By Rick Lau, Healthcare Entrepreneur
Whether Your 1st, 2nd, or 8th Location, It Better Meet These 8 Criteria
Opening your first (or second) physiotherapy clinic is a milestone event. You feel a mixture of tense excitement as you attend to all the details of your new location. Floor layout, waiting room furniture, equipment, supplies, carpet, paint – it’s easy to consume yourself with all these important components.
Unfortunately, oftentimes it’s a bit too easy, and you jump the gun on the most important detail of all:
Where to locate your new clinic.
If you’re looking for a blueprint for how to start up a physiotherapy clinic, step 1 is to find the perfect location that’s within your budget.
None of those other details matter if you get the location wrong. After all, if no one finds your clinic, you won’t be open very long. That means no one will see that pretty carpet that matches the furniture just perfectly.
‘Jumping the gun’ is an apt analogy for brushing aside the importance of location. In a race, if you jump the gun, you have to restart the race. That means going back to the starting line, re-setting your stance, and returning your mind to focus on the task at hand. Do it too many times, and they disqualify you.
Get the wrong location, and your new physiotherapy clinic may be ‘disqualified’ too.
However much attention you plan to devote to all the other components involved in starting a clinic, spend even more on finding the perfect location.
Don’t Rely on Getting Lucky with the Location
One clinic owner I’ve been mentoring is working on opening her second physiotherapy clinic.
But her first clinic kind of happened by accident, and she put very little thought into the location at the time. It wasn’t a good spot for several reasons, and she wouldn’t have made it if things outside her control hadn’t worked out in her favour.
In other words, she got lucky.
As you’re about to see, there are eight criteria you need to look for when starting up a new physiotherapy clinic. Ideally, you want all eight of these. This clinic owner ended up with five out of eight, without really trying. Lucky for her, she was able to make it work, and now she’s planning the second clinic the right way and expects it to thrive and grow much quicker than the first one.
Especially in today’s competitive business climate, you simply can’t afford to leave your location up to chance. It could very well cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to start up a physiotherapy clinic. You need to make sure your location has all eight of the critical ingredients that will set you up for big growth.
The good news: You can identify the optimal location for your clinic within about 30 days using the following eight criteria. So let’s get to it!
8 Criteria for a Physiotherapy Clinic Location
Note: You can also watch a video covering these same 8 points. If you prefer to watch instead of read, watch the video here.
1) Local Competition
I love using ratios to help me decide whether there are too many clinics in a given community. My recommended ratio of residents to clinics used to be 10,000 to 1 a few years ago. With the increased competition in recent years, that ratio is now more like 7000 residents for 1 clinic.
The way to make that ratio work is to pair your new clinic with effective marketing, as well as other features that can make your clinic stand out and become an easy attraction for patients. But it begins with a location. So don’t put your clinic too close to another one. That just adds an additional hurdle in your race to profitability.
Another approach is to focus your clinic on a particular niche (paediatrics, running, pelvic health, multi displinary).
2) Household Income
You don’t necessarily need to focus on high income areas, though that should certainly be a consideration. The bigger question is, who is your ideal customer?
If you want to serve blue collar workers, who endure their share of injuries, aches, and pains, you’d want to locate your clinic in areas dominated by people in that income class.
If you want to serve MBAs and techies who sit in chairs all day, locate your clinic in neighbourhoods where they live.
Household income follows your ideal customer and where they tend to live.
3) Expanding Communities
Pay attention to population trends and demographic shifts. Areas that are expanding with lots of new and young families are prime locations for new physiotherapy clinics. Not only will you be serving the parents, but the kids as they grow up, play sports, and start their own families.
Your customer base will be continually growing over time.
But don’t write off urban and developed areas either. Some cities are going to great lengths to create more housing within their existing boundaries. “Expanding” doesn’t have to mean geographically expanding. It’s more about population and the types of people moving in.
4) Nearby Medical Clinics
This one has great potential because of two reasons: Referral possibilities and walk-in traffic.
If you can place your clinic in the same building or same lot as other medical clinics not in competition with yours, you can forge relationships with those doctors and start winning referral traffic from their recommendations.
Likewise, when a patient goes to their clinic and sees yours next door, they’ll make a mental note. And when they have a need for physiotherapy, they’ll come to you, simply by virtue of having seen your clinic while they were on a ‘medical errand’ to another doctor. Their attention was fixated on their health when they saw your sign, so your presence will be amplified in their mind.
Just make sure that your location is visible when people walk in to the other doctors’ offices, not hidden around the back of the building.
5) Look for Certain Neighbouring Businesses
Some businesses are more likely than others to serve as indicators of the clientele in that area. I personally like areas that have a Starbucks, grocery story and a liquor store nearby. Those are places large numbers of people come to frequently to meet ongoing needs. You will get high visibility if your clinic can grab a nearby location.
6) Busy Roads and Intersections
There’s foot traffic, car traffic, and public transit traffic. You should consider all of these when starting up your physiotherapy clinic.
If people see your clinic with their regular routine, they’ll be more likely to come to you when they need treatment.
A heavily built-up urban center, for instance, won’t get as much car traffic for your clinic because there’s nowhere to park (see #7). But with super-high volumes of foot traffic, it can still provide a profitable location. Residents in those areas don’t want to drive unless they have to. Your clinic gives them another way to avoid driving.
7) Free Parking
You may not be able to maximize all eight of these criteria for every new location. But if there’s one item on this list that may be a deal-breaker if you can’t get it, it’s this one.
People hate paying for parking. Even if it’s just a dollar or two. And especially for something like a physiotherapy clinic where they will have to return several times per week to work through their treatment plan. That means paying for parking at the same spot multiple times per week.
We’ve actually seen clinics get their free parking yanked out from under them when the landlord decides to turn it into a pay lot. Even in cases where the clinic validated the parking or supplied tokens, business still went down over 30%.
People just don’t like the hassle or the expense.
If your landlord catches the paid parking bug, you would be well-advised to try to work it out so you can just pay for it as part of your rent and keep it ‘free’ for your patients. Make up the cost by just raising your prices slightly.
And it’s not just free parking. You need enough parking to accommodate your staff and your patients. If your lot has 20 spots, but your clinic employs 12 people, that doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility for patients to find easy parking.
8) Big Signage
Signage is your passive marketing plan. It just sits there. People see it. They remember you and come in when they need treatment. If you combine great signage with a location at a busy intersection or high-traffic area, we have found this can lead to 2-3 new referrals every week.
So you want a location that offers some flexibility in how you can deploy your signage.
A History of Locations Great and Terrible
I learned the importance of location in how to start up a physiotherapy clinic early on and throughout my career. Often, I had to learn it the hard way.
I’ve started clinics in rural areas and developed areas. I’ve started niche practices. At our peak, we had 1400 employees and a growing network of over 230 clinics. But it all began with just one, which I then grew to five, and it took off from there.
Eventually, I was able to sell these at ten times the value they cost me to start.
I say all this because when it comes to clinic location, I’ve seen it all.
I watched some clinics take off for no other reason than the competitive advantage inherent in their location. They just start making money right out of the gate. Others never took off no matter what we tried.
Overcoming a bad location is a really tough battle to fight, and it’s not fun. And whereas I had to learn the hard way about the importance of these eight critical factors, you can just take what I learned and use it to select your prime location for your next physiotherapy clinic.
FREE WEBINAR: How to Design The Perfect Floor Plan (click here)
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This may be the most practical webinar you’ll ever see, as you can apply what you learn immediately, especially if you’re thinking about starting a new clinic.
So if you’re looking to open a 2nd or 3rd location. Or maybe you feel you can run a clinic a lot better than your boss but don’t want to make all the mistakes others have made starting clinics.
CLICK HERE to watch the free clinic owner webinar
ABOUT RICK LAU
Has built three 10 million dollar healthcare businesses over the past 15 years including a network of 127 clinics with over 1400 employees. He is one of the most sought-after mentors for clinic owners in Canada and USA where he helps owners double, triple, and even quadruple their profits by optimizing their clinic operations using his proven systems and leadership strategies.
