My Business Story. From the Eval King to Physical Therapy – Pilates Studio Owner

My name is Steven Dunn. I’ve been a Physical Therapist since 1998. After finishing school in 1998, I worked for 10 weeks and got laid off. Based on the Balanced Budget Act, they made me some Medicare changes. That process took me eight months to find another job. 

I had to move from Louisiana all the way out to California to find a job, where I received low pay and it was a crappy job. I worked for about two and a half years more for two crappy jobs. That led me to have my own business. In 2001, I own a contract business and that’s one of the best things I ever did.

I finally got out from my boss and I was able to work for about 25 hours a week. I make more money than I was making when I was working 40 hours a week. Originally started with a contract business where I just filled in and worked for other PTs and other clinics. 

I was paid as a 1099 through my business, instead of getting paid through W-2. And I did that for a couple years in Los Angeles and learned a lot. I bounced all over the LA; filling in at this clinic, I did a lot of evals, I did a lot of patient visits. 

So, I have this Eval King through this one organization where I worked and they had 15 clinics. I would fill in and do evals at these HMO facilities all over town.

When we moved to Austin, my wife and I got certified in Pilates and we realized we wanted to build something different. Rather than just doing contract work for people and filling in for people. When we got certified in Pilates, we built and started a new program. 

We did that for a year in LA and then we decided to move back south, to Texas where my wife is from. And we opened up our facility in Austin, Texas, in 2005. We've been open now for 15 years. I had a business from 2001 to 2005 that was contract. Again, no brick and mortar. It’s just me bouncing around and working for other people in a 1099 situation. That was great.

Once we got to Austin, we opened our own brick and mortar, manual therapy Pilates. And that's what we've been doing since 2005. We took a couple insurances for the first 10 years and in 2016, January, we stopped taking insurance completely. We’ve been harvesting cash. 

We’ve got half of our business come from Physical Therapy and half of our business come from Pilates training. We incorporate Pilates into the Physical Therapy. When clients are done with physical therapy, we move them over into our Pilates programs, private settings or in group classes. That’s what we’ve been doing for 15 years here in Austin. 

This page is about teaching and helping others find a way to create other revenue sources in their Physical Therapy business. Pilates is the way we do it.

You can incorporate it with yoga or you could do it with other things. But that's what we do and that’s what this page is about; to share some of the business tips, some of the clinical tips, and some of the things that we’ve done over the years.