One of the first steps is knowing how to play the game.  A lot of you can do the physical therapy hat very well – you’ve gone to college, invested money and time on being expert on getting that hat completely on.  Now that you are private practice owners and not just physical therapists, you also have a multitude of hats in your business, some of you have so many hats that you wear that they are stacked up to the ceiling.

Unfortunately there is nothing you learned in PT school that can help you succeed as a private practice owner.  You paid probably over $100,000 to be very proficient on the PT hat.  How much money have you spent becoming the CEO of your business?  The majority of the time when a practice owner comes to do The New Patient Course at Measurable Solutions, this is the first investment they have made in becoming a little bit more proficient as a CEO. 

What does this have to do with beating the competition?  Everything!  I use to work with dentists in the mid ‘80s in Seattle, Washington in a building in the middle of downtown.  There were 80 separate dental offices in that building.  When a dentist retired and moved out of the building, a brand new dentist would move into that office.  Do you know what?  The dentists in the bigger practices would come around and take that guy under his arm and mentor him and show him how to get new patients and show him how to do a better job and show him how to be a much faster success than they were.

Now, what if you had that in this profession?  Usually, when a new physical therapy practice moves in across the street from an existing practice, that existing practice says “Oh my gosh, what am I to do?  This competition is going to be robbing patients from me before you know it.” 

However, there are more people in your town than all the therapists can treat so what is all the worry and drama concerning existing or potential competition? 

The problem is this:  your community, your referral sources and even your patients don’t truly know what you do; they don’t know what kind of results you get.  If you were to grab a clipboard and go walking down the street and ask people, “what is physical therapy?” do you know what you would find?  That people think that physical therapy is for athletes, old people or stroke victims.  They have no idea that physical therapy is for the housewife whose back aches every time she washes the dishes or the office worker who spends eight hours a day in front of the computer.  They have no idea that physical therapy can help them and that it should be their first choice in care!  What if everybody in your town knew what physical therapy was and knew all the results you could get?  Do you think you’d have any problem getting new patients?  I don’t think so.

I’ve told practice owners this datum with regard to competition when they come in as a new Measurable Solutions’ client.   They look at me kind of cross-eyed and they think that I’m on some sort of drug or whatever.  But, after a while of learning how to expand their practice and gain more control over the business, they come to me and say, “Jeff you were right – there isn’t any such thing as competition.  That’s just a bunch of hooey.” They are now equipped to win the game and know that there is really no competition to beat.