Allison Jones
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Therapy Matters podcast. Your one-stop resource for expert insights and advice on everything therapy and rehab. I’m your host, Allison Jones, and today I’m joined by Jimmy McKay, host of PT Pintcast. Jimmy, it’s great to have you on the show today. Thanks for joining me.
Jimmy McKay
Thanks for having me. Killer intro, good morning, good afternoon, and good night, very Truman Show-y. Right, that was the Truman Show, Jim Carrey, good morning, good afternoon, good night?
Allison Jones
I just got to cover all the bases. We don’t know what people are listening.
Jimmy McKay
That’s right. No matter when we’re recording, the cool part, the asynchronous part of podcasting, is that I don’t know where you are, when you are; message to the future.
Allison Jones
Exactly. Before we dive into our conversation today, I just want to give the audience a little bit of background on who Jimmy McKay is. I shortchanged you a little bit. I said that you’re the host of PT Pintcast, but you’re a little bit more than that. You’re a PT. You’re a former DJ. Take a minute. Tell us a little bit about who Jimmy McKay is and your road to where we are today.
Jimmy McKay
We’re all more than just our title. Who is Jimmy McKay? I think Jimmy McKay is still trying to figure it out. I think we all are. For all intents and purposes, the nickel version is all I wanted to do as a kid was be a radio DJ. That was back in the mid-’90s, when I discovered rock radio. I don’t know what this is, but I like it. Then I went to school for broadcasting, and I did that. I worked at my hometown radio station. I got to intern for a big radio station in New York City, where the morning guy was a guy by the name of Howard Stern. That’s what everybody wants to know—the stories. Human Resources just told me you can’t tell any of those stories anymore. Those aren’t allowed.
Then I worked at or ran radio stations for 15 years, and then a pivot. I didn’t think a guy in a black turtleneck walking on a stage could really change my life, but Steve Jobs did when he walked on stage with this thing. That’s why you’re saying good morning, good afternoon, and good night because time and space shifted with the smartphone and the Internet and how these things connected and how you could send pictures, sounds, and words.
I pivoted. I looked in 2008, and I was running two radio stations, and I was living my dream. But something just felt like this was going to change monumentally. I played that game, which we all play when we’re trying to figure out who we are. If you had $10 million, what would you actually be doing if you didn’t need to work?
I was a bad athlete. I was a triathlete. I like triathlon because I like to be able to be mediocre at three things in one day. It combines my love for athletics with my efficient mediocrity. What could I do in this? Could I be a coach? Could I do this? I had been around enough physical therapists where I was like, I like how people walk away from you. They walk away looking like they feel better, empowered, and more in control of themselves.
I watch interactions, just verbal interactions, with physical therapists and people after a long bike ride with a triathlon club. You never touched that person, and then they walked away taller. What happened there? What verbal voodoo were you doing there? That’s cool.
I knew I was exiting radio because, again, Steve Jobs ushered in this ability of what it’s going to look like in the future. At the same time, YouTube is blowing up. This looks like TV; it’s YouTube. This looks like radio; it’s podcasting and posting on a website, blog, or article; there’s newspaper, so it’s a parallel.
I dropped everything and went back to PT school. I hung up the headphones. That’s it. I’m done. I’m going to go do this new thing. I love physical therapy. But while I was a student, I watched a presentation on stage, and the person had the button buttoned up to the top. They were super formal, and it was a room full of a thousand people and people saying, Doctor, do you concur? I concur. I concur with you. but I didn’t understand what it was. I understood most of what was going on, but I wanted to understand more. But I wasn’t going to raise my hand in a room full of a thousand people and be like, “Stop the presses. I’m the idiot. What are you talking about?”
Two hours later, there was the networking hour, which is code for happy hour in a conference, and there was the presenter across the bar. I made my way over there, and I just said, hey, I’m Jimmy. I’m a second-year student. I saw your presentation. Could you help me understand it more? Actually, I just said I saw your presentation; I didn’t really get it. This is not a great way to introduce yourself to someone, but he saw right through me.
Okay, what did you not understand? I said this; what do you mean by that? I understood his entire 90-minute presentation in 11 and a half minutes. What’s the difference? I locked onto the difference, which was that we were having a conversation. On stage, he was giving this presentation, and he tried to become a presenter instead of just being a human, which he was. He’s a human when he wakes up and during the day when he goes to bed. Why did he change on stage? He thought he had to.
On my drive back to PT school, I was with three classmates. This is 2015, when you had to explain to people what a podcast was. Now, more people have podcasts than don’t have podcasts. We’ve reached that tipping point. I pitched the idea of what if I just went around and used my radio background to talk to smart people and talk to someone who’d had his 90-minute presentation, and what if I just had a beer with them and broke it down? All three classmates said that was a horrible idea. Don’t do that. Just study and graduate.
But it stayed with me, and I eventually pitched the idea to my advisor. She had a PhD in biochemistry, and she was a physical therapist. She said, “I have no idea what a podcast is.” I have no idea how this would work. But she said, “You look terribly excited about this idea.” then she goes, what’s the worst-case scenario? I’m down $80 on buying a microphone. She’s like, I don’t know, man. I’ll introduce you to a bunch of people I know that I think are interesting, and I’ll buy the first round of beers. Don’t threaten me with a good time.
I did that. We might say first mover advantage. I wasn’t the first PT podcast, but it was early, and the North Star was having fun and learning stuff. I used it as a Trojan horse. The show was a Trojan horse. If I didn’t know something, I knew I didn’t learn; just go and read an article about it or get in the book. I love books, but not like that. I like reading books for fun. For learning, can you just explain it to me? Just break it down for me; it is very verbal and visual.
I used it as a Trojan horse. When I’d write a paper in PT school about vestibular care, I reached out to Becky Bliss, who I just found online Googling, and Becky was like, yeah, let’s talk. Everything in that episode was me essentially asking questions that I just turned into my paper. Here’s the thing. My classmates said, you can’t do that. You most certainly do that. That is how people write articles, and that’s how people write books.
It’s a cheat code because Becky, at the end of the episode, said I have a Google Drive folder with the papers I would include and cite. That’s a cheat. It sounds like I cheated, but I reached out to a super smart person and asked them questions about stuff.
Allison Jones
Right. That’s not cheating. That’s just being smart.
Jimmy McKay
That’s not cheating. That’s the cheat code of life. Smarter, not harder, baby. I did that, and I lucked out. Again, first mover advantage. I was one of the first people out there doing it my way. I could not do it another way. Other people were clinicians trying to be radio DJs. I was a radio DJ trying to be a PT. I was the salmon swimming in no matter what direction anybody was going. I just approached things differently. Here’s the cool part: everybody does that. You have your own direction. Even if you’re like, I’m just exactly this person. I was a clinician, and I did that. You’d approach it differently because you have a different lived experience and you’ve got a different vibe. I wouldn’t want to do it like that. I don’t want my podcast to sound like a radio show like yours, Jimmy. Great. Don’t.
I’ve been doing that, and since then, I’ve left clinical practice. I haven’t treated in a clinic in several years, but I help organizations. I’d try to sum it up by saying I help make good work well-known or good work understandable. I don’t care who you are. If you’re a practice, I want other clinicians to understand why they should work with you because this is the place for them if they fit this. I want the public to understand. Here’s why I want to use advertising principles to communicate the value of physical therapy. Because just saying we are an evidence-based practice is just noise. No one understands what that means.
I get to be in rooms where I’m the only clinician in a marketing or communications meeting, and I’m the only marketer or communicator in a clinical meeting. I just speak both languages fluently, and I get to bounce back and forth. In the end, I think, I like to think anyway, everybody wins.
Allison Jones
Since we’re both podcast hosts, we have the distinct pleasure of speaking to a lot of really smart people, as you said, and we get to learn a lot through those conversations. Let’s talk a little bit about that. What we’ve learned from our collective experiences talking to other PT folks and other folks within the industry. I’m going to hit you with a pretty big question right out of the gate. Let’s just dive right into it. What do you think is the biggest challenge that the PT industry faces today?
Jimmy McKay
Ourselves. That’s the deep, profound answer, and I can say that and stroke my chin and sound like I’m profound, but then you have to explain. Let me tell it this way. You’re super good at something, and you want the world to understand you, and I think that’s the mistake. Simon Sinek said, “Start with why.” He’s got the most-viewed TEDx talk ever, but I’m going to disagree with Simon Sinek, kind of. He says, “Start with why.” I think you have to start with who. What I mean by that is that if you have a skill, and it’s a talent and a skill, those are two different things, so talent will get you so far, and skill because you’ve worked on it, and I know you have. If you’re listening to a physical therapy podcast outside of work hours, you’re probably trying to improve yourself. You’re talking about a small percentage. I think you need to pay attention to the other person first.
I’ll give you an analogy. Let’s say we’re back in college and Jimmy is trying to get a date. This did happen. I won’t go into specifics, but I didn’t do so well my freshman and sophomore years. I couldn’t figure out why, Allison. I would meet girls, and that went well. Then I would tell them all about how I was the captain of the high school hockey team, how smart I was, and how many different projects I was involved in. I would tell them all about me. No second date; I couldn’t figure it out.
Allison Jones
It’s all about you.
Jimmy McKay
Junior and senior year, as I figured out, is when I would go on a first date. I would ask questions, and I would be interested. Things got really different junior and senior year, and I think I see that. When I say I think our biggest limitation is ourselves, I mean that we, in an altruistic way, can’t wait to show everybody how smart we are freshman and sophomore year, when in reality, you have to speak to me if I’m the audience about me in words that I use in ways that I communicate about things that either bother me, limit me, or things I want to become. Everybody’s the main character in their own story. If you come in talking about how you’re the captain of the high school hockey team, how smart you are, and how amazing your internships were this summer, that puts distance between you and the audience. As the kids would say, cool story, bro. Tell it again. Thanks for telling me about you.
I think Simon Sinek says to start with why. But I think in order to get to why, you have to ask a couple other questions. The first is who. The second is what. What problem? They call them bads and goods. What are the bads, the things that are limiting you, the hurdles, the things that just plain annoy you? Goods are, I think, the opposites of the bads. What do you want to become? What would you like to do? That’s who. Who am I talking to? What are their bads and goods? Then you have to do some self-reflection.
Then you come in. What are your bads and goods? What are the things you can help people go from and to? When you have those things, who, what for them, and what for you in a nice, pretty Venn diagram where those things cross, that is your shared why. From then on, I agree with Simon Sinek, and then stuff gets really easy. It’s how, where, and when.
How is just how you communicate that. Does it have to be in person? No. Allison and I are talking right now in February 2024, and you’re listening to this some other time in some other place. But does it have to be audio? It could be video. We’re also recording a video. That’s great. Could this be broken down into an article? Can we make an Instagram carousel or tweet through it? Yes, because if that’s where people communicate and that’s how they ingest information, then that’s how you should do it.
I think our biggest problem is ourselves. In an altruistic way, I think there’s a nugget of good: we can’t wait to tell and show people how smart we are, and that’s a mistake. I like why you’re doing it; I just don’t like what you’re doing or how you’re doing it. Stop that. Talk to me about me, and I’ll listen to you all day.
Allison Jones
This is what you do as part of your day-in and day-out. How do you advise PTs on how to get started with making that shift?
Jimmy McKay
Grossly, there’s three ways: DIY, do it yourself. You got a house, and you want to look and feel better; do it yourself. You got to teach yourself. That’s high effort, low cost. Well, there’s some cost in there because you’re going to screw up and you’re going to spend ten times as much time renovating your own kitchen as you would if a professional did it.
There’s DWY; do it with you. You can hire someone to do it with you. That’s a coach; that’s a physical therapist. You can rehab yourself, or you can hire a physical therapist to do it with you. The third is that someone does it for you. This analogy drops out in physical therapy. Physical therapists do not do anything for you. We might plan things out; that’s doing it with you. The actual magic happens to you.
In terms of communication, you can hire someone. go to big companies. They have directors of communications. They have a director of marketing, a director of communications, and a director of public relations. It’s because, when you scale enough, these things are different. They’re similar, but not the same. You can do it yourself, someone can do it with you, or someone can do it for you. Each of these involves different amounts of effort. You hire someone to do it for you, small effort to manage that person, but they’re going to do a lot because they’re skilled. You have to decide: What’s the ROI? If you’re a single practice owner in your town and you’re the only PT, I don’t think you should hire a director of marketing, not off the bat. But can you learn simple practices to do that? I would say yes.
What are those? I’ll give you one. I have friends who say, “I don’t know if marketing is going to work for me.” Apparently, you’re the exception. Okay, keep going. I don’t like being on Tik-Tok. I think that’s stupid. The kid who maybe loves to mock it—that’s the thing to mock for them—all the stupid dances and stupid videos. Okay, good. Don’t do that.
Where do you consume content? I don’t like being on social media. So you’re not on it at all? No. That’s okay. You’re telling me nobody you can help ever looks at these things and consumes content? That is an arrogant thing to say. It’s just misaligned. I always tell people to start with the type of content they like to consume. don’t like podcasts? don’t want to talk? Don’t make podcasts. Don’t do that. don’t like being on camera? It doesn’t mean you can’t make videos because you don’t have to be on camera to create videos. It doesn’t have to be about you talking to me.
I hear this a lot recently with physical therapists. On all these big accounts, I see all these PTs with 50,000 followers, and they do all these exercise videos. That means I need to go on Instagram and do exercise videos. Do you? What do you like to do? That’s going to shine through. I tell people, start creating content in ways that you like to consume content, and then I look at them and I go, let’s be dead honest here. Your first 50 are going to suck.
Now I start to talk about the emotion. I want to remove the emotion. I give them permission to understand. If you listen to the first 50 radio broadcasts that I did, I physically could not listen to those now. I was horrible. But I said that in the end, you told me your goal was to help people. I’m telling you, this is showing, not telling, because I don’t care that you’re in physical therapy. You don’t have to be on a podcast. You’re in show business. You tell someone how to do an exercise, or you show them how to do the exercise correctly. Which one is more effective? You’re in show business, whether you like it or not. As vapid and thin as that might sound, you’re in show business. You’re just leaving the clinic’s walls. That’s all this is allowing you to do however you want.
You can do it yourself. Learn from other people. YouTube channels that just show people how to create content, great. Spend time. Find someone within your organization who likes it, even if they’re bad at it. I’ll take somebody who’s got—can I say bad words in the show?
Allison Jones
No.
Jimmy McKay
Find someone who has a little bit of [bleeped 0:17:17]. There we go. I need someone who cares. That’s the prerequisite. You give me someone who really cares and who really gives a [muted 0:17:26]. I teach that skill. It’s communicating at scale. That can be learned. I know it can be learned. I went to school. I have a degree in it, which means you can teach it to a degree.
I would say, what type of content do you want to create or what type of content should you create, what do you like consuming? Understand that your first 50 are going to suck. How bad do you want it willing to go to 51, 101, 501 and see what works.
Allison Jones
But it’s also like your first 50 might not be your best, but it’s going to be you. It’s going to be authentic to who you are. That will still shine through in your content and resonate with the folks that you want to attract to your tribe. Even if they’re bad, they’re still going to be effective and will build.
Jimmy McKay
They won’t be as bad. You will think it is a negative 465. The average person is going to say nothing resonated. That’s net neutral. I tell people all the time well, my email campaign didn’t work. How many emails did you send? Six. This is why I love talking to PTs in PT language. This is why I get to jump back and forth. What’s your goal here? I want to make $10,000 extra a month. We’re going to have some micro goals here because that’s like saying I want to go from not running to running the Olympic trials in the marathon.
Allison Jones
Jimmy, the question is how do PTs survive then?
Jimmy McKay
Heavy, right? We talked before about Darwin. Darwin is quoted all the time. If he were a published author today, he’d be the most cited. Somebody checked the number of Darwin’s citations. It’s a lot. But he’s misquoted because everyone says the strongest to survive. People get it on a tattoo or they put it on their Facebook profile. But it’s not because the quote says it’s neither the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent that survives. It’s the one that’s most adaptable to change.
You could get mad at another health care provider that survived. I can’t believe that guy survived. He’s not as good as me. Well, you don’t get to decide. It’s adaptable to change. People will say all the time that the worst phrase to use is that this is the way we’ve always done it. People will say that. But then they’ll do it the same way. They’ll get angry. I agree.
Every once in a while, something comes along and changes your plans. My goal was to be in cargo shorts and a Guns ‘n Roses t-shirt as a radio DJ forever. There was really no mass change in terms of communication from when I was 12 years old and heard Nirvana for the first time and said, “I want to be a radio DJ” to when I was 25 years old, running a radio station and hosting my radio show six days a week. Then in 2008, it did. But I prepared for a world where this was the skill set that you needed, and as soon as you reached a certain level, you could skate or get better.
All of a sudden, I had to adapt, and I didn’t like the way that looked. Some people would say winners never quit. You should have powered through, Jimmy. Have you ever read anything from Seth Godin? He’s a business writer and a super smart guy. Not a lot of hair, but a nice, smart guy. He said winners do quit. Winners quit all the time. They just know what to quit and when to quit. I’m sitting there at 33 years old. I have been on the radio since I was 17. I don’t think I want to do this, and I started to pivot. That’s when I pivoted away.
How do PTs survive? Adapt, look at it, and step back and say, where’s the world going? Where does my solution fit? I know it can be overwhelming, but just look at it from the Ws: who, what, them and you, why, and then how, where, and when. It changes. Again, newspapers or articles are blogs. Podcasting is radio. YouTube is TV. This is words, sounds, and moving pictures and images, infographics, or whatever you want to share on Instagram. It’s simple, but it’s not easy.
Allison Jones
It’s not just your communication strategy. It’s not just your marketing strategy. You’ve got to look at your entire way of practicing therapy from beginning to end. A good example there is consumerization. You keep holding up your iPhone. I’d be holding up my iPhone too, and this is how patients want to interact with your practice. I want to be able to book my appointment on my phone. I want to be able to check my patient portal on my phone. I want to be able to sit on my couch at midnight and book my next PT appointment.
Jimmy McKay
And change my appointment. Something just popped up. I had an appointment at 11. Can I change it?
Allison Jones
A lot of therapy practices don’t have that right now; you’ve got to adapt. You have to adjust to that. You have to meet your patients where they want to be. It’s not just your communication styles; it’s across the board.
Jimmy McKay
I would say everything is communications. That’s my lens. Of course, I’m going to see that. This is how I look at it. But I was asked a question in communications school. I went to a Catholic university, Saint Bonaventure University, and the professor for public relations was a brother, brown robe, rope around his waist, talked like he was out of the Bible, super smart guy. He asked, what’s public relations? Of course, a bunch of 19-year-old students are trying to wow the professor with these great, deep answers.
Finally, he just shook his head and was like, silly children. Public relations is about building a relationship with the public. You can have a good relationship, or you can have a bad relationship, but there’s no maintain. You’re either getting better or getting worse. You’re either getting stronger or your muscles atrophy.
I think being able to change your appointment on your phone at any time, easy with three clicks, that is communications. That’s user experience or users on in technology. But that’s a part of public relations. If it’s annoying and that annoys me, then our relationship is now frayed. This is a relationship build. That’s what I put communications and marketing into.
What do people know about you? What do they say about you when you’re not in the room? It’s super frustrating. I can’t book an appointment. There are three or four local barbers in our town, and one skyrocketed, and everybody says that’s the place to be. He’s great. He got so busy, he never hired any more people, and you couldn’t get an appointment on the phone. Two other places came into town, booking on the phones; they have hours after hours and hours on the weekend. Guess what happened? That’s a pivot. They adapted; he did not. Guess who benefits from that?
Allison Jones
I’m probably going to misquote the statistic, but it’s something like 86%. I think the study showed that 86% of people will leave their provider if they have a bad experience with them.
Jimmy McKay
Shouldn’t you, though?
Allison Jones
Absolutely. You should expect great things from the services that you’re paying for, and health care is a service just like anything else. When I go to a doctor or a PT, I want you to treat me like a person. I want you to listen to me. I want you to engage with me, and I want you to have the tools that I need to interact with you.
Jimmy McKay
It’s an inverse relationship. It’s like, 15 years ago, there might have been 20 barbers in town. But I only knew about three, so there were only three. I didn’t know if I was going to have options. The parallel is that people say that for kids these days, everybody’s attention span is shrinking. You’re telling me we’ve evolved—our brains have evolved that fast? We have options. We’re a flick away. I’m a search away from finding someone else. That’s why you’ve got to adapt. The most adaptable to change survives there. I don’t care that you’re better. If I don’t know about you, that’s the greatest rock song no one’s ever heard. Cool story, bro. Tell it again. It doesn’t matter.
Allison Jones
When we’re talking about the technology curve, you don’t necessarily have to be on the bleeding edge. You don’t have to be right there, but you don’t want to be on the laggard side.
Jimmy McKay
Yes. I lurk all the time. I cheat. Picasso said good artists copy and great artists steal. Apple Vision Pro is a great example. I don’t know how much it costs; we can look it up, but it looks like ski goggles, and they’re virtual reality, augmented reality, whatever you want to call it. Do you need to go buy them right now, dive all in, and integrate this into your practice tomorrow? No, but pay attention, sniff around, watch what other people are doing, and then ask, is this a good fit? Does this help me do more of what I like to do, what I’m good at, and what people expect of me? No? Great. Leave it there. It’s not for me.
The parallel in radio was that record reps are the people who come in and pitch. They have a bunch of artists, and they come in, you’ve got to play this new song. Everyone’s going to be playing it. I was taught that you don’t get beat by the songs you don’t play because for three and a half minutes I am Pearl Jam or I’m your band that I don’t have faith in, but they’re playing on the psychology of scarcity or someone else is going to get it and you don’t. I was taught very early that you don’t get people the songs that you don’t play.
You don’t get beat by the stuff that you don’t do. You get beat because the stuff that you do isn’t solving problems, and people will leave. You don’t need to be on the bleeding edge of anything. Don’t like talking? Don’t start a podcast. don’t like typing emails? Great, don’t send emails. What do you like, and who do you want to connect with? Try to connect with one person. What’s the way to do that? The tools we have allow us to connect with lots of people at once. If you try to talk to everybody at once, you miss. Try to talk to one person, and I feel like you’re talking to me. Now that you’re talking to me, again, talk to me about me. I’ll listen to you all day.
Allison Jones
We’re running out of time here. Let me ask you one more question. Final thoughts for our listeners? Final recommendations for our listeners? What would you leave them with?
Jimmy McKay
I would say we’re past the tipping point of me needing to come in and tell people you need to start communicating. In fact, as I mentioned, you’re already communicating. You’re either doing it well or poorly. You decide. It’s not as hard as you think. It takes a little bit of psychology and being uncomfortable, but we’re lifelong learners. We love to brag about that as health care providers. We’re lifelong learners. This is a new skill that either you can do yourself, do it with someone, or someone does it for you, but it’s something that needs to be done now. You need to adapt, or, as Darwin would say, you’re going to be evolved out.
Allison Jones
Words of wisdom.
Jimmy McKay
Words of wisdom. You make it sound prophetic. I like it.
Allison Jones
Where can people find you?
Jimmy McKay
I kept it simple. I mentioned the origin story. If you’re still listening, I’m baffled at how you’re still listening to me ramble on about these things. but I wanted to name the podcast and all the things that I do. Similar to that first experience at a conference where I didn’t understand then I met him in the bar, it’s PT for physical therapy and Pintcast because we were having a pint, and I figured, back in 2015, when everybody was starting a podcast, it was something cast. It’s called PT Pintcast—the website, the socials, the whole nine.
Allison Jones
Excellent. Well, definitely tune in to the next episode of PT Pintcast. I’m sure it’s going to be an exciting ride and adventure.
Jimmy, we are out of time for today. We could certainly go on for hours and hours, but that’s it for today. I want to thank you so much for joining us and having a conversation with me. I really enjoyed it. I want to thank our audience for tuning in to the Therapy Matters podcast, your one-stop resource for expert insights and advice on everything therapy and rehab. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
==========
Thanks for listening to Therapy Matters. Do you like the podcast? Give us a five-star rating, subscribe, and tell all your friends about the show. Want to be a guest or know someone that would be a great guest speaker? Contact me at allison.jones@raintreeinc.com. That’s A-L-L-I-S-O-N.jones@raintreeinc.com.
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