E28 | Starting A Side Hustle Physical Therapy Practice

Do you have 60-100k in student loans? Do you want some more disposable income? Are you seeing 30+ patients a day but not getting practice reps on a certain skill set, like dry needling or manual therapy? Do you have friends that are asking for you to do some treatment on them?

Then you need to check out Episode 28 of the P.T. Entrepreneur Podcast where I talk on how to start your own side hustle physical therapy practice and how to diversify your offerings to patients.

You want to know how to start a physical therapy clinic side hustle? See the guide here.

Up for a Challenge? Try our 5-Day Challenge Here! https://www.physicaltherapybiz.com/challenge 

Episode Transcription:

What's going on guys, Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneurial Podcast  and today I'm getting into a topic that I've had a few people reach out to me about at this point and ask me to, talk about this. And it's the—idea or the business of a side hustle, PT practice or side hustle, PT business. And I like this, the concept of the side hustle practices.

So it's something that you do not as your full time. Your full-time gig. You know, maybe you don't want to leave your clinic, perhaps you like the benefits and a paycheck and all the. Safe things that come along with being employed by somebody else. There's nothing wrong with that, but maybe there are some things that you're just not able to do in that clinic and, or you have a shit load of student loans, and you would like to pay those off faster.

Right. That's probably many of you. You know, most of my friends coming out of school or somewhere in the range of, eh, you know, like 60 on the low end to 120. Grand in student loans. I've heard of more, depending on if they're out-of-state, it's a lot of money, and it can take a long time to pay that off.

Do you know? So the side hustle practices. Exclusively to start to pay this. This stuff down can be useful. In particular, if you start looking at this as a sort of like Dave Ramsey recommends with the debt snowball, where you're kind of taking this and creating a game out of it, how fast can I pay this down?

Right? How much money can I throw at this debt? To. You know, get rid of it as quickly as possible and then free up cash flow from that that you would be paying regularly. And now you can put that towards other things, whether that be other debts, a house, you know, saving for something, whatever it might be.

But if you need some extra income and you don't necessarily want to do home health or, you know, travel PT or PRN work or whatever it is, then. Aside, also, a business can be a perfect option. So I'm going to go over a couple of these with you. So number one, from the standpoint of, you know, can you see.

People on the side. And I recommend that if you're going to do a side practice, it's a cash-based practice. There's a lot of hoops you have to jump through with insurance for you to see, you know, a handful of people each week. It's not worth it, in my opinion. And I'm biased because I have a cash-based practice myself, but, that's, that's what I think.

And when you look at this though, you may be working for somebody to, to the point where they have contracts with. Insurance companies and what you need to look at is, does your insurance are, does that insurance company. Have a contract with you through your NPI number, or is it through your clinic, through their NPI number?

Now, this is my understanding based on a conversation that I had with an attorney friend of mine who I asked about this correctly, and. This was his response. Well, if it's through the NPI number of the clinic, then it's not a contract with you. So you are not contracted to see people for a specific rate.

If you see them on the side and it business not associated with that local practice, you work for. Okay. If your NPI number is listed under the contract, then what you need to do is see if your employer is willing to take your NPI number off of there. Okay. And this may be stated to state, this is in Georgia, the person that I was talking to.

So if that's the case, then you know, ask them. And also, you should be completely upfront and transparent with an employer if you are thinking about doing something on the side. Because you know, you don't want them to kind of find out about something and think, Oh, why are you ho, why are you holding back from me?

Why are you hiding this? You know, what, what are you, are you trying to steal my clients? Do you have a nondisclosure with them? Do you have some sort of a, a non-compete or non-solicitation that you signed? Now they're going to get all pissed off and figure it out. I try to figure out what the heck you're doing versus, Hey.

I'm not getting an opportunity to see this group of people that I like to work with, and I want to try to see these folks on the side, and you know, I'm not planning on taking any patients or anything from this setting. These are people that are going to be like slightly separate to that, right?

So transparency and you go on up the chain of command, their correct way is going to be your best bet with something like this. The other thing that you have to look at is doing what does what you are trying to do. Fall under something that's considered physical therapy because there's plenty of side businesses that we can do that is not technically physical therapy.

And I'll get into some of that in terms of, you know, what, what options that you have. Right. So let's talk about real simple one. And that is, let's say you want to see people on the side as a physical therapist in a gym. This is my wheelhouse, right? I started doing this when I was in the army before I got out to open my practice.

So just like I recommended, you let your chain of command know your employer, know I let my chain of command know in the army what I was doing. So I had opened a little practice. I look at cash-based practice on the side. I was seeing people after work. Some days I'm in this CrossFit gym up in North Columbus, Georgia, right?

So, I just. Honestly just wanted to get some reps in this cash model, and I didn't have much of an issue with this because I was working for the government. So it's not like many of the people that I saw, or any of the people that I saw, could come and see me. The one thing I had to be aware of was if that person was active duty or a dependent, I couldn't see them.

I couldn't charge them for a service that they could technically come and see me for on base. So I could only work with people that were nonactive beauty or dependence. So, but that also made the conversation very easy for me because they couldn't see me anyway. After all, I worked on a military base.

So you want to see me. This is my skill set, is what my time is worth. Cool. So, you know, within, I'd say like a month, you know, I had that little practice up to where I saw probably about five people. A week, you know, so, maybe 20 visits in the month. Right? Twenty visits at 150 bucks, you know, an appointment is pretty good.

You know, that's $3,000, extra that I was making, you know, working 20 hours a month, doing some stuff that I liked with a group of people that I liked. And getting a full hour with people, which I didn't have the opportunity to have when I was in, am I my military clinic. So I enjoyed it, you know, and it wasn't like I was taking a ton of time away from my family or anything at home.

So this model, I think, is very, very, very doable for many people. And the overhead, the startup is very, very low. The risk is shallow, very low, shallow. Oh, you know, mortgage and, and you know, you pay for you. Your food every month is dependent on this little side business that you start, and if that's something you're interested in, your best bet is to take a look at the gym PT blueprint that I put together.

It applies to that situation in particular, and any of these side businesses, it would, it would fall into a category where you get. Information on exactly what you need to do to set that sort of a cash-based practice up, from, from the get-go and, and understand how to market and sell yourself well to where you're not just sitting there, and nobody's coming in your office.

But, that's an easy, straightforward example. If somebody, if you if, you'd like to be in a gym, if you have good relationships with people in a gym, you already have people asking you. This happens a lot. People are like, Oh, you know, can you help me with this? I know you're. You're a PT, can you do this and that? But make sure you do the right way.

Make sure, and you understand, if your NPI is covered by that insurance entity, a contract, or is the clinics and not yours specifically. Okay. So make sure you talk to your employer about that and try to figure that out. Now, here's the other thing, and I was kind of alluding to this regarding many things that we can do.

It's not necessarily considered physical therapy, right? So I was a personal trainer before I went to physical therapy school, and I was a personal trainer at this golf retirement community here in Georgia. That's kind of a fluent golf retirement community. And you know, much of what I did honestly, was just help people move a little bit better, get a little bit stronger and a few more conditioned so they could walk around the golf course and they could hit a tennis ball a little bit better.

You know, and, and not feel so winded running around playing doubles, tennis, you know, whatever with their friends. But that is not specific to a personal trainer or strength coach or whatever. You know, I mean, the skill set that many of us have as physical therapists that are. Also, have a background in training and or sport yourself, right?

You are an athlete, or you've worked with athletes, you have a background in Australian conditioning, exercise science, whatever it might be, personal training. There's doesn't to say that you can't work with people in that capacity and not have to do any sort of hands-on work with them. And train them, right?

So for many people, you just need to set the parameters up where they know what they need to do. Did you have accountability from somebody, and they have somebody that can dial in the movement patterns that are deficient and give them programming going forward and train them to achieve their physical goals.

Do you know? And if your goal is, Hey, I want to be able to play tennis without. You know, feeling like I'm going to puke and not having my back sore afterward. Cool, man, that is not physical therapy, in my opinion. I could punt that to a personal trainer. Problem solved. Or maybe that's your wheelhouse. Perhaps you played tennis in college.

Maybe you're a freaking stud, and you can also help them with their swing. You know what kind of fricking packages that what, what kind of skillset and unique skill set is that? Are you kidding me? You could charge. Just as much as somebody that's doing cash, physical therapy and have no conversation whatsoever about am, am I going to get reimbursed for this?

I mean, how awesome is that? It's frustrating as hell sometimes when you know what you do is so valuable to these people, but because you're associating yourself with physical therapy. They assume that it's a $20 a copay only versus a personal trainer. They know they're not going to have their insurance cover it.

All of a sudden, they charging a hundred to 150 bucks an hour. It's a no brainer if that person is legit and has a perfect kind of word of mouth presence and a pedigree that goes along with it where they've gotten excellent results for people. So think of it in this term or these terms as well.

What can you do besides physical therapy that blends the skillset that you've learned? All the biomechanics that you know, the anatomy, physiology, the programming, the progressions, regressions of exercises, the movement, understanding that is. Bar none better than 99% of trainers out there. And you can utilize that in a way to leverage yourself into a side business that is much more strength and conditioning kind of sports performance-based, and much less about this conversation of physical therapy.

No, this is an example of maybe these are people that you work within your clinic and you get them feeling better. They're ready to be discharged, and then boom, Hey, you know what? I do training on the side. Is this something that you may be interested in doing? This is how I do it. This is what it costs.

Your clinic knows about this. Something that you do that is not competing with them, and now all of a sudden, you have a cash service that you can do on the side. They can generate a lot of money for you like a side business. So there's a couple of kinds of niches that would be effective for this. And before we do that, I want to sort of go over this little exercise with you guys to get you to give you an understanding of how you can decide if a niche is worth your time, if it's worth you putting all this effort behind to develop a side hustle, practice, side, hustle training business, wherever it might be.

So. What do I want you to do is get a piece of paper, and you're going to draw three circles that are intersecting, right? So basically, they're all kind of like running into each other, and there's some gray area there in the middle. And we're going to make your niche. So the top one I want you to write, like, all right, and that circle, right?

Like in the bottom right circle, I want you to write, we'll pay in the bottom left circle. I want you to write can help now, if you have a niche that you like. That you can help people in and that people will pay for. Now all of a sudden, you have a viable option for a side hustle business and eventually maybe a fully-fledged, that's all you do business, right?

And many of these side hustle businesses, it gets so popular, they turn into, this is my full-time gig, man. I'm getting so busy with this. I gotta, and I have to let the other stuff go. I've got gotta focus on this. So. Here's where people can get in trouble. It's the stuff that, Hey, I like, let's say triathlons.

They'll pay for it. I know nothing about triathlons. I can't help. So that niche is not right for you. You are not going to be helpful to somebody if you do not understand the intricacies of triathlon training, and if you haven't done it yourself, it's going to be very hard for you to relate to somebody.

And they're going to be able to see that quickly when they start talking to you about a transition, and you don't know what it is, they're going to think, well, this person's never done and or, learn anything about triathlons. So what about this? What if it's, Hey, I like working with, I don't know, underprivileged families.

I can help them, but they can't pay for it. So, in that case. You know, you may love that, and you make it a lot of personal satisfaction out of it, but if you're trying to work with somebody that can't pay you for your services, that niche is not going to work for you. It's just not going to be very successful.

Okay, so here are a couple of examples of some niches that have been proven to be—a successful and viable option. So, Hey, CrossFit. I work with CrossFitters all the time. As much as we try to stop them from getting hurt, you know, some injuries happened in that sport. Some fractures occur in the running, you know, lots of them.

You can try to get somebody's technique as clean as possible. If they sit all day in an office and they have tightest shit hips, and they decide they want to do a marathon and half marathon training, it's just a matter of time before they probably wear something down, they probably tweak something, right?

So that's an excellent example of a niche. Running. Running is great, and it's a vast number of people run. And if you know anything about runners when they can't run, they're unhappy. There are borderline depressed. It's like movement meditation for them. Right. So do you like it? Yes, I want to run. I've, I've run in the past, you know, I'm, I'm a current runner.

I'm running whatever marathons and I ran in college maybe or you know, I ran in high school, and I can help them cause I understand it. I see the programming side of things. I know the strength conditioning side of things. Will they pay for it? Sure. Some people will pay out-of-pocket for a service like that.

What about other specific endurance sports? We talked about triathlons. You're big into cycling, you know, maybe you love cycling. That's all you want to do. You just sit on your bike, and you cycle your ass off every weekend, you know, and you've got a group of people that love cycling that you work with, and they're all busted up.

Cause there are a bunch of attorneys that sit all day long, and then they get on a bike, and they ride 50 to a hundred miles on the weekend a, in a shit position that's not designed for a human to be in for a long time. Right. I mean, it's just. The human body didn't come out riding a bike, right? Came out, walking upright.

So that position can be taxing on the body. And if you know anything about cyclists, it's sort of an expensive sport to get into. And they're just like runners. If they're not cycling, they're unhappy, right? We worked with a lot of cyclists where, where our clinic is an indicator and. That's an example of maybe you help them fit a good fit for their bike, right?

Maybe you can do bike fittings, and you can do programming and training with them. That has nothing to do with you stick a needle in their leg, in their back. You know, it's completely separate from any sort of personal or physical therapy that you might do with them. But now we're in this injury prevention human performance realm, which is just like 100% fit well into.

Right. What about tennis? How many people do you know that are just bananas about tennis? Right? In Atlanta, there are tennis players everywhere. Everywhere. I'm sure it's like this in many, you know, warmer climates as well. And. Tennis players. Again, there's sort of a barrier to entry there. It's some kind of more of an affluent sports kind of just country club sport.

Right. And there's a social component to it as well. So do you like tennis? Yeah. You love tennis. Awesome. Maybe you used to play tennis, and you know you still do. Can you help them? Sure. I know a lot about tennis swing, you know, I know how to program for overhead athletes. Will they pay? Yep. Cool. Good niche.

That's something that you can get, a viable side practice with side business with where people are going to pay you for your services and see value in it. And what about golf? Hell yeah, golf dude, I, I'm telling you, I was a Butthead 20-year-old selling big Mo. I mean, I'm talking four to $5,000 packages.

As a personal trainer for, you know, six months of working with me to golfers like nothing. Nothing. Because this is a golf retirement community. And if they couldn't walk around the golf course, they couldn't swing a golf club. They were unhappy cause all their buddies are out there golfing. And it was simple too.

I mean, I remember just getting people's legs stronger and they were. Astounded about how much more comfortable they could walk up a Hill to the putting green. Right? So you get it to the green, you have to step up a hill, and you're weak. Our good luck with that. It's going to be hard for you to walk up a reasonably steep hill, right?

Your legs will get a little bit stronger. All of a sudden, you know, you notice, damn, I'm going up this Hill easier. You see, I'm, I see some gains. That's value. People see value in that. You know, if you continually tweak your lower back because your hips move like junk and you know you're just spinning through your spine, your lower back, instead of using your hips through the swing, well, you're going to have reoccurring smaller back issues.

And I don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that you probably need to do some mobility work and gained some anti-rotational strength in your trunk, and if you do that, you're going to feel better going to hit the ball further. Golf is an easy one that people will pay for. It's, it's a no brainer.

Golf, tennis, CrossFit, triathlons, endurance sports, and one other one that I like a lot in youth sports development. So it depends on the area that you're in. If there's a lot of youth athletes in that area, it can be a viable niche for you to start doing some work in, one of our clinics. We see a lot of youth athletes out of this, out of this clinic, mainly soccer, lacrosse.

We see some swimmers and some runners, some endurance athletes, a lot of soccer players through a lot of lacrosse. And. In many cases, what parents are not willing to pay for themselves if it's for their kid, is just a whole different conversation. Do you know? I mean, every, every parent thinks their kids are.

They are going to get a college scholarship and go to the Olympics, for the most part. Right. And you know, it's their kid, right? So there, they're pulling for him. They get their best intentions. And I've had plenty of parents that have paid us the cost of a visit to my practice, just for me to make their kids feel like they're going to puke.

I had a parent tell me like, Hey, I want you to push them hard, borderline puke. You know, like, okay, well, we're going to mix in some things he needs to do, but we're going to finish with something that's going to make him feel. Like he's going to puke himself, right? And they're happy.

The kid's happy. He feels like he did something hard. But we're just helping them move better. We're helping them develop excellent landing mechanics and change of direction mechanics, and a good squat pattern, a good pull pattern, you know, understanding how to use their bodies are going through these big growth spurts.

And they sit all day, right? These kids just sit all day at school. I sit all day on iPad or their phone, you know? So there's a lot of inherent mobility issues associated with that. But maybe you want to work with a team. You know, perhaps he used to play soccer in college. Maybe you still really like being around that, but you got this kind of unique skill set where you can go out there, you can educate them on, Hey, here's how you do a warmup.

I'm going to put this program together for you guys, and we're going to do a strength conditioning program a couple of days a week. We're going to meet at this time 100% cash side business, working with people that you like, that may develop into more and more of what you want to do and not just a little side business as well.

Okay? So what you got to think about is. Do I like it? Can I help them? And will they pay for it? And if they will. And if you, if you fit all three of those things, you now have a potentially viable niche that you can start to leverage yourself into. And the easiest way to leverage yourself is digital content, period, right?

You can use two paths that you can take. It can be digital content, and it can be in-person workshops. Those are the two primary ways for you to get in front of a, I kind of niche community. And if you can do both even better. So pick what you want to work with. Start writing blogs about it.

Start to InVideo's about it. Start putting that stuff out on social media in front of the, you know, the right people, and be consistent with it. And then start trying to get in front of those groups face to face. Teach them something. Show them that you know more than the average person, that you're passionate about it and that you're, that you're willing to help, but also that you're.

Valuable and that your skillset is valuable. Distinguish yourself from the $20 per hour copay and set yourself up in a little side hustle business that helps you pay your student loans off. Maybe it enables you to pay for some sweet ass vacations. You know, maybe, Hey, you want to take your spouse to Lake Como?

Do you guys want to go chill up in Northern Italy, for a week? Awesome. I just got to vacation out of it. Or you know, maybe it's you're saving for a house. Perhaps that's what it is. Maybe you got a kid, you know, kids are expensive, you know, whatever it is. Maybe you're just bored at work, and you want to do more of what you enjoy.

This is a perfect way to go about doing it. Springboard yourself into a sort of side practice, side hustle business, whether it's training or actual physical therapy. It could be either one, but it's the right way for you to start developing an extra revenue stream and distinguishing yourself from the average P T

, right?

All right, so guys, if you have any questions, you can shoot me an email directly at [email protected]. It's the name of our practice. I respond to all emails, so if you send it to me, I'll respond to you. It's simple as that. I appreciate you reaching out to me, and I'll get back. You, too, guys, thank you so much for listening to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

Do you want more cash, PT, biz help? If so, get a copy of my book, Fuck Insurance. It's your playbook—so successful performance, PT practice, and never having to deal with insurance again. You can get a free copy at Finsurancebook.com. Inside this book, you'll learn the direct techniques that we've used to become one of the fastest 100% cash PT practices in the country.

https://www.physicaltherapybiz.com/