We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Marina Lakhmanchuk. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Marina below.

Marina, appreciate you joining us today. When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience moments when the entire field takes a U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.

When I first started Ultra Therapy solutions 7 years ago, I was told that it was not going to be easy. But I’d have never imagined how difficult it is to grow a company in the midst of a pandemic. This pressure pushed me to achieve growth, and in turn, use this opportunity to reach out to people who need our services.

Being a director at a skilled nursing facility for a year and a half, prior to becoming a director at a home health agency, I saw what my home health agency at that time was truly lacking; bringing an actual collaborative approach. Home health and staffing are two separate entities. A staffing agency needs to help a home health agency grow and in return, the home health agency will help the staffing agency feel like more than just a 3rd party vendor. I have come to realize that both sides needed to become a team.

In spite of the therapy industry burnout, I truly enjoyed the pivot of going back to my wound care routine which I started at Baylor Scott and White, Dallas. I realized I needed to be back caring for patients directly; this is what drew me to this career in the first place after all. In my mind, it felt like a natural path to try the industry of wound care and lymphedema. It is such an untapped market which lacks knowledge and education amongst physicians, patients and their families. The program changed the lives of the few lymphedema patients I had seen and it reawakened the excitement of why I became a physical therapist and I knew that it was the change I needed. There were probably other therapists that felt that way too. I was comforted knowing that if all else failed, I could expand to the more established orthopedic and neurological staffing needs.
After I closed that chapter of being a director for a home health agency, I built Ultra Therapy Solutions from 25 to 50 staff members within the first month as an independent contractor. Today, we provide staffing for Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Speech Therapy, Medical Social Work and Nursing Services to over 25 home health agencies. We established our name by going above and beyond to meet our client’s needs; creating a strong relationship and building a great foundation with them. It takes a lot of strategy to build Ultra Therapy and there are millions of people who fall short of great ideas and great implementation approaches. It takes a lot of elements and not just luck, and sometimes it just does not work out. I feel truly blessed that those early adopters leaned into this idea.

In the first quarter of 2020, COVID-19 shut the whole world down; business suffered from big losses. It was a year like no other for every business owner and especially for a healthcare provider. Unfortunately, our company was just one such healthcare provider. Covid hit a time where you had to be open to change because you knew things are never going to be the same and that left me with an incredible amount of anxiety.
The pandemic resulted in a huge drop in our clientele as a client became more focused on price than quality. The downward pricing pressure from our clients has led our company to a precarious situation. My team and I have considered change after change, but I’m not willing to drive my business down to compete at the bottom. I sat on my couch, watching the world crumble and I asked myself, “What can I do to gain the trust of our physicians to get direct patient referrals as opposed to their standard practice of referring to home health agencies?” feeling this pressure to innovate m Ultra Therapy Solutions created a class designed to train existing therapists in Lymphedema Therapy – This class is recognized by the State of Texas and creates a Lymphedema Therapist Certification.
Ultimately, we noticed that the swelling patients’ population receives little attention in a home health setting. As an advanced certified lymphedema therapist with 10 years of experience including wound care management, we are certain that this is the population aligned with our expertise and we could provide them the quality care they deserve. We started reaching out to physicians and introduced them to what true home health lymphedema is; that it exists, not only by performing manual lymphatic drainage, but also by controlling lymphedema with compression wraps and providing wound care for patients with essential needs. We structured our services for the physicians and patients; working in close contact with the physicians on a weekly basis and enjoying centralized care that was given to patients. We gained the trust of some of the largest wound care doctors in Texas and offered services allowing physicians to provide top-tier care. We shared with them our vision to achieve centralized care where physicians and clinicians work together to accomplish the best care and to promote recovery during the pandemic.

All of this direct physician marketing indeed pivoted us into creating our own sustainable referral source without the need for staffing agencies. In return, physicians send us the referrals directly and can do so with confidence that they’re making the best choice for their patients. This allowed us to maintain pricing to support our therapists, while providing the absolute best care to our patients.

To this day, we are now partnered with over 30 physicians and Ultra Therapy Solutions transitioned from being a staffing agency to providing medical solutions. Our services have extended to staffing for all populations, marketing management and providing lymphedema supplies. I also created a mentorship program recognized by the Texas Physical Therapy Association open to my clinicians interested to be certified lymphedema therapists.
I am offering the wheel to this entire industry and encouraging them to take a “U-Turn” with me. As we continuously seek growth, the pressure to be successful is greater than when I first started Ultra Therapy Solutions 7 years ago. Pressure to be consistent. Pressure to provide for my family. Pressure to hone my team. I remember what my college professor said: “Pressure is a privilege” and I used that pressure to my advantage.
Business and life in general changes. We all need to be ready to pivot at the drop of the hat. This pressure resulted in the biggest “U-Turn” I’ve ever done and it became the biggest turning point in my entire career. They say a five-year hump will be enough? That’s a lie, it’s 20 years.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am Marina Lakhmanchuk, a graduate of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, year 2010. I am the Director of Ultra Therapy Solutions, which I established in 2016 to specialize in lymphedema and wound care. I am a physical therapist and my goal is to reach the lymphedema population by expanding to all settings, that’s why I decided to open my staffing agency which transitioned now to a medical solution providing an all-inclusive service. I developed a course that is approved by the Texas Physical Therapy Association and I am proud to rise above to become a leader in an industry with grossly misdiagnosed and misgrouped patients that need treatment.

Any advice for managing a team?

Many of our team members whom I had worked with previously are still with us since day one of business and I couldn’t be prouder and more humbled that they truly invested themselves into me and poured themselves to Ultra. I treat them as my family; playing close attention to their needs and what would help them grow; knowing them, and giving them strong guidance or providing them a reality check if needed. I push my team to grow and step out of their comfort zones; providing the space and support they need. More importantly, appreciating them by recognizing their achievements and had work, it makes them feel rewarded. It feels so natural which is incredibly exciting but at the same time, nerve-racking to see somebody blindly trust you to make sure that you put food on their table. It is the most humbling experience that I could have at the time because just like anyone who starts a business, its starts with hopes and dreams. That will be something I will never be able to thank them for enough.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

Niching down helped me pave a clear path in this field. It wasn’t a walk in the park. There were times when it got too rough but I was driven by my passion for providing care. My team was vital to our success. We would fail, and try again thereby building trust and a true sense of team, that has been the foundation of our success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ultratherapysolutions.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ultratherapysolutions
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ultra-therapy-solutions-a0325a123/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmlZARJHVhMZUnAvpLAfyZQ
• Other: https://ultra-therapy-supplies.myshopify.com/