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

Alright, Jessica thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

Five and a half years ago my husband and I took a massive leap of faith when we decided to resign from our physical therapy positions at an in-network, insurance-based clinic to start our own out-of-network, cash-based physical therapy practice. Many of our colleagues were skeptical our plan would work and one colleague even directly told us “you know this won’t work, right”. This may have been partly because we opened our clinic inside our garage. Looking back, I can understand how our plan sounded crazy to our colleagues. Out-of-network physical therapy practices were few and far between across the country at the time. All we knew up to that point was the environment and work experience related to insurance-based care and I can understand how it was crazy to believe clients would actually choose to pay cash for their care instead of relying on insurance.

To give a little background, both Tim and I had been growing increasingly frustrated with the insurance-based model of physical therapy for years. When we graduated from PT school we had a lot more time with each of our clients than we did right before we chose to leave the insurance model. Each subsequent year after graduation there was a fight for declining reimbursement from insurance for physical therapy services, while at the same time a change in a higher-level degree to become a physical therapist. The declining reimbursement issues created a squeeze for PT businesses to get more patients in the door to make ends meet. In most insurance clinics, this means hiring techs and assistants who are less expensive than a staff PT. Or asking PTs to see more than 1 patient at a time. Of course I understand the need to do this from a business perspective, but for the PT who now has to see more patients in a day and add a higher documentation load to an already tight schedule as well as the client who no longer receives one on one care or a lower level of service, this was not a good situation. We kept thinking at the back of our minds that we could see the writing on the wall. Insurance was (and still is) a mess and we felt the situation was most likely not going to improve.

Around this same time, both Tim and I had started to see holistic doctors for preventive care who also did not accept insurance. We realized that you get what you pay for, and when we visited with our holistic doctors and dietician friends they sat down for over an hour with us, going over labs and going in-depth with not only our labs but educating us on changes we could make to our diet and lifestyle to impact our overall health as well as taking detailed medical histories which, it turns out, are super relevant to our health today. What a breath of fresh air it was to have TIME with our medical providers and what a huge difference it made in our health and well-being. Both of us feel much better and are in better health today than we were years ago even though we were younger. We realized holistic care is super valuable and we wanted to offer a similar experience for our clients on the rehab side of things. Treating the WHOLE PERSON is a very big deal when it comes to physical therapy outcomes, but in order to treat the whole person you need TIME with that person. So, we set our business model up to have 60 minutes with our clients at each visit. Each of our clients will see the same provider at each visit for the best continuity of care. We do detailed evaluations to get to the root of their physical ailments, but we also go in-depth with other lifestyle factors that may be affecting their physical pain. Not surprisingly, people are willing to pay for this kind of care!

We see many clients who have had physical therapy previously and did not get good results. Sadly, this is very common in our profession and this is not because other PTs don’t care or aren’t good at what they do. Unfortunately, it’s a result of the insurance system and the limitations it puts on providers and businesses. I do understand needing to do what you need to do to stay in business, but Tim and I realized we could no longer ethically treat clients in the insurance system. Anymore, most clients have such high deductibles they will be paying for physical therapy out of pocket anyway and the cost can be anywhere from $350-$450/visit. It is a very rewarding thing in our business now to give our patients the time they need to get better faster and also to offer complete price transparency. Our business has continued to grow over the last five and a half years. We have a commercial space outside our home that we just opened a couple of months ago, we have two other incredibly talented and experienced staff members and we have been able to expand our reach to treating not only adults but middle and high school-aged kiddos as well.

My advice to anyone looking to take a risk is to believe in yourself and your talents and abilities. If you are willing to do right by people in your business you will be successful. Talk to those older and wiser than you, especially those in your field of expertise. We took years of business training with other successful cash-based physical therapy business owners which was invaluable. We continue to pursue business coaching and are always looking for ways to be better business owners and to take care of our staff and clients to provide the best experience possible when they enter our clinic. While there is always some underlying stress when owning a business, I am confident we will continue to be successful as we put the care of our clients first.

Jessica, 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 am originally from Chicago and received my Bachelor of Science degree in Kinesiology from the University of Illinois in 2007 and my Doctorate of Physical Therapy from Southwest Baptist Univerity in 2010. Professionally I have always worked for small, private clinics that focused on professional excellence in the field of physical therapy, specifically outpatient orthopedics. My professional expertise has a heavy emphasis on differential diagnosis and manual therapy. In layman’s terms, this just means when you come to see me I am going to do a thorough assessment to get to the root of your problem and to figure out which structure is causing you pain or which structure is injured. This assessment guides your entire plan of care and which hands-on techniques I choose to do for pain relief and to facilitate healing. All of the providers in our practice are focused on a root cause, holistic approach to rehab and we have a heavy emphasis on functional exercise. Our focus is to help active youth, adults and athletes look, feel and perform their best by bridging the gap between “pain-free” and higher-level performance goals. Our clinic looks more like a gym than a physical therapy clinic and if you are doing rehab with us you will be lifting weights at some point. We love helping our clients with movement-related issues get back to the sports and activities they love with confidence! Our goal is to provide not only healing care, but to give our clients a better understanding of how to take care of their bodies so they don’t continue to have pain and injuries. When you can’t physically perform the sports and activities you love because of pain or injury it does a number on your quality of life. It is our joy and privilege to be able to get our clients back to the activities they love. This could be running a marathon or just picking up and playing with your grandkids. I am most proud of the quality of care we provide at Restore/Thrive and also of the amazing team that we have which has a combined 66 years of experience in the field of sports medicine and rehab.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

Being a good listener is extremely important when working with my clients. I always tell my clients no detail is too small and that all of their medical history and other details are relevant to what they are seeing me for in the clinic. Sometimes half of our session during the assessment is spent going through their history and this is always so valuable for me to hear!

How’d you meet your business partner?

Yup….he’s my husband! Ha! I get questions all the time about how well we work together. I’m sure it doesn’t work for some people, but for us we love it! We each have unique skills that we bring to our business, both in our clinical skills and on the business side of things and this is why our business has thrived. If you are not married to your business partner, I recommend choosing someone who is not just like you. Make sure your partner has strengths that you do not so you balance each other out well and have all the important areas in business covered.

Contact Info:

• Website: restorethrive.com
• Instagram: @restorethrive
• Facebook: Restore/Thrive, LLC
• Linkedin: Jessica Cummings, Tim Cummings
• Youtube: Restore/Thrive

Image Credits
Rebecca Peters Photography