US Physical Therapy at East Coast IDEAS: Strategic Growth and Challenges

On Wednesday, 11 June 2025, US Physical Therapy (NYSE:USPH) presented at The 15th Annual East Coast IDEAS Conference, where CFO Carrie Hendrickson outlined the company’s robust growth trajectory. The discussion highlighted strategic initiatives and market dynamics that support both organic and acquisition-driven expansion. While the company is optimistic about future prospects, challenges such as Medicare rate changes were also addressed.

Key Takeaways

• US Physical Therapy reported approximately $700 million in revenue and $85 million in adjusted EBITDA.
• The company operates 773 clinics across 44 states, with a focus on physical therapy and industrial injury prevention.
• Strategic acquisitions are central, with plans to acquire 40 or more clinics annually.
• Medicare rate changes pose challenges, but strategies to mitigate impacts include renegotiating commercial rates.
• The company is enhancing recruitment and retention efforts to meet growing demand.

Financial Results

US Physical Therapy showcased strong financial performance with:

• Total revenue of approximately $700 million
• Adjusted EBITDA of $85 million
• Year-over-year revenue growth of 18%
• An annual dividend of $1.80, distributed quarterly at 45 cents per share
• Workers’ compensation rates exceeding $150 per visit, compared to commercial and Medicare rates of $103-$104 and $93-$94, respectively

Operational Updates

The company is actively expanding its footprint:

• Operating 773 clinics, with 103 new clinics added between April 2024 and March 2025
• Aiming for a de novo clinic breakeven time of 6 to 9 months and ROI within 18 to 24 months
• 85% of revenue is derived from physical therapy services, with the remaining 15% from industrial injury prevention

Future Outlook

US Physical Therapy is optimistic about future growth:

• Focus on de novo clinic openings and strategic acquisitions
• Continued growth in the industrial injury prevention segment, projecting $120 to $125 million in revenue
• Anticipated Medicare rate increase of 2.2% in 2026, contingent on legislative approval
• Enhanced recruiting efforts to address staffing needs due to demographic shifts

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, several key points were discussed:

• The aging population is expected to increase demand for physical therapy
• Efforts to attract traveling physical therapists through flexible work arrangements
• Exploring potential collaborations with remote-first physical therapy providers to enhance service offerings

In conclusion, US Physical Therapy’s presentation at the conference provided a comprehensive overview of its strategic initiatives and financial performance. For a deeper understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - The 15th Annual East Coast IDEAS Conference:

Joe Noyans, Three Part Advisors, Three Part Advisors: Okay. We’re gonna go ahead and get started with the next presentation. off, thank you everyone for being here today. My name is Joe Noyans.

I’m with Three Part Advisors. Up next, we have one of our investor relations clients, US Physical Therapy. US Physical Therapy is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol USPH. They’re operating in 44 states across The US with nearly 800 locations. Also, they’re a leader in in PT, and they’re also a leader in industrial injury prevention where they’re on-site at over 600 client locations.

Excuse me. Presenting on behalf of the company today is the company’s CFO, Carrie Hendrickson. Kerry? Thank

Carrie Hendrickson, CFO, US Physical Therapy: you Joe and I will reiterate Joe’s comment that I appreciate you guys being in our presentation today. It’s great, always great to talk about US Physical Therapy and glad to be here with you guys today. There’s the disclaimer thing, you know, all the forward looking statements, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Right? So we can go on.

USPH, we have been we’ve been in business since 1990 and have been growing pretty substantially since that time. We were a much much smaller company when we got started. We now have 773 clinics that we own and or and or manage. Most of those are owned, about 750 of those are owned, and then the rest are the are the managed. We’re in 44 states.

I’ll I can show you briefly where that is. We have we’re in 44 states across The United States. Most of the most of the states you see except Alaska and Hawaii are are also in Alaska and Hawaii. Just five states that we’re not in. That’s not necessarily by design.

It’s just because we haven’t had the right opportunity to get into those states just quite yet. California is the one that we’ve been a little hesitant to get into just because it’s a little bit regular higher from a regulatory standpoint, a little higher standard there for regulatory. And also it’s a it’s a corporate practices. They have a corporate practices act there where where companies like ours can’t own, can’t be the majority owner in a in a in a medical practice in the state of California. So you have to kind of go through some hoops to get into California and and we just haven’t found the right opportunity to do that yet.

But we’re across most of The United States. We about 85% of our business, of our revenue comes from the physical therapy space and about 15% from the industrial injury prevention space. And I’ll talk a little bit about what that industrial injury prevention space is a little later in the in the presentation. Attractive, very attractive market dynamics greater than a $40,000,000,000 rehab market that we’re in. Very favorable demographic trends with especially with the aging population.

We have an aging population and they’re just aging into the time in their life when they need a lot of physical therapy. And so this is gonna continue for quite some time. We’ve had strong demand for a number of years. Our demand has been increasing, you know, rapidly over the past several years and it will continue to increase for the next for the foreseeable future. And then an aging and obese population also excuse me, active and obese population also lends itself to needing physical therapy care.

So really attractive demographics, very fragmented. Also, there’s no company that owns more than 10%. As a matter of fact, the three largest owners in the space are Select Medical, which has 1,900 clinics ATI, which has 850 and then we have this 773. And even on a combined basis together, the three largest don’t have 10% of the overall market. So it’s very fragmented, ripe for continued consolidation and we will continue to consolidate in this space.

A proven business model. We are the partner of choice for experienced therapists to be actually an employee of ours as well as to join our company if they’re looking for a way to monetize something that they’ve created inside their, you know, with with six or ten ten clinics, we’re we’re glad to acquire them. It’s driven by growth through acquisitions as well as organic growth. And I’ll talk a little bit more about all of these different metrics, and about half of our clinics were actually de novo startups that were either under the existing umbrella of partnerships that we bought. We have a very strong financial position of and this is a TTM number of about $700,000,000 of revenue, $85,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA.

That’s after corporate cost, etcetera. And that’s after the minority interest comes out related to the the minority interest portions that are owned still owned by the founders themselves of those partnerships. Year over year revenue growth was 18%, and we do pay an annual dividend of a dollar 80. So it’s 45¢. Through de novo PTOT clinic openings and then utilize the true partnership model.

So what what we do is we’ll we open about we’ve been opening about 30 de novos a year. So these are, like I said, under the existing umbrella of a partnership. So this isn’t something I’m not up corporate saying, hey, there’s some white space here. We should open a clinic and put an employee in charge in place, you know, there to to start that to start that clinic. This is this is under the existing umbrella of a partnership.

Someone who’s already in that market, knows the market well, but sees an opportunity to expand. They’ve developed someone within their partnership, within their clinic group that they believe would be able to, you know, run this new clinic well. And then the watchful eye of this existing partner who already knows the market, has referral relationships, etcetera, starts this de novo clinic, and and that’s why they they do so well. Our de novos typically will reach breakeven in about six months. So they’ll be on a month to month basis at breakeven somewhere between six and nine months.

And typically by eighteen eighteen to twenty four months, they have returned whatever investment was was had was necessary for it to start the de novo as well as any original start up losses. And then from that point forward, they are in a net positive position. So it’s a a really good quick turnaround on these de novos. They’ve they’ve done really well for us. We also want to maximize the profits of our existing facilities by growing our patient volume, improving pricing, increasing efficiencies, adding programs and services.

Each acquisition that we make, you know, a lot of them are doing something that’s just a little unique. For instance, we just bought Metro Physical Therapy, which is in Long Island. They have about 50 practices in Long Island. We did that in November. They have they do in home therapy, some some in home therapy.

They have a lot of outpatient clinics 50 of them, but they do some in home therapy And we’re looking at their model and potentially expanding that into many of our other markets. So that’s, know, with each one you get something that they’re doing a little bit different and they may be doing it really well and we kind of use that as learnings for the rest of our clinic group. Patient volumes, I talked about how there’s a growing demand for physical therapy. We’ve continued to grow our average visits per clinic per day, which is a metric that we that we follow closely. And that’s just because there’s been tremendous demand and we do a good job of taking care of our patients.

And so so they off they come back to us when they have another another injury. Improving pricing. So talking about pricing, we’ve we’ve we have a contracting team, and that’s a really important part of our business is the is the obviously, what we get paid by the main we’re paid by the Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, Humana, United, Aetna. And so we have a sophisticated team of negotiators who work on those contracts for us. And they’ve had a lot of success over the last couple years on the commercial business.

That’s the biggest biggest piece. Commercial represents about 47 to 48% of our business. Medicare is that’s 33% of our business. And that Medicare piece, the rates there are dictated by CMS. That’s the area when where you know we’ve had some, we’ve had decreases by Medicare over the past five years.

The good news is we are now going to be on the other side of that going in 2026 and forward. So just to give you some background on why that occurred in 2021 was the year of a decrease CMS felt like they needed to pay primary care physicians more because primary care physicians were no longer taking Medicare patients or they were limiting the number of Medicare patients. And that’s the funnel through which all Medicare is, you know, the different care things go through primary care physicians. So they need them. So they had to increase the amount of pay to the primary care physicians.

The primary care physicians are on the same fee schedule as us. So there’s the physician fee schedule, any physician that you see in an office setting. If you go into an office, they’re on this physician fee schedule. So primary care and us and every other kind of physician that you see in an office. And so there was net neutrality that was placed on that by Congress several years ago on that bucket of that physician fee schedule.

So if they increase primary care physicians, then they had to decrease everybody else in the bucket to make up for that. So we got decreased as well as everyone else on this Physician B Schedule and it’s been fair. They’ve been ferreting this out over the past five years and now it’s at an end. We’re at the end of that cycle and now going forward we’re going to have increases even if they’re nominal. I’ll take it.

I’d like, you know, just any kind of increase year to year in Medicare rates. It’s, you know, half a percentage point, that’s fine with me. I just want an increase as opposed to being in a negative position as I start each year. The big beautiful bill as it currently stands and that if it passes in its current form, there’s a provision in there that would say that next year for physical therapy we would receive an increase actually Medicare that would be at 75% of the Medicare economic index. And the Medicare economic index last year was three and a half percent.

Even if let’s say it’s 3% for this year, 75% of that would be something like a 2.2 increase. That’d be a really good position to be in as opposed to what we’ve been in the past several years as like this year, for instance, we went in with a 2.9% reduction in Medicare rates. So to have a lift like that would be tremendous and I think it’s going be an inflection point for the company and for our stock going forward because we’re going to be on the other side of this Medicare rate reduction, which has been the thing that has really been the area that investors haven’t had visibility into over the past few years. I don’t know how much the cuts going to be or when they’re the cuts are going to stop. Now we know this is the last year 2026 and forward there’s going to be increases.

Really pleased about that. In the meantime, what we’ve been doing is we haven’t just said, hey, that’s that’s it. We’ve we’ve been out renegotiating commercial rates and have had significant increase in our commercial rates over the past few years. We’ve also been adding workers’ comp volume to our business. So we’ve been we’ve been consciously out there trying to get additional workers comp business.

And the reason for that is because workers comp visits are paid at a much higher low a much higher pay rate, visit per rate than the rest of our business combined. So just as an example, our first quarter rates were just north of a $105 per visit. But within that, commercial, which is the 47% of our business, they’re at about a $103, 103, 104 per visit. Medicare is about 93 to $94. Medicaid, which we don’t have much of, it’s about three or 4%, but that’s very similar.

It’s about $92.93 dollars a visit. But workers’ comp was north of a $150 per visit. So we want as much of that workers comp visit, that workers comp business as we can get. So what we’ve been doing is out there, we’ve been out there adding to the number of workers comp networks that we are in. How that workers comp business comes in is it, the employers have relationships with these workers comp networks and they send all of their workers comp claims to these workers comp networks and then they allocate the business to the physical therapy clinics.

So we’ve been increasing the number of these workers comp networks that we’re a part of so that we can get additional business. So that’s what we’ve been doing and that’s that’s been we’ve had some success with that over the last couple of years. Our workers comp as a percent of our mix of business was nine and a half percent in twenty two thousand twenty three. It increased to 10.1% in ’24. In the first quarter of twenty five, it was 10.9% of our overall mix of revenue.

So that we’re really happy to see that increase in that workers comp mix the overall piece because that’s increasing our net rates, increasing our revenues. So that’s kind of what’s happening on the rate front. That’s something that we get asked about a lot, so I just thought I would address it there. The other piece is we also augment our organic growth through strategic acquisitions. So we typically will acquire 40 or plus clinics a year and some years it’s more

This last year in in November, we acquired Metro in in Long Island. As I mentioned, they had 50 clinics at Metro. So we probably added about 90 clinics or so in in actually it was a hundred hundred plus clinics in 02/2024. So, you know, we’re we’re continuing to acquire acquisition multiples are relatively the same. We on average over time have paid about seven and a half to eight times for for our acquisitions.

Some if they have more clinics, you usually get at pay a little bit more. If they have less, you pay less. So they’ve averaged out between seven and a half and eight times EBITDA over time for us and that’s pretty consistent with where we are today. And with there are plenty of acquisitions still in our pipeline. So we feel good about what’s available there for us in 2025 and 2026.

We have a highly retentive partnership model. It’s, you know, it’s we’re partnering with exist with experienced physical therapists. They help us drive volume with referrals and we also augment their sales with marketing reps. One of the things that we bring to the table when we make an acquisition is is with a more concentrated effort on referral sources. We have these marketing sales reps that that are making are are constantly sending additional referral sources to our clinics so that they can reach out to those new referral sources in their markets and making sure that all of that is being followed up with, followed up on consistently across the board and really helps with our referrals.

We also, I wanted to talk about the partnership model and how we’re so significantly aligned and that’s really The key to success for our business is the partnership model that we have in place. So what we typically do is when we acquire a partnership, a group of clinics, we’ll buy 70% and the founder, the original founders will keep 30 of that business. And that keeps us best having both vested interest in both the short term and the long terms. Because what we’ll do is we’ll buy that, say it at eight times multiple on the front end, and then the other 30% we say it has to be at least seven years past the past the initial date, but we will buy out the rest of the business.

So at that point or whenever they want to sell out the rest of the business. So grow your business in all the intervening years de novos, you know open de novos do do tuck in acquisitions find acquisition acquisitions your market. You can tuck into your existing operations. You grow that even over time. So your back end payment will be as large as it can be.

And then in enter in every intervening month between, you know, from the from the month after you have been acquired by us, we start to then pay you distributions every month. We look at how much cash is in the bank account at the end of the month and we’ll take 70% of it and we’ll give you 30%. And so they’re they’re incented for both a short term and the long term with the model the way we have it set up. And it’s really been the keys to our to our success because these partners are vested in the in the in what’s gonna happen with that business both for the near term and the short term. So it’s worked out really well for us.

There’s a these are some of the partnership advantages. We take over a lot of back office things, HR, real estate, you know, contracting and credentialing. That’s contracting and credentialing is one of the areas where we really make the most impact. These these and on the contracting side. So basically what they’re what they are getting paid for the visits that they are that they have.

We have a sophisticated team of people who can who negotiate those those contracts with the big payers that I mentioned earlier. And typically these smaller groups, if they have six or 10 clinics, they’re basically having to just take whatever the payer tells them they’re gonna get. Right? But we have a lot more experience in those negotiations and typically will get increases in those rates and that adds to the profitability of those of those partnerships day one, you know, when we get those on. As an example, Metro with their 50 clinics in November when we acquired them their net rate was about a 101 and we’ve already increased at this point to about a $107 per rate per visit and across that number of visits.

That’s a meaningful number. So we’re already, you know, getting synergy from from that additional contracting. And then we have more resources that we can apply to them. We provide them with capital resources to enhance their development. We will we will fund if you will upfront some of these tuck in acquisitions I talked about and the cost for de novos and then they just pay us back through distributions over time.

And and so that’s how that works and you know, we have better benefits packages and they have typically, you know, a lot of collaborative guidance that we can provide them on how to operate their businesses better going forward. Acquisition strategy. I mentioned that we have a strong pipeline. We’ve completed more than 50 acquisitions since 2005 ranging in size from one to 52 clinics. We’ve also acquired five different industrial injury prevention services over the past several years.

We’re always seeking and evaluating M and A It’s just part of what we do. It’s just our DNA. We’re doing it all the time constantly incorporating new acquisitions and the acquisition criteria for us. The owner therapists want to continue to operate the clinics and they retain that significant equity interest. It’s immediately accretive to earnings for us.

We do not buy distressed properties. We buy properties that are already running well. And then we have further de novo growth opportunities within these partnerships and high clock their high quality clinics with a history of profitability. And one of the important things is making sure upfront that our values are aligned. That they’re the kind of people that we want to do business with.

They’re obviously ethical, but they’re also, you know, people that know how to grow their business and are well respected in the industry. That’s the kind of people that we want to do business with. That’s just an example of new clinics that we have opened since April of last year. So in that at this is through March thirty one of twenty twenty five. So we added a 103 clinics since April one of twenty twenty four through March thirty one of twenty twenty five.

And those are some of the listing of some of those that we did. Obviously, we’ve talked about some of this, but there are a lot of scale advantages for consolidation. You know, a lot of efficiency, payer networks, and the fact that we’re able to increase higher rates, centralization of some of the infrastructure and the and the overall operating cost. We definitely increase their enhance their compliance capabilities for for them. They it’s it’s a struggle for them to stay compliant sometimes.

And so we’re able to put in frame a framework that that helps them a lot and the referrals also because of some of the marketing things that we can do and help them with our referral standpoint. I talked a little bit about this but 85% of our business is PT and within that 85% of the business this is how it’s spread out. Private insurance managed care which we call, I call commercial businesses 48%. The next biggest pieces is Medicare which is 32%. 11% is workers comp.

6% is just really everything else. It’s self pay. We have some clients who are self pay who don’t have insurance and come in. Some of it will be automobile injuries that we get paid for through the insurance through the like the property and liability insurance, casualty, excuse me, insurance that patients have. So that’s that’s how that that business kind of ferrets out.

We’ve had significant growth here. Our main drivers are, you know, increasing the number of clinics that we own through through de novos and Acquisitions, right? Our daily patient visits per clinic has continued to increase over time. The only blip in that was in 2020 with COVID. And you can see it really didn’t, honestly, in the in the scheme of things did not drop that much.

In April of twenty twenty, we dropped to 45% of our normal volume. But by September of twenty twenty, we were back to normal volumes. That speaks to the resiliency of this business. The world was definitely not back to normal in September 2020. Vaccines, as you remember, didn’t even come in place until the first quarter of the next year, and yet our business was resilient.

We bounced right back. We actually there was a little A continual increase in our number of visits. So all those things are are favorable for us. We continue to grow the physical therapy business. The industrial intervention.

Let me talk about what this is Industrial intervention is where we have someone on-site at manufacturing clients and or warehouses where they are where they’re making sure that people are doing their job in a manner in which they won’t get injured. They’re doing it. They’re safe. They’re doing it in a safe manner. It’s a safe environment as well as if there’s if it’s a repetitive motion job and they notice what they’re trained in musculoskeletal issues.

And so they advise him on the way to do that kind of repetitive motion jobs that they won’t get injured. And and we can just kind of monitor all of that on a on a day to day basis and it in it saves those companies significantly and workers comp claims, which saves them a lot of money and workers comp insurance and their and their expense. They’re related to workers’ comp. It’s about a three to one return for them. Their savings in workers’ comp related to the dollars they pay us for the service.

So this business has grown significantly. We bought we got into this through an acquisition in 2017 and they had about $5,000,000 of revenue and a million dollars of EBITDA and today it represents 15% of our overall revenue and that’s despite the fact that physical therapy business continued to grow and grow and grow too. But this has grown at a greater pace And we’ll now instead of 5,000,000 in revenue this year, we’ll probably have a 120 to a $125,000,000 in revenue. Our EBITDA in this group will be at well, for this group will be about $25,000,000. So it’s really grown significantly and it’s a great great business for us.

And it’s gonna continue to grow. It grows each year. The organic growth rates in this business have been about 15% a year. And then when you take the inorganic and on top of it, it’s usually another 10 to 15% also. So I was in the first quarter of this year, our revenues were up 29% and our operating income in this business were up 29%.

So it’s a fast growing business as and and has great margins. Their margins are about 20.6%. You can see there in 2024. Just looking at that we were growing those margins. They were up in the in the mid twenties in 2020.

And then in 2021, it started coming down a little bit. That’s because of an acquisition we made. You see the Trump in our revenue from 43.9% in ’21 to 77.1 in ’22. We made an acquisition in October of that year. That was a significant business.

Their margins were a little bit lower. They were in the mid teens because they they had a lot of auto manufacturing business. And so that was a little bit lower rate, lower margin business. So the combination of those lower the margin was still a 20% plus margin business and is continuing at that this year as well. So it’s a great business for us.

We’re really pleased to have that industrial injury prevention business. We have a strong balance sheet and capital allocation strategy. We most of our free cash flow is going to acquisitions. We do have a dividend payment. Mentioned earlier.

It’s a dollar 80 per dollar 80 per year, 45¢ per quarter that we that we pay in dividends. It’s about a 2% yield. You know, we maintain a strategic flexibility in our in our on our balance sheet. It’s conservative. Our our leverage right now is about 1.4 times EBITDA, which is obviously very low.

And even and that’s despite all the acquisitions that we’ve done through the years. We were typically able to pay for those acquisitions through the free cash flow generated by our operations as we go along. And then we’re developing de novo physical therapy clinics and increasing the number of industrial injury locations we have also in in in that business. So a lot of growth liquidity. Like I said, we have a $147,000,000 in debt.

That is, excuse me, that’s a $147,000,000 in our revolver capacity. We have about a $147,000,000 in debt though. That’s a that’s that’s the right number. That’s why I was looking at that and thinking that because that’s what that is. We have a term loan a note that we put in place.

It was a It’s down now about a $139,000,000 on an on a it’s now down about a $139,000,000 based on the payments we’ve made across the principal there, the required principal payments. But that is when we Oh, is it still an outstanding rate? And we’ve had that in place since 2022. So we put that in place because I saw the escalating interest rates to come and got that in place and have really we’ve saved millions of dollars in interest expense over that period of time due to the swap.

And that that debt will expire in June of twenty twenty seven. And so we’ll probably be renegotiating that at some point next year, probably in the early part of next year before it turns current. And then we keep on cash on hand of about 35 to $40,000,000 that we just need for working capital and on a go forward basis. So and we have an executive management team. Our team has been in place for a number of years.

I’m the newbie. I’ve been in place about four and a half years now and I’m the new guy by far. Everyone else has been has worked together for years in this business either here either at use most of they’ve been at use physical therapy now for a while, even before that they work together at other companies before joining physical therapy. Chris Reading has been the CEO since February. So he’s been in place for a long time and has overseen the all the growth of this company.

So it’s a stable and effective management team and that’s it. I mean that’s that’s what I wanted to tell you about our company today. I have five six minutes left for questions. You all have any questions, I’m happy to answer them. But appreciate your time today.

What questions can I help you with? Yes, sir. That’s a great question. It’s a great question. He’s asking about the demographics of our patients and what’s happening with that and do we have enough staffing to meet the coming demand.

One of the areas that we’re real that we’ve really are working on enhancing right now is our our recruiting and retention. We have great retention of our staff. The the attrition rate for our industry is about 30%. So say, you know, so so about thirty percent of the people in physical therapy, you know, move someplace within within a year. Our attrition rate in the first quarter of this year was seventeen percent.

So we’re much better than the industry overall. We’ve been around 20 or in the low twenties for quite some time, always better than the industry because we’re a we’re an employer of choice. I mean, that’s where people want to be. They know they know the company, the stability of the company, the strength of it. It’s a great But we’ve really been enhancing our recruiting efforts and our on campus recruiting efforts to get more new grads into our business.

We for many years have really relied on our local partnerships to recruit at the physical therapy schools that are in their area and they’ve done a great job of that. But what we feel like we’ve missed on was telling that overall US physical therapy story about how you may, because a lot of these programs these days, there’s one that is near us at Baylor University for instance, and they have the two fifty physical therapists that they graduate each year. And it’s a hybrid program. So that’s part remote and part on campus and those people are all across the country. And so if we’re just recruiting at Baylor, is in Texas with our Texas partnerships, we’re missing the vote.

I mean these people are in Washington and in Florida and whatever and we need to tell this US physical therapy story about how we we can you know, you can go anywhere you want with us. We’re in 44 states. If you want to go to Hawaii, want to go to Alaska, wanna go to Colorado, you wanna go to the Southeast, wherever you wanna be, we pretty much have a physical therapy presence. And so, you know, and a lot of young people may not necessarily want to stay where they have lived forever. They may want to go do something different and be someplace different in a sunnier part of the nation or or where some other family, you know, are.

So we provide that flexibility and opportunity for them. And we’re also developing a travel program because some of that that’s really appealing to some students as they come out, is to be able to travel to different markets. And so we’re creating programs where they could stay three to six months in one market and then move to another market and be there three to six months. And it’s we pay them at a higher rate because of this traveling. There’s you know, like if you traveling nurses and those kind of things and there are travel PT programs as well.

And we’re trying to keep people from going to those travel PT programs and coming to us instead. And they can rotate and then find out where they wanna be permanently and then they can they can stay with us in that permanent location. So we’re we’re How many patient how many physical therapists we can have to staff those? We have to have the staffing to be able to meet additional demand. As far as the demographics, I think the demographics are continuing, the age of our population in our clinics is continuing to grow.

We see people of all ages for sure, but as the baby boomers have been aging into this time where they have more chronic pain management that has to take place. I know my my mother-in-law, she’s constantly on a physical therapy regimen and it’s great for her. Know, she’s in her mid 80s and she she needs it. And so she’s on a physical therapy regimen all the time. And that’s what’s gonna happen.

That is what’s happening. That’s what’s gonna continue to happen for people his age. And so these baby boomers are gonna have a real impact on our demographics for sure. Yeah. So yeah.

So we look organically at our growth, which I would include our de novos and tuck ins in that. What we are looking at is a overall growth of somewhere between four and six. It may even be five to 7% growth going forward. Now, we’ve not quite achieved that. And volume increases that would be an additional two to 3%.

So they app come up to four to 6% organic growth and then add the acquisitions on top of that. Yep. Yes, sir. So most of the true physical therapy needs, some can be, you know, the more the remote can be, I think we’ll ever be to where it’s remote as primary. But we we are doing something through a group called Limber, which where where you come into the physical therapy space and then this software that we that we can monetize we get paid for as as people do their exercises.

They have this they have their their phone, I guess, which is really watching them and it’s using AI to track their movements. And if they do their exercises in between visits, then we get paid for that. And so, and it’s not using our physical therapy, our physical therapists, it’s using physical therapists that are monitoring their activity that are part of this limber group. So it’s not decreasing our productivity of our physical therapy therapists in our clinics, which is important because we need them continuing to meet the demand that’s coming in the door. But there are ways that we can continue to use that going forward.

But I don’t think it’s ever going to replace the physical therapy actually in person. Even Hinge which is something that’s out there right now, you know, they recently went public. They’re primarily remote, but they are not taking care of the more. Theirs is more about movement. They’re not taking care of the more serious kind of the real true physical therapy needs.

Think to do that you’ve they’re even they’re even searching for their solution for people that really then need to go into a clinic, like how they’re gonna make that happen. They’ve actually had some conversations with us, you know, about that and probably are with others as well about building out networks where they can send their patients who are remote who really need to be in a clinic space. So there are opportunities there. I don’t think I’ll ever take over for the actual physical therapy coming into the clinics though. I’m sorry I’m past my time.

So but it’s been great to great to speak with you today and happy to ask answer whatever questions you may have afterwards. I do have a full slate of line of meetings today, but glad to meet with you after today in a call or something if you’d like more follow-up. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

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