E474 | Software Worth Using In Your Practice

A lot of us go down rabbit holes on which software we should be using in our practices. This could be e-mail services, EMR's, website options. There are so many different options that it can be daunting knowing which ones to choose. I have been there in my very own practice. Today, I wanted to go through what I think is best and what your approach should be when choosing these. Enjoy!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny:  So I was having a conversation with one of our staff members about documentation and he had come over from a in-network practice that he was working at and he was talking about just how long it would take him to document and click through and the workflow and how, just how time consuming it was and how much easier it's been with the software that we use, which is PT everywhere.

And I know for us, we're very aware. Sort of time leaks within our staff and our own schedules. And it's just one of the worst things you can do is just waste time on things when you could be doing them more efficiently. One thing for us is we have to document. It's something we need to do and you need to do it as efficiently as you possibly can because that's where you're gonna save a lot of your time.

We were seeing our staff members save upwards of an hour a day as far as cleaning up his documentation, making it more efficient. What if you got an hour of your day back just from documentation? What if all of your staff did the same thing? Highly recommend you take a look at PT everywhere.

It's been a huge time saver for us and really has made a big difference in our efficiency of our practice. You can check 'em [email protected]. I think you're gonna really like what they have. 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 Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur podcast, and I'm a little under the weather, so if I sound weird or I sneeze in the middle of this I got I got a little sick this week but I wanted to share this this podcast with you because I get a lot of questions about what what we use from a software stand.

So what type of resources, software, resources do we actually utilize within our own practice and that many of the people and the clients that we work with, what do they use? So there's a lot of options out there. And I think this is something that, it's this like paralysis by analysis.

People get really they go deep down the rabbit hole of. Different mail services, like email services they can use and website options they can use and EMRs and all kinds of other stuff. And I've done the exact same thing, like I've actually, I've used a lot of different things and I feel like we have a pretty good.

Set up with they call it like your tech stack or your tech suite of what you're using, because a lot of this is this is software. These are applications that help help us stay organized and really help you save time. So what you're paying for from a, a monthly standpoint is to get your time back and to make sure that you can stay organized within your business, which is gonna allow you to make better decisions.

As well as have better transparency and scale better. So I think that for us, we've got, we gotta set up pretty well, and I'll talk about the ones that that we use. So the first thing that we use is an emr. So electronic I don't even know what it stands for. Management records, I don't know, whatever it is.

It's documentation scheduling. Our EMR software is PT everywhere. So PT everywhere is software used to run the day-to-day of our practice. So what that lets us do is have the schedule all in one place. All the documentation. In one place people can schedule themself online. We also run payment through that, so it's hooked up to a payment processor.

So we accept payment directly through that. It gets billed through that. And then we have all of our admin. Reports and documents that we can pull within PT everywhere to see how much revenue we have how many business people have left, if they have a package. All of the actual statistics of our business, we can really pull the vast majority of it in that one place.

And the, and when we look at sort of the foundation of a practice like this is one of the key pieces of software that people really. And we've used a handful of other things. I used something called Front Desk. I actually don't even know if they exist anymore. It was mainly for gyms. I've used Mind Body we switched from Mind Body to PT everywhere.

A couple years ago, mind Body was really also more for gyms. We, and we, the model that we have it worked for us. We made it work for us. But PT Everywhere has been very beneficial, especially with our staff. I think they do a good job of being able to save time. On documentation the way that their documentation platform is set up is pretty it's pretty easy to use and you can copy forward things, set up templates and and all that.

And then the reporting is pretty good, for us to be able to like, pull the numbers that we want for staff meetings and look at the backend of the business. One other thing that we noticed when we switched to them was we had a lot more people that were using the online booking feature because it was so much easier to book online than mind body was.

So this is definitely something. That you want to have, as a resource in your business. Now, some people will use Google documents and they'll use Google Calendar. They'll document in Google Drive with their with their notes. I actually started this way when I first started.

It's exactly what I did. I put all my notes in there. And then I use Google Calendar to book people, and I think you can get away with this for a short period of time. But if you're trying to legitimately grow a business past yourself in particular, You're just, honestly, it's, you're gonna be much better off with a software that's gonna help you run your business, makes you look more professional allows you to really have a lot more information in one place.

And if you go from doing that, which is what I did, I, it took me forever to transfer everything over to the system that I moved to after that. And it was a huge time. Time waste in the process. So I think if you can start with the expectation of like, where you want your business to go and build the infrastructure from there, yes, it might cost you a little bit more money per month, but you're gonna grow into that and be really, thankful that you did.

So that's the first thing that that we use. Now, the other there's two other elements I wanna get into, but w the main one. And everybody needs, this is a digital presence, right? So website in particular, and we we've had a handful of different websites. In fact, I actually built our first one on a platform called Weebly.

I, and I think it's fine for most people, Squarespace is another one that's pretty easy to use. You can make your own, you can hire it out as well. But. What we ultimately switched to and really quite a bit, cuz it allows us to centralize everything is a platform called Cajabi.

So it's k a j a b i, it's a really weird name. Don't have any clue what it stands for. Sounds like something outta Star Wars or whatever. I don't know what it is, but what's cool about Cajabi is Cajabi lets us have everything in one place. So our website. Is run on Kajabi and we just outsourced the design of that to a, to the a designer that we work with that's a contractor.

And we had her build out the website in Kajabi from the other site that we had, and we made our transition. You could definitely do it yourself too. It's not that hard to to do. It's pretty much drag and drop and type text in. And they have some temp. Pages and things like that. But your website can live on there.

Your blog can live on there. All your, about US pages, your entire sort of digital footprint can be run through Kajabi. But what's really cool about it is it also allows you to to have a an email service within that as well. So instead of me using something like a MailChimp and.

I have MailChimp and then I have Weebly or whatever I'm using, or Squarespace for website. And then I'm integrating those somehow with code that I have to drop in if I'm collecting email addresses. It's all in one place. So it allows me to have this crm platform. So customer relations management software.

In one place with the website, they're directly connected because they're in the same platform. So if I have an opt-in of some sort for, I don't know, a training or an ebook or whatever it's just gonna go straight there. And when I write a newsletter every single week, it's gonna come out of Cajabi and I can read all the stats on what people are interested in and the open rates and all that stuff.

And then I can segment within that as well. So let's say for instance, like we work with a lot of soccer players. So let's say we have specific content we wanna put in about soccer. We can segment those people and say, all right, this is just gonna go to the people that are interested in soccer, and that helps us get the right information to the right people.

So you can do all this in one place. The other thing we really like about it, and this is where we can get a little more, There's a couple things. You also have, all your landing pages are in there as well, so if you have specific things that you offers that you want to test, or if you have certain opt-in pieces of content that you want to have landing pages specifically for, you can build that in there and it's directly integrated into the entire sort of suite.

On the back end, you can actually also build out courses in there. So this could be a couple different options. The first one is, You, let's say you wanna build a course out for internal training. So we do this quite a bit. Let's say we have. A new new physical therapist onboarding mini course that we put together.

So we hire somebody and we have modules that we can build on the backend that show everything that they need so I can give access to a new employee. And that new employee is gonna go through, module one is gonna be. Welcome to the company. Here's our standard operating procedures.

Here's our core values. OP module two. Here's how you request Time off and Sick Leave Module three. Here is how you utilize the EMR system. Module four, like this is whatever, how we schedule people. And and then for us we'll even build in, sales training as part of how do we, how do we communicate with people within, our ecosystem.

And all that can just be housed on the back end of Cajabi. That allows us to build out systems for training to get people spun up within the company much faster than manually trying to go through everything, which obviously you, you would follow up with on, on all this, but it'll save you a ton of time.

And once you have it built out you're good. You don't have anything else you need to add. The other thing you can have is you can build out external facing courses that you can sell within that. So this might be, for instance, we have a. A running program that people get access to a bunch of videos on, self-care stuff for runners.

That the towels within Cajabi. I did this with a lower back program, a knee program, and a shoulder program for years. Where it would be a direct purchase and then they would get access to this course that they could go through after that. So you could have actual paid courses that could be housed there, that are, it's through a payment or a paywall.

You can actually integrate payment processors within this so that people can pay online. Maybe never even come in and see you at all, and maybe they buy a resource that you have and then go through it on their own. You can do that. You can build any sort of course that you really want in there.

It could be internal training course for your own staff. It could be an external course that you sell. But what's cool is all this is in one place, whereas historically, when I first started with this stuff, God, I look back on, what I was doing? I don't even know if this stuff is still around.

There was a site called Gum Road, and I actually think I still have a course on Gum Road. And then I used a course called or a platform called, I think it's called thinka. That I had another course on, and then I had this payment processor that I had to set up and I, it was like through PayPal, but sometimes the money like wouldn't show up because it would be on hold and they'd have to go and look at stats on one of these sites and see what was going on.

And it was just a huge nightmare. And then you're integrating that with a third party. Email service as well where you're trying to build your email list. And what's happened is people have essentially solved all these problems in one place. And Cajabi isn't the only one doing this, it's just the one that we use.

So there's probably a number of other softwares software applications that you can use that are similar to it. But what I like about Cajabi in particular is the fact that everything is in one place and that is a huge time saver. For me in particular. So first thing is PT everywhere. You gotta have an em.

If you want to grow in particular to multiple clinicians. Cajabi from a website standpoint is has been really good and we like it quite a bit. And total cost. I can't remember what we paid for these. I wanna say it's about a hundred bucks for each of these per month.

Somewhere in there, maybe 120. But. It's definitely not more than 200, I think it's 120 per software. So now we're sitting at two 40 for our tech staff tech stack for the for the month. The third one and the last one, this is one that we started implementing about two years ago. It's something called monday.com.

So monday.com is a It's a project management software, and what it allows you to do is basically like Excel sheets on steroids. So it allows you to build out automated procedures and systems on the back end of your of your business. So for instance, when we have new patient inquiries, We mom put everything in Monday to track follow up and conversion of those people.

So let's say somebody calls our office manager Claire, and she talks to them and they decide not to schedule a visit at that time. Or even if they do, whoever she talks to gets put into Monday. And in Monday we have tasks that will be automat. For her with reminders of follow up with, let's say this person's name is John.

Follow up with John, five days from now with a call to see if he has found like a place to be seen for whatever's going on or follow up with an email seven days from now. And all the reminders are automated in there once you build out all of the the resources. So it allows us to track things a lot better on the back end.

So people that are. Ops people. They just love operations and Like they, they just nerd out on systems. They love shit like this. And Monday has been huge for our business. We also use it with PT Biz and it's great because it allows us to, in one place really track things very effectively.

So for a practice, this has helped us quite a bit with tracking new clients, tracking drop off, which we also. PT everywhere. But we can set up more automations in Monday to make sure that we're following up with people. And don't forget, like this, the phrase is the fortune is in the follow up.

That is very accurate. Very accurate. It's shocking to me how much business people just lose because they don't follow up with people. So just having these automations that you can build out to where you can actually have follow. Be automated which could, it could hook directly into your email as well.

Like you could set up automations where it's actually emailing people from your Gmail account with within Monday, which is pretty powerful. As well as reminders for people to do it in a non-automated way. You can also put all of your resources in there in terms of, the materials that that you need for your business.

Let's say you do a lot of dry need. You can set up automations in there to remind you to order needles every three months or like vendors that you use for everything. You can house everything in there with all their information. And what you're doing is you're building out an ecosystem for your business that is highly organized and efficient, and a couple things are gonna happen when you do that.

The first thing is you're going to miss people less often. So you're going to you're gonna win, these conversion opportunities more often, which means you're gonna make more money and you're gonna, you're gonna be able to help more people. But you're also building a more valuable business.

And this is something that I think. It's not in the forefront for most people is the value of their practice, but we have now seen multiple cash-based practices sell. And that could be a whole other podcast in terms of valuation of this, but I, for a long time people didn't think you could sell a cash-based practice and.

Maybe you couldn't have five years ago, or it would be very hard, but now you totally can and imagine the difference. If you have somebody that has let's call it, let's say it's, there's three practitioners and the business is doing 500,000 in gross revenue a year, and everything is run basically.

Out of the mind of the owner. There's nothing systematic, there's no procedures there's no systems and processes built in. It's basically this person holding it together with the know-how that they've built. And that's it. That's not worth a whole lot unless that person's gonna stay on and run it.

So you can't sell your business and move on if you decide you want to do that because you're the only person who knows how to run it. So it's not all that valuable. Like you're the, you're basically, The only person that has value and they call that acquihire. So instead of acquire, you're being aqua hired.

So they're basically buying you to hire you to then still run your own business, which isn't necessary selling. Now, if you have everything that is organized systematic, And runs in a very predictable way. When you don't have to be there now, all of a sudden your business is inherently more valuable and you're building that intentionally over a long period of time.

This is what we want people to do. We want them to have businesses that are efficient that. Can run without them. Whether they decide to sell, whether they decide to step back and maybe not have as active of a role in it. Maybe they wanna focus on something else. Maybe they want to be able to free up more time with their family.

Whatever it might be. It doesn't matter as long as you are building. A machine basically that is efficient and predictable and runs with or without you. That's very valuable. Cause that could be a passive long term revenue generator. That could be something that is sellable and can create a significant amount of money in a short period of time for you if you decide to pull trigger on doing that.

Think. This not necessarily as a cost and more as a, an investment that helps you be more efficient with the people that are coming through your business and not losing some of the conversions that we see over and over again that the people do and it's just drop off from the business, but also building infrastructure that is true value in the business and.

Increases, the both sellability as well as value of the business if you decide to go that direction. You want the, these sort of tech stacks as part of it because it's going to be very efficient and add a lot of value. Now, again, in summary the three that, that we use, so the documentation EMR scheduling system that we use is PT everywhere.

Really And I've used a few different ones. I think they do a great job, especially for cash and hybrid practices. The next piece of software is cajabi, that's K A J A B i. Cajabi is what we run our website, our email list, email marketing landing page. Backend courses, front end courses all that goes through cajabi.

So a ton of our business gets run through run through that. And then handling systems and building systems and processes that are automated within the business. Or reminders for non-automated things within our ecosystem of our staff. We use monday.com. And there's a bunch of different ones.

Something like Trello is one, Asana is one. Monday is the one that we use. I think you use any of those, but their project management softwares and they just make, they make sure that you're actually. Completing task and following up on task, and that everybody stays on the same page when it's just you, it's not that big of a deal.

But as you start to grow to multiple people it really does make a big difference to have communication in place, in, in an efficient way. So that's that's pretty much it. Those are the three that that we use. I'll take that back. I'll throw one more in there. Our team likes us. I don't get on this too much and they give me a hard time about it, but slack is the other one.

So instead of being an email and trying to communicate back and forth to each other, slack is something that our staff uses to communicate. Just business related things. So Slack is basically just a communication software. It's basically instant messenger. App that you can also put photos and documents in.

A as well. I if you want to add those things and you can also have topic specific things. So let's say you're, let's say you have like digital programming as part of your business. So you, or call it remote coaching or whatever you wanna call it, you could have a tab that you build specifically for that.

So anything that's related to that or people that are tied to that can communicate specifically about that topic within it. So that can be really helpful cause it doesn't get lost in your inbox and you're not in there trying to manage a bunch of different things. You're coming from patients and from other people in the business.

So Slack is really helpful as well. So I guess there's four. And and those are the main ones we use. So PT every. Kajabi monday.com and Slack. Okay. That's it. I hope that helps. Those are the ones that we use. We find them very helpful. I'm sure there's a number of other things that, that you can use, but as a starting point instead of you trying to read reviews and vet different things, I figured I would share with you what we were doing and what we're using and what a lot of people in our.

Coaching groups in our mastermind are using as well and are finding success with, because there are definitely a lot of advantages to implementing these in particular time savings and just clarity of your numbers and decision making from that is huge. So hopefully this helps you. And as always, thanks so much for listening to the podcast, and we'll catch you next week.

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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.

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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.