E451 | Dealing With Competition

Today's episode comes from a Voxer message response from myself to one of our Mastermind Members. Their question was about how they should deal with similar clinicians that begin popping up in their area. I start by giving some context followed by my initial response. Enjoy!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So one of the best ways to improve your customer experience, which we know will dramatically improve your business, is to have clear lines of communication with your clients. And that's something that can be really hard with these multiple channels between email and text. And what you really need is to centralize that in one place.

And that's something that we've been able to do as we switched over to PT everywhere within our client's accounts. We can actually message right back and forth with them. They can manage their home exercise plan within there, and it allows us to really compartmentalize the communi. That we have with those clients, instead of losing an email in the inbox or missing a text and then you're, it's very hard to dig yourself outta that hole because they feel like you're not very responsive, with them.

And for us, it's made a really big difference. It helps make our staff more efficient. It helps us not miss things as much with the volume of people that we're working with. And it's a really smart way of really compartmentalizing. Your communication with your clients so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the channels.

You have communication with family and friends and things like that, so I think it'd be huge for your practice to centralize it the way we have. Head over to pt everywhere.com. Check out what our friends are doing over there. I think it's really cool and I think you really like it. So here's the question.

How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about? This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Mate, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's up guys? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast. And today we're are sharing a response that I sent to one of our mastermind members. To give you some context. I wanted to give you a little intro on this. And he basically asked me, Hey, what should I do with. Competitors, similar type of clinicians in my area.

He's starting to have a few that are popping up trying to, go to similar locations to do local marketing events and things like that. And then how should he, Look at dealing with this. I think this is an incredibly common problem that we deal with as entrepreneurs. And I gave him my response and I think it's relevant to anybody that's dealing with this same issue.

And even if you're thinking about starting as something that you're gonna have to just be aware of how do you deal with competition? How do you view competition? What's a healthy way to go about it? I think there's a lot of different ways. Some people are very aggressive about it.

Some people are very, hands off and, there's enough room for everybody and abundance minded. And I think that I give you at least my perspective on what that is and what I share with him. And I think that it's worked well for me as far as, being able to succeed in those environments, but also not letting it ruin time outside of work because it's so easy to drag frustrations and fear and things over into your home.

And someone once told me, don't let your bad day turn into your family's bad evening. And I think just understanding how to deal with some of the emotions that we have associated with these things is really helpful. And this is my response to him. So I hope that you enjoy, man.

Great question. And something that I think everybody's going to deal with in particular over the next. Five, 10 years even more. And to put it in context think about why you started your practice, the opportunities for our profession and clinicians in general is not great.

They're high volume, low pay stringent work environments, poor cultures, tons of student debt. What option do you have? I think that I don't think, I'm sure you're gonna see more and more competition in your area and just in this space in general over the next five, 10 years.

For sure and much more going forward because the business model's been more and more validated. So there's two ways to look at it. You can definit. Close yourself off. You can, not connect with any of these people. Just focus on your own thing. I don't necessarily think that's like the best strategy, but have to know yourself as well.

For me I definitely just met up with other people in the space that. That were doing similar things and got a better idea of what they were doing and complimentary services and all of that. But at in, in one way, you're going to cross paths at the same areas where you're doing local marketing because it's a very effective way to build the reputation of a provider in a new area in particular.

So you're gonna see that and. There's a finite number of gems, right? A finite number of congregation points, but there's a massive number of people that you can help that you're not right now. So I think that what you have to keep in mind is this idea that like someone's taking, like your piece of the pie versus the pie is really big and you just can't even get over to most of the.

You're, you can only really get to a small percentage of it. And everybody's fighting over that same little, that little piece versus expanding, how you're reaching people via additional channels of it. So for us, what happened was we really cut our teeth on gyms and local businesses, which we still do quite a bit with, but not nearly as much as we used to.

And the reason why is we, when we first started and we used to do our standalone space, there was nobody within probably five, six mile radius of us. And this is a population dense area in Atlanta, right? So a little different lots of people within that radius, you're probably talking.

I don't even know half a million people. Within that, that five, six mile radius now there's at least eight cash practices within. A two mile radius of us. And many of those are within gyms. Two of them are people that used to work for us that establish their facilities within gyms in close proximity to where our office is.

And that's gonna happen, what can we do about it? On one hand, I wanna see these people be successful. I know them personally, and I hope that they succeed. On another hand it's there's a competitive element of it, right? Where it's frustrating and it makes you want to.

Make sure that you capitalize on the relationships you have and not lose market share. But the reality is there's a massive number of people that are, that we are not in front of. And we need to do a better job of education, of creating content, of leveraging that in ways outside of that, maybe that's, connecting more with local business owners, connecting with other service professionals that are not gym owners, that are not in the health and wellness.

Getting out in the community in other ways, being a part of organizations that are not directly going to support you, but create a better brand awareness for your company as well on the digital side in particular, and how you can leverage that to reach people in a more leverage.

Leverage way. Instead of just these one off beat, the documents or workshops or whatever, those are great and there should be a staple of your business, but at a certain point that's not where you're going to scale so much. To give you an example, we are, we had our best month ever last month.

And we didn't do a single workshop in the last. Three months. But we do such a good job with people when they come to work with us. Like when they actually come to be one of our patients. They go above and beyond as far as their. Outcomes as far as their clinical experience customer experience with us that the vast majority of people that we work with end up referring a friend, family member our way, right?

So what you can focus on is the things that you can control. You can't control what somebody else is doing. And also, These are good people, and they deserve the opportunity to put themself in a solid financial position and enjoy what they do for a living. So I think that having more of an abundance mindset is really important.

We have six people that we work with in the Mastermind that are in Atlanta. We, I had somebody in the Mastermind that's like a less than a mile from our office. One of the biggest competitors we have was in our mastermind for over a year. And I did that because I wanted to be able to, Not just say things and to have this, oh yeah, be abundant, but not actually, do it myself.

And that was a hard thing for me to do, but I did it because I honestly feel like, the biggest thing we can do is really try to expand and grow and see these other people be successful because it's going to. Educate more people about our model, and both of us, the person I'm referencing, are doing great.

And we're not far from each other and we have similar niches, but we resonate with different people in a different manner. It's like our personalities or of our staff or, the way that they interact with people or the way they teach things, content might be slightly different and just resonate with somebody more.

I'm starting to a long response to your question, but I think this is incredibly. Challenging thing to face as a business owner, but also one of the things that you have to really, focus on. The more of the abundance side of looking at things versus the retraction, the competitive side, the drawing back and thinking of this as somebody just like your enemy kind of thing.

Versus, another provider that is trying to work with people the right way. And for sure there's gonna be. Tests where, you try to set up a workshop and somebody else is doing the same thing and you get a little jealous and frustrated and you know what, but it also, you need a worthy competitor to reach the potential that you want to reach.

If it was just easy, you wouldn't have to progress and advance yourself. It's like Microsoft isn't Microsoft without out apple or vice versa. Like they, they need those things, this idea of a worthy competitor is very important for you to actually grow and improve and become more sophisticated and be better because you have to.

And that's a really positive thing. So it all depends on how you look at it. But my advice, just based on my own experience, is nothing positive comes from, looking at this as finite. I gotta beat this person. This is how I felt for years and it just caused a lot of stress in my life that was unnecessary versus focusing on what I can control.

I don't even pay attention to anybody's social media that's around us at all anymore. Because even for me, like I know that would make me like, oh, we're not doing that. We should do this. And it's not something that, it's not the right way to look at it. You should focus. You are leading indicators to things you can control, not be reactive to what other people are doing for better or worse it's, that's not the place that you want to be.

So try to keep an abundance mindset as much as you can. We're gonna keep helping as many people as we can, because we think that this is a direction the profession really needs to go. And at a certain point, yeah, there's gonna be a lot more people that are doing this better for you to be the best out of all of them.

And. Difficult to uproot. Put yourself in a whole nother tier. That's where you want to be, and you need competition for that to happen.

What's up, PT Entrepreneurs? We have a new exciting challenge for you guys. It's our five day PT biz part-time to full-time challenge where we help you get crystal clear on how to actually go from a side hustle to a full-time clinic. Even if you haven't started yet. This is a great way to get yourself organized in preparation for eventually going full-time into your business.

So we actually help you get crystal clear on how much money you're actually gonna need to replace with your business to be able to make a lateral transfer. How many people you're actually gonna need to see based on what you should be charging. We're gonna tell you three different strategies you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you get to pick the one that seems like the best fit for you for your current situation.

We even show you all the sales and marketing systems that we teach within our Mastermind for people that are scaling to multiple clinicians, past themself that you need to have in your business to be able to go full-time. And the last thing is we help you create a one page business. This is a plan that's gonna help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and drive action.

That's what this is all about. We want you to win. We want you to take action, and in order to do you have to get really clear on what you need to do next. So go to physical therapy biz.com/challenge. Get signed up for the challenge today. It's totally free. We think this is gonna be a game changer for you and are excited to go.

Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one-way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about 4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our.

Profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country. I do live trainings in there with Eve Gigi every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside that group.

So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.