Tom Cook | The Private Practice Enterprise Club

Two-minute video · to be recorded · replace this block with the embed iframe

Two minutes. Worth more than this whole page.

The short version

I’ve supported more than 50 private practice owners over the last decade.

Most of them US physical therapy clinics with one or two locations, building cash-pay volume and trying to lean less on insurance. Nearly all of them were spending real money on marketing without being able to say what it bought.

I didn’t take the work off them. I taught them to read their own accounts, and stayed on the call until they could.

I’ve run agency work either side of that, and I still do — I run a small agency in the north-east of England for local businesses. So I know exactly what the retainer model rewards, which is why I’ve built this one the way I have.

Why I stopped selling agency work by itself

Because the incentives are wrong and everybody in the industry knows it. An agency that keeps you slightly confused keeps you slightly longer. Every report is written to be impressive rather than useful, which is why they are full of impressions and reach and “leads” and never say the one number you actually needed: what did a booked patient cost.

The clients I was proudest of were the ones who ended up not needing me much. That is an unpleasant thing to notice when you sell retainers, and a very good thing to build a business around instead.

How I work

You stay the clinical expert. I will never tell you how to treat a patient or what your practice should feel like. You know that and I don’t.
I do the marketing research so you don’t have to — then I show you what I found, in plain language, and you make the call.
Everything is measured against booked appointments and revenue. Not leads. If I ever send you a report whose headline number is leads, hold me to this sentence.
Nothing is a black box. Every account is yours, every change is written down, and you could take the whole thing in-house tomorrow.

The obvious problem

I’m in England. You’re not.

Let’s deal with it before you have to raise it politely on a call.

“The time difference will be a nightmare.”

It genuinely isn’t — it’s the easiest of the three objections. Your morning is my afternoon. Every slot on my calendar is already set to land between 8am and noon Eastern, which for most practice owners is the only part of the day that isn’t patients. I’ve never once had to move a call because of a time zone.

“You don’t understand the US market.”

Fair challenge, and a more serious one. Here’s the honest answer: I understand the part I’m being paid for. I’ve spent years inside US physical therapy practices’ ad accounts, so I know what a cash-pay ankle patient costs to acquire in a mid-size American city and how that changes when you’re competing with a hospital system’s outpatient arm. I am not going to advise you on payer mix, state licensure or your Medicare exposure — and I’ll say so the moment it comes up rather than bluffing.

“I’d rather have someone local.”

Someone local has seen the three practices in your town. I’ve worked inside practices’ accounts in cities all over the country, which means when your bookings drop in February I have almost certainly watched it happen somewhere else and know whether it’s you or it’s the calendar. That’s the trade. If what you actually need is a person who can walk into your clinic, that’s a local hire, and I’ll tell you so.

Twenty minutes is a low-risk way to find out if I’m any good.

Bring last month’s numbers. You’ll leave with something useful either way.

Book a 20-minute call