Gayle
Okay.We are going to keep this pretty short and sweet. First off, just kind of tell me about you and your business and how you got into it.

Robert Rawlings
Yeah. We are Crafted Physical Therapy. We’ve been operating for about three and a half years now. It’s my wife, Emily, and I, and we’ve been practicing for over 15 years. We worked for a couple different companies and just decided that we wanted to do our own thing. We wanted to do something different, we’ve experienced both good care and care that wasn’t so great.

We were both caught up in the corporate PT world for a while and just wanted to get back to a more personal approach to our work. Just treating patients and making an impact where we live. When we started out, it was one therapist, one office manager, and we just wanted to grow.

GR
Tell me more about the difference between owning your own practice versus a corporate practice. What are the things you’ve enjoyed or you liked, or even didn’t like?

RR
I think the top thing for me is autonomy. You have the freedom of creating your own brand. Marketing to who you want to. Setting the hours you want. Creating your own environment and culture, that is probably number one for me vs. the corporate structure. There were a lot of meetings, a lot of emails, a lot of things that ate up time and you got away from who you are. Now we can focus on the patients and grow at a pace that makes sense for us.

GR
Yeah, from one entrepreneur to another, you kind of get to choose your own adventure and create the life that you want to.

Shifting gears…We started working together about a year ago. At that time you were doing really well with doctor referred patients, but you wanted to grow in patient requested, direct patient to therapy clinic engagements.

RR
Right.

GR
How has that changed from when we started to now, and how do you feel that digital marketing has helped your business?

RR
Yeah. I would say going back to it, probably 80% – 85% of our patients come from physicians or are considered physician driven. The physician tells the patient that you need to go to physical therapy. Here’s a referral.

What we wanted to do is create that brand. Let people know what we have to offer. This is why you choose Crafted. We know who we are, but we don’t know how other people see us. We wanted to increase our awareness with people who don’t know about physical therapy or have had different experiences about physical therapy or who don’t have a physician referral?

Even if they know enough to come in and see a physical therapist without a physician referral, how do they find us? I think that’s where Atomic helped take that to the next level. The majority of our patients are going to come in with a physician referral. That’s the market. That’s probably how it’s always going to be. For us it was important to extend that base of people who didn’t know we were out there.

Now they find our website, or find our different social channels and that seems to help get them more involved. I think that helped ultimately grow our business. We were able to grow by 40%, which is huge for us. We went from three clinicians to six clinicians. We’re knocking down a wall, we’re doubling in space. I mean, it’s great.

GR
Awesome! Now, was that 40% growth total, or just growth for non-physician referral patients?

RR
That’s total. Non-physician patients probably grew by 200% – 300%.

GR
I like to hear that. We could just end it there, but is there anything else you can think of?

RR
Yeah. Besides just helping establish our brand, and get our name out there. One of the biggest things I like about Atomic is that you guys just listened to what we needed. To what we thought was important. Then you added your own creativity. You helped us to understand more about SEO and content marketing. Why all that was important, and then ultimately made us independent where we can take it and run with it. I mean, that was huge for us.

GR
Perfect. That makes me happy!