The riches are in the niches, or so they say. But in all seriousness, I agree. Most people that I know who love their jobs specialize in a niche that they enjoy.
But how do you get started specializing in a niche? Here are some of our tips.
To view more episodes, subscribe, and ask your questions, go to mikereinold.com/askmikereinold.
#AskMikeReinold Episode 335: How to Specialize in a Niche Population
Listen and Subscribe to Podcast
You can use the player below to listen to the podcast or subscribe. If you are enjoying the podcast, PLEASE click here to leave us a review in iTunes, it will really mean a lot to us. THANKS!
Show Notes
• How to Build a Successful Cash-Based PT Practice
• Is it Possible for a Physical Therapy Clinic to Only Treat Athletes?
Transcript
Catherine Biddle:
Kristen from West Virginia asks, “I see everyone at Champions seem to have a niche population that they work with. How do you specialize and is it possible to work solely with a small niche population?”
Mike Reinold:
Great job, Catherine. I think we start this off with our yearly poll of is it niche or niche? And comment below. No, I’m just kidding. It would be the same comment. How would you comment differently? Is it niche or niche? What do you think?
Dan Pope:
Age-old question.
Lisa Lowe:
I’d say niche.
Dave Tilley:
Niche because the quiche. It’s not a kitch, it’s a quiche. That’s a niche.
Lenny Macrina:
Quiche.
Lisa Lowe:
I try to avoid saying the word.
Lenny Macrina:
Niche.
Mike Reinold:
Diwesh just goes specialty at all times. But I want to hear from our Canadian friend. Jonah, what do you guys say in Canada?
Jonah Mondloch:
Definitely niche. We’re not talking about the philosopher Nietzsche or whoever that guy was. So yeah, it’s niche.
Mike Reinold:
I didn’t even think Nietzsche was an option. Wow, I didn’t even think of that. All right, let’s get to the question. So yeah, Kristen, great question. We do kind of all specialize in a niche. I’m going to use my terminology, a niche population here at Champion. But I will say this before we get into the episode, we all do a lot of things and I think we’re all good at a lot of things. There’s plenty of things I know I am not that good at in the physical therapy world, but having a niche doesn’t mean that you only work with one population or one joint or one injury, that type of thing. But what it does mean is that you’re really good at a small subset of things here. We say this a lot on the podcast, that whole comment like the riches are in the niches. I do think that’s true. So I’m supportive of this quest of people having the niche. Now I do want to clarify that riches comment too. Like sure, could you make a business off a special population? Absolutely.
But when I say the riches are in the niches with a niche, I’m still confused. But when I say that, I think it’s about the quality of your life. And that’s how I want to kind of frame this episode a little bit here. When you work with that special population that you like to work with the most, you have a blast all day. And I think that’s part of the secret to our success at Champion is that we get to work with the people we love to work with that bring us energy as therapists. So Kristen asked this, and to be honest with you, I had about three of these questions in the queue that were all the same, and most of them were around the thought of a young professional saying, “Is it too early for me to specialize?” I wanted you guys to think about that too.
But gosh, you guys all have good niches and niches. You have both. Who wants to start this one-off? Let’s start with Dave Tilley, who I think has probably one of the stronger niches of the group and a very, very small clinical subset of people that you love working with. So Dave, what do you got?
Dave Tilley:
Yeah, just to hit on the main things you’re saying. So one is that I was able to start into the niche work right from the start. So the clinic that I worked at, it was really just a matter of getting out there and talking to people in the community, visiting gyms, letting them know that I was available. And sure, it started with one person a week, two gymnasts a week every other week. And most of my stuff was general population. But I think sometimes people overanalyze what they have to do, working hard and being nice, never let anyone down. So if you just treat one person well, they go back to their teammates, they go, “Hey, this person understands rowing or baseball or CrossFit or whatever. I think you should maybe check it out.” I know we have people who are frustrated with maybe these types of injuries or the fact that someone doesn’t really understand their situation.
So one becomes two, two becomes four, and you just got to be patient with how many people come through the door and just make sure that you’re over-delivering, right? You have to be willing to go the extra mile and phone call people and drop by their gym and talk to their parents for a half hour when they’re concerned about something or help them get through a tough time. And a lot of that stuff is not paid hours. And I think that’s a really big part of it, is just being willing to go the extra mile and care about people and help them. And then, unfortunately, you can’t be bad at physical therapy. You have to actually know how to help these people pretty well and what to do. So that’s the first thing. But I don’t know. The other piece, I think people take it sometimes that we only treat one type of sport. I would say any given time based on the season, maybe half my schedule is gymnasts, right?
So if I treat 30 people a week, maybe 15 or so are going to be gymnasts from all walks of life. But it comes in waves too. Now’s a perfect example. It’s championship season right now in gymnastics, so people are out competing. So I only had a handful of people that were gymnasts that are here and there, but give it two months. When May comes, the college girls come home and the guys come home, it’s going to be 75 to 80% of my schedule will be gymnasts and I’ll be up to my eyeballs with people. So I think you have to realize that yes, it’s great to work in a niche in population, but I treated a 70-year-old woman right after that. I treated like a younger kid who had nothing to do with it as a soccer player. So yeah, a lot of what we do I think is niche, but a lot of what we do I think is general sports, general orthopedics. So I think we’re the most specialized, maybe. And sometimes there’s days where I really don’t treat a gymnast and you have to be okay with that.
Mike Reinold:
And I think that’s a really good point that people need to really understand here. Dave has a very strong target and he still doesn’t work with gymnasts a hundred percent of the time. So kind of keep that in mind. But I love how Dave brought your attention towards almost like the marketing aspect of it’s like you might be the smartest person in the world to work with gymnasts or rowers or CrossFit, whatever you want to specialize in, but if nobody knows about it… it’s like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there. That might not be the right phrase, but you know what? I think you get my point. If you have this gift, this knowledge, but nobody knows about it, then that’s part of specializing in a niche too, is making sure you get out in front of people, which is something we’ve talked about a lot of times.
So I want to hear from Dan Pope, but I think based on what I just said there, I want to go to Lisa and Mike a little bit here. Because Lisa and Mike, we witnessed start a niche from zero to a good thriving practice. Dan and Dave came in already specialized, so it was easier to see those guys dominate. But Lisa, how’d you get started developing your niche and rowing athletes? And then we’ll bounce to Mike. The same with golf. You’re muted, Lisa.
Lisa Lowe:
There we go. Can you hear me? Yeah. So yeah, I mean I started building my niche doing volunteer pro bono work at my boathouse. So I would bring my table and just let people know, “Hey, I’ll be there for these times.” Or if I had certain people that I knew were kind of working on something, we’d actually arrange. So that was probably the first five-ish years of while I was working. I did pediatrics to start with because it was the most flexible schedule I could have while I was training for rowing. So I spent my time training for rowing, treating my teammates on the side for free. And then once I retired, so to speak, from the higher level stuff, my dream was to then be like, “Okay, rowing…” Rowing is my happy place, so how do I surround myself with that all day at work? And so kind of like you said, Mike, it’s like you want to have fun being at work and rowers make me really happy.
So it’s become just this really fun thing of that. That’s who I get to hang out with for a lot of my day. But similar to Dave, it’s not my entire day. I get excited when it gets to be my whole day. Sometimes that happens. But I also love the other athletes I get to work with too. And the cool part about rowing is it’s everything from a high schooler to… I had an almost 70-year-old on my table yesterday. It’s a really broad range of people that are just happy to be doing what they love and that you can help them and you can speak their language.
Mike Reinold:
That’s huge. Speaking the language is huge. And I think a good takeaway from Lisa’s thoughts here too that I got here was that she donated her time at the beginning and she was probably honing her craft more than she even realizes. You know rowing, because she’s a rower, right? You’re probably going to get into a niche that you completely understand. If you don’t, you probably need to take a step back, but you have to understand it: you know rowing, you know physical therapy, you know the body… But then you have to put it together and that’s what makes you special when you do a niche is that you understand the sport or the population. And then you understand the body in physical therapy, you put it together. But awesome, Lisa. Mike, what did you do getting into golf? I know this was a big topic for you, to try to get started with what you’re most passionate about. What were some of your tips?
Mike Scaduto:
Yeah, for sure. I think when we look at how we start out in a niche… I’m going niche, and then how we end up growing that niche. I think hopefully you have a physical therapy clinic that will help you advertise or help promote that niche for you. So at Champion, we put on our website, we have TPI assessments, and so anyone that’s searching for that in the area, they’re going to find our website. They’re going to come see me. I’m going to be the first touch point. Hopefully then that can spread via word of mouth. So I think communicating with the manager or the higher up in the clinic to say, “Hey, can we promote this in some way or run a special deal on an assessment during a certain season when I know it’s going to be more busy?” is an important step to take.
I think also in terms of growing, I think you have to look at who are the influencers within that field that have the most touch points with the people you want to work with. So for golf, golf instructors are seeing golfers all day long. That’s all they do. So you go out, you communicate with them, you build a relationship with the instructor, they send you the first person, you want to do your best with everybody, but you better make sure you give that person a good experience. You build that relationship, now you have a pipeline from that golf instructor. Once you start to build a reputation within the community, more golf instructors will start sending people your way. So I think in order to go from zero to growing it into something that can be very sustainable, work with the clinic to try and promote your niche and then also get in with the influencers that are working with those people every day.
Mike Reinold:
That’s awesome. Good stuff, Mike. And it was fun to watch that kind of growth, and Mike really took that lead, I think with the golf instructors, and maybe that’s unique to some sports that most golfers, they probably know they need swing lessons and they don’t know that they need to work on their body. It’s an awareness thing. So it’s good to create that connection. But Dan, I mean obviously you had a strong niche in the weightlifting population. Again, that was your background. You have an online presence, you had this whole thing, so you had this strong niche and then you moved across the country basically and started over. So tell us a little bit about that experience and how you got that going again.
Dan Pope:
Yeah, so that was tough, and I did that twice and I’ve talked about this a lot, so I won’t go too crazy. When I was in New Jersey, I worked a lot of local gyms. I was already kind of traveling around speaking, all the athletes knew me, the coaches knew me, things were great, really pumped to start my career in New Jersey. And then we moved to Colorado and that was horrible. I had to start over from square one. I use all the same strategies that Lisa, Dave, and Mike just talked about. And then I moved again to Boston and did the same thing. So I’ve done it a few times now. And I guess to answer the question, initial questions, yes, I think can. One of the things I think that students have the thought of is they’re like, “Okay, I’m starting my career and I want to work with this population.”
I need to find the exact clinic that has all of these athletes there. And that certainly does work, but I also think it creates a lot of anxiety because it’s like, “All right, we got to figure out where you want to live. You got to have the right salary. Do you have a family? Is it reasonable to move across the country?” One of the things I did a couple times, but really with my first job in Colorado, is that I found a clinic that I just thought was supportive that had a bunch of good mentors and smart professionals. And when I started, I saw zero of the people in my niche, and that was okay. I just built it and I got a few of my first patients, and like Dave was saying, and Mike was saying, you do a really good job. You do some additional marketing, you get some more people through the door, and eventually maybe you’re treating 80% geriatrics, but now all of a sudden you have 5 to 10% of that is strength and fitness athletes.
You start doing a little less geriatrics, a bit more of the population you like. And at Champion, I think Lisa had said this too, some days a hundred percent of the people you see are the population that you enjoy working with. I think we’re fortunate because we all really like sports PT, so most folks we see are athletic at least. But yeah, you’re going to see a large chunk of the people that you love and then some people that you still enjoy working with, but not that specific niche. But it doesn’t have to start that way. So just find a clinic that’s going to be open to you seeing the people that you want to see, which of course they will. What are they going to say, “No, I don’t want more business?” Just keep that in your head when you’re starting.
Mike Reinold:
Awesome. Well, Kristen, I hope that helps. I think that’s a lot of great advice right here. You have to understand that special population. You have to get out in front of that crowd and make sure that they know you understand that. But then that’s when it becomes super easy. And a couple of people alluded to this in their response a little bit here, but when you’re a rowing specialist and a rower comes to you and you know the terminology, you know the stresses that they deal with, you know how their body needs to move during that activity, you can articulate that and work on that directly. The light bulb goes off in the patient’s head right in front of you, and you can see it because they’ve been to generic PT before or somebody that just doesn’t understand your sport or doesn’t understand the impact of your sport on your body.
So keep that in mind. That’s what this really comes down to is you have to get yourself out there in front of those people so they know. But then once you’re there, the floodgates open. Because you’re going to show yourself, you’re going to be able to really hone in on that target population. And then it’s a snowball effect, like Dan said. Expectations, maybe you start off 10% of your caseload is what you want, but I think your goal is each year you look back and you say, “Wow, my percentage is a little higher each year” until you’re having a good time. So Kristen, we’re big supporters of that. And Kristen, there were several other people actually in the last couple of months that have asked similar questions. So for those people looking to do that, I think we encourage it. I think it’s super doable, and it’s just something you have to just put your mind to and just say, “This is the population I’m going to attack” and you got to go get it.
I remember when Mike Scaduto started and he didn’t have enough golf people, he just kept knocking on doors. He’d just go to golf instructors and he’d infiltrate and he’d kind of start talking to them and learning more things. You have to get yourself out there and do that. So great question. If you have questions like that, head to mikereinold.com. Click on the podcast link and you can fill out the form to ask us more questions. And please go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Rate, review, subscribe, and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks so much.
