From Physical Therapist to Tech Entrepreneurship with Maggie Bergeron PT 046

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About Building a Tech Startup

Do you want to change your career but don’t know if the tech industry is for you? Listen to Maggie’s journey from Physical Therapy to being an innovative tech startup entrepreneur, co-founding a digital health platform, Embodia.

Maggie cultivated an athletic background that inadvertently guided her toward a career in physical therapy. A co-op experience opened her eyes to the possibilities within the realm of physical therapy, leading her to pursue her education. Initially drawn to pediatrics and global health, she eventually found her niche in orthopedic private practice, where the seeds for her future entrepreneurial endeavors were sown.

Starting her own practice was a leap of faith for Maggie, driven by a combination of professional frustration and a lack of adequate mentorship as a new graduate. The closing of her clinic to focus on Embodia serves as a stark reminder of the unpredictable nature of entrepreneurial life. In this episode, you will learn the significance of community and the critical role of hiring people who align with your values. Also, the benefits of avoiding external funding to retain full ownership and control over your business and the problems and stereotypes she and her co-founder ran into while building their tech startup.

Join us as we explore the entrepreneurial journey of Maggie and her tech startup Embodia, detailing its services and the target audience it serves, thereby providing a resource for healthcare professionals interested in tech innovation. Perhaps you’ll find what you need to make a transition in your career.

Resources

Transcript of going from Physical Therapy to a Tech Startup

Intro 00:01

Welcome to the Rehab Rebels podcast. Are you a rehab professional ready to transition to an alternative career? Hear inspiring stories from others just like you and learn the best ways to bridge your career gap. This podcast has you covered. Now here’s your host, doctor of physical therapy and podcaster, Tanner Welsh. 

Tanner Welsch 00:21

Maggie, I’m really excited to have you on and talk to you. I found out that you are the co-owner and founder of Embodia, which is a tech startup, and I’m super excited to hear your story and your journey with how you graduated from PT school and then got where you are today. I’ll have you go ahead and introduce yourself where you went to school, where you grew up, what you’re doing now, and then we’ll lead into how you got there. 

Maggie Bergeron 00:49

Yeah, absolutely. I’m super happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. As you mentioned, I am a PT by training and now in the tech world. 

I was actually born in Virginia and I grew up in Ottawa, Canada. Then I went to school at Ottawa U for my undergrad and I played water polo there on the varsity team, which is an unusual sport, had lots of shoulder injuries, as you might expect with such a sport, which led me to spend a lot of time in the sports medicine department. But part of the program I did my BSC in Kin and part of the program was doing a co-op. I chose to do my co-op at a school for kids who had mental and physical disabilities and I ended up doing the co-op with both a PT and an OT. It was eye-opening. I had no idea. So, coming from a very sports background, I just didn’t know that PTs could be in different practice areas. I had no idea. So I was so fascinated and I enjoyed my placement over the entire year of my fourth year so much that I chose to apply to PT school and I was also in the double cohort year. But I was in the grade 12-13 merge in Ontario, which means that we were two class sizes going into PT school, so it was quite competitive. 

I was a bit surprised that I got into PT school. To be honest, I applied to the ones in Ontario for the Canadian folks listening. I applied to the four. My French wasn’t good enough to apply to Ottawa U so I applied to the four in Ontario and got into three. Didn’t get into the one that I wanted, which is probably good. I wasn’t super financially well off, so getting into U of T in Toronto was probably a good thing, or not getting into that one because it’s just more cost of living. So anyways, I ended up going to McMaster, which was also alternative learning, they do problem-based learning and a little bit more exploratory Choose your own adventure style. Not great for doing the licensing exams but really great for when you get out into practice. 

Loved my experience at Mac, so I went to McMaster in Hamilton, graduated and during that time I switched from thinking that I was going to go into pediatrics, into global health. I made a big jump, I love to travel and I love giving back. Also, I learned in my master’s in PT that a PT could work in global health and international development. In the end, I did a placement in Northern Ontario in a place called Dryden, which has a population of 5,000. I also went to Tanzania in a city called Mwanza. I worked in the hospital there and just loved travel, loved the idea that we could potentially provide healthcare in places that didn’t otherwise help healthcare services, so thought I was going into global health. 

And then in 2010, I graduated with a lot of student debt it’s probably very common, and decided I couldn’t, one afford to go and do my PhD yet and wasn’t sure that I was ready for more school. So got a job and got a job in ortho private practice in Toronto, Canada, for the American listeners and I was a bit surprised at how much I liked ortho private practice and then ended up starting my own practice in 2014. But meanwhile, I had also joined a Dragonboat team, which is totally unrelated. So Dragonboat is 20 people in a boat plus a drummer and a steer person, and one of the people in the boat was a chemical engineer who was unhappy with his job as a chemical engineer. Tee Chi himself had a code. 

On the train to and from work I was complaining about PT problems. This was again 2010, 2011. The first smartphones were coming out just for reference. The internet was a thing, but not used the way it is now. We probably used Facebook mostly. I’m a terrible artist. Could not draw a stick figure for the life of me. He was not liking chemical engineering, learning how to code. He suggested that we try to build an app, and that’s how Embodia started. 

Tanner Welsch 05:29

That is awesome. I love this. Now I have some questions for you. The starting out of PT school, when you were working for Outpatient or though, you really enjoyed it, you really liked it. What was the reason for the shift between working in that setting and then opening up your own practice? What made you decide to do that? 

Maggie Bergeron 05:52

Oh gonna open a can full of worms. 

Tanner Welsch 05:56

Let’s do it. 

Maggie Bergeron 05:57

A few things happened. I was a naive graduate without proper mentorship and support. If you’re a new grad, I highly recommend getting proper mentorship and support. I took a job as a clinician and the promise was for mentorship and I had said that I would see two to three patients an hour at most. I was also a resident, so this was my very first job. Very quickly it became clear that I was gonna see four to five patients an hour, not two to three, and then a lot of it was MBA, WSAB. Do you guys use the same terms in the US? Car accident, workers comp. 

Tanner Welsch 06:36

I haven’t been in the work comp field since graduate school and I don’t recall using the term. 

Maggie Bergeron 06:42

Anyways, workers comp and car accidents, motor vehicle accidents, and it was just a grind seemed. So many patients, so little mentorship. And then I passed my licensing exam. I was even a bit surprised and I think the bosses told me my mentor was pregnant. The reason that they had hired me was actually to take her maternity leave, which they didn’t tell me, and she was partially the clinic owner. The only other PT there is a kin, a PTA and a Chiro and an RMT, and then me. Okay, so you’re gonna basically run this clinic. You’re also gonna see five to six patients an hour and you’re a new grad and they also wanted me to do my FCampt, which is a Canadian thing, but basically your manual therapy levels, which I had done. 

My level one exam was considering what courses I should do. I took so many courses in my first year because I honestly didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. I took a lot with Bram Jam who was still such a close friend and mentor. He was so supportive through some challenging times and that was my first year as a PT. I basically ran a clinic, didn’t know what I was doing, saw way too many patients, got really burnt out, and switched to another clinic with high hopes. It was better in that they had good intentions, so it wasn’t this feeling of they were really trying to screw me over. But there was still too many patients for me and too little mentorship. So then I moved to another clinic bigger time spots, 30 minutes per patient, which I thought would be okay. 

Again, the promise of mentorship did not happen, but I met actually an incredible group of PTs and these are lifelong friends now. I love PTs and I love lots of clinic owners. It’s just, unfortunately, I had three bad experiences in a row and this led me to open my own practice. Because by this point, by three, four years into being a PT, I had taken so many con-ed courses. I felt relatively confident in my clinical skills. I had zero business skills, but I decided that I’m gonna see patients the way that I wanna see them. And I also started to take more mindfulness-based courses yoga-ish courses, mindful movement, Franklin if anybody knows Eric Franklin, not PT, but Eric Franklin courses and then I also started to take myofascial release courses. So I decided to open my own practice. 

Tanner Welsch 09:14

Awesome In Canada. Where did you begin to? Okay, you made the decision you wanna open up your own practice. Where do you begin trying to figure all that out? I mean, was there a course? Was there a mentor for that? How did you put it together? 

Maggie Bergeron 09:27

Things just came into my life. I would say the dragon boat aiding is my co-founder. The clinical practice that I opened was actually out of a community acupuncture clinic and I was going as a patient, so I’ve also been a patient for many years. I have something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, as it turns out for those who are familiar, so I’m very bendy, I’m built like a dancer but very not coordinated, so I’m a terrible dancer. A lot of dancers have this because it’s a very bendy condition basically and it affects your connective tissue. I also have chronic pain as a patient and so I had been going to this community acupuncture clinic and their space is beautiful. It had lots of plants, it’s a big open space. They also have private treatment rooms at the back and they knew that I was a PT. I was going there as a patient and they suggested to me that I could rent space from them. That’s how I opened my own practice. 

Tanner Welsch 10:25

Perfect, congrats. It’s a big first step. 

Maggie Bergeron 10:28

It was a big first step at the time. I’m still very close with the owners and there is a bit of a side tension, if that’s okay. 

Tanner Welsch 10:35

Go for it. 

Maggie Bergeron 10:36

A lot of business for me has been maybe not in the traditional sense, because we do get a lot of questions now, especially Embodia has been running for eight years and we’re a Canadian-incorporated official company, very much so, but we’ve run very much as a business. So I get asked a lot of business questions, but I think a lot of it for me has honestly been about the people that we’ve worked with, and it’s the same with Embodia. It’s been the same with my clinic. The people that I opened my own practice with are just such wonderful humans and it is the same on Embodia. We look for people that we wanna work with, whether it’s instructors or people that we choose to hire, and it makes just such a world of a difference if you align with the people that you’re working with and if you understand your values and if you also understand the values of the people that you’re working with. 

Tanner Welsch 11:29

Absolutely. Do you have any pointers for hiring or what to look out for red flags? 

Maggie Bergeron 11:35

I have lots. Some of it’s very personal though. So I think at the core of it you need to understand one, what your values are as a person and as a business owner and then you need to have a process. This has been immensely helpful to me. So I no longer have my clinic, I closed that down, and I only do Embodia and now I see some patients virtually, but really it’s all Embodia. 

The way that we do this is by getting to know somebody, and I took this from Seth’s Rogan. Generally, I think a lot of ideas are reused and recycled and you learn them from other people. We basically work with somebody, whether it’s on a short-term contract or they’ve done a student placement Embodia. It takes students and they do placements with us and then occasionally we’ll hire somebody afterwards because we know them and you know how they’re gonna work. You get the real sense. 

An interview is fine, but you don’t get the reality. We’ll sometimes hire. I’m actually in the process at the moment of hiring somebody for a month contract paid, and they did their placement with us already. So I know them pretty well. But we really get to know somebody and they also get to know us, because it’s a two-way street If somebody doesn’t wanna work with you, probably you don’t wanna work with them either. It’s just sometimes hard to come to that recognition. So we really like to know the people that we work with and I think it’s really important to get to know that side of somebody. 

Now it’s not always realistic I’ve hired people clinically as well and it’s tough to know how somebody’s really gonna be with patients and all of that. So if you take students on, that’s certainly one way, but then also maybe just doing a short-term contract could be helpful, Certainly doing multiple interviews. And when we’ve cold hired somebody, we always do submit a resume and there’s usually something in our job posting. That’s a bit of not a trick, but it’s a clue. So ours, which seems very simple, is you have to submit a CV. We just ask that you submit a CV and then you email it. So there’s a specific instruction. If people don’t follow the instructions, they’re automatically cut. 

Tanner Welsch 13:36

Perfect. 

Maggie Bergeron 13:37

And then we do an interview, usually a phone call. So it’s a short amount of time. It’s a 10-minute phone call and then an interview. We try to meet people in person as well, even though we’re a tech company, we try to meet people in person if it’s possible. 

Tanner Welsch 13:49

That’s great. I love that little pre-screening solution you have with the instructions. If they’re unable to follow that simple request, how do you think they’re gonna be in the clinic? So that’s brilliant. Let’s talk about that transition of you. I’m not sure if you sold your practice or letting go of that and then doing Embodia full-time. 

Maggie Bergeron 14:08

To be honest, it was a process because I’m a clinician at heart, I think, but it was partially. The pandemic clinics closed in Canada, so there wasn’t much of a choice, and also Embodia just grew so much overnight that there was no time for anything else. And then, coming out of the pandemic, I just basically made the choice that I want to grow in Baudia and that’s where I wanna spend my time. 

Tanner Welsch 14:39

Did it naturally close itself because of COVID and you didn’t really have much there and it naturally shut down. 

Maggie Bergeron 14:47

No, it did close lots of requests, but then as I came out of COVID, I basically said maybe, and then I said yes to a few people as things were reopening and I started my practice again. I actually hired two clinicians to take over my caseload. But part of the problem if you have your own clinic and it’s Maggie’s clinic is people wanna see you, and that’s probably not something that I’m very. I just don’t have enough experience in making that transition because I didn’t. Basically, my transition was oh, you wanna see Maggie, she’s closed. That was the end result. 

So I probably can’t speak to that, but I had a really tough time coming out of COVID and trying to balance. I was working on Embodia through COVID basically 18 hours a day. It’s not an exaggeration. I didn’t sleep for about two years and neither did my co-mounder. It was a bit insane. But I had a decision to make coming out of COVID and also what simultaneously happened was some private personal things. Basically, I broke up with my fiance. The lease on my clinic was coming to an end, so there was a decision about whether I was going to move to the new space. The group that I was with was moving to a new space and there was an option for me to get out, which I chose. I basically said if you wanna see me, it’s going to be virtual, I let go of the clinical staff and then I have been traveling actually for the last year. This only happened last year that I made all these decisions. 

Tanner Welsch 16:13

Oh, so pretty recent. Well, I am really excited to dive into the next questions regarding Embodia, this tech startup, and being a woman in this space. I haven’t interviewed anybody quite to your caliber or what you’ve done and would love to hear all of it. I’m curious, you know, if you ran into a bunch of stereotypes or some of the challenges you guys faced and how you overcame them. 

Maggie Bergeron 16:37

You can probably tell, I’m fairly open to sharing if it’s helpful to other folks. There have been tons of challenges, but some of them probably related to my gender. My co-founder is also Lebanese, so there’s maybe some related to his ethnicity. But I think honestly, if you want it bad enough, it’s going to happen, and it might take eight years. It has taken us eight years to get to the point where we’re at and where people actually want our advice and where we’re a far better known platform, and we’ve done it the hard way. 

I would say We’ve bootstrapped, which, for anybody who’s not in the tech world, bootstrapped means that we’ve self-funded it, so we basically put our own money on the line. We bet on ourselves and did not take any external funding. We don’t have any investors. That means that we own the company and we can make all the decisions, which is, I think, fairly important and also, just from a practical standpoint, it is something that you want to ask any of your tech vendors, because who owns the company is pretty important, and who’s making the decisions is very important as well, not just the privacy and security parts, which is usually what healthcare practitioners think about, which is totally fair. Those are important as well, but who’s making the decisions? 

And I’m going to give a very extreme example, which is dialogue at Canadian company. Probably most listeners have not heard of dialogue, but there are more in the med-tech space. They provide virtual care doctors to patients. They were just purchased by Sunlife, which is an insurance company, so the insurance company is now paying for the platform that they own. The insurance company is making the decisions for that platform. That is a bad sign and I’m sure people can see how that’s bad. Just know who owns the company that you’re using. Preferably, know who they are and, yeah, know what their passions are. We’re excited to be doing what we’re doing, not that it’s been easy. 

Tanner Welsch 18:35

For sure. How long did you guys work at this before you actually started seeing a return on your investment, and started generating a positive net income? 

Maggie Bergeron 18:46

We started October 26, 2014. It was the date of our incorporation and we started to see a return probably in about October of 2018. It took about four years of a lot of hard lessons. We had people using it, but it was still pretty hard and it was mostly improvements. And the best comparison that I could give is if you opened a clinic and people always came in and they just wanted to see something different time and time again for four years, that’s basically what it was. Oh, but you don’t have this thing, or you don’t have this program, or you don’t have this practitioner, or you don’t have this service for four years. And then, about 2018, we hit our stride. We formed a few very important partnerships and we signed up a few very large clients, which just gives you validation and some confidence. 

Tanner Welsch 19:43

Did some of that. I remember on our discovery call. I’m not exactly sure about the terminology, but it was a melting pot or a fast track for tech startups where you could go in and pitch and talk to a bunch of different companies and stuff. Is that the result of some of these connections and partnerships you’re talking about? Can you tell us a little bit about that and what that is? 

Maggie Bergeron 20:03

For sure. So part of it certainly was that program. In the tech world, there’s something known as tech incubators, and those incubators provide resources for people who are trying to build a tech company. In order to get into this incubator, you need to pitch your company, which means you stand in front of a room often men coming back to your female question usually white men. 

Tanner Welsch 20:30

That’s what I figured. 

Maggie Bergeron 20:32

And you pitch your idea and you have it’s called a slide deck, presentation deck, and you’re showing the problem solution, why you are the right people to solve this problem, how much money it’s going to generate, why somebody would invest, why somebody should be interested. And then they decided we started in 2014. In 2015, I found out that there’s an event in Toronto called TechTO, in which not just healthcare, but tech people from all industries, and tech startups go and hang out and eat pizza and drink beer, as you might think with tech startups and network. So it’s cool. I clearly need to go to this thing and drink beer I’m actually celiac busted and drink beer and hang out with these people, and we did. And one of the vendors there was called the DMZ, the digital media zone, which is a big tech incubator in Toronto. 

As it turns out and I explained what we’re doing. They’re like great, you should apply. So we did and we actually got it. I’m not 100% sure how we got into the incubator because it was the first time that I had ever heard of this concept of pitching or putting together a pitch deck, but it’s basically just a presentation. Anyways, they liked us because probably one, I was female and at the time so this was 2015, they were very conscious of this idea of more women in tech my co-founder is Lebanese more people who are not white in tech and I’m also a PT. So this idea of having a technical co-founder, who is my co-founder and me in the industry, is the perfect marriage because you understand the industry and you could build the tech. 

We were two people at the time. We didn’t have a team, but they saw something and they let us in and we were in this incubator for the next three years and 100%. It led to our personal development, I think, as people, but also as business people understanding how to run a tech business, connections, the ability to practice pitches, and the ability to network with other tech companies. And, just to give some idea, it’s based. The DMZ is this four-story building downtown Toronto where they have tech companies from every industry, so it’s fashion, healthcare, there’s some grocery tech in there and you just work alongside each other every day. You’re in open co-working space and you get to network and chat with people and they also have resources. They have mentorship and programs that help you develop as an entrepreneur and as a tech founder. 

Tanner Welsch 23:16

Perfect. What does this incubator do you have to pay to be in this? Because if they aren’t investing in you, if they aren’t going to be able to buy equity in your business, then what are they getting out of it? It is what I’m trying to figure out. How does all that work? 

Maggie Bergeron 23:31

They get funding. Most of these incubators will get funding from governments, so they’d get funding from the Ontario government based on how successful their companies are. They also have a program where they will invest in you. We weren’t at that stage when we got in and we said no at the time when we were at that stage. There is an option for investment and equity. 

Tanner Welsch 23:53

That’s awesome. So the program that you guys show us is actually funded by Canada. I didn’t know they had those things going on, so that’s brilliant. 

Maggie Bergeron 24:00

They do. There’s some in the US as well, big ones in the US. 

Tanner Welsch 24:04

What would you feel was one of the challenges that you’re willing to share on this tech startup journey, and how did you overcome it? 

Maggie Bergeron 24:12

as a clinician myself, I’m going to pick the challenge of rejection, because I think that we all get rejected as clinicians. This is something that I didn’t understand in school. We’re not all the right fit for every person, and Embodia is not the right fit for every clinic, for every practice, or for every clinician. And becoming very comfortable with that is so helpful with your own internal piece, I think, and part of that is also understanding who you are the right fit for. So if you are a clinician and I’m not interested in tech at all that’s okay. 

But wherever you’re at, if you can understand what value you’re bringing and who you’re bringing it for, you will also be a lot more comfortable when people say no, and okay when they say no also, which is a wonderful thing. Once you become okay when people say, oh, this isn’t for me. They may not say it in those words, but you will be able to pick up on it. It’s just such a beautiful inner piece that you can come to and your life will be better and you will feel better about yourself, which will then allow you to serve the people that are the right fit for you, because then you can also notice when people come in and you are the right fit for them, that you can spend more energy there and then you can distribute your energy, because it is hard being a clinician or a business owner or a clinic owner. It is really challenging, and to better understand where you’re going to put your energy is such a helpful thing for yourself. 

Tanner Welsch 25:56

I love all that. Who do you feel would be good at owning and operating a practice and who do you feel would be good at, you know, launching and owning and operating a startup? 

Maggie Bergeron 26:08

I sincerely hope that there are more PTs and generally healthcare practitioners who want to get involved in the tech space. That’s been my side piece for a number of years. Startups are certainly a different beast. If you’re interested in doing that work or if you think that you’re interested in exploring that, I’m 100% open to talking to you. I’ve spent many years in that space so I think, even just to be a soundboard I don’t think you know until you try it but startups, you need to be okay with uncertainty. It’s a different level than clinic ownership. 

Clinics if you have solid clinical skills and you have a passion for a particular niche, I think you’ll do probably okay as a clinic. Startups if you have a passion for a particular area and you’re okay with being punched in the face multiple times all the time, go for it. It’s not pleasant for many years and I think it’s different. I haven’t been VC backed, so again back to the bootstrap. We self-funded it, but I just think startup is a different beast. 

Clinic ownership I did it a bit and it was a clinician for many years. But I think if you’re interested in owning a business, then you should 100% explore it and figure out a plan for exploring it in a way that you also have your non-negotiables. So if you have a family and you’re like I can’t pay my rent or my mortgage, that’s a non-negotiable then that’s when you need to go get an employee job or whatever. But you need to have your non-negotiable set so that when things go down, you know what your benchmark is. So you need to have basically your benchmark, your low benchmark, what is not okay anymore. 

Tanner Welsch 27:52

Yeah. So a question that I had for you, for sure, too, is how did you support yourself? I mean, you’re dedicating all this time to getting this off of the ground for several years. What did you do, I guess, on the side, to stay afloat and pay the bills? 

Maggie Bergeron 28:09

Yeah, it’s a very good question. I worked a lot. So I started my PT practice in April of 2014, and we started in Baudia in October of 2014. That wasn’t really planned, it’s just what happened. So I was building my practice, which there’s always patience. I was doing that as my full-time gig for four years, as we were building in Baudia and then building in Baudia all the time in between. I didn’t have much of a social life and I worked a lot. 

Tanner Welsch 28:44

Makes sense. I figured you probably practiced on the side you know in use for PT skills, but I just wanted to check because you never know. 

Maggie Bergeron 28:52

I found a few other creative things, but it was mostly my PT practice that was painful for me. 

Tanner Welsch 28:59

This is an overall, broad question. Whatever comes to mind. Answer it however you like. What have you realized from this journey, life awareness, or something that you’ve realized or gained that you didn’t know before? 

Maggie Bergeron 29:11

I think there’s been a lot. I think that when you really challenge yourself, you learn a lot about yourself, and sometimes that challenge is incredibly unpleasant and you feel a lot along the way. But I also think that you develop into a very different person than you would have been. I just can’t encourage you enough going outside of your comfort zone. I am somebody who is very introverted, and who likes to be one-on-one, which is maybe why this is quite comfortable. But if you put me in front of a group of 500 people on a stage, it might be a different vibe, although I did start a tech event which was called HealthTO, for the purpose of practicing my public speaking skills in front of a live audience, which started as 20 people and it literally ended as 500 people. 

Tanner Welsch 30:06

Dang. 

Maggie Bergeron 30:08

It was quite an experience to have to present and host and emcee in front of that many people, but when you push yourself to do things that are so uncomfortable being in a tech startup at times is still very uncomfortable to me, but when you push yourself to do those things, you also learn so much about yourself and you grow as a person. I think it’s a little bit cliched, but I do think that if you’re not pushing yourself and probably PT’s one of the things that’s more easily relatable is exercise. When you don’t push yourself, you are not at your limit, and I’m also a rock climber, which I love about rock climbing, because if you’re not falling off the wall, then you’re not pushing yourself hard enough, and I think it’s the same for everything else. 

Tanner Welsch 30:50

I completely agree, and that’s, I think, what’s required to grow and learn and discover even more about yourself. You have to be challenged and be put in these unfamiliar, sometimes uncomfortable situations in order to do that and grow. Have you heard of I don’t remember the title of the documentary, but there’s this climber that climbed up a huge mountain solo. 

Maggie Bergeron 31:11

El Cap Alex. 

Tanner Welsch 31:13

Yeah, so you know the guy. 

Maggie Bergeron 31:15

In the rock climbing world yes, very well known. It’s a bit of a crazy thing to me, so okay, that to me I would not do. I don’t understand the mentality, and there’s a new Netflix series called The Human Playground which is all about people doing really extreme sports that cause extreme pain and why they do it interviews about why they do it, which I find fascinating. But for me, when I rock climb, I want to know that if I fall, I’m not going to fall to my death Free, solo. If he fell, he was falling to his death. I don’t understand it, but I think that the idea of pushing your limits is fantastic. 

Tanner Welsch 31:50

It is great documentary. I really enjoyed it. Let’s talk more about Embodia. I would like to know, and the rehab rebels would like to know, who this service is for and what it is that you offer. 

Maggie Bergeron 32:04

The primary thing that we offer is an all-in-one platform For the practitioners and the clinics who want to manage their practice on one platform. That’s what Embodia does. We offer everything from practice management, EMR charting, scheduling, online booking and billing. We have super bills, and we do not integrate with the insurance system. So if you’re an insurance-based clinic, I’m sorry we’re not for you, but otherwise, practitioners in the US, yes, and in Canada we do have an integration with TELUS and we’re just about to launch our insurance with HCI, which is a very Ontario-based insurance integration. And then we also have HEP. 

So exercise prescription we have a huge library of exercise videos. Patient education that can be shared with the patient. Questionnaires, so intake forms, outcome measures. We also have a large group of pelvic folks who use Embodia because we have pelvic content. We also have the fiber and bladder diaries. You can build your own diaries like stress and sleep diaries. Those are the most common ones that people build. And then we have a TELEREE hub platform. 

So if you want to run virtual sessions, group and one-on-one two-way messaging between patients and practitioners, and then we have the whole con-out side, and the con-out side is multifaceted. So we have a library of courses. There are about 1,000 on-demand courses that are for practitioners. We also have an option where clinics can host their own content, their own courses, and sell them to patients in the general public. So if you have content ideas whether it’s birthing prep, that’s a common one, labor and delivery, how to treat your knee, how to treat your own back, clients and clinicians put together their own courses and then can sell them. They can also sell them in memberships and packages. And then for the large organizations like hospitals, universities, large clinics, we have something called private academy, which allows you to host your own content internally and train your team. So typically that’s used by hospital systems, universities, like I mentioned, it’s really for internal team training. 

Tanner Welsch 34:11

Whoa, that’s awesome. You guys really hit the whole spectrum there. 

Maggie Bergeron 34:15

We are literally an all-in-one platform. 

Tanner Welsch 34:18

Are you guys accredited to in the States, in the United States? 

Maggie Bergeron 34:23

We have courses that are accredited, but not the entire platform. So you need to check the course pages and if they have been accredited for CEUs in the US, then it’ll be listed If they’ve been accredited, because we also get accredited in places like South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, so anywhere that they’ve been accredited. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see an FAQ that says CEUs and then the list where it’s been accredited. 

Tanner Welsch 34:47

Perfect. Do you have any book recommendations that have been really helpful for you going through any part of this process that you would like to share? 

Maggie Bergeron 34:58

I have lots. It depends on where somebody’s at. 

Tanner Welsch 35:03

For sure, and if nothing comes out, that’s fine too. But if there’s something that you’re like, man, I think this would be good for maybe, the general population, or for somebody starting their own business, or whatever comes to mind. 

Maggie Bergeron 35:16

This is one of my favorite authors, bloggers, and podcasters not in the PT world, but I think that he has a very practical voice which I think PTs would appreciate. His name is Seth Godin. He has lots of books. The one that might be of interest, especially in the time that we’re in right now, is called Purple Cow, and the idea is there are lots of brown cows, but how do you stand out as a purple cow, how are you unique? Think about the area that you’re in practice, clinic, whatever business you’re in, how you stand out, and how you market that message. He’s a marketer by heart, but I like his voice because he’s so practical. 

Tanner Welsch 35:57

For sure I love that. Well, Maggie, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and share and talk about your story. We really appreciate it, thank you. 

Maggie Bergeron 36:07

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, it was my pleasure.

Outro36:10

Thank you for listening to the Rehab Rebels podcast. If this podcast was useful, make sure to hit that subscribe button and leave a review. For more information about transitioning to alternative careers, head to rehabrebels.org or follow us on Instagram at Rehab Rebels podcast. We’ll see you next time

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