Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Zuzana Rogers. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Zuzana, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?

Runners’ Edge Alaska is a niche physical therapy clinic, serving Alaska’s active population. The company started in 2019 as a solo practice. Within 3 years, it grew to 7 employees. Looking back, there was a natural need to hire a team as the company grew. As we grew initially, I quickly realized could not do things by myself. My first hire was a contract marketing assistant. The clinic relied of leads coming from the community, and educated leads were the most valuable leads.
As marketing became more successful, I got too busy to run the clinic and treat patients all by myself. That is when my next hire came – a full time physical therapist. Hiring a full time physical therapist (my first full time hire) was frightening; I was trying to grow the clinic pretty much 100% within the span of several months. Am I going to be an OK boss? Am I going to have enough work for this new PT? How do I assure I fulfill the expectations? I had never been a boss before. That is why to took my time with the hiring process. I had 5 candidates. It took almost 5 months from the start of the process to my PT starting to work for us.
The hiring process was extensive, I really wanted to make sure the PT would fit into the vision and values of the clinic. I picked 2 candidates from the applications process. Once I found my best candidates, we went thorough a 3-part interview process; the first one was just a casual chat over Zoom to make sure our personalities were compatible, talking about our personal values and the clinic’s values. The second part was a team meeting, still over Zoom, making sure the candidate fit within our growing team. The 3rd part was a meeting with me, where we talked about the specifics of the job and the offer was made.
I love the 3 part hiring process, where my team is involved. It allows everyone to be a part of the decision making process. I used this process to hire all my additional employees, and it has been working very well.
We now have a coherent, amazing team of 7 that share the same vision, and I could not be happier. I really make sure I dedicate time to spend with my team as a whole and one on one meetings. This happens weekly, as Team meetings and individual mentorship sessions.
A solo practitioner can only go so far. A small team got us further, but as the company grows, the need for additional employees with specific roles became more obvious. Moving forward, we are now fully staffed, the goal for the future is to optimize my team members’ roles and make sure they have everything to succeed. My role as a ‘boss’ evolved to one as a ‘leader’, where my main goal is to take care of my people. I am looking forward where this takes us.

Zuzana, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have been a physical therapist since 2003. The access to a quality sports physical therapy that is more goal oriented has become more difficult in the past decade or so. This led to Runners’ Edge Alaska, a niche sports physical therapy clinic. We empower active Alaskans to return to activities they love – safely, efficiently, and for life. Our clients come to us for several reasons; we are the best PT clinic that serves runners, from someone who is looking to start running to an accomplished ultra endurance athlete who is looking to break records. We work with out clients from the start to the finish, including recovery from an injury, maintenance, running gait analysis, footwear recommendations, cross training and performance enhancement, and nutritional advice. We are considered a ‘one stop shop’ for Alaskan active population. Being an out of network clinic with all insurance companies allows us to to do this. This is very unique in Alaska.
We help our clients to make decisions about their health and physical activity. It is often frustrating for active folks to have to sit back and wait for their injury to resolve, for them to be told that they have to stop running because they have osteoarthritis, to find a different activity that is gentler to their bodies, or to stop sports in the young age because of an injury. We strive to return our people to what they love to do, and we are very proud of it.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Physical therapy as a profession has a flaw – people really don’t know what a physical therapist can do for them, what kid of a problem they can solve. It is not ‘just a massage’. It is not ‘showing me some exercises to ‘get my shoulder motion back’. A physical therapist needs to be considered a primary care provider for any musculoskeletal conditions and should be able to answer all questions regarding to this. Our clinic has a very strong presence on social media, where our goals are to educate our clients on what a physical therapy clinic can do for them. An educated lead is one of the best leads we can hope for. Our social media presence is 95% education, fitness and recovery tips, and 5% sales.
We started with organic content, this quickly grew as we built our audience. We are now tapping into paid social media advertising.
As for an advice for those just starting on social media – know your audience and talk to this audience directly, Know their issues, questions, what they like to do, where they shop and where they look for information. The content needs to be to the point and the posts need to be short (you have about 1-3 seconds to capture attention). Don’t be salesy, you will lose people.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One lesson that I had to unlearn as a physical therapist is to put my degrees behind me and to talk to potential clients in a way that is scaled to them, without big, educated-sounding words. Our clients don’t care what advanced degrees I have, how many continuing education classes I have taken, or what fancy techniques using even fancier equipment I use. they care about whether I can help them solve their problem. They care whether I can help them. At Runners Edge Alaska, we address just that – we help people solve their problems.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.runnersedge.physio
• Instagram: @runnersedgealaska
• Facebook: Runners’ Edge Alaska

Image Credits
Gloria Johnson