The Traditional PT Business Model Will Bankrupt You If You Don’t Pivot With Will Humphreys, PT Of Multiplexit

The traditional physical therapy business model will not be sustainable in the future. The model that has been successful in the past – open your doors, be nice to doctors, take all the insurances, set up a standard EHR – won’t allow you to grow and navigate thru the changes that are coming to healthcare generally. Thus, PT owners in modern society need to be aware of the need for business coaching that they never learned, how to discriminate between insurances, the capabilities of MSKUS and EMG diagnostics, the addition of cash-based practices, AI software effects on healthcare, etc. In this episode, Will Humphreys, PT of Multiplexit and Rockstar Recruiter, joins Nathan Shields to discuss what owners need to be aware of to succeed in the future. Even with Artificial Intelligence coming into the healthcare industry, enhancing certain aspects could help run the business smoothly. Embracing the mindset of constantly learning will help you adapt to the changing landscape of Physical Therapy. Be open to integrating technology, diversify revenue streams, and tune in to this episode now.

https://unlockhba.com/about

https://now.unlockhba.com/therockstarrecruiter

https://intheblackbilling.com/

—

Welcome to the show. Joining me is longtime buddy, friend and partner Will Humphreys . How are you doing?

Good. It’s good to see you again. I’m always excited to be on the show. Thanks for having me back.

It’s been a few episodes so it’s good to have you back. Let’s get into it. Traditional PT business models will die if they don’t pivot. I’m not sure where you were going with this. I was like, “Why is that possible?” As we started talking about it, that’s possible.

It’s a guarantee.

Tell me about it. Where does that come from?

Here’s the climate on this. One of my friends Seth Colter once said, “We sharpen the knives that slit our throat and over time we’ve gotten our industry to a point.” This is going to sound scary because it is but there’s also a lot of cool things behind this. I want to preface that piece of it but look straightforward. We have increased interest rates. That’s a temporary problem. We’ve seen that before in the early 2000s. What we didn’t have is a bunch of students with an average student loan debt of $155,000. They’re coming in at starting salaries that haven’t changed in the last many years because we haven’t gotten high reimbursement. If anything, it’s gone down.

This bottleneck and then the demand for our service has gone up. It’s gotten smaller that this little window of profitability keeps getting pinched. PT owners are feeling that more. We’re talking about a major attack on reimbursement. Not the brightest economic forecast for the next many years. Experts that I follow are saying 2030 could begin the largest depression the world has ever seen. We’re in a position as physical therapists where if we keep doing what we’ve always done, there is no world where we are going to survive in five years is my estimate if we don’t pivot. The pivoting is where there’s hope and potential but the old days of hanging the shingle, going to work and wishing you had more new patients aren’t enough. It’s pretty scary.

I can see what you mean by the traditional business model because when you look at it, what we grew up doing, our businesses many years ago when we started was hanging our shingle, talking to the doctors, getting referrals, finding an EMR, find a front desk person and then market the doctors, get word of mouth referrals and take all the insurances. No discrimination, just take them all.

$30 is okay. We don’t want to offend the doctor or the population so let’s take everything and not see our kids ever.

Hopefully, we’ll make it up in volume.

Do we make it up in volume?

We consider those loss leaders. No. If that’s the traditional model that you and I are used to and they’re going off of, I agree. That model will die if they don’t do some pivoting. They have to change and keep up with the day. It also goes back to what you shared with me. AI is going to make a significant impact on the medical profession. We’re already talking about robots doing surgeries, being capable of doing surgeries better than the actual human physician and being able to do them 24/7 without vacations and weekends that surgeons use. They’ll be very proficient and capable of performing those surgeries. That’s the tip of the iceberg of what could change in the medical field.

The conference I went to set the stage because I don’t think I shared it on the show but I went to this conference for an organization called YPO. I’m not a part of it. It’s a very elite group of very high-income earning entrepreneurs or CEOs of publicly traded companies. We’re talking billionaires, no exaggeration. A guy who delivered it is eight times New York Times Bestselling Author. He has a medical degree from Harvard and an engineering degree from MIT. He associates with Elon Musk and some of his businesses. He sat there and spoke to this very elite group. I got invited by a mutual friend of ours who is in that group because he owns a SaaS, a software company and is very rich.

I was able to go and participate. It blew my mind because they were sharing about how AI and biotech are the future. The two domains to tell our kids to get into for jobs down the road are biotech and cybersecurity. He says those two things are going to be the ultimate professions in the next couple of years. He was describing these things. There was this one study that he showed that using sample data from patient histories with a specific type of potential cancer and I’m estimating that AI was 85%, close to 85% accurate in diagnosing this very difficult disease based on the subjective and objective reporting.

Whereas human doctors were roughly 35% to 40% accurate. This doctor, a video of it of him, is saying, “I’m out of a job.” His job is as a diagnostician. He’s going in there looking at all the data and information. What’s crazy about AI is it’s constantly learning. As they get more data, more accurate they become. How does it affect physical therapy? This AI is one of the accelerants to either snuff out our industry or will be a tool that we use to promote independence in usage. If we aren’t aggressively harnessing that, what can I use AI for? You had an episode about that. What came up from that episode since its release?

That’s exactly what he did. That was one of his doctoral research. It was Pedro Teixeira of PredictionHealth. He’s using AI to help PTs be compliant in their documentation and bill correctly. It will assess all your documentation and what you did and say, “This verbiage might be needed to justify that code. You did this exercise so you might want to build this code versus that code.” That’s the beginning but he has big plans for how it can guide care.

These types of techniques help with these types of diagnoses best. It will start guiding care. You can imagine what insurance companies are going to do with that if it takes that skill away from the physical therapists and puts it in the hand of AI software. If you think reimbursement’s poor, wait for something like that. You got to be able to manipulate and stand out in spite of stuff like that.

It’s very educational what you said there because ultimately if we are proactive, we can use it as a tool. That could be one of many pivots that an owner could make by getting used to AI. If you’re not sure how to do that, start downloading ChatGPT on your phone or getting to that website. Start anything you have to do. Ask it. I’ve been using it when I’m coaching or job descriptions. I created a job scorecard for a PT in ChatGPT and advertisements for patients that can go in newspapers. Anything that you can think of, ChatGPT can create it. Social media content. If you’ve never done reviews with employees, a ChatGPT creates a review form for me to give to a physical therapist who’s at six months. It can be whatever you want it to be and that’s to make things easier.

I did the same thing. I compared ChatGPT with Google Bard. I asked the same question. “Give me a 4,000-word description for the Physical Therapy Owner’s Club show that would create engagement.” They gave me these 4,000 words. I’m going to take those and cut and paste them. It was amazing what it spits out. I’ll put it on Apple iTunes as my description soon. Being aware of what AI can do, all I’ve seen is PredictionHealth. If PredictionHealth is there and he’s been working on this for 4 or 5 years, then you know there are other software that even in the beginning stages will be out there in a couple of years. You better be used to it or be comfortable with the lingo.

If you think about pivoting, you hit upon something important. There are two types of pivots as far as what we’re going to talk about. 1) Pivoting into tools that we can leverage to accelerate our effectiveness. 2) The model itself. How can we pivot the PT model itself? AI falls in that category of PT tools that we can start learning and harnessing. The biggest cancer of our industry is that because we’re so under-reimbursed, PTs are driving themselves so exhausted that the only self-work they do is listening to a podcast as they’re driving to work in some cases. Not to minimize that as that’s better than a lot of other PTs who don’t but they need more than that. They need to take what they learn on this show like building some time out to learn the tools or pivot their model for them to be successful.

A lot of that is you can do a lot of learning, read a lot of books, watch all the webinars and listen to the podcast but at some point, you have to start implementing. If you were reading my show and you’re in the same situation that you were in months ago, then it has been of no value to you. You might as well have saved the brainwaves and not read my show.

Listen to Adele who’s amazing. It’s like the voice of an angel so do you. You have the most amazing radio voice. I always feel like when people listen to our interview, I always feel like they have a professional podcaster and Mickey Mouse on the line at the same time. “I love physical therapy.” That was pretty good. I’ve never done that.

People have to implement and sometimes that’s difficult. I’m leading into one of the things that I would say pivot into. Get some coaching and in this case, that means accountability. If you’re listening to the podcast or reading the books and you’re not getting some coaching or implementation, then you need some help to help guide you into what you need to do and hold you accountable to what you need to do to improve your business.

You and I did not talk about this in detail. The number one pivot that I thought of is what you mentioned in terms of leadership. The summary could be the word leadership development. People are like, “How is that a pivot?” It’s the water of pivots. It’s all vessels. No matter what you’re going to pivot into, we’re going to need a coach. Someone who’s either done what we want to do or someone who’s been successful at getting somewhere we want to go or helping others.

No matter what you pivot into, you will need a coach.
Click To Tweet

For you to say that is so perfect because no matter what we do to pivot, we could also get overwhelmed by the ideas of how to pivot. If we don’t have a guiding star, which is the investment in a coach, then we’re going to potentially run ourselves ragged and not make progress. I agree with you. The first and foremost important way to pivot is to find a coach. If you’ve already got a coach and you love them, great. Start leveraging them with this type of verbiage to get more of a product.

That coach needs to give you some guidance like, “Where do you want to be this next year? What do you want to accomplish in this next year?” Be clear with him so that he can guide you in the direction that you want to go and not where he wants you to go and do not leave it up to the wind. It’s important to make sure you and the coach are on the same page but they also could and should be helping you drop the $30 visit insurance.

If you’re not talking about that with your coach, then you’re doing yourself a disservice because you need to be increasing your profit margins. You need to get a return on investment both in the business and out of the coach, you name it. You can’t do that with insurance that is paying below your expense rates.

You’ve helped people do that.

If you haven’t listened and don’t know that I’m a coach, that helps people drop insurance then you’re not listening very well.

Understandably, you don’t self-promote enough. That’s why whenever I’m on your show, I make a point of doing it. Not a limb but I would’ve sacrificed maybe a finger that has avoided so many years of pain and suffering to have had a coach like you or you’re growing into a whole ecosystem there. This is a no-brainer if people have been tuning in to this and they haven’t been taking action to give you a call. It’s not a commitment to sign up but to at least understand what’s out there, you’re one of the best deals out there for sure in terms of what you bring in terms of value. That’s a great point.

You sent somebody to my Rockstar Recruiter Program. You referred them to me. I ended up having him on one of my YouTube channel pieces because with your help, he dropped a couple of his lowest bang insurances and it tripled his profitability. He was less busy and more productive. There is gold in them hills. Helping people figure that out alone is the ultimate pivot. I would say this arguably. If PTs can work with the coach to look, learn how to change their reimbursement structure as you’ve done. That’s all they need to do. You’re developing because we’re not worried about patients. Stop worrying about new patients. Everyone’s so worried about it.

Start worrying about recruiting and getting paid for what you’re currently doing. Maybe there’s a world where you can see way fewer patients and make more per patient so that you have tons of energy to go home to your kids with more profits. That is what’s potential here. All the other companies are going to die off but they’re going to feed more new patients to us anyway. That’s the real silver lining message. People who are going to pivot are going to kill it and live their dream at a level that they wouldn’t maybe be able to do when they were comfortable.

The proof is in the pudding because you see cash-pay offices opening up quite a bit. Aaron LeBauer and Joey Allbritton have a following of cash-pay clinics out there that are doing just fine. What they’ve learned that the insurance-taking clinics have not learned is how to sell their services. 1) You have to believe that your services are of value. 2) Learn how to sell them appropriately. Get to the patient’s pain points because if they recognize that you are the solution to their problem, they will pay for that. It’s important to recognize that cash pay could be a pivot that you make. If you’re dropping some insurance, what does your cash pay model look like? You could do a hybrid.

There are plenty of people that are telling you about their UnitedHealthcare patients in particular. Once they go out of network with that contract, you’re going to be out of network. “Here’s our cash pay rate and we’ll go with that.” The people that have done it thus far are telling me it’s amazing how much better life is in general without low-paying insurance. The headache is significantly less. The payment and the reimbursement per visit are better and they’re not as busy. Patients are able to come in more frequently because there’s space to put them in if they need to reschedule.

The quality of the people is better. I’m not saying the people aren’t quality. When I talk about quality, I’m talking about alignment. I’m not talking about financial background or anything else. When someone’s in enough pain, I don’t care what their personal circumstances are financially with the exception of some dire straits thing. Most middle-class Americans which is most of what we serve, lower to middle-class, will pay the money if they knew what you could produce for them and when we can message it correctly.

What we don’t realize is that when we drop the lowest paying insurance and take cash pay or higher paying insurance, the alignment of the patient to us is so much higher. Those people aren’t the ones that drain our energy. Those are the ones who feed us energy that helps us live where we grow. A quick example of that would be Rockstar Recruiter. When I started Rockstar Recruiter, the initial fee for that was $2,000. It was a six-month program. I had success. When I raised that price to what I knew it was worth and people started showing up in that regard, that’s when they started getting results because when people pay, they show up. When they show up and the quality is good, then it goes well.

To your point, maybe some PTs struggle with self-belief that maybe they’re not good enough. I used to struggle with that for sure but when I look back, a lot of it was patient engagement and alignment. PTs would feel a lot more effective if they were taking cash payer high paying insurance because those people show up. They don’t miss appointments and they get better. In that case, we’re clearer about what value we create but we all need coaching to get there, back to the main point.

Other things that people are doing to pivot and get away from the traditional model. Some of these are rather basic when it comes to coaching and dropping insurances, maybe adding some more cash pay and not at $60 a visit. We’re talking at least $150 a visit.

That was exactly the number I thought. No kidding.

At least but other ways to pivot are also considering what other revenue streams can you generate besides physical therapy revenue alone. Let’s get past selling supplies that don’t generate a lot of money, whether it’s orthotics, more THERABAND or cold packs. You’re not going to make a huge revenue stream off of that. Other concepts that are out there. I’ve interviewed Stephen Rapposelli about his stretch labs concept. He called it StretchPlex where they offer a la carte menu of modalities to people. All those people say, “I wish I could come and get heat and stem. I would pay for that.” Make an option for that.

Maybe set up a few hundred square feet on the side of your building if you can and there’s space to offer compression, ice and stem, heat and stem, cryotherapy, you name it, whatever you want to do. Theragun, stretching with an athletic trainer, could be another revenue stream. We are big believers in diagnostics. Musculoskeletal ultrasound will be ubiquitous like dry needling is. Dry needling wasn’t around many years ago. It is in almost every clinic now. You’ll see that same thing with musculoskeletal ultrasound. EMGs could be similar. Those are other revenue streams that are not PT-specific that could benefit the business.

There was another one, a NEUBIE.

The NEUBIE is huge. Garrett Salpeter and the NEUBIE product for neuropathy patients, especially for pain control for athletes. The NEUBIE has been amazing.

You have episodes on all these things. Maybe in the description you should list these as, “Here are the episodes to learn about these cash revenue-producing services that are going to dramatically increase your profit margin.” You’ve already built that path. I’m thinking about the financial value of the show that you’ve created. If people apply what they learn here in a way that serves them with a coach, you of all people could be that. I feel like I’m hard selling people on you. They don’t need to be a hard sell. They already love you.

The point is that this idea of implementing these things would make life so much better because you and I have seen it personally and with other people. That transformation of someone who’s been so worn down, see them enjoy what they do and have time for their kids. It’s the equivalent of how I used to feel as a therapist when I saw a patient come in and go, “Will, look what I can do with my arm. I can play with my kids.” That feeling is bigger than that to me because it is a more complicated disease to diagnose and treat.

You see what’s coming down the road whether it’s AI, some software or any other profession that might intrude into physical therapy. Having physical therapy as the cash cow leaves you at a sacrifice. You’re vulnerable. It’s always good once you have established some continuity in your physical therapy practice to have other revenue streams that you could count on. I want to say it’s a well-rehearsed phrase or saying that the wealthiest people have seven streams of revenue from different sources.

I don’t know if that’s true but it goes to the point where having multiple streams of revenue means you could lose 1 or 2 and still get by. You’re not dealing with a scarcity concept at that point. You have abundance. Having other things to rely on was helpful for us, even when we were considering diagnostics like, “If PT went to crap, there’s always a need for EMG.” We could go perform some EMG somewhere. Robots aren’t doing that yet.

I don’t think they ever will with needles. There is no way. The technique it takes to go into a muscle with a needle, do that repeatedly and not have the person punch you is a gift.

It also goes further. It’s something that it’s talked about, maybe not too much but I see it on occasion in the IMPACT Magazine, having some form of real estate. That’s something that you and I have banked on. We’ve owned the real estate in which our clinics have performed and that is a form of wealth. The income from that helps when you consider having multiple streams of revenue.

I lean on you as the expert in that piece. You and I started that journey together. It was you who started that idea back in 2006. You and I bought our first building together the year before the biggest crash. I don’t want to speak on behalf of you but I never cared that we bought it for $500,000 and it went down to $250,000. I never cared that it lost 50% of its value because it was part of the PT clinic that was in it. We were always able to produce rent for it. It was never a big deal.

You have since gone on. I’m glad you brought that up because I was hoping to highlight that as there’s good, better, best. The good thing would be to leverage the tools. The good thing is AI tools and learning how to pivot into those. Better is creating similar revenue streams in the PT space like the NEUBIE. That’s better because we’re dropping insurance. The best is to have this diverse portfolio outside of PT and real estate is a good, better, best.

Pivoting into tools is good. Better is pivoting the business model a little. Best is diversifying our investment portfolio dramatically. We don’t have anyone guiding that. I’m leaning toward you and hoping that you’ll be that person because how you’ve helped me is big. My favorite money coming in has been real estate money. I work the least for it. Not only do I get a cashflow from it but the investment itself is becoming more objectively valuable over time. I’ve had the privilege of experiencing it.

It speaks to this one phrase I heard as making it true for me which is, “To get wealthy, we have to niche.” In this case, it’s like putting all of our time and energy into a PT practice but to get rich, we diversify. If you do that in reverse order, you can’t make progress. Once we have a strong asset like a PT practice, we can leverage the proceeds from that to start creating a diverse investment portfolio that starts to produce revenue for us. Why don’t you share what you’ve been working on? I’ve been gleaming a little bit from here and there in terms of how you’ve been building well over the last few years.

Once we have a strong asset, we can leverage its proceeds to create a diverse investment portfolio, producing revenue for us.
Click To Tweet

We have to preface all of this by saying we’re not financial advisors.

We’re not real estate agents.

You need to talk to Eric Miller at Econologics or some kind of financial advisor if you’re going to consider any investment vehicles. One of the things that have helped us is that even selling the practices that we did years ago was a chunk of change, which is nice. That got us rich. What will maintain wealth throughout time and even pass on to generations? You’re talking about cash value, life insurance plans and annuities. I don’t sell those but I’m in some of those. You have your mutual funds and Roth IRAs. They need to be contributed to and they should be.

Also, your cryptocurrencies. I’m a big believer in those.

There’s a place for it. I would recommend a small percentage of your wealth in cryptocurrencies but some percentage of your wealth.

Like 30%.

Maybe 50%. Maybe your life savings or a small percentage. Real estate can be huge. It’s something that we invested in with our clinics over time. I don’t know if you noticed it but it wasn’t until after we sold that I recognized the gold that I had in the real estate that I had purchased years earlier. I didn’t even consider it an asset of mine. It was there collecting appreciation, giving me depreciation and offsetting some taxes. At the time, I didn’t charge myself a lot so there wasn’t a lot of cashflow. When I had another tenant in there, all of a sudden, I had this passive cashflow that was pretty amazing with a lot of equity.

Leveraging that, you can do whatever you want with it once it’s paid off but you can also leverage that in a 1031 exchange to take the equity out and put it as down payments towards larger properties that could cashflow greater. That’s the whole idea behind Rich Dad Poor Dad of Robert Kiyosaki. Whether the story was true or not, they decided it was false.

Did he lie about that story?

I’m pretty sure that it’s been debunked.

I’ve heard controversy. I didn’t realize that was where they were landing. I’m going to agree with you. I feel betrayed because it’s a great book.

I would always recommend people read it. I just don’t know if the story’s true. That’s all. The idea is you invest in something like this so that it will grow over time. It’s a long gameplay. This doesn’t happen year after year but you hold onto something and let it grow over a few years. You sell it, take the equity out, buy something a little bit bigger as an investment and its cashflows a little bit more. It appreciates you write off the depreciation and then a few years later turn around and do that again. That’s how people start to accrue some real estate portfolio that can work for them passively.

You know people who do that. It’s not just a supplement in some cases. It’s a lot of money.

It becomes the basic foundation for their income flow to the point where a physical therapy clinic’s income flow is like, “That’s nice.” Real estate can become the foundation that covers your expenses no matter what lifestyle you’re living. What you get from the clinic can be added to it to put in retirement vehicles or help fund an even greater lifestyle if that’s what you want. Since you brought it up, I’m looking at starting another episode regarding the path to wealth for private practice owners.

We talk about financials here at the clinic. I had Eric Miller on and those are some of my favorite episodes. I’m already in my sandbox or play zone to start talking with other wealth professionals. It could be CPAs, financial advisors, real estate people or any influencers in the wealth-building space about how practice owners can leverage what they have to generate more wealth that’s not specific to their practice.

How can they leverage those funds and generate wealth? As we’ve noticed, there aren’t a lot of old PT practitioners like the 60-year-old, the 70-year-old, not like the dentists and the doctors that will practice until they’re 80. It’s not the case with PTs. It’s a demanding job. If that’s all you know how to do and all you can do, then it puts you in a bind when you can no longer do that physically. Having some of that something else can help you.

The idea is to be able to submit yourself to your practice by choice. Whoever’s reading this ask yourself, “If I was making six figures a month off of my other investments, how would I show up differently in my practice?” I’m sure a lot of PTs are so burned out. They’re like, “I wouldn’t even do my practice.” You got into it for a reason. I bet PTs who stay in it would have no problem asking for the $150 cash pay piece. What we don’t realize is part of the reason that we’re not bold in our sales is we’re afraid because we need them to come.

We’re so desperate for money that if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s because we need that $30 UHC check added together with all the other patient visits so we have enough to cover our bills and maybe go on a vacation. “If I pivot from that, what would happen?” The fear of that is what’s keeping us and it’s selfish. If you’re feeling judged, total judgment, I’m judging all of us. I’m not saying you’re a bad person. I’m saying, “This is what we’re doing.”

Think about it. If we were all $100, I bet a lot of people would still treat but they would only treat if it was reimbursed at a certain level because they don’t have to. People go, “Physical therapy is worth more and we’d stop decommodizing it.” I have to pause what I’m saying and go, “Did everyone get what Nathan said? He dropped a huge reveal that there’s a new episode coming to help you solve this problem.” I didn’t know Nathan was going to drop that. That is massive. As someone who’s been with Nathan for the past years, it is clear that this is an area of expertise that he will be able to expand upon.

Nathan, you’re not certified in financial planning. You’re not an expert in a certified sense but in my world, what you have is more valuable, which is the practitioner’s experience, the private practice owner’s background pivoting into that world and you’ve done it better than anyone I’ve known. That’s an area of expertise that I would encourage you to say. “I’m an expert in helping PT practice owners develop a diversified wealth portfolio. Not saying the expert to go to for annuities.” You know in your network who is and that’s more valuable. This is huge. Congratulations to you on this new endeavor. I’m going to tune into it.

You’re going to going to be on it I’m sure at some point. How can I not have you on the show?

How would I be on it? Let’s talk about money. When you were talking about CPAs being on the shows, my initial reaction was maybe a high-personality CPA.

Maybe not a CPA per se. A sexy bookkeeper instead. I didn’t say which gender. “I love numbers, do you?”

That’s what I’ll do. I’ll be your guest. What I’ll do is pretend to be a more up-tone version of a boring financial personality type.

You come on as the make-believe CPA.

When you ask me questions about investing, I’m like, “I don’t know.”

What would you tell your clients to do?

What would you do, Nathan Shields?

That’s funny. I love talking about some of this stuff because it is true. If we’re going to consider what the PT landscape looks like years from now, if it’s anything like it is in 2023, I have no hope for it, honestly.

It’s going down. This ship is sinking. There is no question. It is going under the traditional format.

You have to do something different than what you’re used to. Unfortunately, physical therapists are not different from anyone else. They don’t like change. You switch EMRs and their whole world is upside down. That’s understandable. Adding something that’s beneficial, like musculoskeletal ultrasound or AI, people are like, “Why would that help me? How does that help the patients?” You’re like, “Are you serious?” Dropping the insurance, “My community needs me. Who else is going to take them?” You’re stabbing yourself in the back so you can be a martyr for the patients.

I know we’re going to alienate the entire audience here but the reason we do it is because that was us. It’s so funny because I remember my first mentor ever. David Berg told me, “Tell me about your practice.” I was doing what typical PT owners do. “I’m a big deal with my patients. I don’t know if you know that.” He’s like, “You still care about patient care personally. You’ll get over that.” I thought he was challenging me to a duel. I was like, “How dare you? Good day.” I was so mad at this guy for suggesting that my heart had anything to do with anything other than patient care but I understand what he meant.

It’s so funny because I think part of that resistance to change and fear of the change comes from the fact that our industry acts like and has been treated like an abused stray dog. It’s so true. The craziest thing for me is when I’m working with the PT owner and they discover that they’re amazing at business, at that moment, PT is one of the harder businesses we could ever own. Organically, are we better than we think we are because we don’t see a lot of money and we self-judge? We don’t have anything to compare it against. We’re working with somebody and they’re amazing. They go from being that battered dog to being the top dog. It’s cool.

Part of that resistance and fear of the change comes from how our industry acted like and treated like an abused stray dog.
Click To Tweet

I get why they complain about every little change. Even though you and I complained very directly and personally with my clients that when I’m asking them to make these changes, it drives me insane. “I don’t want to miss that dime when I’m picking up that dollar.” I get it. You’ve also been abused by the system in a sense. It’s been a hard call for a lot of PT owners for a long time. I’m hoping this episode will be a wake-up call and a bit of a beacon of hope and get them going in the right direction.

What are you working on? If people wanted to reach out to you, how do they get ahold of you?

I have the medical billing company that’s going great. In The Black Billing. We are backed out for six months for new clients. We’re in June 2023 and we can’t accept clients until January 2024, which isn’t very exciting for a lot of PT owners. That’s also cool. The main thing that I do with PT owners directly is Rockstar Recruiters. I’m still helping PTs recruit. I had a group meeting. I meet with my group twice a month. There were 8 people on the call and 4 of them had a PT hire.

In an industry where people are struggling, I honestly am surprised that the program is that effective, to be honest. I’m always like, “What the crap?” As you know, I’m looking at launching a new program called Rockstar Director with a common partner of ours, Michelle Bambenek, where she will train physical therapy directors for you to help them run your practice for you. If you want any information on any of that stuff, give me a call. That’s it.

How do they find you? Is it your email or cell?

Have them come through you. Email Nathan and Nathan will do an email introduction.

Whatever you need from Will, I will hook you. No problem. Thanks for joining me. It is awesome to have you on again.

Thank you.

Love the show?  Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://ptoclub.com/

The post The Traditional PT Business Model Will Bankrupt You If You Don’t Pivot With Will Humphreys, PT Of Multiplexit appeared first on Physical Therapy Owners Club.