The 3 Most Common Pricing Mistakes in Cash-Based PT Clinics (And How to Fix Them)

Pricing isn’t just a number—it’s a strategy.

In this episode, Doc Danny dives into the three biggest pricing mistakes he sees in cash-based physical therapy clinics across the country. Whether you’re running a solo operation or leading a team, getting your pricing dialed in is one of the most important (and often overlooked) parts of running a successful, scalable practice.

Let’s get into it.

Mistake #1: Undercharging for What You Do

This is by far the most common (and costly) mistake.

Many clinicians set their prices based on what they used to get reimbursed in insurance clinics—or what their old employer charged cash-pay clients. That’s usually in the $100–$150 range, and it’s simply not enough to sustain a low-volume, high-touch model.

If you’re charging less than $175–$200 per session, especially in a major metro area, you’re undercharging. Not just for your expertise, but for the long-term sustainability of your business.

“Say your price out loud—and if it doesn’t make you slightly uncomfortable, it’s probably too low.”

You’re not just covering your time. You’re covering your overhead, future staff, taxes, your own salary, and the margin to reinvest and grow. Charge accordingly.

Mistake #2: Selling Packages That Are Too Small

3-visit and 5-visit packages are common—but they rarely solve real problems.

The majority of patients in a cash-based model have chronic or recurring issues. And you can’t fix a 6-month back problem in 3 visits. Small packages often just lead to short-term symptom relief… which means the problem comes back, and the patient thinks your treatment “didn’t work.”

Larger packages (like 10 or 20 visits) give you the runway to deliver long-term results and transition patients into ongoing wellness or performance care.

It also sets up your staff for success. When you bring on team members, they’ll default to selling whatever the lowest package is. If the smallest is a 6-pack, that’s what they’ll pitch—every time. So make sure your default packages match the outcomes you actually want to deliver.

Mistake #3: Not Offering a Payment Plan

Most people make decisions based on monthly cash flow, not total price.

Think about it—when you buy a car or a house, you’re not just looking at the sticker price. You’re asking, “What will this cost me each month?” Your patients do the same thing.

So if you’re only offering packages that require $2,000–$3,000 up front, you’re likely turning people away who could benefit from your care. But if you offer a simple, structured payment plan (like $800/month for 3 months), it becomes more digestible—and easier to commit to.

And no, you’re not going to be chasing people down for money. If your service is good and they’re making progress, compliance is high. You’re simply making your care more accessible while still maintaining your value.

What Happens When You Get Pricing Right

✅ You increase conversions
✅ You improve retention
✅ You get better long-term outcomes
✅ You set your team up to win
✅ You generate more consistent revenue
✅ And most importantly—you build a business that works for you

Final Thoughts

These three pricing mistakes are fixable. Today.

You don’t need to overhaul your entire business to see big results. Sometimes, just adjusting your pricing strategy can unlock better revenue, better patient outcomes, and less stress across the board.

Want help getting this dialed in?

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Podcast Transcript

Danny:  Look, we know burnout in our profession is a problem, and one of the bigger contributing factors to burnout is the amount of documentation and paperwork we have to do just to be able to do our job, and we're now able to help offset a lot of the time that you spend writing your notes through ai. We created a tool called Claire and Claire listens in the background while you work with your patients and it writes your notes for you.

How awesome is that? It is literally a game changer. It's gonna save you what we see four to eight hours a week in our testing and our training as we've actually built this up and train this specifically for physical therapists. That's a lot of time. That's a lot of time. You could be working out. It's a lot of time you could be hanging with your family.

That's a lot of time that you could be seeing more patients if you need more productivity. Um, it's huge and it gets you a ton of time back doing something that we know nobody really wants to do, but we have to do in order to cover our own butts as clinicians. So if you want to test this out. Get 10 free notes, uh, to see how this works for you in your clinic.

Go to meet claire.ai, sign up and get 10 free notes to test it out and see how we can help save you 40 hours a week as well. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skillset in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot.

My name's Danny Matta and over the last 15 years I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession. I've been a staff uee, I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice, I've sold that cash practice and to date my company, physical therapy has helped over a thousand clinicians start, grow, and scale their own cash practices.

So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up 'cause I'm here to help you. Hey, what's going on? Danny Matta here, founder of PT Bizz, and today we're talking about the three most common mistakes I see in cash-based PT clinics. So when we look at pricing, pricing is one of those things that can make or pray or break your clinic.

And not just you, but as you scale past yourself, getting your pricing right and getting it dialed in is incredibly important. So we're gonna talk about three mistakes that I see that you can either. Make sure you're not doing, or if you're doing these, you know, start to change these right away so they don't become a bigger problem for you as your clinic grows.

So let's talk about number one. So number one is that you are grossly undercharging for what you do. This is probably the most common mistake that I see, and frankly, a lot of this has to do with our confidence, uh, in our ability to sell as well as. Our confidence in what people see value in right early on, it's very easy to undervalue yourself because number one, you may have never had any sort of association of somebody paying you money for what you do.

Uh, you may be coming out of a insurance clinic where you never had those conversations with people. Uh, you had no idea what they were getting charged. And oftentimes they don't know what they're getting charged either, right? You may have have had a cash rate or something at the clinic that, uh. That the front desk handled, but you never really had to have those conversations.

So what most people do is they look at, well, what was the cash rate? For the clinic that I was working at, and for most, in most cases, from what I've seen, it's anywhere between a hundred and $150. Um, you know, and I've talked to some people that are, you know, in network clinics that have moved over to more of a hybrid approach that are, that are clients of ours.

And I asked 'em, I was like, why'd you pick $120? And they said, well, that's what roughly I was getting reimbursed for a Medicare evaluation. So I just figured I'd be in the same, same area. I guess somewhat logical, but honestly far too, uh, low for someone wanting to run a low volume clinic and not necessarily see high volume.

Right. And see multiple people per hour. So if you are charging anywhere between a hundred and a. Uh, maybe $175, uh, for what you're doing, it's gonna be, it's just gonna be too low. Some of this depends on your area. You know, if you're in a big city, a little city, um, you know what part of the country you're in, all kinds of things, your niche.

But for instance, let's say you're in the Atlanta area, which is where I live. You know, this is an area that absolutely can sustain 200 to $300 a visit. We see this with clients that we work with. We see this with the clinic that we owned for a decade and sold, uh, I mean, it, it is, it is a market that sustains that.

Now, that means Charlotte, Orlando, Tampa. These, these comparable sized markets are absolutely in the same ballpark when you go into bigger cities. You know, let's say it's a DC or a New York City, Chicago, something like that. You could even go up above that. And in many cases you may need to because the cost of living there is more, your expenses are more, you know, I was just looking at, um, a lease for, for one of the clients that we have and you know, they're in an area where for a.

900 square foot space, they're looking at $3,500 a month for rent. Uh, and this is like the cheapest that they could find, and they're in a very, uh, highly populated area, very expensive area. So that means they're gonna have to charge a good bit more to be able to afford that overhead, to be able to afford to bring staff on as well.

So the number one mistake I see is that you're grossly undercharging. The vast majority of people need to be at $200, if not significantly above it, depending on your marketplace. So number two. The second thing, the second big mistake that I see with people that are selling packages is that they are selling packages that are way too small.

Okay? So it's very common to see people that are selling packages that are like three visits, five visits, maybe six visits, somewhere in that range. Now if you have someone who is very acute, uh, that could be all you need to see them for, right? But most of the people that we're seeing are dealing with chronic problems, um, or they're dealing with, you know, subacute on, uh, chronic issues to where maybe it's a, a re exacerbation of, of a back injury or shoulder problem or neck problem or whatever is going on.

But normally it's going to be people that are dealing with kind of. At least one issue, if not multiple, and a, a chronic, uh, issue they're trying to resolve. I got news for you. You're not solving that in three sessions, right? You might be able to make a, a symptom change, but you're not actually making a true long-term change in three sessions.

And for them to really get a long-term, uh, benefit to what you're doing, they need to actually put a lot more work in after those symptoms are resolved. Like we know that they don't know that, right? So when you sell 'em into like a three visit package or something. All you're doing is basically selling symptom resolution and then it just comes back eventually and they think you're not all that great at what you do.

So the other thing is, whatever the lowest uh packages that you have, when you bring other staff on, that's what they're gonna sell the most of because they're the most comfortable with whatever the lowest price point is. And you can't blame 'em for that. Like they don't come from a world where they've had to sell things and it's not their clinic.

So they're going to sell to whoever the lowest common denominator is in the clinic. If it's a six visit, they're probably gonna sell the most six visits out of any other package option that they might have. So, bumping your packages up or limiting the number that you have to maybe one or two, but making those bigger package options and making it very simple.

If this is acute problem, just go session by session. No need for to do a package if this is a chronic problem. Like the vast majority of people that come in here. They should do one of these bigger packages so we can commit to really solving a problem with them. Right? So selling packages that are too small is mistake number two, and it's a killer for your average visit rate.

Okay? Number three, not having a payment plan in place for packages. So this is something that we didn't do for a very long time, and it really didn't. I mean, it didn't really make sense to me to do it. Um, I didn't know that I should, but when we look at the way people make decisions, I. People typically make buying decisions, not necessarily purely on price, but on what that's gonna cost 'em on a monthly basis.

It's how they, how they're budgeting for their, for their finances, we're all the same way, right? So if you look at, if you're gonna go buy a new car, or if you're going to buy a house and you're looking a mortgage, you're not really looking at. The total price as much as you're looking at what the monthly cost is.

Now, obviously the total price is important, but that can be very, uh, it's variable based on other factors like interest rates. So if an interest rate is 7% like it is now, versus an interest rate is two and a half percent like it was a few years ago on a, on a house, I. The payments can be very different.

So you may have to look at a house that costs a lot less because the monthly payment is different. Well, when people look at our uh, packages, they may be looking at the total, but more than anything, they're looking at what's this gonna cost me on a monthly basis? Because cashflow might be an issue and they might wanna spread that out to help with budgeting.

So. Not having some sort of payment plan in place, especially for things that are gonna be two to six months, you know, bigger package is gonna cost thousands of dollars. Uh, you're, you're leaving, you're leaving conversion on the table and the likelihood of somebody you know not paying you, uh, is very low.

The. Compliance side is very high, especially if you're, you know, honestly like really doing a good job with people and you've built a relationship with them and they're making progress, which is the ultimate goal that we want, right, is to get people better. So if that's happening, you're not gonna really have a lot of issues with people not paying or having to chase down payments.

I mean, I can think, I can count on one hand how many times that's happened to us, you know, with thousands of people that had come, come through our clinic. So, you know, but what it does is it eases the cashflow burden for people. So, you know, if it's like a. Uh, you know, a $2,400 package and you can spread that out, 800 bucks a month over three months.

Now all of a sudden that looks a lot easier for them to digest than 25, 20 $400 upfront, right? So adding in a payment option where they can spread it out, you're essentially self financing will increase your ca, your package sales percentage in a meaningful way and allow your staff to work with people for the duration of time that they need to really get them the outcome that they want.

And we know. If that happens, the likelihood they stick around and wanna do ongoing work with us with really more like health problems and wellness problems that they're working on, performance problems, you know, performance goals is much higher. So it's a win-win because we get a chance to help them solve a long-term problem.

We also get our business in a place. That puts us at a higher likelihood of a continuity sale, which means we also then get to help them live a high performance, pain-free life and actually achieve other physical goals that they, they have outside of just getting outta pain. And that is a fantastic place to be.

It's, it's, it's actually the most fun part of working with patients, in my opinion, getting me outta pain and all that stuff. It's what we do, it's our bread and butter, but being able to help them actually, like, you know, run a 10 k they've always wanted to do, or, you know, to be able to go climb some mountain that they wanted to climb or whatever their physical goal is, that's huge.

And that wasn't really happen. Unless they've actually seen massive progress with you on the front end. So in summary, number one, grossly undercharging. Huge problem. You gotta stop it. Just stop today. Just stop doing it, right? Charge more. Charge what you're worth. You should say a number out loud that makes you feel uncomfortable.

That's what you should be charging. And if it's a hundred bucks, please stop. You're way too low. Number two. Stop selling tiny packages. Okay, two visits, six visits. These are ones that you can actually just remove. You know, I'd prefer that you just have a 10 and a 20 if that's what you wanna do, and you're just working with more sort of chronic problems like that.

And then just going, you know, visit to visit with people that are more acute that way, whoever your staff members are, where they come on, especially the junior ones. They're not just selling to the lowest common denominator when they should be working with people for a longer period of time if they have more chronic problems.

The last thing is add in a payment plan, especially if it's like longer, uh, you know, amounts of time or, uh, a, a bigger purchase amount. So things are like three, six months in duration. It really will help you a lot. Be able to convert more people for them to have less of a burden as far as cash flow is concerned, and to be able to commit to the things they need to commit to in order to solve their their problems.

So add in a, uh, a spread out payment option where you're cash flowing that for them, and that will help with conversions, especially with larger packages. So hope this helps. Super tactical. Three simple things. Change your pricing. This makes a very big difference in terms of your overall revenue and your profits.

So get your pricing right and that will help your clinic in a significant way. Thanks so much for watching. Catch you the next one.

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