As a physical therapy business owner, setting annual goals is crucial for growing your practice, improving your revenue, and managing your time effectively. Now that we’re stepping into 2025, it’s important to not just focus on revenue growth but to create a well-rounded plan that integrates your personal goals, business milestones, and the practical steps needed to accomplish both. This is essential for ensuring that your practice thrives without overwhelming you in the process.
In this post, we’ll break down 12-month planning strategies that can help your physical therapy practice stay on track for success while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
Common Mistakes When Setting Annual Goals
Setting clear, achievable annual goals is one of the most challenging aspects of business growth. Many practice owners focus too narrowly on business goals like increasing revenue without considering how those goals align with their personal lives.
The biggest mistake many business owners make is tying their identity too closely to their practice. This is a surefire way to experience burnout. For example, if your only goal is to increase your revenue by a small margin, you may inadvertently end up working longer hours and sacrificing your personal time. To prevent this, it’s essential to approach goal setting holistically.
The Importance of Personal and Business Goal Alignment
A great approach to annual goal setting involves using a vision-driven framework, like the Vision Traction Organizer (VTO) from the book Traction. This framework helps break down long-term visions (10-year goals) into 3-year and 1-year milestones. Once you’re clear on your personal life goals, you can reverse engineer them into your business strategies.
For example, if you plan on taking a trip to Italy in two years, you’ll need to ensure your business can run without you being hands-on, which means you must hire employees and build a solid team. This approach ensures that your business goals are in harmony with your personal life, preventing you from overworking and maintaining a balance.
Building the Business to Support Your Desired Lifestyle
It’s critical that your business serves as a vehicle for the lifestyle you want to achieve. Whether it’s working fewer hours, spending more time with family, or enjoying vacations without the stress of running your practice, you need to prioritize your time freedom when setting your goals.
Many practice owners focus solely on achieving business milestones like hitting revenue targets. However, the key to avoiding burnout is recognizing that your business should allow you to live the life you envision. Once your goals are aligned, the path to success becomes clearer, and the process of achieving these goals becomes easier and more enjoyable.
Strategic Planning: Reverse Engineering Your Goals
Reverse engineering your goals involves starting with the life you want to live and working backward. Once you understand the lifestyle you want, think about how much income you need and how your business can generate that income. This will help you set more specific, actionable goals for your physical therapy practice.
For example, if you need to make $200K a year to live the life you want, you can reverse engineer that by calculating how many patients you need, how much you should charge per session, and how you can market your practice effectively. This process also highlights the importance of hiring the right team to help you scale your practice without sacrificing your personal time.
Identifying Your Practice's Constraints
Every physical therapy practice has constraints—areas that limit its growth. These can range from lead acquisition to fulfillment and retention. To effectively set your 12-month plan, you need to identify which area is holding you back and focus your efforts on solving that constraint first.
For example, if your business is generating plenty of leads but you’re struggling with converting them into appointments, your constraint might be lead nurturing. Alternatively, if you have a full waitlist but don’t have enough staff to serve all of your patients, the constraint could be hiring.
The Five Key Mechanisms for Scaling Your Practice
To successfully grow your physical therapy practice in 2025, it’s important to focus on these five key mechanisms:
- Lead Acquisition
- Lead Nurturing
- Conversions
- Fulfillment
- Retention
By tracking your numbers regularly, you’ll be able to identify which area needs the most attention. If your lead-to-booking rate is low, focus on lead nurturing strategies. If you have a backlog of leads but can’t serve them quickly enough, focus on hiring more staff.
How to Tackle Your Constraints
Once you’ve identified your biggest constraint, break it down into actionable steps. For example, if your constraint is lead nurturing, you may want to refine your content strategy or enhance follow-up processes to increase your booking rate. If your constraint is hiring, you might need to invest in recruitment and build a structured process for finding qualified candidates.
Focusing on one business constraint at a time is crucial for maintaining focus and momentum. Trying to solve multiple issues at once can dilute your efforts and slow down progress.
Final Thoughts on Setting Annual Goals for Your Physical Therapy Practice
When it comes to annual goal setting, it’s important to think big and work backward. Set personal goals first, then reverse engineer them to create business goals that will support your desired lifestyle. By focusing on your constraints and eliminating distractions, you can structure your practice to grow effectively without overwhelming yourself.
With a clear vision and a strategic plan, you’ll be able to scale your physical therapy practice and enjoy more time freedom, while helping more patients than ever before.
Watch and Listen to the Full Video
For a deeper dive into a cash physical therapists’ journeys, make sure to listen to the full video. Click here to listen to the video: Master Annual Planning: Exclusive Strategies to Triumph Over Your Yearly Goals
About Author:
Although the company eventually failed, it provided Jordan with invaluable learning experiences. He became passionate about designing world-class patient experiences and building efficient marketing & sales funnels for cash physical therapists. Utilizing this expertise, Jordan became the CMO of a well-known physical therapy media company, and consulted for and built marketing funnels for some of the top physical therapy business coaches.
Eventually growing tired of the typical agency and consulting grind, Jordan, alongside Max Zirbel, founded Clinical Marketer. They infused it with the hands-on support and mentorship that they benefited from in their initial venture. The company was a success from the start, aiding clinics in scaling to 6 and 7 figures in revenue. During its first launch, Jordan and his team met Dr. Ben Bagge, whom they later partnered with after helping him grow his business from $200K/year to over $1M/year in three years.
