When To Open Your Own Clinic | Hoang's Journey
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[00:00:00] hey there. My name is Hoang with Hand Therapy Secrets. Today I wanted to talk to you about some questions that I've been getting and I wanted to answer them here on my show and share a little bit about my backstory and how I got started in doing what I'm doing now as a certified hand therapist and a business owner.
[00:00:22] Both my clinic here at Hands-On Therapy Services and the owner of Hand Therapy Secrets, I know I picked some of the longest, hardest names, but when I picked my business names, it was all because I didn't want to use my name. My name is actually quite hard. But it is quite common. It's very common name. My whole name is Hoang , which is Vietnamese, and it means a yellow bird.
[00:00:46] It's actually a swallow, which is a yellow bird. And then my last name is Tran, which is like super common. It's the same as Smith, down here in Miami, like Diaz . It's a super common name. [00:01:00] And actually my. The Hoang part can be either male or female, but I think the Hoang ian part is what makes it female
[00:01:08] So anyway, so I wanted to come on today. Today's just gonna be us. Talking and I wanted to share with you some questions like I said. So one of the questions that I got was, when can I start a clinic? So I know that some of you guys might see me on Hands on Therapy Services, or you might have seen other therapists.
[00:01:31] Have their own clinic and you're just dreaming big. Kudos to you. I say dream big. If it's something you want, then work towards it, right? So when can you get started? I can't tell you when to get started, but I can tell you a little bit about how I got started. My background is I'm from Vietnam and my parents came over.
[00:01:51] After the Vietnam War. So I came over when I was four years old and my parents worked like [00:02:00] dogs. Like they just worked constantly to make sure that we had a roof over our heads and that we could go to school and all that good stuff. And so my parents opened their own business and I actually worked in it for a long time.
[00:02:13] I. with them during, I think it was it middle school that they got started and into high school. And when I was in college, I would come home and fill in sometimes for them. They have their own business and they've been in it for over 30 years. And when I went into occupational therapy school, I actually thought that I didn't want my own business because I saw my parents have their own business.
[00:02:40] I actually didn't want. to go into business for myself, but yet at the same time, . I would always kind of think in the back of my head, what would it be like if I started my own business. And I saw other therapists have their own business too, and I said, wow, [00:03:00] that'd be so cool to work for them, or that'd be so cool to, have my own business at the same time.
[00:03:07] So I hope you can see, you know what I'm doing here at my own clinic. And dream big for yourself too. So that's how I got started and I started working in the hospitals and I eventually got myself into an outpatient hand therapy job and eventually became a certified hand therapist. I actually worked for.
[00:03:29] Was it five years, five and a half years, and then set for the cht. Back then it was, you had to be a therapist for five years before you could even sit for the exam, and I was able to get all my hours based on a lot of the work that I did in acute care in the hospital and then in the outpatient setting as well.
[00:03:48] So there's various ways in which you can get your hours, but you don't have to rush into it if you. don't want to. Opportunities will come your way and you really have to make sure you're picking the right [00:04:00] opportunity so that you can build the kind of career you want. Sometimes I think people choose the wrong opportunities for them and they get stuck in thinking, oh, Therapy is not great, or hand therapy is not great.
[00:04:10] So I think there's a lot of ways in which you could move yourself around, especially with with our career in occupational therapy. So I started thinking like, yeah, you know what? I do want to have my own business. Not because I didn't enjoy working for others. I always say that it's good to move around when you're happy, right?
[00:04:32] It's good to make decisions when you're happy when you're not, because when you're mad, Or you are like, I hate this job, I hate these people. Sometimes you don't make the best decisions. So I think that was one of the things that I always did was I always wanted to make sure that I was content and what I was doing while I was making big decisions in my life.
[00:04:58] So even though. [00:05:00] Really happy in my job in, in acute care. There was just always something like that was like nagging I wanna do more, I wanna do something different because I just, I'm a person who has a ton of energy. Like I have a ton of energy. I'm always moving, I'm always going, I'm always doing something that's just me, right?
[00:05:19] That might not be you. But if it is you, then you know, kudos. Totally understand where I'm coming from, but I would always like interview at different places. Just make sure, am I in the right place where I need to be right now? And a lot of times it was, I'd be like, you know what? I am in a good place.
[00:05:37] I am in the right place. And so I would stay at the hospital where I was working, and then the opportunity really came and I was an outpatient. And then I started a family. My husband and I, we finally got married. We were together for a gazillion years, and then we finally got married, and then we were together for a while and I just kept pushing off the baby stuff.
[00:05:59] And you know [00:06:00] what you're, what you can do as a female, what you can do as a male may have different timelines. I don't agree that women can't do what men do and all that good stuff, but there's differences and there's no denying it. There just can't. When I started a family I wanted to make sure I was available for my kids and stuff like that.
[00:06:17] So when my son was about a year and a half, I really wanted to go out on my own. I was like planning it. My husband and I were talking about it. And then I got pregnant again and we decided it wasn't the right time. To do it. So when can you start your own clinic? Whenever the hell you want, but it's gotta fit within whatever it is that your life circumstances are.
[00:06:40] So my life circumstances and my family circumstances at that time wasn't right. And I'm very intentional about a lot of things I do, or at least I try to be for the most part. But I didn't want to have one thing or ruin another thing. Like I didn't wanna have this career where, M move faster, do [00:07:00] more have more effects at the risk of rooting like my marriage, right?
[00:07:04] So I have to go at a pace that's good for my family unit. And I had a therapist she had started her own business when she, when her kids were older, and she was like, she told me, she's Juan you have a toddler at home and then you have a baby at home. You might wanna think about, and she didn't tell me what to do.
[00:07:25] She's you might wanna think about what that means and what that's gonna do in terms of your family and what you might miss out on. And so that's where I really did think about what would I miss out on. If I started my business right then, right? I would've missed enjoying time with my kids and all that good stuff.
[00:07:48] And so I really did wait for a while. So I went and worked in a private practice for a little bit, and then I decided, okay now it's time [00:08:00] to go. Now it's time to go and trot on my own and, , when can you start? You can start whenever you want. I've worked, I've spoken and worked with other therapists who've started out very early in their career, actually was, friends with a physical therapist who started his business probably a year or two years out of school.
[00:08:22] And there's a certain amount of risk that you're taking a ton of risk. And what's happening is, if you wanna start out. , right? If you wanna start out very early out on your career, you have to go very. So I often talk about when you are a therapist, you need to develop your therapy skills, and then when you're a business owner, you need to develop your business skills.
[00:08:47] Like you have to have both. You can't just have therapy skills and think, oh, because you are a therapist and. Gonna come to you if you are a great therapist, that everyone's gonna come to you. [00:09:00] Quality doesn't determine whether people are gonna come to you and if they're going to pay you for your services, right?
[00:09:07] Or determines that our business skills. So you have to have two types of skills. And so therein lies your problem skills, right? When can you start your clinic, whenever you are willing to pour into yourself? Invest in yourself the skills that you need to run a successful business, a successful clinic, if you haven't seen it before, look.
[00:09:36] My video that talks about the one book that changed my life, right? And I say changed my life cuz it changed my business thinking. And ever since I made that video, I've had people come and ask me about it. And it's because, and I see this often, that you might be unhappy with your job and you just might be sick of the corporate run or you might [00:10:00] be tired of people telling you what to do, and you just wanna do stuff on your own.
[00:10:04] That doesn't necessarily mean. You're in business for yourself. That means that you created a job for yourself and you might get stuck. You might get stuck there too. So when it comes to when you can start your own type of business, it's really, do I have the clinical skills or whatever skills it is that you.
[00:10:22] Think that you need. So speaking as a certified hand therapist, you don't have to be a certified hand therapist to go into business, but it sure is powerful when you are. It sure is powerful when you are, and that's why I have people who are in my hand therapy mentorship program. and who are, because they want to become they want to become that certified hand therapist, or they are that certified hand therapist and then they don't want to develop even more skills.
[00:10:52] And it's not, I'm not just. Teaching shit that you can find on YouTube, I'm not in [00:11:00] my programs, I'm a very much an applied knowledge type of person, so I'm not teaching you like freaking wrist bones and whatever and calling it a day. Like we're taking the knowledge that you. Applying it to different scenarios we're applying.
[00:11:18] It becomes a critical thinking, problem solving type of situation where you're taking what you know, and that's your clinical skills. Believe it or not, you're taking your clinical is what you know. As an occupational therapist of how to do an evaluation, critically thinking through and becoming a problem solver.
[00:11:41] People will come to you and have them help, have you help them solve their problem, which is my hand hurts, my bone is burning, my, I can't move. I have pain. My scar is stuck. Things like that. So we are very much about that applied knowledge. . A huge component of it [00:12:00] is communication, too.
[00:12:02] How you communicate with your patients, determine. How they're gonna come back to you, how often they're gonna come back to you and how they're gonna be with you, while they're there. And how often they'll come back to you, time in again and again. And that's a big thing when it comes to having your own clinic.
[00:12:23] We as hand therapists, and this is a golden gem here, , this is a golden gem here, is that we have as a hand, Certified hand therapy community think that, oh, they come in with one type of injury and then you're just like done with them. But you have to, if you are gonna have your own clinic and you think about your own business, how do you keep that person coming back to you?
[00:12:50] That's how you know you stay in business. They, They keep coming back to you for different types of problems. They're gonna refer more people to you. [00:13:00] Over a period of time. So it's not just a right now type of thing. It's a, how do you make this person, a part of your business life, your, your life in general, right?
[00:13:12] So when you are a brand new grad, like I was telling you about a friend of mine, he poured thousands of dollars into him because he was willing to invest and invest very fast. He's also a risk taker, he gambled on himself and you know what he's winning because. It's a very strategic type of gamble.
[00:13:33] It's not, you're just not, you're not just going to the card table and just, guessing, you're at the card table and you're playing cards and you count on some cards. You're gonna probably do. About it than someone else, right? So you invest in yourself. He is able to invest in himself and just develop his skills really fast.
[00:13:52] He poured into himself business skills, so clinical skills are your problem. Solving your hands-on [00:14:00] technique, oh my gosh, hands-on is huge. Like I know telehealth is becoming big. People are moving towards it, and I'm a proponent of that to a certain extent, but people crave touch, right? They want you to touch them and it's in how you're touching them and how you're manipulating them.
[00:14:20] To actually get them the results that they came to you for. And then you pour into yourself the business skills. So on the business skills side, it's all about communication, which is pretty much marketing and selling. So as healthcare providers, as occupational therapists, like you need to quote unquote be very good at selling your.
[00:14:42] Selling what you do and sometimes saying, I'm an occupational therapist, or selling, I'm a physical therapist, isn. Enough because there's just too much vagueness with it. With, even within physical therapy and occupational [00:15:00] therapy and even within hand therapy, there's a lot of vagueness. For example, I work with hands, right?
[00:15:09] I work with post-surgical cases, but sometimes those people who are post-surgical cases don't really understand that. Work with non-surgical cases too. So I have to constantly tell them like, Hey, these are the problems that I could solve for you. For example, another thing as a certified hand therapist, like how many of us do the, that hap that happen to us, that we do more than just hand?
[00:15:32] I work on the elbow, I work on the shoulder, I work on the spine. And yeah, somehow they think we only do hands. So from a business standpoint, you've got to develop skills that will allow you to communicate in a way that people want to work with. , right? And want to keep coming back to work with you over and over again so you can open [00:16:00] your, you can dream big, like dude I'm a big fan of just dream big and then take those small steps towards it.
[00:16:08] So I dream big. I dream big for my clinic. I dream big for hand therapy secrets. And developing a community of people who want to invest in themselves, who grow their career, develop their. Grow their confidence and really do the things that they want to do with their career. Now, whether it be, a top dog, top notch of the company that you work with and then slowly but surely move into whatever type of position you like to move in within that corporate world.
[00:16:44] Or if you want to develop your own. Developing your own business it's a risk that you can take. I've taken that risk and I've hired people within my business to help me to for the business to be successful, right [00:17:00] from the clinic side and from the program side. But it is a risk, and it's a risk I'm willing to take, and it's a.
[00:17:08] It's a platform I'm willing to build because I think it's needed and I think that there's a lot of value in, in helping other therapists develop their skills so that they can feel and believe. , right? So that they could feel and believe that anything in their career is possible. We went to school for a very long time.
[00:17:33] Some of us have doctorate's degrees and stuff like that, and I think it's very possible for you to have the career that you want to have, but just because you went to school for it doesn't mean that your education stops there. Actually, it becomes tenfold once you are. Really does, it becomes tenfold when you're out.
[00:17:56] I often think about how I thought about education [00:18:00] after I started, after I came outta school, because I had a lot of people who told me, oh, like just take classes for continuing education credits. So we often think, oh, let's just take classes for educational, like for the CEUs, right? So when I came outta school, that was a lot of the message that I heard, which, oh, you just need 24 or.
[00:18:20] Six eu. And so you're only really just taking courses just enough to get by if you wanna get ahead of the game. And you wanna really skyrocket or propel your career in the way you want it. So if you have dream. If you have dreams of opening a clinic, then you might have to invest in yourself a lot more now.
[00:18:43] A lot more now, so that you can see the fruits of your labor later. But there has to be a plan and that's why I've created, the programs that I've created, the mentorship program, the hand therapy mentorship program. It's really because it's not just. [00:19:00] course. It's not just one body part, but it's like everything that you could potentially need to make yourself one of the best therapists out there.
[00:19:10] The more patients you can help, the more skills that you could build, right? And the potential that you could have if you wanted to open your own clinic such as, you know what I've done here and I had, I had that opportunity back then, or someone who, if I found that message earlier, I would have. I already took more courses than I needed to for CEUs, but I never thought beyond CEUs.
[00:19:34] It was just never a thing that I heard of much before. And that's what I'm doing with the hand therapy mentorship program cuz it's not CEU based. I don't want you to think of only that as a way of building your skills, cuz you would limit yourself if you did. , right? So I just wanna open that box just make it bigger instead of just like [00:20:00] this little box, like EU box.
[00:20:01] I just wanna make it bigger for you. Developing orthosis 1 0 1 was like a huge thing for me because as a business owner, I need therapists that know how to make splints. It never ceases to amaze me that. People who are in hand therapy who don't splint and we have such a need for it. Some people say it doesn't make money, it's cuz you're not fucking billing that shit correctly.
[00:20:28] Sorry, . But there's ways that you is financially profitable for you as a business to bill for orthosis. And if you only think of that one piece, you are missing out. I'm telling you, you're missing out because when you can help that person fully fully, they're gonna stay with you. And think about how many visits that is for that patient that comes to you time and time again.
[00:20:55] People who don't know how to make small splints, medium sized splints, dynamic [00:21:00] splits, size, progressive. You can lose those patients to someone else who can make them worse than that, you're not fully helping them achieve what they could. People come to you because they wanna know what is possible for you to help them.
[00:21:17] A patient in mine devastating career. He's been a laborer. I actually spoke to him yesterday about his his injury and how it's affecting his life. Yeah. I would think about, oh, how they can move their range, range of motion, like how much range of motion do you have? How much pounds of grip strength.
[00:21:34] Oh fuck. put that all together. The man can't lift anymore, and his job was a laborist type of job. Now he can't lift with his arms, he can't do the heavy work that he needed to do. So what can he do? So he is on the computer. His goal was to , he was going back to school to become a electrical engineering person.
[00:21:56] But I told him yesterday and he's I don't [00:22:00] know if I could do that because it required heavy work and I'm not able to do it anymore. Like the kind of injury he has he like, it's not possible to go back to that. But he still can be very functional in his life, right? So I said, men like you are gonna be an engineer.
[00:22:18] You know how hard that is in math and science to go to school for that's a lot, you can change that mindset like your brain, like it's still. You still have it in you to do something else. Let's think about your options, about what you can do, with your arms, with your potential, right?
[00:22:35] Don't we do that as occupational therapists, help people to be more independent, to be very functional, active people in their lives and their community and stuff like that. How can he be an active participant in his life? A person in the c. A productive person in the community within his family, you can use his brain like, what else can we do with your arms?
[00:22:58] You can type, like they can't take [00:23:00] your brain away from you. , right? And so that's, and that's where we can do with our skills, with our clinical skills. And had I not been able to communicate with him in a way that motivated him, if I was not able to make the custom splint custom orthosis that he needed he would've he kinda left here and thought, my life is over.
[00:23:25] It's I'm gonna be a burden. Like I'm, I'm not gonna amount much, like my arm's not gonna move. I'm never gonna use my hand like the way I used it before, . So we have the power, we have a, we have the power to really affect a lot of people. And when you improve those skills, your clinical skills and you improve your if you wanna have your own clinic, like I have my own clinic, be able to build a business around being able to help people and you invest in yourself and over time.
[00:23:56] and people will invest in you back [00:24:00] to give them what they're looking for. So that's my story. , in a roundabout way, I hope I answered the question. I'm talking for a little while. It's what happens when I talk. By myself. I started going into these tangents, , but I hope within this whole story that there are some tidbits in there that you can help to inspire you, to motivate you to think about what's possible for you to develop your skills and to one day.
[00:24:31] Own your own business if that is what you want to be able to do. All right. My name is Wong here at Hand Therapy Secrets and I'm gonna include the links below. If you're interested in the Hand Therapy Mentorship program definitely click on that link so you can learn more about it. And when you get those emails, there's a link where if you're not really sure which programs are right for you, book a strategy.
[00:24:54] Me, I'm a big fan of making sure that you get what you need, [00:25:00] right? That I'm not just putting out programs that you don't benefit from. And the whole point of it is that you benefit from them, that they're the right ones for you right now. And if you are ready to sit for the certified hand, Exam and you need some help, then that is the hand exam prep program, right?
[00:25:23] We're gonna get started with that in a few weeks, I believe. We're gonna get started with the following year, cuz we always gotta plan ahead. Always gotta plan ahead, right? So we're currently. Thick of preparing for the November exam, and I really happy with everyone that's in there right now that they're making the strides, they're connecting in our private Facebook group.
[00:25:51] They're getting together and they're studying together as they need. You have to know. Study. [00:26:00] Don't get me started. , don't get me started. That's a whole nother topic. But yeah, the links I'm gonna provide you below and make sure that you grab the information that you need. Orthosis 1 0 1. We'll be down there as well.
[00:26:13] If you're just starting out, you need to develop your skills in creating custom fitted orthosis. Orthosis 1 0 1 is a great program to get you started making a risk support splints and making thumb spiker. And from those two pattern, I tell you, I'm not lying, that you can create so many. Custom fitter orthosis from that, from the wrist support.
[00:26:39] The way I do it, you can turn it into so many other things. That pattern that I do, it's very similar to the radial nerve palsy splint that I make only on the dorsal side instead of the OR side. And then of course there's some extra components, but that's beside the points. , you [00:27:00] develop. Skills and you will build upon your skills, right?
[00:27:04] You get started with one set of skills and you will build upon those skills, get your clinical skills to build upon that. You're looking to start your own business, start developing some business skills, and then you build upon that and then you can have all the success in the world, and I cannot. To hear more of it from you when you do.
[00:27:26] Thanks for joining me here on the won show and I will talk to you soon.
[00:27:30] Hey, thanks for listening to Hoang's world podcast. If you are brand new to the hand therapy world, head over to my website, www . Hand therapy secrets.com, where you can get started with some of our free guides and paid programs for both OTs and PTs diving into the world of hand therapy. Or if you've been listening for a while watching on our YouTube channel and you think you could benefit from developing and moving your career further along in hand therapy, reach out to me and my team at info @ Hand [00:28:00] therapy.secrets.com and tell us exactly what you're looking for, By the way, if you know someone who could benefit from today's show, please share.
[00:28:07] Thanks. See you on the next episode.
