The Therapy Business Podcast

Mailbag: Answering Your Questions

• Craig Dacy • Episode 72

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We answer three big questions practice owners keep asking: how to reward teams when margins feel tight, where the best referrals come from, and the single financial move that protects profit you can actually spend. Practical, simple steps you can apply today without guesswork.

• profit-sharing that flexes with real results
• session incentives tied to clear thresholds
• training, flexibility, and perks that staff value
• referral partners for PTs and mental health
• how to build two-way referral relationships
• the one habit: bank profit first every deposit

Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a practice owner that you may know
If your practice needs help getting organized with finances or just growing your practice, head to therapybusinesspod.com to learn how we can help you


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*Intro/outro song credit:
King Around Here by Alex Grohl

SPEAKER_00:

I'm coming at you with another mailbag episode, one of my favorites. And today we're going to be digging into your questions about your practices. How can you pay your team more if you feel like you can't afford to? What are the best referral partners that you can be looking at? And more. My name is Craig, and I'm the owner of DAC Financial Coaching. Our team is on a mission to make your therapy practice permanently profitable. If you own a solo or group practice, we're here to help you build a business that creates more time, makes more money, and serves more people. This is the Therapy Business Podcast. I love getting the chance to connect with our listeners and look at your questions and get to specifically address some of them, as well as just some general, frequently asked questions that we hear from our clients all the time. That I we might hear in a session, we're like, you know what, I think this is something that a lot of people would be interested in, or it might be a recurring theme question that we feel like is something you could be wondering to, and maybe just don't even know where to find the answer. Or honestly, maybe you don't even know that it's a question yet. I can't tell you how many times I've showed up to a coaching session with one of my coaches, and I'm like, you know, I don't know what I need to focus on. It's like I don't know what I don't know. And so sometimes we can extract those by hearing questions from others, areas that they're looking for help in. And so that's why I love doing these mailback episodes because it's kind of like a little popcorn of different things that other practice owners are struggling with that you might be too, and it might provide some clarity and a path forward. Now, before we jig into these, first of all, I want to say thank you so much for being a listener to our show. If this is your first episode you're ever listening to, welcome. And if you are somebody who subscribes and regularly listens, thank you so much for joining us. I would love it if you aren't subscribed yet to hit that subscribe button, whether it's on YouTube or Spotify or Apple, wherever you're listening or watching. That would be amazing. It helps put us in front of other practice owners, as well as if you don't mind leaving us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. And you can always go to our website, the therapy business therapybusinesspod.com and reach out to us and let us know is there an episode topic that you're interested in. Do you have a mailbag question, something you want us to answer on the show? We would love to hear from you. But again, thank you for your support. Even if this is the only episode you ever listened to, we're grateful to be engaging with you even on this one short time period. Now let's dig into the mailbag. Uh, I got a few questions. And so the first one I want to talk about is this question of I want to pay my employees more, but I feel like I can't afford to. What are alternatives to compensate them without raising their base rate? This is a common issue both in physical and mental health therapy because a lot of times, especially if you're not private pay, you don't have a lot of control over income. So if you're working with insurance companies, you get reimbursed X amount from that specific company. So if you're giving an employee a pay raise, but you're not getting a raise in reimbursement, then you're squishing down that profit margin and it can be a slippery slope. So this is something that a lot of practice owners are looking at of how can I show my team that I care about them? How can I compensate them financially? But also knowing that I feel like if I raise the rate, then we're gonna be in a tougher situation personally and business-wise. So there's a lot of different things that you can do, and some of them do involve money, but it's a smaller amount that usually can work, we can work in a little bit better, especially if it goes team-wide. So, number one is what we would call profit bonuses. This is my favorite way to share with the team. This is what I do with my own team. So we use the system profit first, where we're putting uh we have a bank account, a checking account nicknamed profit, and we're putting a certain percentage into that account every time money comes into the business. Now, with that money at the end of the quarter, I'll either pay my well, I'll pay myself a profit bonus out of it, and then the other part of it. So I'll take half for myself as a bonus, and then the other half, we can determine what we want to do with it. So this is an opportunity for you to say, okay, I want to use a portion of this fund to compensate my team. You could open another account as well and nickname it team profit sharing or profit sharing, whatever it is, and put one, two, three percent, whatever you think you can afford into that account. And the same thing at the end of every quarter, taking that that account and dividing it across your team. The idea here is intentionally setting aside money so that when the business is profitable, people are being getting a bonus, they get a compensation, a little piece of that pie. If profit is down, then the compensation is is down too. And so it kind of follows the trends of your business. And so that fear of we may not be able to afford it, it really is tied to profitability. And so if your profitability is way down or you had a really bad quarter, then you're not obligated, you're not stuck paying more money out to this team. The other reason I love these is it gives your team members a connection to the company, they have some buy-in. They get if the company does well, they get rewarded for it. It's not just how many clients am I seeing, uh, it's how is the team, how is the whole company performing across all facets. So if you're seeing one type of patient, but somebody else is offering group or whatever it is, everyone's kind of tied into that one piece of the pie. You can also offer session bonuses. So if they're seeing, if they're doing enough hours, um, session hours per week, maybe you set a mile marker of okay, if you hit 20 per week, then we're gonna offer you X, whether it's a little bit more per session or a one-time like a flat rate kickback of 50 bucks or whatever it is, just these little financial compensations. And again, the idea behind it being they're hitting this threshold, they're generating more revenue, so then you can afford to maybe give them a little bit of a kickback. So I like the profit one the best because again, it gives that bigger company-wide one, whereas a session one really is based on them. But at the same time, session incentives can also help you because it's incentivizing them to see more clients. Now, going aside from that, we could you could invest in, and sometimes these can even be free, but extra trainings, both professional and interest interest-based. So uh bring in some people, do some lunch and learns, and it doesn't have to be regarding their actual field. So, yes, I mean, if you can pay for different uh training hours or so that they can or help them work on certifications, whatever those things are, those are great. And those are really enticing to somebody when they are working for someone else, but also you can venture outside of that. So, for example, we've done a ton of lunch and learns for companies where we go in and we talk about personal finances and how to manage your personal finances better or get out of debt or whatever that focus is. And that is the company investing in their employees and into their finances and to their personal lives. So you can bring in area experts based on a bunch of different things that maybe can come in and work with your team. You can bring in somebody to do yoga with your team. You could whatever it is, you can think outside the box, you know your people well. What would be interesting to them? And if you don't know, don't try and guess. Just send out a survey, come up with a few ideas and say what would be which of these would be interesting to you? Do you have any other ideas that you would find fascinating or something you'd like to learn more about? Something else you can do is flexible hours, shorter work weeks, giving them the opportunity, if you're not already, to choose uh the hours they're working, um, if they want to do a four-day week instead of a five-day week. So there's a lot of different ways that you can incentivize them in those areas without having a direct financial compensation for it. My team gets to choose their hours. Um, I genuinely am not picky about how many hours they're working or or what hours they're working, as long as their clients are taken care of. Option to work remotely. So if you aren't offering that yet, maybe you consider it. You know, I know for physical therapy, that's probably not much of an option, but uh for mental health therapy, it could be one. So if you have team members who they you think they would find that valuable, maybe offer a 50-50 split of remote and in-office. Uh, lots of different options there. If you're not offering remote, there once again, another way that you could maybe offer this, you could compensate them without finances being involved. Catered lunches, having lunch provided, stipends for gym memberships. Maybe you're paying for a gym membership or their Amazon membership or some other kind of uh maybe even just a flat rate dollar amount every year, they get to uh reinvest in themselves and some kind of self-development. My team gets a stipend every year for training or any kind of self-development. So all they do is they come to me with a receipt and say, I purchased this or I signed up for this training or I took this course or I bought these books and we reimburse them up to a certain amount because we want them reinvesting them. It's just an incentive. So there is a list, it's not a comprehensive list. There's a ton of different ways that you can compensate your team, uh, but those are some ideas for you if you're trying to think outside of the box without actually raising their hourly rate. And a lot of pretty much all of those are gonna be somewhat affordable. Lunch for the whole team is a lot cheaper than raising everybody's hourly rate. All right, let's let's dig into the next question. So uh referral partners. This person's looking for networking partners. So, what are the best referral partners to seek out in my industry? And I'm gonna break this up into physical therapists and and mental health therapists because we have both uh who listen to this show. So I'm gonna start with our physical therapists first. Your best referral partners, and again, this is not a comprehensive list. This is just some ideas I've come up with, or ones that I've heard from our clients. You may know of some better ones, or even just jump into Chat GPT or Google search as well if you want to look for some more on top of this. Um, so orthopedic surgeons, uh, primary care physicians is a good idea, um, pain management clinics, chiropractors, personal trainers, gyms. So people who, as you know, work with someone who might need to rehabilitate, who might need to go to physical therapy. You want to make those partnerships well known and uh connected. And then vice versa, a referral partner should be working both ways. And so you're keeping them on your short list so that if you have a client who who needs one of those professionals, you have somebody you can send them to as well. So I always recommend any referral partner you're talking to, uh, get coffee with them, even if it's a virtual coffee. Meet with them, I would say at least once. Uh, a lot of times I I will meet with our referral partners two, three times just to develop a relationship and make sure that there's somebody that I'm sending, if I'm sending a client to them, that I trust them, that I trust they're gonna be in good hands. All right, now our mental health therapists, so you know, primary care physicians as well are a great referral source. Uh I I know we're going through that with my son right now, going through some some testing stuff. And so uh, if we were to need a mental health professional, they usually can connect you to somebody, and that's why we want you being connected with them. Because again, if especially if you work with kids, pediatricians, that's always a great connection, psychiatrists, um, school counselors, other therapists with different specialties. All of these are great. A lot of times, what I found is, and and same with the physical therapy, find other physical therapists who have different specialties. Every not everyone is is different. Some people specialize in one or two things, some people maybe offer a service that you don't. Uh, so mental health. Maybe you don't work with teens and adolescents. So, or maybe you know somebody down the street, maybe you do, and you know someone who doesn't. You you meet a referral partner who doesn't. So they can send you people who are looking for therapy for their teens, and or maybe they specialize in a specific area and you don't, so you can send them people for that. It is a really great relationship to have. I'm connected with so many different coaches, so many different financial professionals because I know there's areas of expertise that is just not our wheelhouse, and they would be better taken care of going somewhere else. We don't offer taxes or bookkeeping, so we have referral partners that we can send people to for those things because that's just not our area of specialty, and vice versa. Those bookkeepers don't work with people in creating a money system and working on their behaviors and getting accountability. That's just not what they do. They prefer to focus on the numbers and getting their books and taxes up to up to code. So, physical therapists, if you know somebody who has a piece of equipment, or maybe you have a piece of specialty equipment or offer a specific type of of therapy that not a lot of people in your area do, create those connections, those referral partners so that when somebody goes to them and they're looking for this specific type of therapy, you come to mind, they send them to you. All right. So again, not a comprehensive list, but there's just a off the top of my head list um that I came up with and then also just reinverse with a little bit of Googling myself. All right. Number three, the last question for today is if I only did one thing for my finances this year, what would you recommend? And this actually came in um on one of our consultations. So uh we we like to list questions. We ask people to put submit their questions before they get on a consultation. Somebody said, like, what's the one thing I should be doing for my finances this year? I was like, Oh, that's a great question. So I want to talk about I'm gonna hone in on one, and that's gonna be profitability, which is probably no surprise, but it's not the sense of get a better bottom line on your PL. I want you to focus on profitability like in the bank account. And so what that looks like is opening an account, just like I was referring to with the profit sharing and nicknaming it profit. If you don't have that already, open a checking account today. They're easy to open. Just hop online, open a checking account, nickname it profit, and start allocating one to five percent of all your sales into that account. If you feel like money's really, really tight, just start with one percent. Uh when we work with clients, we usually try to start a little bit higher, if not maybe around three percent. Regardless, start setting something aside. If what it's 1%, that's fine. And just start to build one, that habit of profitability that we are moving this, we're setting it aside first, and we are not going to touch it. That money is profit and we're gonna run the business on the rest. Now, with that, you can use that money as your quarterly bonus. So, like I was talking about before, you could take that, pay yourself out a bonus. You can use it to build your cash reserves, your emergency fund. You could use it to pay down debt, you could use it to save for a new team member or a new building or whatever it is, but it's intentional and you're focusing on that profit so that you, the business owner, are taken care of, regardless of what you do, whether it's debt, saving for a building, building cash reserves in the business. I want you to take some for yourself, even if it's just a little bit that you use to uh go out to dinner with to celebrate a profitable quarter and you focusing on profitability, maybe for the first time in business. All right, those are the questions we got today. We we do these mailbags regularly. So, like I said, please submit any questions that you might have, and we would love to answer it in our next mailbag episode. Thanks for joining us on the Therapy Business Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a practice owner that you may know. If your practice needs help getting organized with finances or just growing your practice, head to therapybusinesspod.com to learn how we can help you.

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Craig Dacy

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