Hippotherapy and Aquatic Therapy in Private Practice with Gina Taylor OT RR063

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About Hippotherapy and Aquatic Therapy in Private Practice

Ready to break free from traditional rehab methods and create a practice that truly resonates with your passions? Gina Taylor is an occupational therapist (OT) who has successfully built her OT private practice integrating hippotherapy and aquatic therapy. The birth of Gina’s first child was a pivotal moment in her career, and the rigid work schedules and lack of flexibility in her traditional OT role drove her to commit to her private practice full-time.

One of the most significant challenges Gina faced was integrating hippotherapy into her OT private practice amidst fierce competition. The market was already saturated with established facilities offering similar services, making it difficult for a newcomer to gain traction. However, Gina’s determination and innovative approach helped her overcome these hurdles and have a successful OT private practice.

In this episode you will learn about her career transition, balancing motherhood, implementing innovative therapy strategies, and the importance of partnerships that prioritize community service over financial gain. She explains how she diversified her OT private practice to include aquatic and nature-based therapies, overcoming initial challenges such as integrating hippotherapy and gradually building a consistent client base.

Gina provides invaluable advice for rehab professionals contemplating their OT private practice, highlighting the importance of hands-on experience in their chosen niche before committing fully, meticulous financial tracking, and early bookkeeping. Gina’s story is a testament to the determination needed to carve out a unique path in the rehab field while balancing a fulfilling personal life. Her ability to homeschool her children and manage her work schedule is a testament to the flexibility and freedom that come with running an OT private practice. Join us for an episode brimming with practical insights and encouragement to take those first steps toward your dream OT private practice.

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Transcript of Hippotherapy and Aquatic Therapy in Private Practice

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

Welcome back to another Rehab Rebels episode. This episode is for rehab professionals interested in hearing an OT’s journey to creating her own OT private practice. Our guest today is Gina Taylor. She has a Master’s of Science, adjunct instructor at Raritan Valley Community College and is a coordinating faculty for the American Hippotherapy Association. She has clinical expertise in pediatric and psychosocial interventions and holds certifications in sensory integration, dir, slash, floor time intervention and is a hippotherapy clinical specialist. Welcome to the show, gina. 

Gina Taylor 01:07

Thanks, thanks for having me on. 

Tanner Welsch 01:09

Yeah, I’m excited to have you come on. Let’s dive in here and get started. I know you’re doing a lot of things and just to give listeners a little bit of a background, you are an OT. You run your OT private practice and specialize in hippotherapy and aquatic therapy. 

Gina Taylor 01:28

Yeah, we feel like we’re doing a little bit of all the things, but we’re doing it. 

Tanner Welsch 01:31

For sure, for sure. Let’s talk a little bit about the traditional experience as an OT that you had, and probably starting recently out of when you graduated from OT school, and then we’ll talk a little bit about maybe the first sense of awareness that this traditional rehab model really isn’t for me or doesn’t fit me. So can you lead us up to really that point that you just had a sense that this traditional OT model wasn’t for you? 

Gina Taylor 01:58

I think there’s been a big part of my story that’s been non-traditional from the beginning, and going into grad school knowing that I wanted to incorporate horses into my future OT profession was part of the plan. But then as you go through school, there isn’t a lot of support for that, there isn’t a lot of faculty who have an idea where to direct you. And as you go through your clinical experiences you have that opportunity to see what the traditional rehab model was. And it was really important for me to have a field work placement at a traditional rehab outpatient clinic and I had a really good placement. But I also got to see exactly what it entailed and I was. 

02:42

Patients are really interesting, caseload was really interesting, turnover not so much, productivity demands not so much, and that definitely confirmed that I wasn’t that sort of therapist. I wasn’t going to be that sort of therapist. I loved my mental health placement. That was number two on my list of potential career options would be to work in mental health, in the inpatient psychiatric unit. But really, looking at what there was out there and what options were, was that beginning of? I don’t want to be in a school, I don’t want to be in a hospital, I don’t want to be in a rehab clinic. Want to be in a rehab clinic, then it is well, what can you make? Where can you find a place? Because when you’re working in a specialty area, there aren’t too many facilities that are looking to hire a full-time therapist. Often it’s one or two nights a week, and so that creates a dilemma of well, how do I make this work? How do I work as a therapist? I went through all the trouble to go through and pass my boards, and, and now what do I do? 

Tanner Welsch 03:45

For sure, yeah, was there a specific moment that you had that? From that moment you were like yeah, okay, I’m going to create my own OT you know private practice and build it out. 

Gina Taylor 03:56

That specific moment was the moment after having my first child when I asked for some flexibility from my job at the time and that was not an option. I had to stick with the schedule that I had been doing and we were just finding it wasn’t working very well for our family. That was really the moment of okay. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to make this happen, but it’s going to happen. Right from that moment the wheels basically started turning of okay, now I have to find a private practice location. I need to get the flow for a client in place. I had already had the LLC formed because I had seen a couple of clients here and there over the years, but this was a big change from that employee-to-owner mindset. 

Tanner Welsch 04:45

Let’s talk a little bit more about that timeframe. You’re a new mom. You’re wanting to go full-time with the OT business. You’ve had some clients in the past. What were some next steps for you for really putting on the business owner hat and doing this full-time? How did you get those clients and how did you find a facility and start implementing this stuff? 

Gina Taylor 05:05

Yeah, I think that’s the big thing. For a lot of therapists who are interested in working with animals or aquatics, it’s like, well, I don’t own a farm or I don’t own a pool, what am I going to do? I would love to do this, but I don’t have the facilities. And so it was a lot of emails, phone calls and visits and I went to a lot of different farms. We talked about what my needs were, what they could offer, what their schedule was, what my schedule would likely be based on the types of clients that I serve, then eventually finding someone who it was more about serving the community for them than another business venture, right? So some facilities that I was talking to, about partnering for them, it was really a financial investment to bring me on, and so they were looking at it from a financial perspective and finding a facility that was looking at it from a service perspective really worked well because they were much more flexible about what they could offer. It was more of a kindness than just what are you going to pay me per hour. And that was really the beginning. And same with the pool is calling around networking with some other schools swim schools and finding out facilities that they were using or had used in the past and getting the inside scoop of who you might want to work with, who you might not want to work with, finding somebody and finding a facility that was willing and welcoming really to take us on. 

06:25

As far as finding clients, it’s really interesting because I guess the traditional model is referrals, right, referrals from doctors, pediatricians, and that has just never worked for us. I got my first call with a neurodevelopmental pediatrician and that doctor is the doctor in our area and I was so excited and nothing. Nothing came of it. Really, our best pipeline is Facebook, both being in Facebook communities and just being a part of the special needs community, and when something comes up that I think is appropriate, or if we’re doing like a free event, we post that and doing Facebook ads. We’ve actually had a pretty good client conversion rate off of ads. So I know that doesn’t work for everybody, but it has worked really well for us. 

Tanner Welsch 07:09

Congratulations. That’s awesome. Yeah, Looking for a community angle for how to serve the community with the services that you can bring to the table. What sort of groups or places did you go to to find the best matches for this relationship versus those that were just really looking at the bottom line and wanting to see how much they can make from having you come and rent out their space or whatever? 

Gina Taylor 07:32

Yeah, it was a really, really interesting experience meeting with different facilities. Again, we have the barn farm side of things. We also looked at a couple of properties we wanted to set up a nature-based camp where we could operate out of, and so we met with a couple of property owners, did property tours and looking at what’s the lay of the land, what opportunities are present in this land. Is there water? Is there dense trees? Is there open fields? Are there danger areas Like a pond? 

08:03

For us was something that we didn’t want to have to worry about, but a stream is a benefit. So the traditional expectation, especially when we’re incorporating horses, would be to go to an adaptive or therapeutic riding center and partnering with them would seem to make sense very much. But in some cases some of the owners felt there was almost too much overlap and so explaining the difference of what I did as a therapist to what they did as a riding instructor they didn’t feel would be a particularly good fit. Some other riding stables again, they were teaching most of their riding lessons at the same time that I would be providing therapy, and so that after school hour, when you’re working with kids, that’s your main time of day. So I think that’s one of the challenges is finding those places that are not already fully booked for that 3 to 7 PM after school shift. Mark. 

Tanner Welsch 08:55

Makes sense. Yeah, I wasn’t sure. If there was non-for-profits or any community or state-based establishments, that would be a possibility to create relationships with what you’re wanting for the aquatics and or the equine. 

Gina Taylor 09:09

Yeah, so one of our facilities is a nonprofit. They’re a 501c3. One of the facilities we work with is a for-profit business model. Another one is a public institution like a college, and I do know that there are other therapists who are successfully operating out of state-run park facility as well as other nonprofits. So partnering for us has been the best way to go. Our dream is to have our own facility. That way we can be a teaching facility, a hosting facility. But right now it’s very economical to lease out space and so when we’re there, we pay, when we’re not there, we’re not paying. And also it works really well when you’re in this phase of parenthood, when you have young kids, that when I leave, I leave the horse maintenance behind, we leave the pool maintenance behind If there’s something going on. That’s not my responsibility right now, and so there is a huge psychological benefit to that. 

Tanner Welsch 10:05

Yeah, relief, and some responsibilities that you don’t have to worry about. Could you talk us just briefly about which service, I guess, do you offer at each of those different establishments? 

Gina Taylor 10:15

My husband and I are both occupational therapy providers, so we provide occupational therapy in all of our settings. But it does look a little bit different. So at the farm facility it’s primarily focused on using the movement of the horse to achieve the client’s goals. But I do have some clients that don’t want to interact with the horse, and so we use the other parts of the barn and the farm and do some outdoor, nature-based stuff. 

10:40

We’re at a strictly nature-based site and so those are all outdoor sessions, very much integrating things that we’re seeing in nature. We have stream, we have hills, we have forest, so our OT sessions there are generally about an hour long, because by the time we get out and come back and then at the pool, the aquatic OT sessions are very play-based and are incorporating the resistance of the water, the buoyancy of the water, and having that client interact with the water has been really beneficial in meeting some goals, and sometimes it’s goals that we don’t necessarily think about. For both hippotherapy and aquatic therapy the physical biomechanical model seems to be the obvious one, but there’s such a sensory implication of being in the water and so our clients with sensory impairments really often do very well in the aquatic environment as well. 

Tanner Welsch 11:33

For sure. That’s some great insights about the other therapeutic effects of using animals and or water for your therapy. So I really would love to get some insight on before you went full-time let’s say six months before you went full-time with this what was that like? And then we can talk. You know, maybe six months to a year after you went full-time, what was that like, and then we can talk. You know, maybe six months to a year after you went full time, what was that like? Let’s start with six months before. What are you doing? What are you going through your mind? What are you still working on? What are your problems or pain points, and can you share how you overcame those with us? 

Gina Taylor 12:04

Yeah, sure. So six months before was before I was a mom. I knew that having a child was going to change things. I knew it was going to change my work flow and work schedule. Didn’t know exactly what that would look like. I knew I didn’t want to go back full time and it was the question of how am I going to make this work? Is my employer going to be flexible enough to accommodate a different schedule or not? And if not, then what? 

12:31

And so there’s a lot of uncertainty, I think, in that period, and then add to it the fact that you’re going through a major life transition, these two big things that are happening at the same time and they’re wound so tightly together, feeling very unprepared for what was going to come next whether it was work or having a kid and not knowing what was going to be the best or possible solution. And as my child was born and then, of course, I had some maternity leave and thinking about all right now I know that I’m going to need to change plans and trying to make it as smooth as possible, both for my previous employer, but then also, what’s the low hanging fruit that I can start with that’s going to start to build us up and I stuck with what I knew and come to find out that wasn’t necessarily the best, maybe, solution. I mean it worked in the end, but I think it maybe was a little more challenging than it needed to be. 

Tanner Welsch 13:32

So what is this that you’re referring to? That you knew that was a little more challenging than it needed to be. 

Gina Taylor 13:37

So I stuck with the horses and I stuck with incorporating hypotherapy as our initial offering through our OT private practice and, unlike other areas in the country, there are actually quite a few facilities that have therapists that are incorporating hypotherapy into their practice. So, whether that’s OT, PT or speech, there are a number of established facilities that have therapists that are incorporating hippotherapy into their private practice. So, whether that’s OT, pt or speech, there are a number of established facilities that have been doing it for 20, 30, 50 years. And so coming in as an individual person, private practice owner, without a facility name behind you, when there are other choices, I think made it a little bit harder than if we had started off on like nature-based or aquatics, both of which there was nothing at all in our area. So, yeah, it was interesting. 

Tanner Welsch 14:23

Yeah, that’s an interesting perspective and pretty insightful. And so after going through that initial experience in the early phases, did you happen to change your approach or presentation to where really the hippotherapy was more of an additional service or maybe a back-end service, and then you went more with the aquatic OT situation? 

Gina Taylor 14:44

Yeah. So the really cool thing is now we find that the way we’ve structured ourselves is that our clients come to us for OT and then we often see them in multiple settings. They’re not necessarily just being seen at the barn or just being seen in aquatics, and so if I’m having a particular challenge in one area, then when I see them in a different context, either I don’t see that same challenge here or I see it present differently and I have different tools to work on. So I have a client right now that we’re working on a lot of motor coordination issues and so upper extremity extension and lower extremity flexion, and she just can’t quite coordinate the both. When you see her in the pool, can you get her to do extension with the barbell in the front or do like crisscross applesauce on the flow through mat. It’s worked really well in that they’re much more flexible and being able to see them in different settings gives us a lot more insight into what’s going on than if we just saw them with any one of our tools. 

Tanner Welsch 15:43

For sure, and some more opportunities for intervention to try in that setting. Yeah, I love that. That’s cool. We talked a little bit about six months before going full time. Let’s fast forward there. And how was that transition? What was going through your mind? What were some of your struggles? 

Gina Taylor 15:57

It was hard. It was harder than I expected it to be. I feel like when you’re in the Facebook groups of private practice entrepreneurship, some people are like I filled my caseload in three months and now I have a waiting list and we’re looking to hire. And that was definitely not our experience. Again, that initial offering of sticking with hippotherapy being the main area that we were specializing in, it was much harder to get going and there were much more ups and downs. You know, one client, three clients, and then things would change, that panicked feeling of am I going to be able to fill those spots again. 

16:39

Then summer came and then we offered the nature-based interventions and we had some groups run. Within that timeframe we were able to start to have a little bit of diversity in what we were offering and we had that opportunity to be like okay, we can offer some nature-based groups. We had that opportunity to be like okay, we can offer some nature-based groups. And then some of those people sort of filtered either over to the barn or into individual one-on-one sessions. That allowed us to, or me in particular, take a deep breath. There’s an up and a down and an up and a down, and you just have to know which one you’re on to look for the next and up and a down and you just have to know which one you’re on to look for. 

Tanner Welsch 17:16

the next and the services that you offer in this timeline. When did aquatics come in? Because you talk about experimenting a little bit with a nature base, which worked great, and you already had the aquine stuff. So when did the aquatics filter into all this and you guys see that as like a legitimate additional service that you can offer. 

Gina Taylor 17:30

That was about two years in. We had been looking for a facility for a couple of months prior to that. We knew we wanted to bring it in and just trying to find the right facility that was going to be the right fit with ours and the environment itself. Somebody was willing to work with us on time and time a day and then, about six weeks before we did, ran Facebook ads and we filled that right from opening day. It’s changed from where it started, so we filled it with one-on-one OT clients and now we’re a mix of aquatic OT sessions and adaptive swim lessons. So some of our OT clients that see us in the other settings are adding on adaptive swimming lessons as opposed to another OT session a week. In some cases paying for two therapy sessions a week was really hard for families, but getting that adaptive swimming lesson in was really helpful as an adjunct. 

Tanner Welsch 18:31

For sure. Let’s look at the year mark after you went full-time. At this point it sounds like you’ve done the nature-based as a service and you’re still doing the equine stuff. Where are you guys at? What are some of the pain points you’re having and how did you overcome them a year after you went full-time? 

Gina Taylor 18:48

So the interesting thing about when you’re in a nature-based setting or you’re working with animals is that seasons matter, unlike a clinic where seasons don’t matter. Seasons really matter. And so you need more than a year to go through the cycle of seasons so that way you can start to plan when people are available, how they’re going to react to the cold and make sure that you have parent education coming on in August, because if they’re signing up, they’re going to fall out by October oh, it’s getting really cold or parents start to have concerns about it. So as we got to that one year mark okay, it’s definitely viable, it’s good. As far as scheduling, I can book out most of my schedule now. 

19:35

Then it was just starting to back into what we had learned through that first year regarding seasonal changes, because in some ways you think of aquatics as a summertime thing, but it’s actually. Most people have their pools open. In the summer they’re much more likely to use their own pool or their friend’s pool, whereas in the dead of winter they’re much more likely to come to a facility, and so some things are even counterintuitive as far as what that schedule would be. And as we sort of came into that second summer we realized that families were booking their therapy intensives in November of the previous year so we thought we were on it. We’re like we got our stuff out end of March, April and people are like, no, we’re all booked up. 

20:20

Probably one of our biggest pain points of we knew what we could offer, but now we were learning when did we need to offer it? If you wanted your summer schedule out, you had to be getting that out as early as November, but definitely by January-ish, because people were by April. They had their summer planned. I was like, wow, that’s amazing. 

Tanner Welsch 20:40

So, since we’re talking a little bit about the seasonal stuff, what happened in those winter months, you know, november, december, january with the equine therapy? Is it temporarily just not available at that time, or how did you adapt with the season changes? 

Gina Taylor 20:52

So one facility has an indoor riding arena and so then you have the cold but you don’t have the elements. The other facility does not, and we just went with it. If it is literally snowing heavily, we will cancel. If it’s not and the client can tolerate it, we won’t. Because I have some kids that really can tolerate it. Right, they have more social emotional issues, and so as long as I gave really good instructions of what dress warm meant, we were good. And then I had some other clients that they just couldn’t tolerate the cold, no matter what they were dressed in, and so we learned a lot as far as telling families ski gear. If you have ski gear like pants, thermals, snow pants, coats, you had to spell everything out, because tights don’t cut it. And this year the facility that doesn’t have an indoor I said, from daylight savings time to daylight savings time, I’ll just be at the other facility. So we just switched locations. 

Tanner Welsch 21:50

I love that flexibility and adaptability and checking in with the clients. That’s great. What is obvious to you now that maybe you struggled with in the moment of you know, six months before going full-time with this business, or you know around the time that you were a new mom and everything was up in the air and just felt ill-prepared for everything, like you mentioned. What is obvious to you now and that hindsight and experience perspective that you can share with us. 

Gina Taylor 22:16

Yeah, I am such a planner, I like to have things planned, and there’s only so much planning you can do. And I thought, once I get it set, I thought there was going to be some magical done point. And at this point I realized there is no magical done point because it’s just an iteration, a new iteration of what you had done before. So each time we change or add or grow, you have to go back and redo everything. You have to go back and do your intake forms, you have to go back and do your welcome sequences. There is no done. And so it’s obvious now that you’re going to ride those ups and downs. You’re going to be starting over in some ways as you bring new programs in, and I was so worried about having it done that there was some sort of done point. 

23:01

And it’s obvious to me now that there is no done point. There’s just where you’re at and where you’re going For sure. What do you love most about your new reality? It might fly, it might flop, but there’s just something as a professional that is so freeing about that. And I don’t have to go through a board, I don’t have to go through paperwork process, I don’t have to go through six months of paperwork and red tape to just try something to find out. It might not work anyway. 

Tanner Welsch 23:41

Yeah, right, I mean there’s different aspects of the traditional model that we can talk about this on. One is specifically for the company that you work for and their red tape and their limitations, and then also the limitations on the insurance and reimbursement, what they’re willing to pay for and not willing to pay for, and all that stuff. So, yeah, that is definitely frustrating and something that is unfortunate. That is in the traditional model For rehab professionals interested in starting to branch out, do a side hustle and start their own private practice, bootstrap it and build it up. What advice do you have for them, or tips or what’s something that maybe you would have liked to have heard back then from somebody who’s already been in your shoes, where you’re at now? 

Gina Taylor 24:28

I’m going to give two things here, because one is on the niche side of things and then the other is on just the experience, overall side of things. Make sure that you take the time to go hang out with a therapist who’s doing it, volunteer, go and spend some time in that niche that you think you want to work in before you get all the things, because it’s often not what you think it’s going to be. Being out with the horses and walking around on a beautiful spring day and the birds are chirping and the client’s having a great time and they’re having this amazing break that that’s fabulous. But on the day that it’s 37 and raining and miserable and the horses are all tense because it’s a cold, windy day in the spring and the client is freaking out because they didn’t have a good day and they’re trying to bite you and they had bite you with the helmet. You want to see that before you jump in with both feet. 

25:24

So that’s what I would say Go out and put the time in to find out what that experience is like, or start in a micro step of going with a client and meeting a farm and going to pet a horse or something, because, again, it’s not often what you think exactly it’s going to be. You’re never going to waste time by doing that first, and you may save yourself a lot of time and money. And then, from the what I wish someone would have told me before getting started, because the niche area was my strong point and the business area was my weak point. I wish someone had sat down with me and looked at different ways to structure things and had helped me set up the bookkeeping and looking at which numbers I really wanted to track earlier on. I think that would have been really helpful of know your numbers. Get to know your numbers, start tracking things, categorizing things. That would have helped me a lot early on. 

Tanner Welsch 26:20

Let’s dive into that a little bit if you don’t mind. So you’re talking about setting up a business plan or different streams of income or different services you’re going to offer. Can we talk a little bit more about that and what you mean? 

Gina Taylor 26:33

Yeah, because we don’t own the barn or the pool. We have facility fees, Then we have our income that comes in from the clients paying us for their therapy sessions, and then we have your other business expenses, like email or your website platform. And just starting to track, what percentage of expenses do we have? What percentage do we need to set aside for taxes? What percentage is profit that we can pay ourselves from and still feel comfortable in making that payment? Because in that early phase and even sometimes now, it’s okay. How much should we pay ourselves this month? We know what the average is now, but did it vary significantly? Because most of our expenses are not exponential, so as we get more clients we don’t necessarily incur more expenses, and so that means our profit margin would get bigger. Just knowing where that line is of expenses, taxes, profit pay yourself would be great. 

Tanner Welsch 27:35

You know that would have been really helpful advice early on breaking that down and then there obviously becomes a limit on how many actually you guys can patients you can see before you’d have to hire somebody else, for example if you’re going to scale stuff. So yeah, something we haven’t covered yet. The horses sounds like something that right away you’re interested in right in OT school, maybe even before OT school. Can you give us a little bit of background of what was the big interest in doing that from the start? 

Gina Taylor 28:06

Yeah, so I was a horse kid. Pretty much as soon as I caught wind of a horse, I was a horse kid. I participated in 4-H as a middle school, high school kid, and once a year the Special Olympics kids would come and we would give them rides on our 4-H ponies. And so I was like, oh, that’s cool, and so my undergraduate degree is in equine studies, my H ponies. And so I was like, oh, that’s cool, and so my undergraduate degree is in equine studies. My parents were very supportive. They didn’t say what A career in horses? Get a real job. They were really supportive. They’re like I don’t know exactly what you’re going to do with it, but you’ll figure it out. 

28:35

So my initial side of coming into all of this was from the horse side of things and I started with teaching adaptive horseback riding. I was teaching riding because I was a rider to people with special needs, but then I was I really don’t have all the tools in my toolbox that I would like to have. And then it was just a decision of do I want to be OT, do I want to be PT? Do I want to be an SLP? So when I sat down for my graduate school interview and they said your undergraduate degree is in equine studies. Why are you here? And I was like I know exactly what I want to do. 

Tanner Welsch 29:10

And look at you now proving them all wrong. A follow-up to that is the aquatic therapy. When did that come into the picture? How and why did it come into the picture as a service that you offer? 

Gina Taylor 29:20

I had kept trying to convince my former boss to put a pool in. I was like it’d be great in the winter, when it’s too cold to be outside, and when, in the summer, when it’s bloody hot, we’ll just have a pool. And she’s we’re not getting a pool. Come on, we need a pool. We’re not getting a pool. I really want a pool. We’re not getting a pool. I lost that battle. 

29:34

I never did get a pool, but it was always something that really made sense for me. Again, there’s a lot of overlap in the benefits from both. And my husband he’s a CODA, you know, a retired Marine lifeguard, so he had all the pieces there and I was. So why aren’t we doing it? Well, we don’t have a pool. Okay, let’s find a pool. And that was really okay, let’s, let’s try it and see. And I knew from being pregnant I wanted to take an aquatics prenatal class. There was nothing. I drove an hour and 15 minutes to go to a prenatal aquatics class. I was. This is amazing. So I knew there was. Just there was nothing in our area. It made sense. 

Tanner Welsch 30:09

That’s awesome. I really love your life, your career, your life. You really have a what I would call a more lifestyle of freedom, like a customized life that’s outside of the traditional rehab profession and career. And I guess, closing here, I’m just going to open up the mic to you and just say is there anything else that you’d like to share with others that are interested in either starting their own private practice or even just, you know, cultivating a lifestyle that you and your husband and family have created? 

Gina Taylor 30:39

It’s doable and it’s easier than you think it is to get started. You don’t have to overcomplicate it, you can just get started and it will grow from there. You can grow it as big or as small as you want. We’ve grown to the point that we’re comfortable growing right now because we have three little kids at home that we homeschool and we don’t want to work five nights a week we could if we wanted, but we don’t and so it’s possible to start with just one night a week and enjoy the experience of doing something different, and I think it brings a lot of passion back to your work, just to have a breath of fresh air. So if you’re excited about animals or aquatics or hypotherapy, just getting started can really refresh you and then you can decide if you want to go further with that. 

31:27

A lot of the therapists that I talk with they just they really overthink it and they get stuck in their head about making any sort of move and it’s really not that hard to just take those first steps. So I think that’s what I would say to people you can just take the first steps and see where it goes. If you’re meant to do it, the path will be there. It’s not for everybody. I know some people. They just can’t handle being either in charge of it all or the business side, or the unpredictability. But if it’s meant for you and you take that first step, the path will be there for you. 

Tanner Welsch 31:58

I love that. Don’t get stuck in the analysis paralysis. Also, I think there’s other options. Like you pointed out, you don’t necessarily have to go full time into your OT private practice business. It’s something you can do on the side it’s like a supplemental income or have basically another avenue stream and customize your schedule the way you want. As you mentioned, you don’t have to work five days a week if you don’t want to. So I really love that flexibility and creativity with the career and schedule and lifestyle. Yeah, 100% Well, Gina, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your story. I’ve loved it. 

Gina Taylor 32:34

Thanks for having me. 

Tanner Welsch 32:35

Of course, anytime. 

Outro 32:37

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 rehabrebelsorg or follow us on Instagram at Rehab Rebels podcast. We’ll see you next time.

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