Shifting Your Career From Being A Physical Therapist To A Business Practitioner with Becky Allen

Hi, welcome to the Pelby Biz Podcast. Are you a pelvic health PT or ot struggling to start your own practice? This podcast helps pelvic health PTs and OTs get out of debt, gain the income they desire, be able to treat patients without insurance restraints, and learn how to create time freedom for yourself and your family. I'm your host, Dr. Kelly Alhui, founder of Ortho, Pelvic Physical Therapy, Pelvic health business grower and Pelvi Biz. Over the last two years, I went from a solo entrepreneur to a seven person team in counting. I'm here to help provide a clear path to grow your pelvic health business as fast as possible so that you can gain the time freedom, decrease debt, increase income, and live the life that you desire. Before we get started today, make sure you click the link in our bio to grab your ticket for Pelvi Biz. Now let's get into today's episode.

Welcome guys to Pelviz Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kelly Al Hui. I have a special guest here, Becky Allen. Welcome, Becky.

Yay. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah.

Awesome. So can you give us a rundown of where your clinic is, what is it called, and kind of like how you got started? That would be great.

Totally, totally. So I have Genesis PT and wellness. We are in dfw, so Dallas, Fort Worth, down in Texas, in we have five locations. The fifth one is actually opening up this weekend, so that's kind of crazy. But we're spread out across the metroplex. We have two in Dallas proper, one in Fort Worth, and then two kind of a little bit north of Dallas in Richardson and Addison. And so we're just kind of spread all over the place.

That is so awesome. That's amazing. And can you kind of give us a rundown of how you got started and when did you get started and why? Like, overall you wanted to start your own practice.

Sure, yeah. So it's always a funny story because people are always asking me this question. Right. As I'm sure they do you too. But I was always the person who said like, pelvic floor therapy is so weird. Who does that? Like, who chooses to do this job? Right. I always wanted to do outpatient orthopedics. That was my dream. And that's where I started right out of college was outpatient orthopedics. And since then, fast forward a couple years into like my career as a physical therapist, I became a mom. And so I pulled back from treating a little bit and stayed Home with my son for the first almost year of his life. And then I kind of dabbled back in some part time stuff, nursing home, rehab, just to kind of get out of the house a couple times a week, as moms can understand. And then I had a second baby. And the funny thing is, is my pregnancy, my second pregnancy with my daughter. I had a different midwife that time and she kept harping on me the whole pregnancy. Every prenatal visit, it was, oh my gosh, Becky, we're going to open this awesome wellness suite upstairs. We're going to have multiple practitioners. It's going to be fantastic. We want a pelvic floor pto. We want to be you. We know you're a pt. We want it to be you. And I was like, that's so weird. I'm not going to do that. I don't know anything about the pelvic floor. I don't know how to run a business. Like, what? And so it was kind of a funny conversation that she would bring up every single time at my prenatal visits. And then fast forward to post postpartum. At one of my postpartum visits, same old, same old. She brought it back up, hey, Becky, in 10 months we're going to be upstairs. VR Pelvic PT. And so I was still like, no. So I left that day and that night, got an email in my inbox from my alma mater, Texas Women's University, Dallas, right at PT school. And it was just a notice that they were taking applicants for their certification program in women's health pt. And so I was like, what the heck is this? Why is this in my inbox? And so I just emailed a question about it and loved the lady that I was chatting with kind of back and forth on the email and she kind of convinced me to just try the pelvic anatomy course. She was like, just take the first course if you hate it. I won't make you finish the other the rest of the year, right? I was like, okay, okay. Well, of course I loved it because it wasn't just pelvic anatomy. They tied it back to function and movement. And I was like, oh my gosh, like how I've been missing this piece of the puzzle this whole time. So that kind of got me into the pelvic floor world. But then to answer your question about starting a business, like, why didn't I just find a job in pelvic health when I started business? That was just mom life. So I had two little kids. I wanted to be Able to have a flexible schedule. I wanted to be able to work, you know, between 30 and 40 hours and be able to take off when I wanted to travel, like leave early for whatever activities they might have, you know, just things like that. So those are kind of the driving factors what got me into a pelvic health and then baby starting a business, right?

Yeah. So time, freedom and just freedom, just in general, that's really what drove it. Yeah, I know. That's so huge. And that's something that we all desire. So let me ask you this, can you give us a rundown of how your practice works? Like what's the model? Are you guys cash based? Give us, give us all the goods.

Yeah. So we are 100% cash based. We're not in network, we don't bill out of network even. But we do provide the super bills if patients want to submit for reimbursement, of course. And we're totally cash based. We have 90 minute evaluations which we price at 225 and then we have hour long follow ups which we price at 200. Then we have a couple little packages in there too for patients. We have like a prenatal wellness, postpartum wellness and then just a general kind of packages of follow up visits if patients want them. Just to save a little bit of money here and there. But that's kind of how we do things.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think cash based practices right now are on the rise just because in healthcare, you know, we need time, especially in pelvic health, we need time to assess our patients and have a multifaceted approach. So I personally think this model will be the next like generation of all the PTs coming out of PT school. Like this is where it's going.

Yeah. And I think it should go that way. I really do. Because how else are we going to give our patients what they need?

Yeah. Well, and two, how else are we going to pay employees as well when reimbursement keeps going down and down? There's no, there's literally no other option. Especially I don't know about you. When I came out of PT school I only got paid 62k and I came out with over $200,000 student loan debt. And how is someone, you know when reimbursement's going down and down, how am I going to ever a pay off my student loans just working for someone else, number one. And number two, like how is my salary ever going to match that? It can't because there's only so much that the company can bring in because the reimbursement.

So. Yeah, yeah, their cap, they can't pay us what we're worth, honestly.

Exactly. Yeah. No, so I think that's huge. So, you know, because I was looking at your practice, I was seeing that you guys have a massage therapist on board. So can you tell us how you integrate massage therapy and pelvic health and you know, what does that look like in your clinic?

Yes, we love Julie. So she is at our Fort Worth location where we have 3pts there. And what really drove me to bring her on was we just found ourselves as a practice just constantly referring out like, you know, we referral to all types of practitioners, but specifically like our prenatal patients who were constantly asking, well, where do you know of a massage therapist? Where can I get a massage? Like, and then our chronic pain patients, we found ourselves advocating for massage therapy and you know, then where do we send them though? So. Right. That's kind of. It was kind of a no brainer to bring on a massage therapist that I trusted because now I can just say we have one in house. She's the best. Go to Julie.

Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so do you guys have any? I know some practices have like personal trainers or acupuncturists. Do you guys have any of those other, you know, services that you provide?

Yeah, so we actually at our new building that we are opening this weekend and my head is kind of spinning with it. We are going to have a personal trainer there with us. So he is going to be for exclusively Genesis clients at the Dallas location. And he will be there. He's starting out two days a week and he can go up as needed. And he already has people booked next week, so he's the best. He has some postural restoration institute training. He's taken Sarah Duvall's course, so he is like primed and ready for our clients. And he, he's actually my own personal trainer too, so I trust him.

Nice.

Yeah.

I love it. I actually have a personal trainer myself because. I don't know, I mean, I'm kind of tangenting here a little bit, but as business owners, we have to have the energy. And I don't know about you, but I know my personal trainer, he brings the energy and to run businesses and multiple businesses, it's just like if you don't have that energy and that's where I get my energy is from, you know, my workouts. Yeah, you're done, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And I have some like random old injuries that If I'm not consistently strength training my SI joints talking to me, or my shoulder is talking to me, and so he gets that, and he. He's able to kind of throw in some targeted stuff to keep me at my best so I can keep treating my patients.

Yeah, no, that's. I think that's huge. Just the function.

You just need to be able to. Totally.

That's it.

That's it. Yeah.

So let me ask you. So what prompted you to have multiple locations? Like, for so many of us, and so many people listening right now, they're even just scared to get one location. So what prompted you to be like, you know what? I'm gonna go and do another location? Because we know that's more overhead, that's more people to hire. That's technically a lot of times more problems. So what made you make the jump to have more than one location?

Totally. That's a great question. So I think what pulled me to do that was honestly the demand. So a lot of my patients were driving into Dallas, which. I don't know if you've been to Texas, but have large, larger charge. Yes. So in dfw, I mean, it takes you an hour to get from Dallas, Fort Worth. So getting anywhere in Dallas, it's just big. It's just big. And so patients were driving 30, 35, 40 minutes to get to me. But because the metroplex is so large, where they were driving from was not in the boonies it city. So I felt like I could, you know. You know, I noticed I had a ton of patients from, for example, Addison. So I was like, why don't I just put someone in Addison that's 30 minutes north of me? But it's still a high enough population where there will be plenty of patients. So it's kind of nice that DFW is like that, as are many metroplexes, but. And then on top of that, there was other practitioners, like chiropractors or midwives who were reaching out, saying, oh, we want. Can we get a genesis therapist in. In house with us? You know? And so depending on where they were located and how I felt about their practices. Right. And how they were treating their clients, I would weigh the pros and cons, and a couple of those turned into a location. So two of ours, the Fort Worth and the main Dallas one, which is the new building we're opening, those are our biggest two. And then the other three locations are like what we call satellites. So we have one therapist at each of those.

Awesome. Yeah, that's great. So you Know, people want to know, too. Like, how do you manage all these people?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. First of all, I hire the best people ever. So they're the bomb. Yeah. So they're. They make it pretty easy. But what I've learned is delegate, delegate, delegate. So I have my very first hire ever, Corey. I put her in charge of Fort Worth. So I trusted her. She's killed it. Fort Worth has been open for not even. I mean, it's like, I don't know, eight months. I'm going off top of my head and they, all three of them are full. Like they're just rocking and rolling there. And so I was able to kind of hand that location off to her. And then over on the Dallas side of things, I have Amelia, who helps me kind of manage the Dallas side of things. So I kind of have all employees who I love and trust, and I don't even bring them into the Genesis family if they're going to suck. And then on top of that, I. Right on top of that, I have two awesome kind of heads of managers. Dallas, yeah, kind of. That kind of help run the show. And of course, I'm still over in Dallas some, but I can trust her. Like, I was like, amelia, you're going to pick up the Dallas keys tomorrow and you're going to be there on Friday for the washer and dryer. And like, she's handling these things while I'm at home planning for growth and, you know, doing, you know, being with my kids or whatever the case, whatever I want to do. And so delegation and delegating to people you trust, hiring people you trust has really been huge.

I mean, I can't speak more on that. I completely agree with that. You have to build a team that you completely can trust and rely on. Are you treating at all? Are you treating patients at all?

Yeah, yeah, I'm going in twice a week right now. So it's about 20 hours. Ish of availability, which is working well. We'll see. I may be cutting back, cutting that back a little bit because that's starting to feel a little bit crazy. So I may be cutting back to two half days a week or something. Yeah, pretty soon. We'll see. Yeah.

Guys, hopefully you just took note of what Becky said was that she was at home doing the higher level task. And I think this is very important. Personally, I treat. I don't treat anymore. So I am pulled out of my clinic. Not to say that I'm never there, but I go in on Wednesdays and Fridays and just help manage all the things. But, you know, as the clinic grows, your position as a pt and sometimes this is your ego that you have to kind of let go. And because you're known as being, like, the best pelvic health PT in your area.

Right.

And when things start to grow, your role switches and you really have to pull back, be the big visionary person and be like, all right, I'm going to take this ship and I'm going to lead it. If she was still in the clinic treating 40 hours a week, there is no way that she'd be able to grow her practices the way she's done it. There's no way she just wouldn't have the time and be a mom and do all the things and manage all the people and whatever else.

Right, Right.

So I think this is a really big point right here, is that as things grow, your role as an actual practice owner is going to have to change for it to continue to grow. And if you don't change that role, then there's not going to be a lot of growth being had.

Totally. And I think it's hard as pts, Right, because we got into this to help people and to make a difference. But where my mindset has shifted is by me stepping back from treatment. I am able to manage my employees better. I am able to help train other physical therapists, and that is going to extend far more than what little old me could do in Dallas, Texas. Right? Yeah.

I mean, you are. You're cultivating a team that's actually making such an impact on so many more people because this team's growing, and it's not just you treating the patient for one hour, one on one. And I just. It's just, like, amazing that you're making so much impact, especially in Dallas, and I'm sure just wherever around the US and even the world, because I'm sure you have people contacting you on ig. Like, people reach out all the time.

Right? Yeah, totally.

So, I mean that the impact that you're really cultivating is really amazing.

Well, thanks. I think so, too.

It's awesome, right? It's so cool.

Thanks.

Yeah. So, okay. Any other. Any other things that you can think of that make your clinic special or unique or interesting, like any other little pearls or tips that you want to tell the listeners about, hey, this is what our clinic does, and this is why we do it.

Ooh, I love that. Yes. I'm going to go with the first one that popped into my head because that tells me it's the most Important. Okay. So when hiring, people have asked me all the time, how have you found such amazing, like, therapists to hire? And even my admins are awesome. And I always tell them, I can train anyone. I can teach anyone how to treat like I want them to treat. I can teach anyone how to treat the pelvic floor with movement, and I can teach skills as needed. What I can't teach is someone to have passion for this field and a personality that fits in with my team. So that's kind of my big piece of advice that I've been giving lately when people ask me about hiring is hire the person and you can train physical therapists. Yeah. And so a lot of my pts have been newer to pelvic health, actually, and I have loved that because they're not coming in with a bias or a background of the. The old way of treating pelvis. Right. So it's nice because they just come in and they're passionate, they're excited, they're like, oh, I love Genesis. It's awesome. And then I'm like, okay, let's go. Here's how the hip. Here's how the foot and ankle connects. We're treating it this way. We're going to get. We're going to move where, you know, the whole thing. So it's really, really cool.

No, I love that. I think connecting, because we're really big on hips, because hips are pelvic floor. Pelvic floor is hips. That's why my comics called orthopelvis. And. And I also think this, Becky, you may not realize this, but just. I don't know Becky guys that well. Okay. I don't know Becky that well, but what I do know about her is the energy. I don't know if you guys can feel the energy. It's pretty good, right? So when the energy is pretty good, you actually attract that same energy. And when you attract that same energy, then it, like, just all aligns, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And I agree with you. It's hard for me to see that looking at myself, because I don't know if you know the enneagram things, but I'm a nine, and I very much. I struggle with taking compliments or being. I don't know, like, I don't know. So thank you. I'm going to take your. I'm going to receive it. Perfect.

That's great. It's great. All right, Becky, well, it's been so amazing to have you on here. Thank you so much for coming on. Can you drop or can you say, like, how people can find you on Instagram, Facebook, your website, all the things.

Yep, absolutely. So for patients, you guys can find me at Genesis PT Wellness. That's our Instagram. Facebook is just Genesis PT and Wellness PLLC website www.genesisptwellness.com. all pretty easy there. I'm also over on at the Pelvic Powerhouse. That's kind of my coaching training, helping PTs learn how to treat without kegels and run a kick ass business doing it. So awesome. Those are kind of where you can find me right now.

Congrats Becky on all your success. We love it. It's amazing.

Thank you. And thanks so much Kelly for inviting me on. This is awesome.

Yeah, no problem.

If you are ready to change your.

Life, click the link in the show.

Notes to get your ticket to Pelvi Biz.

Let's go.