Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mitchell Schroeder. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Mitchell, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.
As with any journey to starting your own business, mine was a winding road. I started my career out in a traditional outpatient physical therapy facility in California. It was a high volume clinic, and though seeing 11-18 patients a day was great for building my clinical experience fresh out of school, it didn’t take too long before I started feeling burnt out. After about three years there, I realized there wasn’t any potential for career advancement and I didn’t feel like I was providing the quality of care to my patients that they deserved.
At that same time, my friend and roommate from PT school was a few months into starting his own PT clinic out of the CrossFit gym we attended. I decided to take the leap and join him in working to grow and build a clinic that truly had an emphasis on patient focused care. We worked together for two years and had great success, not only professionally, but also personally as we both found that feeling of burnout was gone. Even though it was a constant grind to build a new business, when it’s something you have passion for, it doesn’t feel like pointless effort.
Unfortunately, after two years of great growth and experience there, my father was diagnosed with cancer and I made the decision to move back to Colorado to be closer to my family. I was worried that it would be difficult to find a job that I was so passionate about again, but that’s when I found Colorado Sports Chiropractic and the owner, John Minen. He was a chiropractor who had the vision of building a multi-disciplinary clinic that also had a focus on providing “Olympic quality care” to all of their patients. I shared in his vision and always had the dream to be part of a multi-disciplinary team as I felt that different backgrounds and experiences really provided the diversity that patients could truly benefit from. I joined on there as in independent contractor with the responsibility of growing the physical therapy side of the clinic and I have been greatly enjoying the past three years there and everything the Boulder community has to offer!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My interest in Physical Therapy stemmed from a youth spent in sport participation and parents who were also involved in the medical field. Like many kids, I grew up playing a variety of sports but ultimately settled on soccer which I ended up playing through college. When I was in high school, my dad (a respiratory therapist) was the first to suggest that a career in physical therapy may interest me as a way to stay involved in athletics my entire life. That piqued my interest and so my senior year, I took a Career Internship class and spent one semester in an outpatient PT clinic and the other following hospital based physical therapists. After doing that, I knew that was what I wanted to do!
Or so I thought…when I went to college, I was studying Exercise Science on a pre-PT pathway and part of that entailed working as a student athletic trainer. I fell in love with that environment and the feeling of camaraderie that is so unique to sports. I started to think that might be a better career option. However, instead of making a decision between the two, I decided to pursue both in Graduate School which is how I ended up at Shenandoah University in Virginia. At that time, it was the only school I found that had a specifically designed Dual Degree program to receive both your Masters in Athletic Training and your Doctorate in Physical Therapy.
Now, with about nine years of clinical experience, I’ve seen my skill set grow and become more honed. Though I don’t specialize in any specific patient population, I would say our clinic has a general focus on the active population, which in Boulder, is very inclusive! I utilize a process in my evaluation called Selective Functional Movement Assessment which takes a look at the entire body and helps to identify stability restrictions versus mobility/motor control restrictions. This provides a great overall picture of each individual patient and their unique movement patterns. From there, we utilize a variety of treatment techniques including Active Release Techniques, Functional Dry Needling, cupping, tool-assisted soft tissue mobilization, and therapeutic exercises to gradually progress the patient in their recovery. Myself, and our clinic as a whole, really take pride in not providing any “cookie cutter” treatments. Every injury, every patient, every story of what brings someone into us is different and deserves to be treated as such. That’s what sets us apart.
Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?
You have to be able to connect with people! You could be the best practitioner in the world, but if you can’t develop a connection with your patients, they’ll never come back. On the flip side, I’d even go as far to say that you could be a sub-par practitioner, but if your patients like you and enjoy coming to see you, then even if their progress is slower than it should be, they will keep coming back (to an extent).
Understand that each person in front of you is a unique individual and a unique case. Treat them as such, and they’ll feel the difference, they’ll build trust with you and then they’ll know they can always come back to you if/when they have new injuries or they’ll be the first to refer their friends and family your way.
In school, we had a professor who constantly talked about “person first” language. It wasn’t the “15 year old patient with a torn ACL” or “the 45 year old recreational runner with plantar fasciitis” but it’s Jimmy, the 15 year old soccer player who tore his ACL and is now on the road to recovery to get back for next season where he’s trying to make the varsity team while managing all of the stress of high school. It’s Mary, the 45 year old mother of two who works in a high stress environment so running is her outlet and she can’t do that now due to constant heel pain.
Once you start seeing your patients that way, it’ll change a lot of how you practice!
If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?
No, definitely not. I can’t think of any other job where you get to be active, make genuine connections with people and get the natural reward of watching people achieve their goals and get back to doing the things they love to do!
All of that being said, if I could go back, I would try to have a much better understanding of student loans, how they worked, how much I was accruing during my time in school and start having a better plan of attack in regards to re-payment. Additionally, knowing where I am now, I would have taken more interest in understanding/developing the business aspect of a PT clinic while in school as well.
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Image Credits
Erica Johnson with EJMJ Photography