Dana Strauss (00:00) Hey everybody, welcome to episode 29 of Future Proof PT. Alex and I are here with our special guest, Kylie Williams. And without further ado, we're have Kylie introduce herself to our guests.
Kylie Williams (00:13) Yes. Hi everyone. My name is Kylie and I have the unique and special privilege of not only being a physical therapy assistant, but also I've transitioned into non-clinical work. And now I consider myself a sociologist or a psychologist of the industry, because now I market as a vendor to you all. So I see a little bit what's behind the curtain, see a lot more challenges and I know now what a typical
private practice business looks like and what they need to know to be operationally sound and be profitable in these harder times.
Dana Strauss (00:49) ⁓ It's a unique, your unique guest to bring onto the podcast with a different perspective, Kylie. And for any of those who are receiving our newsletters, and if you aren't, please do. Kylie has published a couple of articles for us and we have her doing a five or six blog series. The latest one was last week and it's entitled Stop Posting for Patients.
Alex (00:49) of sound.
Dana Strauss (01:12) start posting for therapists. So we'll start off with if you could share a little bit about your article and what inspired it and what you would want folks to know so that they then go ahead and read the article themselves.
Kylie Williams (01:25) Yes, thank you. the, the gist of the, article is that as someone who's looking on the outside and who does a lot of industry trends, there is kind of a bad habit in the, I will, I want to say the private practice space, but it still also applies to larger health systems is there is a group think. And when a certain individual or business has a, has a, a, like a little bit of success, they all want to join in on it. And so over the last like decade.
In the past, there were a few names that got a lot of patients by posting social media videos. And maybe there's only three that have reached millions of followers, but the average physical therapy clinic, if you're in the highest 1%, you're over 30,000 followers across all platforms. But the typical, um, like clinic is around 500 to 2000 followers.
And so they're spending all this extra time having their their PTA AIDS, their PTA's and even some of their clinicians like churning out content because that's what they're told. if you want more patients, you got to be on social media when really patients aren't looking at your videos anymore because of algorithms and AI. You there's just so much more content out there that if you're I don't want to say wasting time, but if you're putting your time and talent into making just a funny video about like
your clinic culture or just something in the average patient's not going to watch it. And so if you want to be successful going forward, you have to put your time and talents into what matters most. And where I've seen it have the greatest dividends is creating a work culture. So, a really good example, and this is another thing you don't have to be a large, have a large following to be successful. my favorite one.
is PT Evolution. They're out of Tahoe in California and they have around 2 4,000 followers, but they have zero turnover in their clinic in the last five years, which is a huge problem in our industry.
Dana Strauss (03:31) Tell us about that more, about the turnover.
Kylie Williams (03:33) Yes.
So clearly, and this is not just in the physical therapy space, this affects, you know, all rehab therapists, physicians, know, doctors, they're, leaving the space at a greater rate. And even, you know, you can even look at myself. Yes, I'm non-clinical right now, but I still have an active license. And, you know, I'm always, you know, if there was a really good clinical opportunity, I could go back.
But the average lifespan of a career right now is seven years. There are more people walking away than ever before because of the high costs of education. And maybe a private practice owner can only pay you as a DPT coming out of school, maybe 80, 85,000. But with the cost of inflation, people are struggling to make their payments. And so...
you have to find a, this is especially in private practice, you have to have a culture of flexibility or unique opportunities and you have to promote that to attract talent because there are hundreds and thousands of clinics clamoring for the same, you know, 40 kids coming out of a new cohort, you know, every two years per school. so it's just getting more competitive and in a competitive space, you have to be more
actionable and targeted with how you position yourself in the market. And so that's what's just going on right now.
Alex (04:54) That is so true, Kylie. So I think the most important thing to map out here is how do we even define culture? So these organizations, everybody's virtue signaling that we have culture, but nobody actually knows how to define it consistently, right? So what's your consistent definition?
Kylie Williams (05:05) Yes,