Parkside Sports Physiotherapy turns 21 years old today.
21st speeches are usually boozy recollections of embarrassing anecdotes provided by friends and family, outlining stupid events and actions punctuating a young life, while still holding out great hope for a bright and exciting future.
No different here. We are a family business. No Incs or Corps, no franchise or group to report to, just a local husband and wife who have managed to stay in business for more than 2 decades when the average is 2 years. We have learned a LOT along the way, we’ve been burned by colleagues, accountants and lawyers, marketers, employees and clients. Our first accountant and lawyer stopped returning calls while we were setting up the business and we later found out they were allegedly busy setting up their own business, an upmarket brothel and had quit their day jobs without telling anyone. We bounced back from that very shaky start somehow!
All business owners struggle with common challenges that keep us awake at 2am, like staffing, admin, marketing, red-tape and bureaucracy. The pay off is being able to fashion a business after your own values. After working in some less than fulfilling workplaces as a young graduate, being able to run a business where we can pass the “sleep at night” test every night is very fulfilling. Making Parkside Sports Physiotherapy a rewarding place for our fantastic team to work and offering our clients the best experience we can is what drives us forward year after year.
Physiotherapy has changed a great deal over the past 21 years. Being an applied science profession means we must keep up to date with the latest scientific research and developments. Many of the techniques and devices we used in 1998 are long forgotten, but the basics of listening to you, our clients, identifying your frustrations and goals and devising a plan of attack to get you back to doing what you love has never changed. To our great delight, a lot of research is pointing us to education and exercise rather than gadgets surgery and technology as the ethical, effective solution for most of the injuries we see.
As we’ve gained more experience as practitioners and employers, we’ve enjoyed employing and mentoring young people either on our front desk team, or as young graduate Physiotherapists. We are continually learning how this works as we get older and our team gets younger! But the basics of caring, treating our team the way we wish we had been fresh out of Uni and learning from our own work-life challenges will always guide us to be able to recruit, reward and retain an engaged, passionate team who buy into what we do.
Looking to the future, we are not planning on going anywhere! Despite greater competition every year, we are looking to expand our team, to continue to develop services and exercise programs which will add value to your rehab. We’re looking to continue improving the way we do things for our team, the way we engage with our community of loyal clients and the way we play our part in developing our profession.
Finally, we’d love to thank you, the thousands of loyal locals who continue to trust us with your health and well-being. Your continued support means a great deal to us and gives us great inspiration to keep doing that we do.
Matt and Meghan McEwan
Parkside Sports Physiotherapy
