Fyzical Therapy & Balance Centers

Award-Winning Care

 

Comprehensive Franchisee Support Pushes Fyzical Therapy & Balance Centers Toward Future Brand Sovereignty

Physical therapy franchises represent the accessibility of specialized care in America. However, widespread reach always comes with a unique set of challenges.

Balancing standardization of care while catering to individual patient needs, maintaining consistent quality across multiple locations, and staying at the forefront of advancements in rehabilitation are among the distinctive hurdles faced by physical therapy franchises.

Only those companies with a passion for community and healthcare can maintain their commitment to enhancing lives.

One franchise that has grown its reach across the nation is showing that its dedication to its clients remains unwavering. Through its thorough selection process and all-encompassing support system, this franchise is setting the standard for top-notch healthcare from coast to coast.

A Franchise Born from Previous Success

Fyzical Therapy and Balance Centers has earned its name as one of America’s most prolific franchises in recent years.

Forbes named it one of the Best Startup Employers of 2020, and in that same year, it was recognized as one of the Top 100 Brands for Franchise Culture by Franchise Business Review. The company’s established presence within the country only makes sense, considering its strong entrepreneurial foundation.

Fyzical was founded by a gentleman named Jim Abrams in 2012, who then expanded into a franchise in 2013. Interestingly enough, Abrams had successfully founded three other franchise brands prior to starting Fyzical as a company,

He experienced tremendous success in doing so and grew those brands to the point where they each had hundreds of units before semi-retiring. However, Abrams’ entrepreneurial spirit soon compelled him to do it all over again, except this time, he decided to venture into the physical therapy space.

The booming brand we see today is the result of that spirited decision.

A Multi-Path Model of Success

The surplus of experience that Fyzical was founded upon certainly shines through in its current business practices. With an array of versatile franchise models, the company has been able to turn a multitude of unique circumstances into optimal conditions for the brand’s growth.

The earliest of its models was the Conversion Model, which Chief Development Officer Scott Wendrych describes as its initial focus after becoming a franchise.

“[We would] go out and convert existing privately owned physical therapy practices… have them become franchisees, convert their locations over to Fyzical, put the Fyzical [logo] up, and rebrand,” Wendrych explains.

This practice not only benefited the company but also helped new franchisees, as most private practices were owned by physical therapists who possessed a ton of clinical experience but needed more experience running a business.

The Conversion Model presented a win-win scenario that allowed an expansion of both the brand and the individual therapist’s entrepreneurial skillset. In this way, they not only grew but also found a way to softly begin centralizing a lot of the mostly scattered specialized care in the physical therapy industry.

It was a smart move, as it gave Fyzical the authority and opportunity to begin attracting the interest of new players to the physical therapy market, justifying the deployment of their New Franchise Model.

This model simply involves opening a brand-new location by itself. Over the years, many of the New Franchise locations that Fyzical has opened have been started not by physical therapists but by experienced entrepreneurs who wanted to jump into the medical space, people similar to the brand’s founder–Jim Abrams.

However, what makes it so special is that while many other franchises use this exact model at the start of their run, Fyzical only went this route after it had gained momentum from the success of its Conversion Model, ensuring that all New Franchise clinics suffered little to no setbacks.

Wendrych adds further context, saying, “Everybody knows that healthcare is a booming industry… in the next six years, it’s going to become a $73 billion industry. So, it’s growing at a healthy 5%–6% rate per year.”

Entrepreneurs understand that there is no clear giant in the physical therapy market, but they recognize that there is room for a brand to become a leader.

As a result, Fyzical’s already stable growth rate, coupled with the New Franchise Model, gives savvy entrepreneurs the opportunity to secure their slice of the healthcare pie with a brand that has the best chance of becoming that industry leader.

That brand is certainly Fyzical because that influx of investor-franchisee confidence gave it a chance to introduce what is now its most lucrative structure–the Master Franchise Model.

This model allows someone to purchase a large territory and then work with the company to develop it into the market.

The perks of this model are fantastic. Firstly, franchisees get a reduction on royalties paid out to the Fyzical brand for all locations they own within their territory, dropping from 6% to 3.9%.

Additionally, suppose any clinics open up within their territory that they don’t own. In that case, the master franchisee also collects 65% of those franchise fees, as well as 2.1% of the royalties those franchises pay every month.

So, even though this model has a minimum $300k buy-in, the return is well worth the investment, which is why there are already over fifty Master Franchises across the country and likely why Fyzical was listed as one of the top 150 brands for multi-node owners in 2023.

A Culture of Top-Shelf Support

Despite its incredible franchise structures, that is still only a part of the puzzle behind Fyzical’s rapid expansion. The company is also well-versed in leveraging technology to boost its visibility.

It uses the service of an external firm named Buxton called SCOUT. This mapping software integrates customer and location data, along with its programmed analytics, to identify the top locations in any environment.

“That really gives us an edge over the competition,” Wendrych says, “it helps us understand what types of locations we should be looking at.”

Once the right location has been identified, the Fyzical Marketing Hub takes over. This is a fully integrated suite of marketing applications that the company uses for total brand support.

It contains thousands of market-ready solutions, from ready-to-use social media posts, scheduling software, patient education solutions, automation, digital newsletters, net promoter scores, and more.

This seamless integration of marketing products is quite literally the engine driving the brand visibility of every franchise in the Fyzical network, and every engine requires maintenance, of course.

That maintenance is done primarily by a data network called Fyzical Business Intelligence.  “It’s really important to understand the key metrics of your business,” Wendrych says, “this is how we keep score.”

This network contains information regarding anything from the number of new patients and referrals to the number of reschedules and cancellations and can display that data over several different timeframes–daily, weekly, or monthly, for example.

Franchisees can then compare that data in real time against the business plans the company provides them with to keep track of how they’re performing.

However, Fyzical doesn’t just give their franchisees a plan and expect them to hit every metric perfectly; rather, the company also provides an extremely thorough line of support and training the instant an individual becomes a member of the brand.

In the pre-operational phase, franchisees are provided with a real estate team to help them evaluate every single site they’re interested in and help them negotiate the best economic terms of their lease for the selected site(s).

There’s also an interior design team and partnered architects that help create the most cost-effective floor plans for their clinics.

Following that is an intensive training process that includes a three-day in-person orientation, a two-day hands-on lab, onsite education, and continuous business training with over four hundred and sixty hours of modulated video courses franchisees can access at any time.

This training is so thorough that if franchisees have employees who are physical therapists, they can gain continuing education credits via the Fyzical curriculum.

Lastly, the tip of the spear in terms of new franchisee support is what the brand calls FRCs–these are former clinicians and managers who have worked in Fyzical locations. “So, they’ve basically got a live troubleshooter for any question whenever they really need help,” Wendrych explains.

So, from setup to opening to actual operations, Fyzical provides its franchisees with incredible technological and human support.

The Fyzical Standard of Excellence

Ultimately, Fyzical’s goal is to become the brand people think of when they think of physical therapy centers. Wendrych expands on this, saying, “We will be [that] brand… at full growth, we’ll probably have somewhere near four thousand locations across the United States.”

To do that is no easy task, but with its unique niche service–Balance of Vestibular Therapy–and its focus on the sixty-five and up age demographic that needs it, Fyzical is poised to outperform competitors who have yet to begin offering such specialized care.

When combined with the pre-requisite standards of leadership, community involvement, and professional grit needed to become a franchisee, it’s clear that Fyzical Therapy & Balance Centers will not only continue to grow in territory but also in brand name.

Succeeding as a franchisee, ultimately, Wendrych says, comes down to two questions, “Do you believe in what we do? And are you passionate about it?”

AT A GLANCE

Fyzical Therapy & Balance Centers

What: A highly acclaimed physical therapy franchise leading the nation in specialized care and franchisee support.

Where: Offices throughout the United States

Website: www.fyzicalfranchise.com