Emerging Insights From PPS 2023
Paul reports live from PPS 2023 in Austin with his team's takeaways: renewed optimism, intentional recruiting and retention, and how little most owners know about the M&A process and their financials.
Full transcript
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.
Hey, good afternoon. This is Paul Martin and I am talking to you live from the 2023 private practice section conference in Austin, Texas. First, any of you that could not make it here to the conference, what a beautiful city. What a great venue and what a great job PPS once again has done putting this on. Now, I asked our entire team and we were all here, but I asked them to come back to me with what were some of the biggest takeaways that you got from conversations that you had with private practice physical therapy business owners?
What were those takeaways? I think first and foremost, one of the biggest takeaways, there is an air of optimism. It's in the air. It's in the air. And it's going back to that kicking and screaming in the little soccer play saying there's electricity in the air. I don't know. May just be me, but I really got a feeling like we could catch fire and have a great season. Huh. Now, who's with me? Woo! Electric in the air. Yeah. Thank you for that show of enthusiasm. You can feel that there's this air of optimism.
We got the big announcement on Thursday that interest rates will not be hyped. We got the announcement that they may be dropped in 2024. A lot of acquirers here, a lot of new acquirers here, and a lot of good solid performance on the other side from companies here. A lot of companies are saying that they are getting much better staffed. I can't say that they're all saying they're fully staffed, but companies are saying that they are better staffed. So again, just an air of optimism, and I think that's really positive.
And again, we see this as almost New Year's Eve for the physical therapy industry, which is the PPS conference. You know, one of the things that I took away from many of the meetings that I had, companies that are literally diving into strategies of recruiting are doing a much better job at getting staff and retaining staff than companies that are not. For example, student programs are huge. Sending your staff out to schools, another great tactic. Having a an internal op program where you're going to bonus your therapist for bringing other therapists into the fold.
We're hearing a lot of success with that. So, recruiting and retention is not something that will just happen. You have to be intentional about it. And those companies that are intentional about it, that's why we have that air of optimism because they're getting staff. You know, one of the big takeaways now look these are our analysts who are in physical therapy, you know, numbers, financials all day long, every single day. One of the things that their takeaways are is in talking to business owners about the merger and acquisition process, how little most business owners know about that process.
Now, that may sound koi, but I wouldn't expect that as a physical therapy private practice, whether you're a one clinic company or a 20 clinic company, that you would know a lot about a physical therapy professional sale process. It's not something you ever went to school for. It's not something that you can learn on the internet. It's something that really has to be done by somebody who does it every day. So again, you know, if you don't have a lot of knowledge about that process, you know, let's talk, let's have a conversation, let us do an assessment to really give you that knowledge so that you can make a knowledgeable decision about that someday transition.
I think the other thing is with the financial statements, you know, one thing that in talking to business owners about their financial statements, there was kind of an air of not optimism, but an air of we don't really check our financial information all that often. And again, another area where our team can really be of help and value to you. Now, I'm doing this video before my talk, which is this afternoon, where we're going to roll out our Delphi analysis, talking to all of the large acquire CEOs in this country.
We have round one. We're going to roll it out this afternoon. So excited to do that. And stand by because we'll be doing more videos rolling out those results of where is the trajectory of the rehab M&A market going and what are the acquirers saying about that. As you can hear from the background, this has been a very vibrant conference. It's a vibrant exhibit hall and I wish you were all here. So if you have any questions about the content of what we talked about today, click below and let's talk. Thank you. Have a great day.
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