Car Crash Leads To Pain Relief Side Hustle

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

Oh, hey there. I'm so glad you made it. Thank you for downloading, subscribing, and listening to Side Hustle School, the only podcast in the universe, bringing you a story every single day of someone who is creating more freedom for themselves. In most cases, this person does not want to be an entrepreneur. They have a regular job. They are a full-time student,

like the person you're going to hear about today, or otherwise they're just living life, but they want to have more than one source of income. They don't want to be dependent on a paycheck. They don't want to be dependent on an employer, even if they like their job, even if they like their employer. So, the whole purpose of this show is to teach through storytelling, show you case studies, look at how these people did it, and perhaps give you an idea, or even some direction for yourself. Now, it's no surprise to many of our listeners that the U.S. health care system leaves a lot to be desired. Despite the great wealth

of our country, many people lack access to basic services. And it's not just about this profound inequality, as bad as that is. Even if you have good health insurance, it can still be difficult, cumbersome, and expensive to get the care you need after an accident. So, today's story features an MBA student who was in a car crash that left her with chronic back pain. There's not much good to say about a car crash, but the silver lining of her experience came about when it inspired her to create a system that referred physical therapists to patients' homes. This might sound like something that would be started

by a large company or a Silicon Valley startup with access to significant capital, but no, it really does begin as a student side hustle. It's very new, less than a year old, but it's already profitable. So you'll hear how she gets this idea and how she made it happen right after this quick thank you to today's sponsor. Rachel Sanders' life was changed forever by a car crash. The accident happened while she was still a full-time business school student, and afterwards she was left with persistent neck and back pain. During the months following her injury, she visited what

felt like hundreds of doctors to try and cure the pain, but the diagnosis was always the same. The pain was chronic. The only relief she found was through acupuncture and physical therapy. The sessions she undertook helped relieve many of the symptoms and made her studies much more bearable. But like so many students, Rachel's schedule was full. There

were essays to write, classes to attend, and events to host, leaving little time to spend on self-care. Most of the clinics she needed to visit for her treatment were only open when she was working or in class, and it was hard to get appointments for after-hours care. Rachel began to look for solutions. She wondered if instead of going to the therapist, she could bring the therapist to her. This also piqued her entrepreneurial interest. Rachel

realized that there is no shortage of busy people who struggle to find the time for self-care around their work. She saw this as a business opportunity and a way to help people she could empathize with. She'd learned a lot in her studies about how much people love convenience. Meanwhile, health care was still an inconvenient industry. Despite the amount of money most people pay in insurance over the course of their lives. This led to an idea that Rachel

called paging patch. She wanted to connect people with injuries or medical problems to physical therapists who would travel to them. The name came from the idea of paging a doctor and the way a doctor can patch you up. Paging patch. Her goal was to keep startup costs low. All she wanted was a website with a contact form that patients could use to submit info.

Everything else would happen once that form was completed. However, there were some factors that forced the costs up to much higher than Rachel had planned. Entering this industry, she needed to have a better understanding about health care and liability issues. She also wanted to make sure she got the project off to an effective start. Consultations on those issues brought her total startup cost to around $5,000. Much like the website for

paging patch, which was made in a few days using Wix, the product idea is simple but effective. Once you complete that form as a prospective patient, you first have to go through a consultation call. On that call, Rachel, or eventually one of her team members, will assess your needs and help you decide what kind of physical therapist might be a good fit. You'll then be paired with one of those providers in your local area. That provider will come out to visit you at your home where you'll receive a 60-minute one-on-one consultation and a personalized plan to fit your needs. If you like your therapist and

your plan, you can rebook, or you can switch to another therapist and try something different. This allows suffering patients to get personalized care and work with a therapist they can trust. And the system doesn't just help the patients, it also helps the physical therapists. They are able to sign up to the platform and register as a paging patch provider for their local area. They're offered contracts on a freelance basis, which allows them to maintain their flexibility and independence while bringing them another source of income they wouldn't have had before. Rachel makes her money from a finder's fee payment from what the therapist

is paid by the client. Now, I mentioned this is really new. Since its inception in October 2017, Paging Patch has worked with around 60 therapists to treat more than 100 patients in the Nashville, Boston, New York City, and Denver areas. They're seeing their numbers double each month, and some of their therapists are now able to earn $1,000 a month or more by being registered on the platform. Rachel's first sale came when she was at a networking event. She got a phone call on a company line, which back then forwarded to her cell phone,

and ran out of the event to take down the details and match up that person to their physical therapist. It was a rush of excitement that helped validate her idea. Since then, she's been using content and email marketing to grow her following. The project has been featured on industry websites like Shape and Huffington Post Health, and she's also building an email list where visitors to the site can sign up for physical therapy tips and tricks to help them improve their self-care at home. This gives Paging Patch direct access to their inbox and they can send promotional messages from time to time. So looking ahead, Rachel

hopes to expand. As mentioned, she's already providing this service in four cities. She hopes to increase that to more than a dozen over the next year. So if you need to get patched up and you want your physical therapist to come to you, maybe you should give them a page. Awesome congratulations to Rachel. This does sound like an intriguing project, pretty much

all across the healthcare industry, but especially in regards to having physical therapists or other providers come to your home. From the outside, it seems like there would be a lot of logistics and complexity to something like this, but it also seems like she's been pretty motivated to keep it simple. Or if not to keep it simple, to simplify and to focus on what is most essential, that contact form, forming a network of the right providers. Expanding quickly, but not too quickly, like she's in four cities, but she's not trying to be in 100 cities all at once. So it definitely seems like something that has merit. And it

also reminded me of a number of years ago, I had a running injury and this running injury was very persistent. I don't think it was as serious as Rachel's problems following her car crash, but it really bothered me because when I had this injury on my IT band, I went to a number of doctors. I was in grad school at the time, so I actually had really good healthcare. I could go and see a lot of different people at the university, but I ended up being frustrated because everything I tried didn't work. They did x-rays, I got a steroid injection, I looked up stuff on the internet just to try to figure it out myself. And the whole

point was what fixed it for me, and maybe this is a testimonial to the physical therapist industry, I don't know. But what finally fixed it for me was when I started going to see a PT. And that person gave me some very different exercises, showed me some stuff that I hadn't considered and nobody else I had talked to considered. And as I recall, it was about four to six weeks after that, that I was able to run again, and I hadn't been able to run for four to six months. So I was very grateful to her for helping me. And therefore I'm glad

to hear of other solutions that are bringing physical therapy to people in their homes, like exactly what Rachel is trying to do in this story. So got a mission, she empathizes with her patients, but she's also trying to make money. And that's great, good for her. It is my strong hope that you can find something like this too, perhaps it's something totally different. You may not want to go into the healthcare industry, but there's something out there that you can do, something you can do to make other people's lives better and make your own life better too. That is what it's all about. And that's why I keep bringing

you different stories every day. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. The show notes for today's episode, including a link to Paging Patch are at sidehustleschool.com/503. That's for episode 503. We're going to keep going strong. I'll be back with you tomorrow. My

name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.