seeking. Ultimately, it’s respect and communication and that level of professionalism to lead them through the process. One of the worst things that I can see over the years and I’ve had it happen to me personally is when I go in seeking a service or an item and someone says, “It’s over there,” and they point me toward it.
To me, the difference is when that person says, “Let me go take you there and show you where it is. Let me get it for you.” That’s the difference. We always want our clinics to run within that model. We have five stations or so. Front desk, we use the aids, therapists, hosts and hostesses because their first action is to bring them back. There’s a whole set of steps there on how you body language that action to show them respect, honor and appreciation for them being there and bringing them back with them, being cognizant of those things. Things that they tell you, things that they maybe don’t tell you, the subtle tells. If you’re sitting at the poker table, you got to be able to read people. Going through clear to the end again, the front desk individuals are the last ones to get them again. They got two important parts, in and out. That’s all within the book soon to be released.
Marketing has to drive a feeling. It has to create an emotion. Click To TweetDo you have a title for it?
The Feel-Good Experience: How to Grow Your Practice with Five-Star Customer Service.
When is this coming out? If someone read this episode in the future, what do you think?
It’ll be out in February or March 2021.
Congratulations on that. It all goes back to the topic of how we can improve our marketing and much of that can be fortified and even multiplied by having a good customer experience.
You’ll find out quickly if you’re not, particularly if you’re at an executive level of management in your company where you’re managing a lot of different sites and you’re not right there watching everything. When your former patient bucket starts tanking out and you’re still doing all the ingredients that you’ve always done that work to bring people back in and you’re dropping off quickly, there’s a reason they’re not coming back. You definitely want to target some of those things.
You’re saying that a lot of people will measure the return patient percentage of their new patients. What percentage of your patients are returning patients that have been there before? You’re finding a correlation between that statistic, that number dropping and maybe a worsening of the patients.
It’s usually two different things. The first thing I’m targeting is I’m going to my marketing going, “What’s fallen out? What are we not reaching out to them with?”
We’re not sending emails and calls to the patients.
We’re doing it all and it’s all because everything is well documented in our system. I’m like, “They’re not coming back then on the phone calls. What are they saying?” “They didn’t want to come back or they went somewhere else.” You then start taking note of all that. They started going to other places and that’s when bad things are happening. You want us to fortify former patients and get them served.
I love that you brought that up because that can be key for some people who are seeing numbers dip and give them something to look into because they might be saying, “This circumstance led to not coming back,” but you are not looking internally and saying, “Maybe they’re having some poor customer experiences that they didn’t have in the past or something’s fallen out.”
Particularly if it’s a lifelong person that keeps coming back and they’ve been back for ten years and we’ve had this happen, it’s the most painful thing ever as an owner, when you treated that patient. When I was a therapist and you had this such tight connection that they would text you, they will call you at home and you took care of them. All of a sudden, the next time you see them, they’re standoffish and then they say things like, “I went somewhere else.” It’s like, “What happened? Something’s not right.”
That’s such valuable feedback that maybe you get that from physicians occasionally if they’re honest and you have that relationship with them, or the one person in the community that came through and then decides to go back on Google and give you a one-star rating or something like that. You can simply trust and get much more out of those past patients if you stay in communication with them regarding how things are going in your clinic. That’s something that you have to do as you personally step away from treating everybody, which is the most PT owners. There’s so much value there, for sure.
They’re a wealth of survey knowledge, instead of hiring a survey group to do surveys, survey your past patients. That is the simplest and most cost-effective way to find out how you’re doing. You’ve got to make sure that they’re being honest. You allow them to be honest, you give them a safe place to be honest. If they say something bad, you can’t lose your cool with them. You have to say, “I appreciate that,” then you can mark it and make your changes off of that.
You covered a ton of great stuff and shared a ton of wisdom. Steve, is there anything else you want to share before we start wrapping things up?
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This is an absolute, tremendous opportunity. If anybody would like to contact me, they can contact my clinic number at work (402) 564-5456 or reach me by email, which is CPTSL@ColumbusPhysicalTherapy.com.
We’ll look forward to your book here. Thanks for your time and sharing. Hopefully, everyone gets a ton out of it but I appreciate your time.
I appreciate it, Nathan. Thank you.
Thank you, Steve.
Important Links:
- Columbus Physical Therapy
- Paul Gough
- Angie McGilvrey – Previous episode
- Keet Health
- CPTSL@ColumbusPhysicalTherapy.com
About Steve Line
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!