Welcome back to the Healing Pain Podcast with Aaron LeBauer, PT, DPT
We’re discussing the advantages of cash-based physical therapy and cash-based pain management services. My guest is Dr. Aaron LeBauer. He is a doctor of physical therapy and a business coach for healthcare entrepreneurs. He owns LeBauer Physical Therapy in Greensboro, North Carolina where he’s been helping people stay active and fit without medications, injections, or surgery since 1999. He specializes in treating people with chronic conditions and persistent injuries, which have not responded to traditional treatments and therapies with the goal of helping patients have less pain, move better, and feel better in their bodies.
Aaron also helps other passionate physical therapists create and grow successful physical therapy practices without relying on insurance companies. In this episode, you’ll learn all about how to start a cash-based pain management practice, how cash-based models can offer more for people living with pain, how you can break away from the constraints of major medical insurance and why you may decide to choose a cash-based practitioner to help you treat and self-manage chronic musculoskeletal pain. Let’s begin and meet Dr. Aaron LeBauer and discuss cash-based physical therapy and cash-based pain management.
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Cash Pay Pain Management And Improving Outcomes With Aaron LeBauer, PT, DPT
Aaron, welcome to this episode of the show. It’s great to have you here.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate you bringing me on.
I am super excited to talk to you because you’re the first guest that I’m talking to about the business of pain and the business and practice of physical therapy. Not just physical therapy, but other practitioners treat pain as well. Let’s start to look at what are we doing in practice? How do we enhance or transform our practice? How do we help practitioners develop their skills and professional development, then take that into practice, help their patients and potentially, increase their profits, which is what all of us need when we function in the private practice world? In healthcare in general, there’s a profit side to it as well that we have to be mindful of. We know you are a physical therapist. I mentioned that in the introduction. Tell us how you got started before that though.
I was born to be a physician. My dad, three uncles, grandfather, and his brother were all physicians. That was expected. None of my older cousins ever did that. I was like, “That’s the only path I see.” I got to organic chemistry and couldn’t do the first night’s homework in less than four hours. I didn’t finish it. I decided to quit right there and I got an A in the previous semester in chemistry. I realized then that I didn’t want to spend my life studying. I want to spend my life experiencing. When I graduated from college, no one knew what to do with me because I wasn’t going to be a doctor, lawyer, or business consultant.
I went out and experienced the world in trying to race bicycles. I realized I had to have a better job than as a temp. I realized I could go to massage therapy school. I had always wanted to use my hands and it had benefited from getting a massage as a younger adult. I realized then, “I can do something I love. I can treat people who are hurting and I don’t have to go to med school to do it.” I went to massage therapy school out in California. This was back in 1999. After I started taking some Con Ed courses and experiencing patients who told me that I was the first person to touch them where they hurt and the first person to help them when they’d been to PT massage, chiropractic surgeons, etc.
I realized after a few years of doing that, I needed more knowledge, more education. I didn’t know how to predict and tell them when they were going to be better. I thought, “Maybe PT school.” My wife was like, “You need to go be a PT.” I was doing more structural bodywork at that time or I was working with people who were injured, who were getting help from me when they couldn’t get it from someone else. I didn’t have the tools to help them long-term. I could provide some pain relief. In the middle of PT school, I realized how real this insurance game was.
On my first clinical rotations, I saw 43 patients in one day. I realized that day no one was going to pay me to see one person an hour, a salary that I wanted and no one would hire me to do this. I was going to have to start my own business. Everyone thought it was crazy what I was trying to do, but I had experienced it. At some point, people needed more time, more touch, more empowerment. I started my business. I started sharing what I was doing with people and they are like, “How’d you do this?” I was like, “Here it is.” Now, I help coach physical therapists and private practice owners in creating more time, income and impact without relying on insurance companies.
I want to get into that topic, that time, income and impact without an insurance company. As you mentioned, there’s a whole lot there in the introduction. I want to rewind and touch on a couple of spots. The first thing is, you said three people in your family were physicians. What kind of physicians were they?
My dad’s a cardiologist. His brother is a gastroenterologist. My uncles are twins. The other twin is a pulmonary specialist. He’s board-certified, but he worked in emergency rooms with infectious disease and pulmonary issues and became an allergy and asthma specialist. Their brother didn’t have a specialty. He passed away when he was 25 right before he graduated medical school or right before they walked. My grandfather was a family physician and his brother was a surgeon.
Not exactly in the physical medicine realm, so to speak.
Not at all, just disease. I saw that they cared for people. If we can all remember, many years ago, you could sit down with your physician for more than five seconds and have some conversation. They would evaluate their patients, bring them back to their office, they’d sit them in a comfortable leather chair and they’d talk to them not just about the disease, but they talked about their family. They build relationships with people. I saw that growing up. Once I got into PT school, I knew that it wasn’t going to exist for me. That was eye-opening.
What’s interesting to me is when I think back to physical therapy school, I first had a Bachelor’s in Physical Therapy. I did a four-year undergraduate. For those of us who can remember back many years, there was a time when physical therapy school was not a Doctorate degree, but it was a Bachelor’s degree. It evolved into a Doctorate degree and most of us have evolved with that. There was a moment when I was in undergrad, in physical therapy, in my Bachelor’s program, the school I went to, Downstate Medical Centers to SUNY Brooklyn which is a wonderful school, had a College of Nursing, College of Pharmacy. There were OTs, PAs, PTs, and the College of Medicine.
We took some similar courses. Everyone took anatomy and physiology together. You would interact with the other disciplines. Quite frequently, people would say this to me, “You seem smart. Why don’t you go on to become a physician?” I didn’t have the words for it back then. Now, I have a whole lot of words for it. It’s interesting to me how we see a physician as a top of the pyramid in medicine, but how our evolution with following pain management, pain care, and opioids has started to maybe erode that belief for certain people and the impact that’s had on the profession of physical therapy and other professions as well.
That’s something that I’ve seen from the beginning. My first CI told me, “When you walk in the room, everyone thinks you’re the physician or surgeon.” This was when I was on a rotation at the hospital. It’s the way you carry yourself. I’m 6’3”. I had been on rounds with my dad and grandfather. This is how you do it. That’s the big friction that I hit with learning how to try to learn how to market to physicians or even in PT school and clinical rotation is that everyone thought that this one profession was the top of the chain and my voice didn’t matter unless it was approved. That’s not the case anymore. We have to make our voices heard.
Is that a barrier that you find when you start to interact with physical therapists who are thinking about starting a private practice or open their private practice? Is that something that they struggle with the idea that, “I’m my own boss. I have my own practice, but yet I still haven’t found my voice within the other professionals? How do I communicate that with the patient or the public necessarily?”
It is something that’s there. It’s getting a little bit less and less in the last many years especially in the younger PTs getting out. I feel like they have it, but part of it is because they don’t have the experience versus someone who’s been in clinical practice for 5 to 10 years working in a more traditional PT clinic. It gets in the way as people think, “In order to start, I need to go market a physician.” I tell people, “It’s not going to work if you have a non-traditional practice.”
It’s not the way you think it is, but that’s part of the mindset of physical therapy is the technical service rather than the decision-making service. When I was interviewing you, we both agree that we’re decision-makers or we help make decisions with patients. The big distinction is, “Am I doing what someone else is saying, or am I helping patients make a decision? If we’re in the decision-making service, then we have to go find patients who make the decision to come to see us.” That’s how the best, most equitable relationship to create positive outcomes.
You mentioned a nontraditional practice. Can you define for us what that looks like? I’m sure it looks different depending on the practitioner and what their vision is for their practice.
I’m going to define what a traditional practice is to me and then nontraditional is everything else, I’ll get to that. To me, a physician-owned clinic or a big hospital-owned clinic where I’m a physical therapist and I take in “orders” where I get a script to put someone, “I saw five shoulders and I did five shoulder rehab programs today.” It’s like, “You saw five different people. How can you give them all the same protocol?” That’s the old way because physical therapists were physician extenders and we no longer are. In certain states or certain practice settings, the orders and referrals come from the physicians, even if it’s not required by law, and people practice and it’s easy.
It’s like, “You tell me what to do. I’ll do that.” Those would be the settings that I see. Someone working in that setting might say, “No, I disagree. I make decisions for my patients. Get it.” That’s the traditional model of physician-owned or hospital-owned, corporate physical therapy. We’re seeing multiple people at a time. Nontraditional doesn’t only mean one-on-one, but it might mean, “I can take as much time with you as I need to upfront and I can put you in a group program or a one-on-one program. Maybe help you through telehealth or online programs. Maybe there’s a group program.” It’s anything else that isn’t our initial picture of what physical therapy might be. I’m talking mostly outpatient orthopedic rehab style physical therapy versus a lot of the other types of therapy that we do as physical therapists.
My follow-up question to that would be, you’ve seen this change over the last many years as the DPT has solidified itself and there aren’t that many Bachelor’s and Master’s in physical therapists’ leftover. Are you are finding that in PT school, there’s a little bit more of this talk of nontraditional or alternative practice settings were probably back when I went to school there was almost none?
I don’t think that students now are learning it in school. What I’m hearing is that they’re getting in and going, “This doesn’t quite seem what I signed up for. Let me go see what everyone else is doing.” What is reality? The way the information can be put out on the internet, they’re finding information more. When I graduated PT school in 2008, there wasn’t any information online about cash-based practice or telehealth or how do we do PT groups or courses. There was none of that. Now, there’s more information out. It’s easier to find and they’re still questioning. The big struggle that they come out with that I’m seeing is, “I have a Doctorate of PT. I paid $150,000 for it. I’m being told not to tell people I’m a doctor.”
That comes through more. That’s confusing because it’s not empowering and not allowing them to say, “Now I can go make these decisions.” I do know in PT school when I was there, it was frowned upon to be put into a physician. We couldn’t get a clinical rotation of physicians doing practice, but we still could in a hospital-owned outpatient practice. There’s not a big distinction in my mind on those. The internet is doing that job and people come out with zero business knowledge and understanding. They need a little bit more than to write a business plan for a $250,000 business with 5,000 square feet of space.
That’s getting the surface on that part. The aspect of identifying oneself as a doctor. A doctor of medicine is a physician. Psychologists are a doctor of psychology. DPT is a Doctor of Physical Therapy. DC is a Doctor of Chiropractic. We now have DNPs, which is Doctors of Nurse Practitioners. It’s interesting you say that because when I started my show a long time ago, I started out with, “This is Dr. Joe Tatta. Welcome to the Healing Pain Show.” I still start every single show like that. A number of people have asked me, “Why do you call yourself a doctor? Why do you start off like that?” I say, “First of all, I earned that degree, both in sweat, blood, and tears, as well as money. I’ll use that.”
There’s also a perception to the public as far as if you’re looking for a skilled practitioner who can help you with your physical function, who can help you with pain and other lifestyle factors, I’ve gone to the furthest place I can go with that degree. It does, in essence, help the public understand that there’s a certain amount of competency built into me as a practitioner. We haven’t given physical therapist permission to use that in school. We still identify the doctor as the physician and we are aside from that, or less than that, or below that, or is it something that people grow into as they start to practice?
It’s a little of all three, but I’ll rank them like this. Number one, we’ve given them permission and at the same time, there’s some professor or clinical instructor or someone of influence somewhere in people’s fear telling them, “You shouldn’t say that you’re a doctor. You’re not Dr. LeBauer. You’re Aaron LeBauer, the physical therapist.” I have a DPT degree. It means a Doctor of Physical Therapy degree. I’m not a real doctor, but I play one on TV. That attitude and mindset are being put onto some of these young physical therapists. Not being told they have to, but they’re getting that influence so that in that clinical practice setting, they’re not empowered to use the term doctor because someone else is upset at how it might make them feel or look.
Number two, there are places where people are getting jobs as physical therapists, where if they’re making critical decisions with their patients, they’re being reprimanded or told, “You’re not following the ‘script.’ Now you’re in trouble.” I had this happen with one of my residents here at his previous job. He was reprimanded for getting a patient better in five visits when the script was for eight. “That person’s met all their goals. Why do I need to see them three more times? To talk?” It’s a mindset and it’s okay. I can be Dr. LeBauer or you can be Dr. Tatta and neither of us has to be physicians to be called that. We’re experts. We’ve earned it.
I may have mentioned this when I spoke with you on your show, which everyone should go check out. When the DPT started, I had a therapist I employed at that time, I encourage them, “When you first meet a patient, when you go outside into the waiting room for the initial evaluation, say, ‘My name is Dr. Aaron LeBauer. I’m going to be your physical therapist. Come on back to the evaluation room. It’s a pleasure to see you and I look forward to helping you. Come on back.’ At the end of that session, if you decide, you want to say, ‘Each time you come in, call me Aaron. We’ll keep it relaxed.’” Patients like that, but it’s an opportunity to do both. It’s an opportunity to share what your knowledge is as well as an opportunity to then solidify that bond with someone.
It’s important. It’s a lot of professionals don’t know. On all my outfacing material like my website, business cards, Facebook page, it says Dr. Joe Tatta because that’s how people first see you. I’m wondering as we’ve scaled that hurdle, which is an important one, what are some of the other foundational skills that you find you’re helping people cultivate as they first enter into private practice or their own business?
The number one skill is transferring your ability to help someone heal with your ability to help them understand how you can help them heal. A lot of times we’re all great at healing people or helping people heal themselves like providing therapy, but that’s not enough. I can be a great healer. I can see if someone needs help, but that person needs to understand that they need help and that I can be the one to help them. When we get into private practice, it’s like, “I can help you.” One of the biggest mistakes that I made was trying to help people or fix them in the first visit.
What I need to do is get them on board with my treatment plan in the first visit. It’s almost like there’s no therapy. The therapy is them understanding that I understand them and that I am the one to help and they’re like, “I feel much better. Dr. LeBauer, I don’t know what you did, but I feel better already. You didn’t even touch me.” I’m like, “I know.” They understand I know, but if I lead with jargon and techniques, they’re like, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” They don’t understand that I know it’s what to do with them. They’re unsure and uncertain than I’m the one that can help them.
We had this conversation in my ACT Program where we’re discussing, how do you discuss acceptance and commitment therapy with a client? What is that? How does it help them? The truth is most people don’t understand what acceptance and commitment therapy is even some licensed mental health professionals who are trained in more traditional psychotherapy don’t understand what acceptance and commitment therapy is and explain it.
If you go to many professional’s websites like the technique, you’ll see things listed out. I’m an OCS, which is an Orthopedic Certified Specialist. I’m trained in McKenzie, in pain neuroscience education, ACT or cognitive behavioral therapy. Should we list those things on our website? Should we talk about that to patients during the first visit? Are there other things we should be talking about? What are those?
That’s the number one mistake. A lot of the people that I work with in my coaching programs make is what they show up on their websites is a business card or an online CV like, “I’ve done all these Con Ed courses.” You have. You’ve spent a lot of time learning it, spent quite a bit of money and time traveling, investing, and learning some advanced therapy, but patients don’t care. Occasionally, patients do care and they’re looking for a certain therapy and that’s still not the best thing to happen because they’ll end up price shopping you. They’ll look for the lowest price. What we should be doing is speaking the language that our patients speak on our websites and our marketing materials. Think about what’s in it for the patient because we are not your customer. I’m not my own customer. My patients don’t care about the techniques I have.
If I want to refer someone to someone I think is quality and I want to figure out like, “Are they a therapist that aligns with my values and techniques?” Maybe I want to know what courses they’ve been to so I can say, “I know this person has been to some similar courses to me. I can’t guarantee, I know they won’t be the same as me, but you should get some good care.” That might be important, but my website doesn’t have any of that. My bio says a little bit, but it’s the primary things that are on our websites and websites that work or websites that speak to patient’s wants, needs, and desires. People want to get better. They need to know that you can help them and then they desire to not for me to help them, they don’t want to see me.
They want to be better, faster, stronger, more confident so they can be a great role model for their kids or even get on the floor and play with them without fear of blowing their spine apart or whatever image is in their head. That’s what’s in it for the patients. That’s what our websites should do and that’s what our conversations need to be around is figuring out what is it that they want and concerned about? If we understand that, then we can help them because the ACT, MFR, EMR, DMR, DBT, HTS, all those things are the ways that I get people from point A to point B. They’re not the thing that people are buying.
It’s interesting as a physical therapist and other practitioners are reading this, everyone’s like, “People come to me because they want pain relief.” I’m like, “Most people with pain want some kind of pain relief on some level. What’s underneath that? Other than the physical pain, what other pain problems do they have? What are their pain points? How do we talk about that with people?”
It’s like, “What do people want?” They don’t just want their knee fixed or the knee pain to go away. What is the knee pain going away going to allow them to do? “It’s going to allow me to run and go to CrossFit.” “That’s not the goal. Going to CrossFit five days a week, why is it important to you?” “I feel strong. It makes me feel confident.” “Why is being strong and confident important to you?” “I want to be a good role model for my kids.” “Why is being a good role model to your kids is important to you?” “I grew up and didn’t have one. If I don’t get my knee fixed and can’t go, then I’m a crazy stress case and I feel like a bad parent.” “I can help you avoid that and I can help you do this other thing and we’ll get you to all physical therapy along the way.”
The values-based care that we lead within our session is the values-based marketing that we should include on our forward-facing material like websites and all pages that are in the ethers out there nowadays. How has the chronic pain epidemic and opioids changed the way private practice, physical therapists are positioning themselves and marketing themselves? Has it lit a fire under our butt a little bit to say, “This is a prime opportunity for us to take advantage of a big movement that almost every government and other types of organizations are on board with regards to conservative pain care?”
I hope it has. It’s lit a fire under me. I’ve realized I can’t do it on my own. I would love to share one distinction that we changed. When I started my practice, my promise on the website was, “Get become pain-free today.” One of the problems I found that is I attracted people that were difficult because they were associating and identifying with pain. They were having a hard time letting go of that part of their identity. There was another subset where within 1 to 2 visits, they feel better and they don’t need me anymore, although they still move poorly. I’m like, “I’m not done.” They’re like, “You promised pain-free. I got it. I’m good. Thanks, Dr. LeBauer.” Others that after 5 or 10 visits, they go, “I feel the same.” I’m like, “You can run a 5k now.” They are like, “I still hurt.”
That was the pain trap for me. Now, it’s less about pain and more about how can it be for me active without pain meds, injections, and surgery. That’s moving us forward and getting me into a mindset with patients. I feel like I can help them even more. That’s me and I feel like as physical therapists is a profession, we have been dropping the ball on this whole opioid crisis. I’ll turn it into NPR. There are no physical therapists being interviewed on NPR. There’s no mention of alternates to the pain meds.
We shouldn’t give them pain meds. It’s like, “What’s the thing that we should give them?” They were like, “They should be seen in physical therapy.” I know that and you and the readers know that, but that’s not part of this national conversation. There’s a huge opportunity there. If someone knows someone who can get me on NPR, I’d be happy to go on NPR, but I am not the one that’s most first in the science around pain and healing. I’m more of a business person, but I know that needs to happen. I wish we could be part of that conversation. There’s a huge opportunity out there even if there are five other physical therapists doing their own thing in your town because no one is getting physical therapy when they need it. Ten percent of the people are probably getting it.
I had this conversation on a Facebook chat with someone. It turned into a little bit of a heated debate because the question was, “Has the American Physical Therapy Association done everything it can do to help promote physical therapy as the alternative for opioid pain medication?” I said no. I had a little bit of, “Have you seen the campaigns out there? They did this podcast on this topic.” I’m like, “Yes, but what the American Physical Therapy Association is putting out is aimed at physical therapists.” They’re preaching to the choir which is fine.
Our profession needs to be educated about these topics and there’s a lot to discuss on these topics on a National Healthcare Regulation level. That’s beneficial. Have they done enough to get to the public? Do we have physical therapists in positions that if you recalled onto Oprah and she wants you to talk about conservative pain care and how a physical therapist can fill that need? Do we have people who are articulated enough to talk about that, not just the science behind it, but the transformation that we can provide patients with? I’m not sure we’re there yet as a profession.
I don’t think so. I think we have a few people. Either they’re hidden or polarizing. I believe that the APTA, when you said that first question, “Have they done enough?” I’m like, “They’ve done everything they know how to do. I don’t believe that as an organization, they’re allowing themselves to be open to new ideas or new ways of reaching the public and marketing.” There are new things and it takes a lot of momentum to move a big ship. They could certainly do a lot more, but I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt that seeing they’re limited by their knowledge of how to make this happen. I’m like, “I could make this happen. I don’t have the money and the resources behind me.” I could float some ideas, but you have to be willing to listen to new ideas. They’ve dropped the ball in plenty of places.
I also wonder along those lines. This is not 100% true but our professional association is mostly staffed and run by PhD trained physical therapists who are academics. We need an academic voice in the American Physical Therapy Association. We also need a business voice, clinician voice, and those other aspects. I’m not saying at the lower level, but at a higher level. When you walk up to the higher levels at the APTA, those are academics who’ve been in academic careers for decades. I would argue, they’re not in touch with certain aspects of our profession.
However, there are opportunities for them if they’re attuned to start to change some of that. My question and this is somehow turned into a discussion about the APTA and this is for all of us to reflect on because we are the PTA in essence as physical therapists. Why have we been not been talking about these topics before it became a national epidemic? I reflect on my own work, show, website, practice. Could I have done more to educate the public about some of the dangers of opioids and other pain interventions that are not necessarily health-promoting?
What’s in it for me? If I got a job somewhere, I want to get paid to clock out. If I have a successful business, why am I going to go spend 50 hours a week working at the top of the organization and paid what they’re getting paid? As a former academic, that’s an awesome job and exactly what I want to do. I look and go, “I got a million views on my clinic YouTube page and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I did it.” There are people out there that have a higher profile, more million views a year a week, who are PTs. It’s not even up to them. It’s up to all of us to put in the work and to share what we’re doing. When we fight amongst each other like, “My clinical way is better than yours. You shouldn’t say that and you shouldn’t say this,” we don’t get anywhere. It’s not serving anyone, but our own egos.
What does a physical therapist out of school or maybe you’ve been out a couple of years and thinking about leaving those traditional practice settings you spoke about. How can they start to do some research and investigate whether or not a cash-based alternative model is for them?
The number one question to ask is, “Do I want to put in the hard work for the big reward? Am I okay putting in the work I’m doing for the reward I’m getting?” Whatever specialty you are, if you go into business for yourself, there’s a lot of hard work, but there’s a huge reward and it’s not just money. It’s in satisfaction. I know every day why I get up to do what I do and because of the frustrations I’ve had in the past and like, “I’m doing it because of the guy who was told he needed a third ankle surgery when he never had anything wrong in the first place. I’m doing it because there are more meaning and time I want with my family.” It’s a combination. That would be number one.
Number two is to go to YouTube or Google or wherever and lookup cash-based physical therapy and there are few things that you have to do strategy-wise. Number one would be like, “Are you in this for the long haul? Do you want a quick change? Are you running away from a bad job? Are you wanting to run towards something amazing and you’ll put in the work to get there, even if it’s hard, frustrating and you feel like you’re failing along the way?”
Is starting cash-based physical therapy a side hustle? A business takes a certain amount of time and dedication. If you’re going to do it, you should prepare for a year and then take that step in.
It’s not the question of, “Will a cash practice work?” It used to be like, “Will it work? Let me start on the side hustle and see if I can get it working.” We know it works. I work with people that are six figures in their first year, scaled at multiple locations. It works if you do the business right. Do you want it to work for you? Why start a side hustle? Are you getting current requests for people to see you? You can see 4 to 9 people a week. You can make $60,000 to $100,000 extra per year and then you can easily move over. If you’ve got family, bills and things, you can’t just build culture. That would be a way to do it.
It’s going to take you longer to get there or you get started. If you’re dedicated and you put in the right steps, you can get started with 5 to 15 people in the first month or two per week and make plenty. Make your expenses because nine people a week, charging what we’re charging is a little over $100,000 gross per year. That’s not chump change. That’s a real income. That’s nine visits a week, not 43 a day. Time becomes something a little different. My other thing that someone needs to investigate is, “How much are you worth?” Worth is someone else is going to pay you. In running your own business, you’re worth the results and transformation you help your patients and clients get and those are two different numbers.
I love that part about the self-worth aspect of it. Even that, people start, “I’m going to charge $100,000 for an eval and $80 each session.” A year or two, they blow that up and it’s completely different. The model and pricing changes. I’m wondering who’s not right to enter into a cash-based practice.
This is in any business. If you don’t like uncertainty and you want to make the same amount every few weeks, you don’t want to go into business for yourself because it’ll drive you crazy. If you’re okay with a little uncertainty to do more, spend more time, and have more time for your family, getting into business is great. The distinction between cash and insurance, if you were going to say, “I want to own a PT clinic. Why would I do cash or insurance?” it’s not about the patients that live near you, how much they make, or what car they drive. It’s about do you want to be involved in a three-way relationship with insurance companies, your patients and you. Do you value having your patient also be the customer who’s the person paying and you value that relationship? That’s what I value. I don’t want anyone else, whether it’s physician referral or insurance company influencing my decision-making process with our patients. If you value that above everything else, it’s going to be worth the struggle to make that work.
Aaron, it’s been great talking to you about physical therapy, private practice, and cash-based practice. Tell everyone how they can learn more about you.
Thanks, Joe. It’s been awesome being here too. I love the questions and being able to share this with you. The best way to connect with me would be find me on Instagram @AaronLeBauer. My website is AaronLeBauer.com.
Thanks for joining us to discuss private practice, physical therapy, and pain care. Share this episode with your friends and family on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, wherever anyone is talking about private practice, physical therapy, and pain care. We will see you next week. Take care.
Thanks, Joe.
Important Links:
- Radical Relief: A Guide to Overcome Chronic Pain
- Amazon – Radical Relief: A Guide to Overcome Chronic Pain
- LeBauer Physical Therapy
- @AaronLeBauer – Instagram
- AaronLeBauer.com
- Facebook.com/aaronlebauer
About Aaron LeBauer, PT, DPT
Aaron LeBauer PT, DPT is the host of The CashPT Lunch Hour Podcast, Author of The CashPT Blueprint, founder of The CashPT Nation Facebook group, International Speaker and as a business coach & mentor has helped 1000’s of passionate physical therapists scale their time, income and impact without relying on insurance.
He owns LeBauer Physical Therapy in Greensboro, NC, a multi-therapist 100% cash-based physical therapy practice.
Aaron’s personal mission is to save 100 million people worldwide from unnecessary surgery by inspiring other healthcare providers to start their own businesses and learn how to market directly to their patients, not physicians.
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