You Can't Do Everything By Yourself: How to Hire PTs for Your Clinic

Welcome to pelibiz podcast. I'm Dr. Kelly Alhui. I've grown my pelvic health practice, orthopelvic physical therapy, and now I'm helping pelvic health professionals do the same. Each week, I give you the knowledge you need to grow your practice. Let's get into today's episode. Today we're going to talk about hiring and how to handle that. So we're going to be going over many different questions of what made me pull the trigger to hire, where did I post when hiring, what was the importance of why I should hire, what's the process of hiring, and what challenges I faced when hiring. So there's a lot to dive into today. So let's get into it. Let's go. So here we go. So, number one, a little bit on my backstory is I was working for a year before I actually hired. So I got up to 50 patients. I'm gonna say that again. 50 patients a week, treating patients by myself and running my clinic. That is called a psycho. I was psycho, and I highly recommend you not do that. However, what that gave me was something called profit. That profit then allowed me to have extra money to then be able to pay and hire an admin and a PT when the time was right because I had profit because I was psycho working so many hours. So don't do that. What I recommend is, okay, when you get to about 15 to 20 patients a week, that is when you should look at hiring. Hiring. What we have found takes about three months. To find a pelvic health PT takes about three months. So looking back on it, when I first decided to pull the trigger and hire my first double ever pt, I was absolutely terrified because for the past eight years before that, I couldn't even pay myself. And now I was thinking, oh, my gosh, now I'm responsible for paying someone else and all their livelihood. It was just such a burden to me, and it was so scary. What I didn't realize at the time was I needed to hire because I was truly killing myself seeing 50 patients a week, and it wasn't worth it. Yes, I was making an unfair amount of profit, but that wasn't the point. If how. It doesn't matter if you're making a profit. If you're dying, it doesn't help you at all because you're just respending that money on medical bills and everything else. So the first question is, what truly made me pull the trigger to hire? For me, it was I was working six days a week from, like Seven in the morning to seven at night. I didn't see light. And I just said, you know what? After a couple months of doing that, I'm done. I need to hire no matter what. So I just pull the trigger. But what makes someone pull the trigger is when you get around that 20 mark with patients and you're still kind of running the business. You don't have anyone helping you run the business. The trigger is that. That's the trigger is when you hit the 20 mark is or around the 20 mark of patients a week. You can't see patients for 20 hours a week. And then also run your business and also market and also pull in the leads and also do all the sales calls and then also like do the fulfillment stuff. You can't do that. All you're going to drown and it's not good because it will affect your health. So anyone that's listening right now, if you're around that mark, you've got to start thinking about who I can hire and where do I find those people. So that leads me into the next thing is where the heck do you post when it comes to hiring? So there's many different places you can post. You can post on the APTA career site. You're going to spend anywhere between 200 and 300amonth to post there. You can post on LinkedIn that is free. You can post on college career boards where you contact them. Many of them have Facebook groups that you can post in there and be like, hey guys, job opening. So you contact the physical therapy. I don't want to call them chairman, but you contact them. The ones that's kind of like the CIs that place people in the different placements. And typically a lot of these colleges have job boards that you could just post on. So that's cool. So definitely do that. Any colleges around your area reach out to. You can also do on indeed is very good Facebook groups. Like many different pelvic health Facebook groups. Pelvibiz community is one of them. So you could post in there, um, and then also on your own social media. That's a really good platform as well to post on because you can post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, make a video about it. Hey guys, I'm hiring. This is what it's like working here and you show your place, or if you don't have a place, you show what it's like going mobile and that's it. Like people want to come and be a part of the movement. So again, there's many different places. If that doesn't work, you can always hire a recruiter. Recruiter may take about a month to onboard someone. You will have to pay them a fee. A recruiting fee can be anywhere between 8 to 11k depending on if someone's full time or part time. So once they come on, how a recruiter works is once they come on the person, the candidate, okay, you would pay them a percentage of the salary that you are paying the new employee. So you, you would pay the company that. And so again, on average it's around 8 to 11k you would pay them. So. And some people would say, well, is that worth it? I had to pay $11,000 to bring a PT on. Yeah. Because that PT overall is really going to help be able to build your caseload and be able to build your practice. So yes, it's worth it. So that brings me right to my next point of why it's important to hire. It's important to hire and you must hire. Okay, so here's a false belief. I can't grow past myself. I've heard this many times. I never want to get too big because I saw my past employee have many people in the company and it was so overwhelming. They're so stressed out and I never want to be my old boss. This was me also. Or there's no way I can grow past myself because that's just too scary and I just want to be in charge of me. If you have that belief, if you have that belief, that is going to hurt you a lot because it's just going to wear you out. You can't do everything by yourself. You have to grow in a path and you have to have people on your team. No matter if you want three people on your team, no matter if you want 20,000 people on your team. A team is what makes a company run without you killing yourself. So the importance of hiring is that you have to start to change the mindset. Your mindset on if I hire. It doesn't mean that it's going to cost me more. It's actually costing you to not hire. That's the truth. It's costing you to not hire. It's not costing you to hire. So what I mean by that is most of us in our minds, and I was one of those thought that if I hire my hire, it's going to cost me a lot of money because I have to pay their salary, which could be a true fact. However, if you switch that belief and you say if I hire, they can actually help get more money. And gain and continue to improve the business and grow the business. That's the mindset you have to adopt to understand why hiring is important. And knowing that you could be like me and work. I mean I don't know how many work. I probably put in 90 hours a week working. But that's only going to get you so far. It only got me to having health issues. It only got me to 30k in profit a month. That's as far as I can go. Just being a one man team. I did it. Trust me, if anyone's done it, I probably have seen the most patients in a week out of anyone that is a solo provider ever. I don't know anyone that's seen more patients than that in a week. And I did that for months. So I've been there. I got to the end of where you can literally get to. Couldn't see any one more patient if I tried. So I had to get to the point where I had to hire because I couldn't go anymore. Also this, it's very important to hire because if you ever want to go on vacation or sick. Who's taking over? Think about this. Who's taking over your practice? Is your practice still going to be able to run? This is also a very important reason why you have to hire. I truly believe people don't have a company until it runs without them. Until your company runs fully without you. It's not a company because you haven't created the systems yet to then make the well oiled machine run properly without it involving you. And this takes time. I don't fault anyone. It just takes time to build up. That's eventually where most of us want to get to. Where it keeps running without you having to do all the stuff. Because what happens if your health fails? It happened to me. What happens? You're going to shut down your company? No. You just got. You had so much momentum to get it all started. Now it's going to go bye bye. No. So the goal is to hire as quickly as possible to make sure that you're not just stuck just spinning your wheels. Because that is the most painful phase when you're doing everything. So hire quickly. Honestly, if I could give one massive advice, is higher as quick as possible way before you think you're ready. Because that higher boost, the right hire is going to really help move your company forward if they get your mission. So when it comes to hiring, here's the process. When it comes to hiring, you have to post the job. You gotta know what to post. In the job post, to attract the people, what they actually want, you have to look at their resume. You have to then get them on a call and. Or on a zoom. Then you gotta get them to come in person. If you're in person, okay, once you've gone through all those steps and you're like, hey, I think I found my person, great, then you have to start thinking about what systems you have in place to get them onboarded as quickly as possible. Do you have them? Do you have training set up to where they can just watch it and you. And then come into the clinic and be able to implement it? Do you have that training? Most of you guys don't. I know I do. This is what I do at Publicbiz. I have training that I train anyone's admin that comes in or anyone's pts that come in because I have it ready to go. Yes. It's taken me a couple of years to develop, but it's there. So when you hire people, you've got to have a processes that's going to clearly lay out the path of when they join your team. What is the process to getting up to pace. Systems is the number one thing you have to have in place. Maybe I'll make a whole podcast about systems because there's so many systems. But. But that's what has to be had so that it's very clear when they come on of what that looks like. Then you do a little in person training. Okay. Or over zoom. You can do training over zoom too. And then you're going to have to do test runs. And sometimes it's like, okay, go ahead and try this. All right, what worked? What didn't work? Let's talk about it. Then you go from there. So these are things that we have to keep evaluating and reevaluating. When I hire people on, it's not just like, here you go, good luck. No, you have to train these people on what you want. That takes time and energy. So you just gotta be ready for that. And I think that leads me into like, what are the challenges that I face when hiring? My first hire quit on me after two months and I was freaking exhausted after seeing 50 patients a week then trying to train her as well. And I wasn't clear at all on what I was doing, what she was doing. It was just horrible. And she left. She was like, what the hell is this? Bye, bye. She left. So the challenges can be your energy. The challenges can be, is your system up to par of where you want to be? If it's not up to pace. Reach out to me. I have all the systems. This is what I give my anastoma. I have all my systems. Is it the right fit? Do they have the right personality type? You can teach anyone anything, but do they have the right personality type? Are they cut out for this? Whether or not that's admin, pt, manager, whatever. And a lot of times I just tell people, go with your gut on this stuff. Like, go with your gut. If your gut says, hey, you know what? This person feels right fit, go for it. I hire based on personality. I don't hire for skills because I can teach any skills. I don't need you to be from Harvard. I don't care what school you went to. I just care about can you get along with people and are you a nice person and good person? That's all I care about. And great. If you have great personality, you're nice, you're on. So, you know, I think went on to the challenges. I think the other challenges that I, that I face with hiring is, you know, getting them up to pace as fast as I want them to. Integrating them into the team could be challenging. Sometimes I think that's it. I've really honed in on some of the challenges that I've faced in the past, but don't have those same challenges anymore because I got smarter. Once you've hired, you know, 10 plus people, you're just like, okay, got these systems down. So in the systems I just told you is basically create systems to then get people onboarded so it takes away less of your time and less of your energy so that it makes it easier. But I think the number one thing to learn from this podcast is for those people that think I shouldn't hire, I just want to stay small. That's going to kill you. It's literally not going to kill you. And you can't. You must hire. And as a must, you got to work smarter and not harder. And how you do that is by hiring. So hope you guys learned something today about hiring, but if you're at around 20, you're at around 20. Patients start looking for people, guys. So hopefully that helps. Talk soon. I consider myself a business and life coach. Are you ready to live the life of your dreams as an entrepreneur? If so, let's chat. See the episode notes below and go ahead and book a call. See you all next week.