Successful Marketing Tips During A Crisis With Dr. Joe Simon

How does a practice built on the premise of physical contact with the client survive a crisis where everyone is forced to isolate themselves and do social distancing?  Dr. Joe Simon  shows how effective telehealth has been in marketing physical therapy and how it has helped out-of-network practitioners such as him continue to serve and even expand their clientele even during the lockdown. He has owned PT clinics through the 2008 recession and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Now he’s at Ground Zero of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City. A master marketer, he has been able to strategize and plan, and thus survive, during the downturn by using his previous experiences. Listen in as he joins Nathan Shields on the show today to share his tips for successful marketing during the crisis.

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I’m excited to bring on Dr. Joe Simon . He is a physical therapy owner in New York and he’s been through issues like this. For example, he’s been a private practice owner since 2005 and he not only survived the 2008 recession but even expanded during that time. In 2012, during Hurricane Sandy, he lost one of his clinics and his home. Yet again he pushed forward and grew his clinics. During this time, other practitioners took notice and ask for his guidance, coaching and consulting, which eventually resulted in founding the Private Practice Business Academy .

Dr. Joe is an Owner and Partner in multiple out-of-network medical and wellness clinics. He’s doing video marketing, leadership training companies, merging and acquiring other clinics. He’s doing a ton but I’m excited to bring him on simply because of that. He’s been through some of these pretty major issues with his clinic, so he comes from a point of experience. We had Jamey Schrier on. His clinic burned down and came back from that. Joe has been through this a couple of times. I’m excited to bring not only his story but also his advice and his recommendation to other clinic owners. Thanks for coming on, Joe.

I’m grateful to be on. I’ve run podcasts for many years and I stopped doing it for about a year. I missed it, but I can see it’s getting back into it again and I’m like, “It’s exciting to be back on and connecting with good people.” I’m excited when you ask me, “Do you want to jump on?” I’m like, “Of course.” Nathan’s been on my show. It was a quick one where you did it in person, down and dirty. We had a mic and a phone and we did it.

We had a great conversation. We riffed for about twenty minutes or so and it was easy. You shared a ton of great wisdom and asked some great questions and we were on the same page as far as what business owners need to do. What was the name of your podcast if people wanted to check it out?

The original one was the Private Practice Business Academy, and I ran that for about two years. That one stopped probably at the beginning of 2018, then I started a new one called The 30 in 30. It was all marketing. All the marketing guys that I’ve met over the years, we’ve become good friends and I’m like, “Can you jump on the show and share some knowledge?” It was a fun show to do. You went on The 30 in 30 because it was good. There are a lot of these owners on that show. It’s everyone. It’s not just PT. We had people like dentists and psychiatrists. I still get podiatrists and every one that reaches out and still talks about, “What would you do right now? What’s your next move?”

Speaking of that, do you want to share some of your stories first or do you want to get into it and say, “Here’s my next move?” 

I’ll give them the background. You’re not getting it from up on high. I’ve been for the downs and ups and the cuts and bruises. The biggest cut, I’ve got to say, it wasn’t even the financial crisis. It was in 2012 where New York got hit with Hurricane Sandy. We’re in the Northeast, we don’t get hurricanes. It doesn’t happen to us. It’s like having a snowfall in Florida. You’d shut Florida down. This hurricane, it wasn’t the storm, it was the surge, the water that came up. It flooded lower Manhattan. It destroyed almost all of lower Manhattan where I had one of my clinics. That clinic was completely gone and you think that’s bad. I also had my apartment, which was a condo, which was right on the water. I had it for about a couple of years. My wife, I had a small child at the time and it was the same thing. The water came into the front door, went out the back, and then brought the outside patio furniture back into the living room.

When I came back two days later, I was like, “My furniture didn’t move. That’s my patio furniture.” With that, clinics are shut down. I still had staff to pay. There are no bailouts. There was nothing even coming anywhere near that at the time. I’m pulling every credit card I got. “Let’s see how many can I get a credit line here?” I was about $150,000 in the hole. That’s how deep I got. We were losing money left and right. I was telling my wife I said, “This is going to be the last-ditch effort here.” In marketing, they have a saying, “If you have $2 left, you put $1 towards marketing.” I said, “We’re going to give this a shot. We’ve got $2 left. Let’s put the $1 towards marketing.” I did something stupid. I didn’t believe in myself and I hired a marketing company. I said, “They probably know better than me. Let me hire a marketing company.”

They were running at about $5,000 a month. I didn’t have $5,000 a month. I signed a contract for six months without a dime to my name. I was in the hole, but I was like, “If they can fix it, it’ll be great.” I also had an intern that worked for me. She was like, “I need the money.” I felt bad and I’m like, “I can give you some hours if you can help me with my marketing. All this stuff that I know I’m going to translate it to you on. I’m going to teach you how to do this stuff. I’m going to hand everything, you just got to implement it.” The first month goes by a marketing company, marketing company, zero and she gets six patients. I’m like, “We got six patients.” Not life-changing, but we got six people. It’s huge. Long story short, at the end of three months, the marketing company came back with a goose egg, marketing intern comes back with 90 new patients.

Everyone else had their head in the sand or they were frozen. They were like, “We’re damaged a lot of work. We don’t know what to do.” We were grinding. We were like, “Let’s go. Let’s talk to everybody we can. Let’s put out the information. Let’s educate as much and show people were still around.” We did that. Three months came back with 90 new clients. That was pretty cool. Funny thing it was the marketing company tried to sue me because I didn’t want to pay them for the last three months. I’m like, “You got zero results. I have a $15 an hour employee that generated 90 clients in three months compared to you that took $15,000 for me and generated nothing.” I paid them for the fourth month and we called it quits. Here’s the fun part about that whole thing. All of the docs, all of the community or everyone that I was networking with, and seeing that we were the only ones open were like, “You are still seeing patients. “How are you doing this?” That was the first time I got attention from a doctor looking at me instead of the other way.

Back then, PTs had to knock on doors and say, “Can you refer a patient to me?” This is the first time doctors were saying to me, “What are you doing? How are you doing that?” I was like, “I’ll show you these are simple stuff.” We were doing basic Google Ads back then, which was nothing. We will also do mailers, postcard mailers. We were mimicking what the dental industry did, but we changed the wording of it. The messaging is what I learned was important. I shared it with those guys and they were getting good results from it. They were like, “We want to do more of this.” That’s when I started the Private Practice Business Academy. I said, “If I’m doing something different while everyone’s going this way and then I go in that way and I can help people, why don’t we make this into something? Why don’t we all go together?” I have a passion for marketing and sales. That for me was an easy outlet for me to go and ramp-up. The podcast was born and we skyrocketed from there.

Are you doing marketing for healthcare professionals across different industries at this time?

I used to coach and consult. I retired my coaching and consulting business at the beginning of 2019. I said, “I’m going to take a year off. I was done with it. I did that part.” It was one of those pieces of my life that I said, “I’ve done it. I ran it from 2012 to 2019. I met great people. I saw a lot of great clients.” We mentioned Jamey, he was a good friend. I said, “He’s a great coach. You should go to him. He’s going to do it.” If they did, they did. If they didn’t, I didn’t pressure anybody. I said, “There’s the flip side of what happened.” A lot of them said, “We know you have a great way of managing people, bringing our culture and our business together. How can we work together?” Some of my clients, we merged together. We formed a partnership and we moved forward. Some of the clients said, “Joe, you taught me a lot. I can do it myself.” With my blessings, they were good to go. They don’t need anything else. They were like, “I’m good.” There are many other consultants in marketing in general. That’s good news.

Is that some of the work that you’re doing now then is marketing not just yourself but for other people?

We’re only doing in-house. All of my partners and my own clinics, we’re doing all in-house. As I mentioned, we do have a video marketing company and you’re like, “I’m jealous of that.” I’ve learned the hard way not to outsource everything. We have that in-house and that’s helping all of my partners and our own clinics because that’s what you have to put out these days. That’s a big change. Everything’s video.

Not only in the case of Hurricane Sandy but now with the COVID-19, Coronavirus pandemic, you’re ground zero in Downtown New York City. Tell us how are you surviving? How are you getting patients at this time? How are you staying afloat?

I only have one clinic left and my main clinic is in Midtown Manhattan. It is still there to this day. The other clinics are in other states, New Jersey as well. Manhattan is the only one. We have zero in-person physical therapy visits. Here’s the thing with Manhattan. It’s either you commute into the city from the outer boroughs. No one’s doing that anymore. If you have some money, you left. You said, “I’m out of here. I’m going to Florida, Long Island, Connecticut, to the other states, to my summer house.” They left. Our target audience disappeared. Here’s the other thing. All the companies said, “We’re going to require our employees to work from home.”

This is the truth for those that aren’t from New York. The majority of people are not from New York. I was born and raised here, but the majority of people graduated college and they say, “I want to live in New York.” They get a job at a big advertising company and they come and work here. Let’s say Gina works in McCann Erickson or McKinsey. She’s originally from Colorado. The company says, “Work from home.” She’s not going to live in her apartment with her two roommates and a dog. She’s like, “I’m going to go home to mom.” She flies back. She’s gone. She’s not even in New York. We have zero in-person physical therapy visits for the clinic.

It’s gone all telehealth.

Let me tell you what we did, and I don’t know if I was right or wrong, but I’m seeing that I was right. Before the shutdown happened, we were getting a lot of flags. We were hearing it from everywhere. We had a lot of things on the news. We had everything. I made an executive decision. I said, “We’re going to shut all of our clinics down. Let’s shut down for two weeks,” before anybody said it. Two things. I want the staff to feel safe. The staff was feeling a little bit jittery. I said, “We’ll shut down for two weeks.” I was naive enough to believe that it would be gone in two weeks. “We’re going to be shut down for two weeks. It’ll go away. We’ll be back by April 1st. We’re all awesome, don’t worry.” That didn’t work the way we wanted. We closed the last two weeks of March. We opened the first week in April, but the two weeks we closed, we were closed for patients.

We spent that time training our staff, but we trained on what would happen. This is a risk analysis I do with a lot of my former clients. I still do it to this day with my partners. I put a risk analysis on the board and I said, “What if worst-case scenario, it doesn’t open? What if the president says it’s not going to open until July, August? What if that happens?” I put that risk analysis on the board and I said, “What do we do?” It was me and my leadership team, we sat down and we went through the analysis and we looked at all the worst-case scenarios. To be honest, the majority of those worst-case scenarios came true. We were thinking this is the absolute worst case, shut down and they’re going to quarantine us. We’ll never be able to leave. We’re making that up. We didn’t believe that. We were basing it off of what they did in Italy and we’re like, “That’ll never happen here. That won’t happen.” It happened but we made the decision then is, what can we do to keep the doors open and keep our staff paid?

We said it’s going to be telehealth. We consumed as much information about telehealth. Rob Vining , who is a guy that I interviewed a long time ago on my podcast, I reached out to him and asked him a couple of questions. If you’re in telehealth, reach out to him. He’s a generous soul. He’ll give you whatever he got. He guided me through. He said, “This is what telehealth is, it’s not difficult.” He said something important to me. He goes, “It’s a conversation. You have to make the PT feel confident in what they’re doing because a lot of PTs don’t feel confident and they feel like they cannot give the same treatment. I talked to a couple of friends, they’re like, “Joe, I’m a manual therapist.” I’m like, “So was I back in the stone age. I was a manual therapist.” “I get it but how do you stay alive?” A lot of that is, can you use your voice to explain to your client what to do? We created a training program and ran in-house and we said, “Can you follow this step by step? Is this something you could follow? How you greet somebody? What you talk about? What’s the first thing you could do? How do you go through these steps?”

My PTs at first were a little bit like, “Yeah, I guess.” We did a lot of roleplay and this is before we shut down. We did two weeks. The majority of them believe that we wouldn’t have to do this. They were like, “There’s no way we’ve got to do this. This is not going to happen.” I didn’t believe it. I will be honest with you, I was like, “No, it’s not going to happen.” It did happen, but they had something in place. They had some type of format in place to follow. When they were ready to go, they were like, “We’re good to go. I have a format.” The funniest thing happened. The first couple of ones when we didn’t follow a format, the patient would come on and they wouldn’t schedule for the next one. They thought it was a one-off thing. We were unable to keep the first couple we got, then the lockdown happened. I had to explain to them, “We have to figure this out. Let’s follow the format.” They started following the format, referrals happened. They were able to keep their patient there, explained to them what they’re doing for them.

We went from our first week we had a total of two telehealth patients, then we have 50 telehealth patients. That’s what two therapists operating three days a week the other two days a week. The new norm now is, how do we make it better? We’re like, “How do we make the experience better? How do we make this new normal better?” I’ve been stepping heavily on the gas pedal since day one because as I spoke to a lot of friends, I’m like, “Like in 2008 and 2012, marketing is what’s going to save us but it depends on what type of marketing you do.” That’s the key there were some are saying, “I’m doing this, I’m doing that and it’s not working.” It goes back to the messaging as we said in the beginning. All your messaging and some are getting a completely wrong, some are copying from others. They say, “I saw this guy talking about it.” I’m like, “How would you speak to your current clients?” You and I having a chat and going along and it’s amazing where when you explain that to the PT because I get it. They’re not cerebral, hands-on like, “I get it.” When you say, “We have to learn how to have a conversation.” It changes the game.

You did a lot of training and I’ve been a big proponent of that since this got started. It’s an opportunity to train, plan and strategize, how are we going to ramp this thing back up? It takes a lot of work and effort behind the scenes. I’ve also talked to Daniel Seidler of TelePT Solutions and talked about telehealth as well, and it doesn’t come normally. It’s not what PTs normally do. They want to get their hands on people. They want to be in front of people but you don’t have that. How can you provide value if you’re distant and you can’t touch your patients? It’s possible. You have to challenge your PTs to think in a different way and say, “This is how it’s working and this is what we do.” Challenge them to say, “How can I bring value to each visit even though I can’t touch them?”

It’s possible that you can. Daniel Seidler recommended a book called  Becoming a Supple Leopard . It’s written by a PT out of San Francisco and it has tons of pictures and guidance on doing self-mobilizations. How do you mobilize a joint if you can’t touch them? It goes through stuff like that. There are ways to do it but what I want to get from you at this point, you did great in preparing for worst-case scenarios and it’s good for people to even do that even though they’re getting some funding here and there. Are you getting any new patients? Let’s go back in 2012, how did you get 90 new patients when you were the only one open at that time? What was your messaging and what mediums did you use for marketing?

Back in 2012 is a little different. The landscape was different. Google Ads was probably what we started with and it wasn’t as popular. I had an unfair advantage where I was playing online when others weren’t. That was one advantage. Let’s remove that advantage and say, “What else did we do at that time?” A lot of it was we borrowed from the dental industry their postcard process. They were good at sending out postcards to remind you of this. All we did was remind them of, “By the way, we’re still here.” The postcard, it’s a branding thing, but we changed it to almost a direct response where we asked them to do something immediately. We send a postcard out, but we said, “If you know someone else that would appreciate our services or know somebody also benefit from this, you will qualify for a free session,” or whatever it was back then. It’s 2012 I don’t remember a few years on that and whatever you can provide. There’s much more than they can right now that it made sense. Did all of them work? No.

Sometimes when you do a postcard when you do the Google Ads when you do a phone call when you do a bunch of things together and you’re targeting the same person that person’s going to be like, “You’re everywhere. You must be the best guy for this because I’m seeing you there. I’m seeing you here.” That’s the same concept what we’re doing now. We’re trying to be everywhere. The landscape has changed. We’re leaning heavily into video these days and that’s everything we do. The advantage is we do have a video marketing company. If you don’t have one, do it on your phone. Get down and dirty and have your phone going. The problem is and I see it, we see a lot more people doing it. The challenge is, what are you saying that’s interesting to the audience, to your patient? That’s where we get into a big challenge. Some people are going to hate me for this. Standard PT is boring. I don’t want to burst anybody’s bubble here. We get it.

How do you make that sexy? You can’t make standard PT sexy, it’s not. We’re not talking about the latest new craze or whatever. What I see a lot of now from all the ads and all the Facebook ads I see running and I see other clinics posting stuff up and I’m watching it, there are two things that I see. One thing, they show me a boring old exercise with a clinic in the background that’s not even clean, that looks in jumbles. I’m like, “What are we doing?” It’s something I call it being tone-deaf by the way. We’ll touch base on being tone-deaf. The second thing is, they’re not even connecting with who they’re speaking to. They’re putting out information. They’re saying, “My boss told me that I needed to shoot a video or create a video, I’m going to do it because he told me to do it.” You’re like, “That’s great.” They put this out, but I’m like, “Is it hurting you?”

That might be hurting you and unfortunately, if you took ten minutes to think it through before you picked it up and said, “This is what I’m going to do.” It doesn’t have to be perfect at what you say, but if you get a little bit there, each time you do it gets better. The first time I shot a video, I was horrible. If you pull up some of my old videos back in 2009, you’re like, “Miserable.” You get better over time. That’s the takeaway. It’s knowing what that messaging is, what the key is. You have to say, “Who are we talking to? How do we make it interesting?” We would want to simplify things. We also see they make it too complex. We’re talking about a stretch and they made the stretch complex because they’re talking about every muscle that’s attached when realistically we should say, “You’ll feel better in your lower back with this stretch. Give it a shot,” like eighth-grade reading level.

We have to dumb it down because the therapists want to bring out the models, the hip joint, the shoulder joint, and the knee joint say, “This is how it works.” A lot of times people don’t care. Some people might, and I know for people who are PTs, we want to know how it works, but a majority of the population this is where you’re going is whatever. How does it help my low back? Does it make me feel better if I do this and how often do I need to do it? Do you need to take ten minutes to explain all that? Maybe spend a little bit more time connecting and say, “If you stretch this muscle and you do this thing, it’s going to help you feel better.” As you said, dumbing it down and not getting into the specifics much. Is that where you are going then?

Yeah. Let’s be honest, the practitioners that are hurting that are having a hard time wherein network practitioners that never had to market to get a patient because they had a doctor referral source that fed them, patients. They didn’t have to go outside because they had, “These docs send me patients. We’re good. I’m in the network. I see Medicare, I see this. I see everything.” They’re coming in. Who would ever think orthopedic surgeons were not allowed to work? Who would ever think that? It’s unfathomable to even put that as a risk analysis. That wasn’t even on my risk analysis, that docs can’t work. Who would ever think that?

That’s the one thing that shut down 97% of the practices out there. Not even the virus. I’m going to tell you, they have no other referral source because they were standing on what I call, instead of the three-legged stool, they had one leg on a stool. COVID knocked that out by taking out your referral source, which is your docs. They’re like, “I have nothing.” If you’re scrambling for marketing and your message isn’t clear and you don’t know who your patient is because you’ve been getting your patient from ortho for all these years or primary care or whoever. You never had to work to get somebody. It’s a difference in being out of network. We have to work to get them in. It’s a different mindset.

You’re constantly working on your message.

It’s something that we built a muscle too. I told good friends that are in PPS, that I know in the APK I never saw a difference between in and out. I said, “We have the same problems. We have the same issues except for the fact that the word you’re in and I’m out. That’s the only difference that shows up but everything was identical.” All these years later, I see it and it was the referral source. That’s what we can see. When we say standard physical therapy, we’re talking about guys that never had to struggle to get people because their clinic was used to being busy and not productive. They were used to getting clients coming in. Now, unfortunately, this is where we’re at.

Marketing during this pandemic forces the determined PT owner to market their value to the community.
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Your marketing is just that? The messaging I am assuming is focused on connecting with patients and speaking at their level. What’s your secret sauce? I know it takes some time, but if you were to say, “I mark it like this,” and you see it. People are spending thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, sending out email campaigns and that stuff. What is your secret sauce for that message and how to make it more concise that you’ve learned that you’re willing to share?

Nathan, I had this for a different genre of practitioners but it will work well for you. It’s the same thing. I have a link, DrJoeSimon.com/Masterclass. It has a ten-minute video on messaging. To all your readers, jump in on that. There’s no login, opt-in, nothing. I don’t want your opt-in. I don’t want your emails. Don’t worry about it. Log in and you get a free ten-minute on messaging alone. It’s my gift to you. That ten minutes will change your mindset on what you have to say. My only advice for that ten-minute master class I would say is I spend 40 minutes doing it. If you don’t spend 40 minutes of working on that project, you didn’t give it enough time because that’s the thinking that will have to go into it to get something out of it. That’s a huge difference.

If people didn’t notice, I mentioned it in the bio when we first got started that your PT clinics are out of network and your message is different and every visit has to be showing some value. You’re working at a different pace. I can understand what you’re talking about, how people are busy but not productive. The difference between in and out of the network is that you have to focus on your messaging to get them in the door and not focusing on the physician referral. Also, how do you provide value at each visit? Your messaging is completely different. Not only to bring them in, but also engage and maintain and retain those patients in your clinic. It’s different. Nowadays, are you spending much time on social media platforms or how are you getting your video message out?

It’s everywhere. Wherever you can get out, you want to get it out. You don’t want to be limited to one platform or another platform. If your audience is sitting on Facebook, then by all means, go on Facebook. If your audience is sitting on Instagram, go on Instagram. Realistically, I can tell you 90% of the practices that I’ve consulted in my lifetime of consulting, they didn’t have a platform that they dedicated time to. They didn’t even dedicate money to marketing. When we looked at their budgets and we were like, “What are you dedicating towards marketing?” it was always between 2% to 5%. One guy was at 6% and this was probably a good sample size over 100 people over a few years. It’s one of those things like, “You didn’t even break the 5% on your budget.”

The messaging is simple. If I told somebody, “It costs $25,000 from my services,” they’re like, “I’m not paying that. That’s massively expensive.” If I say, “If you could get a return of $250,000 in a twelve-month period, would you invest in me?” what do you think most people are going to say? They’re going to be like, “$250,000, absolutely. I want that return.” There’s no brain activity on that. Everyone’s like, “Absolutely.” Even my own messaging changed years ago because I knew the result I can deliver my clients back then, and this was every industry. This was PT, dentistry, podiatry and some were easier than others. PT sometimes, depending on the demographic where they were, we were like, “It’s a little challenging. It might not work. We might have to tweak it a bit.”

The easiest one I’ve ever had, I can share this even though it’s off-topic, was my wife’s friend, she was a vascular surgeon and she was going into the hair plug industry. She goes, “Joe, I’m switching into hair plugs.” If you’re a vascular surgeon, you deal with tiny capillaries. Doing plugs is super easy. I’m like, “If a hair is thin, you could put some plugs in. I get it.” Like, “I’m thinning and my hair is gone as we speak.” Who wouldn’t pay for this? I put one ad for her that spoke realistically to myself. She had more leads in the 24-hour period and it’s the vanity behind it. The vanity was what drove the whole thing. Physical therapy is not sexy. We’re not going to get somebody saying, “I want to go to PT.”

We’re not providing hair plugs and sprouting hair for people.

That was a takeaway from that. What I’ve worked with my partners and your audience will find super helpful is we went on a complete guidance program of three things. We look at even not just my partners now, the people I’m speaking to. We went to a concept of pivot, protect, and plan. I’m like, “We know this is the new normal. We got to get used to it.” I had a conversation with a staff PT that I saw and she’s like, “I’m burnt out. I’m doing telehealth and this clinic sees in person, then I have to make sure I work on our marketing. I still got to do authorizations, notes, and all these things.” She’s like, “How do I keep up with this?” I said, “I hate to tell you, but this is the new normal. We will provide as much help and guidance you need but I don’t see it changing any time soon.”

When I say practice owners need to pivot, if they haven’t done it already, you have to pivot immediately. Some practices got the PPP money, some practices got the Medicare money, and some practices got whatever funds and grants they could get. Some did, but some did get big goose egg. I’m one of those guys too. I got a big goose egg. I didn’t get it yet. I’m on a waiting list. We’ve already pivoted. We said, “We’ve taken that time off. We came back when lockdown occurred.” We said, “We’re back and this is what we’re going to work on.” We made that pivot quick. We’re in the hole, “We protected what we needed to protect now we’re in the planning stage.” We were like, “How do we move forward? What we’re going to do coming forward?” That’s the mentality behind, how we’re going to get through this? Get out of 2020.

I love how you broke down, pivot, protect, and then plan because this is what I’m worried about is people are going to get that money and go back to the way they were doing things. They’re going to take all that money and say, “Now, I can go back to my safe nest and sit and do what I did before.” Instead of taking that money and taking advantage of the opportunity to, as you said, pivot, protect and plan for a different normal or take advantage of other opportunities, look at other opportunities that maybe we’re not even into 2020. If you want to consider how you’re doing things, is now the right time for an updated EMR change?

Is now a good time to improve your billing program or outsource your billing if you’re in-house and you’re not satisfied with it? Even more so, it meant to bring your PT into the 21st century and do some social media campaign work. Posts some videos that are engaging and not a twenty-minute lesson on hamstring stretches without the models and everything. Start getting engaged and use digital marketing to your advantage. Start using project tools like Slack, Loom, and Asana if you’re a little bit bigger to coordinate things. Start taking advantage of some of these things. Use these programs for policy and procedure manuals.

If you don’t have one, it goes into the protect and plan stage that you’re talking about. Make some pivots and those pivots become policies and that protects the things that they don’t slide back into what you were doing before and then plan. You got to reset to the new normal. Going back to your point though is that I’m worried that people are going to take that money and then go back to what they were doing before and think that that’s okay and that they’ll survive when people and things are going to change around them.

I talked about the Pivot Protect Plan. When I went through this risk analysis with them, I said to them, “If we think about it, what do all practice owners want?” We say, “Most practice owners, I know they want freedom.” They’re like, “I’m tired of the rat race. I want to work. I want to do my own thing.” We all know that. The majority of them want meaning they want to say, “I’m a great practitioner. I’m doing something valuable for my community. I’m helping my community.” The last part which I’m a big proponent of is, you need profit. You need to be making money. If you don’t make money, then we have an issue. You’re not going anywhere and that’s the thing. The last part is, I put an S there because S is for scaling or growth or whatever it is that figure out. This is what I’m going with everyone is, “We have to pivot. We have to protect, which I want to have the plan.” These are the pieces of it.

This is the pivot and we’re going to take this little line off, is that pivot marketing? Are you pivoting your whole company by learning how to market? Let me figure out how to market my company. Is that pivot to say, “I need to work with somebody else or I’m going to be closing my doors?” Would that be a merge? Would you merge with somebody and say, “I got to go with somebody else, and maybe somebody else could guide me through this.” The pivot at the end is you exit, where you’re like, “I’m done with this. I don’t want to go through this again.” I have a business partner that went through 2012 with me. She was like, “I don’t know if I can go through this rodeo again. What do you think?” She’s like, “I’m in it if you’re in it.” I said, “I’m definitely in it. I’m only in my 40s. I’m going to push through it.” Don’t get me wrong. If I was closer to my 50s, I might not have gone through this time because I’m like, “I put enough away. I’m good to go.”

My mentality is I got to push, I got to conquer. I got a win and I have a good mantra that I’ll share. It’s something that I shared with her and said, “We got this. We can do this.” These are some options that I’ve been sharing with that. When we talk about an exit, it’s not like, “I’m going to get a chunk of money and get out.” Unlike other bigger boxes, the big franchises are the big guys that come along and buy you out. When I work with practice owners, I look at them and say, “It’s one thing, money’s one thing, but what are you going to do after?” What are you going to do with your knowledge? Are you going to retire or you’re going to say, “I’m going to sit down and fish every day?” That’s not you. How do we package your IP? You have much that you can share with everyone out there. You might do it on a small scale where you say, “I’m going to share it with the younger generation of PTs coming up, or I’m going to share it with my community. I’m going to set something up in the community where they can come to me.”

You can go look for some PTs that I know and we both know in our space, they sold their practice and they got into a consulting game. They went big and they said, “I want to reach out to everyone. I want to help as many practice owners as I can.” There’s a lot of ways to exit a business that could work as a pivot for them. Packaging that IP is something that when I come in, I’m like, “This is what’s different about me. This is what we’re going to do an exit is one thing. You get the money.” Everybody wants money to say, “My baby is worth something.” That’s what all value our practices. It’s worth something. We want to be able to say like, “What can you do with your time?” That’s it. That’s where the protection response comes. Your protection is like, “Is your practice protected? Are your people protected?” I’ll be honest with you, I have never purchased a practice if the people were not 100% behind with what they were doing. If I saw practice, no matter how great a deal I was going to get, I’ve walked away from deals when I found out that the culture was toxic.

No matter how much money they were making, they were printing money, but the culture was toxic. It’s not worth it. When I say, “We want to protect your people.” We’re talking about culture. That’s what we always want to protect. Is your culture protected? That’s huge. The freedom and money part, that’s where we start planning and that’s it starts going through. That plan could be a number of things. It could be anything. Sometimes it’s too many things that you want to list out. At this point in time, most people, the biggest thing they’re trying to say is they’re trying to survive. They’re like, “How do I survive? How do I get through this?” Most of it is like, “I did it.” I completely get it. As a business owner, you want to be able to say, “We were able to get through this.”

With the funding, without the funding. I have nothing against the funding. I applied myself. If somebody gives you free money, take it. I’m right there with you. It’s one of those things, I have a personal belief that the government is not meant to save us. I don’t believe it. They gave the money, great. My business partners would get on my case when I kept telling them, “We need to have six months’ worth of a dry powder. We need six months.” They would get on my case and they’re like, “Joe, calm down. The economy’s great. We can take this money, we can spend it.” I had one partner take out money and pay down his entire house. That’s a couple of $100,000 that disappeared. A good thing was we had three months’ worth of dry powder. We didn’t have six but we had three on that practice. It’s one of those things that we look at it. That’s what surviving means at this time. For the guys that got to see the video and see the Venn diagram, you get a sense of where we go with this entire process or we look at it.

When we do a risk analysis, I’m trying to break it down to say, “What are the risks we’ve got to take?” Even with a practice of 2021, we have to look at all that. These days our risks are elevated through the roof. I’m an optimist, Nathan. I’m going to tell you, we have more opportunity as physical therapists. I want to throw one golden nugget out there to everyone reading. Look at one thing, personal training, massage industries are shut down, but we’re still open. That’s a lot of clients that don’t have access to two of the things that we are legal that we can do. It’s in our practice act. We can do exercises with people and we can do soft tissue with people as safe as you have to be. Think about the two industries and unfortunately, I don’t want to beat up on personal trainers. I have a lot of great friends that are personal trainers. Some of them are watching me on Facebook live but it is what it is. You can’t do it. That’s a golden nugget. I want everyone to use that. Run with that. There are two industries that we have access to. What can you do in your community?

The Venn diagram I thought was awesome because there was the pivot protect and plan, and in the middle was scalability. As those overlap, then you’re able to scale. As you provide freedom, profits, and meaning, you’re able to do something. As you expanded that out even more as it applies to nowadays versus the need to survive. The market is the huge takeaway when on the pivoting, how are you going to the market when you don’t have physician referral sources and you’re relying on elective surgeries? The third thing was the culture. What a great opportunity to define your culture and revamp it even if you thought it was good. There’s an opportunity to make it what you want and make it exactly what you want and plan accordingly to keep it there. Those three things are what we’re working on, survivability, marketing, and people. How do we handle that, who do we keep around and who do we trust going forward? If we can maintain those things, then if we can survive, market appropriately, and keep the right people, scalability is inevitable.

That’s 100% right on the money. As I said, we’re in a crisis but if we look at the opportunity that’s before us, even if you said, “I am in the Midwest. I have not been affected at all but we have a shutdown.” How do you take that opportunity? In God’s good graces, if you’re in a place where you’re not affected by this, and I’ve spoken to other business owners, I get it. If you don’t see it, you don’t believe it kind of deal. We’re in that center. I have close friends, people that have gotten sick. I have family friends that have passed and you see it firsthand. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there and everything, but at the end of the day, people are people. If somebody gets sick, you say, “I got sick. How do we make sure no else gets sick?”

I’m part of everything. I’m like, “If you get sick, hopefully, you overcome the symptoms and you want to have some immunity to it.” That’s what we’re all looking for but we don’t know. If we look at it from a business point of view, what can we do to move forward? When you guys go to the website, you’ll see what I have been doing the last couple of years have been working with business owners to see if they want to start a practice or sell a practice. I knew a lot of PTs at a certain point that was like, “Joe, I’m tired of working for somebody else’s private practice.” I’m like, “We can do that. There’s a way to do that. There are proper steps to take for that.” I’ve had that question. It was popped up on Facebook. That’s why I want to address it. They asked, “Is this a good time to start a practice?” It’s one of those things. You look at it with the glass half-full or the glass half-empty.

If you can learn to survive during this time, it’s going to be super easy for you.

The rest of it will be cake. You can get through this. That’s my advice to you on Facebook live. You can get through this. This is nothing. That’s thinking. You won’t have the overhead that we have. With our practices, you have overhead. If you are starting as a one-man show, you’re not going to have that. If you have backing, that’s even better. If you have knowledge-base, that’s even better. It’s always better. If you don’t have that, if you’re like, “I want to start and do this because I graduated.” We have a lot of graduates that like, “What do I do? I can’t get a job.” That will start. Roll the dice. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Do you need experience? Absolutely. There’s nothing wrong with rolling the dice, seeing if you can do it. Do it in a safe way. I have confidence in a lot of our brethren out there in PT.

With telehealth, it is possible to provide value even if you’re distant and you can’t touch your patients.
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The people who are taking advantage of this opportunity are the ones that are going to be able to scale and do more and look at it as an opportunity. There are plenty of clinics out there that are hurting that are in that position that they might want to bail out there like, “I have burned out already. Now, I’ve burned out and I don’t want to put the effort into it.” You said I’m turning 50 this year. I don’t want to start a clinic if I had to all over again.

That’s the tough part about it because you look at it you’re like, “How long can you push through especially when these cycles happen?” On a risk analysis, we would never think that “Ortho is couldn’t work and you have referral sources out the window.” I’m telling you, the new norm is going to change what standard PT is. It might be a hybrid model. Everything I’m pushing towards is a hybrid model of we have access to telehealth. Is that a great marketing tool? Even if everything opens up and it’s perfectly fine, but could you use telehealth as the best marketing tool ever to get people to experience what you do, to like you, and trust you and then say, “I want to come into your clinic?” We’re leveraging it as a marketing tool.

At this point we know will eventually be open, but how many people can we see like restaurants? We won’t be able to see the numbers, I don’t want to call them mills, but some of those practices profitable. I have nothing against anybody’s business model. If that’s how you make money, that’s how you do it. I have nothing against it. I’m a business guy myself, so I look at it. If you can’t do that, what are you going to do? If you can’t see that many people per hour or if you tell me, “My population is 40% Medicare, 30% Medicare, it’s gone. It’s a tough thing. It will help just to change your messaging. It’s a great time to pivot and that’s a starting point.

To reiterate the masterclass that you offered, DrJoeSimon.com/Masterclass , is that right?

Yes.

To do some messaging for your marketing, your website is where they can learn more about you as well?

Yeah. These days, I don’t do the consulting or coaching anymore, but if you find me on LinkedIn, which is Dr. Joe Simon , I have messages all day long that I do get back to. It takes me probably 1 or 2 days. To a certain extent, I’m in quarantine too. I still go to the clinics that I can reach, I can still get to some of them, but the rest of the time I’m doing second-grade math. It’s a challenge for me. I became a PT because I couldn’t do the math, but that’s where I am.

All of us have to chip in on the homeschooling. It’s not easy.

I’m going to share a little mantra that I shared with my staff. It’s something that if everyone could take away, “Action alleviates anxiety for everyone.” We have a ton of that. That’s something we have to say that every day, “Action alleviates anxiety, rethink and reframe.” That’s super important to rethink and reframe what you’re doing and find new solutions in what you already have. If you look at your assets. If you have gym equipment and I’m going to go back to the old school E-stim and ultrasound machines. If you have people, whatever you have, how can you leverage that? How can you rethink and reframe the assets? Don’t think all is a loss. Even if you laid everyone off and assist you, that’s fine. How can you leverage what you got? My favorite is never negotiated with your inner bitch. We all have one. I had to negotiate with that son of a bitch every day. It’s like, “We’re going to do it. No, we can’t do it. No, we’re going to do it.” Don’t negotiate. Remember those four things and I guarantee you will push forward.

You can either create or you can complain, but you can’t do both.

Unfortunately, we have some in the industry that they’re stuck, they’re not moving. If you’re out there and you’re like, “I’m stuck.” Even if they want to have a conversation, I’m open to those conversations. If you’re looking at like, “I want to get out and exit.” I’ll happy to have those conversations. When I say conversations that’s all it’s going to be. There’s no hard sale. There’s no like, “We’re going to buy you up.” There are none of that. My goal for everyone that I speak to and wherever we are is, “Can I help?” I’m a firm believer in sending the elevator back down. I started back there and I had to struggle to make my way up. Along the way, a lot of people helped. They were consultants. I had coaching myself, but people helped. That’s what I can offer everyone out there is like, “I’m more than happy to send the elevator back down in any way that I can.” If it’s somebody that says, “I’m having a tough time. How do we get through? Do I need funding? Do I need your advice? Do I need to merge?” All that stuff is okay to have the conversation and we can get started from there. It’s one step at a time. It’s baby steps.

They have to reach out. There are many more resources nowadays that there were back in 2008 and 2012 when you and I were owning our practices and whatnot and running our practices and treating full-time. There are many more resources that people aren’t at least reaching out to coaches and consultants and options and opportunities like yourself, like me or any of the coaches that I’ve had on the show. You’re doing yourself a disservice at this time. Any of us will have a conversation with you to talk to you about your business and try to help you out as much as possible. If people aren’t reaching out at this time, then they’re doing themselves a disservice. There are many resources, there are many people who are willing to help without any sale going on.

I’ll talk to anybody about their business any time and it’s fun for me. I have people say like, “Why are you talking to me? I’m not paying you to be my coach.” I’m like, “I love networking. I love talking business. If I can network and talk business, I almost feel like I don’t have to get paid.” That’s okay. I want my readers to understand that they need to reach out to somebody, anybody. Reach out to Joe, reach out to me. If I don’t have somebody, I’ll refer them to Joe or if I can’t help you, I’ll refer people to Joe or Jamey or whoever. The same with Joe. If Joe can’t help you, he’ll refer you to me or Sturdy McKee or take your pick of anybody. There are opportunities out there. I want to highly encourage our audience to make sure they’re reaching out to people and getting support.

This is the new normal and it’s not changing any time soon. PT owners need to pivot immediately if they haven’t done so already.
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We have a lot of solid coaches in the PT industry. There are some that I don’t want a 100% to agree with, but everyone needs to go through a learning curve of some sort. I put up a post on Facebook and I want to be respectful of time, but I’ll share this quick. I put up a post saying, “What are the coaches and consultants doing at this point when we’re hitting this crisis?” That post got the most responses. One guy says, “Who are you referring to?” I said, “I don’t need to call them out by name, but I want people to realize the people that are going through it, the people that are working through it, the people that are giving you a resource, a lifeline without asking for anything in return, those are the guys you want to go to.” Those are the guys that are going to say, “If they did the work, they got a solution pushing forward.” They’re in it or out of it. I don’t agree or disagree with it. If they own or don’t have a clinic, that doesn’t bother. If you’re a good coach, you don’t have to be a good basketball player. It’s one of those things. It’s important. Seeking help at this point in time, even if it’s a conversation is still valuable. That’s my point.

Joe, thanks for your time. They can see you at your website, I assume. Is there any other avenue or way they can get in touch with you if they want?

That’s the main thing. Otherwise, I’m highly active on LinkedIn. Go on LinkedIn, type in Dr. Joe Simon. You’ll see this mug on there with shaving and without a haircut these days. We were waiting. I know you guys have the barbers already opened, but I’m waiting for that day.

Good luck with the second-grade math and keep your sanity.

I’m trying. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thanks for your time. We’ll see you.

Dr. Joe Simon has been a private practice owner since 2005. He has not only survived the 2008 recession but expanded during that time period. In 2012, during hurricane Sandy, he lost one of his clinics and his home. Yet again he pushed forward and grew his clinics. During this time, other practitioners took notice and asked for his guidance, coaching, and consulting. This resulted in the founding of the Private Practice Business Academy.

Dr. Joe is currently an owner and partner in multiple (out of network) medical and wellness clinics, including video marketing and leadership training companies.

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The post Successful Marketing Tips During A Crisis With Dr. Joe Simon appeared first on Physical Therapy Owners Club.