Summary:
This week, Nadeena Thenabadu, a physiotherapist and business owner, joins Michael Dermansky to share his journey from clinician to successful clinic owner. He discusses how he integrated podiatry services, tackled recruitment challenges, and built a strong team culture through open communication and leadership.
Nadeena also reveals what it takes to expand to new locations, maintain high-quality care, and keep staff motivated. If you’re looking for practical business and leadership insights, this episode is for you!
CLICK HERE to read the full transcript from episode 8 of The Business of Allied Health
Nadeena Thenabadu – Director of Head2Toe Physiotherapy and Podiatry
Nadeena Thenabadu is the Director of Head2Toe Physiotherapy and Podiatry, a multidisciplinary clinic with 11 clinicians operating in inner northwest Melbourne. In December 2023 he became a business owner at the age of 24 after purchasing the practice where he had worked as an employee for two years. Since then, he has successfully expanded the clinic from a small suite in a medical center with 3 clinicians to a thriving practice with 11 clinicians across three sites.
When initially taking over the business, Nadeena faced numerous challenges in leadership, marketing, and quality control. One of the most pressing issues was the absence of podiatrists despite a large patient waitlist—an obstacle he had to resolve swiftly.
Professionally, Nadeena is a passionate physiotherapist currently pursuing dual full-time degrees: a Master of Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy at La Trobe University and a Master of Health Administration at Monash University. He is also committed to shaping the future of physiotherapy by supervising undergraduate students as part of their APP training program. His dedication to clinical excellence and business growth is driven by a vision to create a workplace where both patients and practitioners can thrive.
In 2025, Head2Toe Physiotherapy and Podiatry was awarded the Outstanding Healthcare Improvement Award in North West Melbourne.
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Medina’s journey in physiotherapy
- Establishing podiatry services
- Recruitment strategies for podiatrists
- Integrating physiotherapy and podiatry
- Challenges in podiatry services
- Building a cohesive team
- Expanding services to new locations
- Reflections on leadership and growth
Key takeaways:
-
When introducing podiatry into a physio practice, the most important steps Nadeena took to reduce risk were:
- Assessing crossover skills – Identified which services could also be provided by the physio and which required a podiatrist. There was significant overlap in musculoskeletal treatments that could be performed by either clinician.
- Expanding his own knowledge – Learned skills from podiatrists, such as orthotics, to enhance his expertise and further reduce risk.
- Bridging the knowledge gap – Realised there was a significant gap in podiatrists’ knowledge of musculoskeletal conditions and their ability to apply manual therapy. Addressing this improved their skills, enhanced service quality, and became a key staff retention tool—especially important given there are only about 6,000 registered podiatrists in Australia.
- Managing team fit – Regardless of short-term business risks, retaining staff who didn’t align with the practice’s culture wasn’t worthwhile. He prioritised having tough conversations early and fostering a culture where these discussions were normalised.
- Showing appreciation – Staff don’t always know their efforts are valued. Regularly thanking them is a simple yet effective way to boost morale and motivation.
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Ep 8- full transcript
Michael
Hi everyone, and welcome to the show that explores with allied health business owners and managers what’s important about being in allied health business today. My name is Michael Dermansky, I’m the Senior Physiotherapist at MD Health and I’ve got a special guest today, Nadeena Thenabadu, who’s from Head to Toe Physio. Welcome to the show.
Nadeen
Thanks Michael, thanks for having me on.
Michael
Well, tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, about your career as a physiotherapist and what got you to where you are right now.
Nadeena
Yeah, so I’ve been a physio now I think now for around four five years. I graduated in 2020. I started working in private practice at Head to Toe Physiotherapy and Podiatry where I was an employee for two years, working under someone else. And then in that second year, I approached the business owner to actually buy the practice because I had a few ideas that I wanted to implement. From there, I started business ownership in my third year built the practice because we were in a medical center in Moonee Ponds. In that first year, I think it actually took around eight months and I wanted to open a second practice. Did that in Brunswick and then in my second year of ownership, was last year, also established like an exercise rehab space in Moonee Ponds as well. Pretty much a little bit of background about me is now I’m also studying my masters of musculoskeletal physiotherapy a bit of study into my Masters of Health Administration as well. two post grad degrees that I’m nearly done with. I’ll be finished both this year. And yeah, I’m big sucker for knowledge. I enjoy what I do. I love what I do. I love both the physiotherapy side of things. I love getting great quality outcomes, doing great assessments on patients. And I also like the business side of things. I love helping the people around me, my employees around me, who actually a lot of my ex students now, it’s hard to say that in like your fourth or fifth year of practice that you got ex-students who are working for you. yeah, just helping them grow, like where they’ve started and where they’re going now is quite inspirational for me to see. So yeah, I’m just enjoying it. I feel like I work a day in my life actually.
Michael
Yeah. Fantastic as well. I’m not just, you saying that out loud in such a short period of time, how much you’ve been able to do. It’s pretty exhausting for everyone else too, so it’s fantastic that you’ve been able to do so many things too.
Nadeena
Yeah, I think it just comes down to the fact is I never looked at it as work. I never go, work’s at seven o’clock. I think I never looked at it in that perspective. was, Physiotherapy is what I loved, so it was just doing what I loved. So I never worked an hour for the last couple of years, I guess.
Michael
Fair enough. Well, the one topic I want to talk about today is, you know, the podiatry clinic. So a couple of years ago, you bought this business. When you bought the practice, you were an employee. It had previously had, so it previously had podiatry services, but at the time that you bought the practice, that that service had stopped or was wasn’t running anymore. Is that right?
Nadeena
Yeah, 100%. Look, there’s no sugar coating. There was a bit of a breakdown going on. So we had a previous podiatrist, the senior podiatrist, she was great. She was seeing a lot of patients during the week, very popular in that area. But because of that business transition, wanted to move away from the clinic. And because of that, it left this sort of gaping hole of there’s like 80 patients, 80 to 100 patients a week trying to get in and we had no podiatrist. So, and if you think physios are hard to and recruit. podiatrists, like there’s only 6,000 registered podiatrists in Australia. The APA has 30 to 40,000 members itself for physiotherapy. it’s just such a small cohort that it was almost a little bit of panic stations at that time. yeah.
Michael
Yep. So how did you go about it? Cause you needed to establish a service from scratch. You know, you knew the demand was there. People were asking you about it too. You’re saying your podiatrist was gone. yet you did it. So what did you do?
Nadeena
Yeah, 100%. So to be honest, we ended up hiring three podiatrists. So within a month of that, other senior podiatrists are moving. And all those three came from different ways of recruiting someone. So the first podiatrist was our senior podiatrist. He came on part time. I knew this guy because I had kept in contact with him. That’s networking. I hadn’t lost contact with him had been friends with him like a year ago and like you know people get busy we sometimes lose a bit of contact but we always keep on talking keep on joking with each other but because of that, he knew who I was, he knew the personality and what I was sort trying to do to the organisation and he wanted to be a part of that. Another part of him as well was also breaking down where he was at in his career and what sort of personality he was and what would attract him to come to our organisation even if that was in a part-time basis. And for him, he was a person that had been, let’s say like an employee-based person who’s just service delivery, service delivery, but this guy’s really social he actually loves teaching. So I looked at that and I looked at what like pretty much job design. I’m like, wait, hang on this person. Yeah, he loves his service delivery, but he’d be a great mentor for other clinicians. So that was one piece of the puzzle piece that I put together and that came down to just pretty much networking and just getting to know a person. And this wasn’t planned or anything like that. I want to make that clear is it was just from having those relationships in the past that I could draw on those in that present time when I needed someone.
Michael
Yeah, yeah. And then you said you had three in a month after that too. So that was the senior podiatrist. What happened?
Nadeena
So that was the first one. Yeah, the other two. One of them was straight off seek. It was just a job ad and she was looking to change businesses and she’d been working somewhere else for six months. So again, what we look at is what can we do to sort of attract such a person to our organization and looking at what the podiatry industry is and what do we offer. And to be honest, that was in our name is, hang on, we’ve got physios here get to work with physios, let alone in a team. When we look at the podiatry industry, there’s some great large big clinics here and there, but a lot of people are doing afternoon sessions, day sessions in a GP clinic, and they might be doing that all week, and where they actually don’t get to interact or be within a team. So for her, that was sort of her need, and because of that, we were able to sort of attract her to come and be part of a bigger team. The last podiatrist and this one I was actually like she’s still with with us and Two of the podiatrists are still with us to this year, but this one I’ve been really impressed with this last few years is he Was a graduate, but how I actually got onto him was I was sending out messages on LinkedIn I was messaging people like hey, I mean would you be interested? In coming across and this one guy and his name was Tom He said look I’m hired, but I know my mates look looking for a place to work. And just through, again, that sort of networking, he put me onto Jordan. And Jordan lives so close by, he’s literally almost like 500 metres down the road, he found our practice. And yeah, for him, it was just getting his feet into the door and he wanted a mentor. And then we had Eunice, who was that senior podiatrist. So it was almost a marriage made in heaven, I guess, yeah.
Michael
Fantastic as well. so you said with Jordan as well, was a new graduate at the time, wanted to work as well, but he’s really impressed you the last couple of years as well. So how has he progressed over that period of time?
Nadeena
Yeah, I think straight out of university, think there was, he was really adapting to that full time, not close to full time caseload and like getting used to being in like a mature environment. Like we got to take a step back and understand like a lot of people graduate and they’re 21, 22, like they’re not full grown adults yet. And that’s that is just the fact of the industry. So because of that, it actually just take a bit of adaptation, being able to be like thorough in your processes, having pride of quality in work, that at the start I think he had the good intentions, he wanted to do that but did not know how to go about it. But over years he’s been working on that and I can see him sort of growing. not in a leadership position, but he’ll go in and help somebody else or he will look to sort of improve our practices within our podiatry department. Those are sort of the little signs that we saw that of growth over the years, yeah.
Michael
Right. Well, I mean, guess I was gonna say a question, flipping it a little bit. You’re a physio, you know that with your degree, you can’t just step in and do the job. So, you know, if it’s another physiotherapist, if they leave, they’re not available, you can step in and do it. With podiatry, you can’t do that. What does that mean in establishing the service for you?
Nadeena
Yeah, great. So what I pretty much did, and I still remember this was that crossover time with the clinic, is I looked at what can I do, what can’t I do. So what I can do is I can do the musculoskeletal stuff. What I can potentially grow myself into is to learn more about orthotics as a physio to then actually also help with orthotic prescription as well, which I actually did. Because that was needed of me at the time. What I can’t do is the dermatological care. So you’re ingrowing toenails, you’re calluses your athlete’s foot conditions. I can’t help with that. I can’t help these physios with that nor can I sort of step in. So I’d identify, all right, these are the key main areas that I can’t help with. So what we then did was we looked at it and pretty much looked at what’s the patient journey for these conditions? What are their initial presentations like? And what do we need to do across their journey? Create a standardized, almost protocol in a way of what we need to achieve with this. And then based on that, we would give it to our senior podiatrist Eunice who would then go through those things with the podiatrist. I also want to emphasize as well is within that musculoskeletal space of foot and ankle, again another great opportunity that we found with combining physio and podiatry together is the podiatrists aren’t actually trained in undergrad in things like manual therapy or a clinical reasoning framework. It’s actually quite biomedical. So breaking things back down to a functional perspective and simplifying things was actually a massive advantage to them. So they would come and they would say, this mentoring that we’re getting, which is almost a physiotherapy model, it’s actually what I want to do. I want to do manual therapy. I want to do good exercise prescription. And I think there’s, again, there’s some great clinics out there with podiatry, but there are some that will be very sort of either protocol driven or based on like sort of passive therapies like shock. We see a lot of clinics doing shockwave. So we identified that and we’ve just presented it back to these grads and like, look we can do that shockwave if we want to, but we want to empower a patient to be able to actually treat the reasons why they were in pain in the first place, if you take it like a basic plantar fascia. We want to work on those reasons why that plantar fascia got irritated in the first place, not just whack it with a bit of shockwave and then off you go. So that was really attractive. And I think just bringing that almost ethical model to them of musculoskeletal care, they resonated with. So then they were willing to buy it into, okay, this is a physio who’s teaching me about MSK foot and ankle, but I’m actually willing to do this because I can see this is value driven and I can see that this is going to hopefully potentially make them advance really far in their career and give them a competitive edge in the podiatry industry.
Michael
I know. I mean, that’s a really interesting story because there’s three major elements to that. So number one, you minimise your risk by making sure, well, what can I do? What can I do? What can I learn? And what can I not learn? And so you reduce the risk of what the podiatrist, where that unique skill set was there that you couldn’t step in to do. Second of all, you flipped it and made it a whole opportunity where I can see a gap in their knowledge that will make them better clinicians. We’re gonna expand on that, make it one of our competitive advantages as opposed to a hindrance by teaching them musculoskeletal skills and improving their knowledge and getting even better outcomes for clients as well. That’s two very, very clever things to do,
Nadeena
Yeah, and like it was crazy the stuff that we were sort of learning is like even things like simple outcome measure taking like from like a foot and ankle disability index, it’s the stuff that hadn’t been taught. So teaching that was actually a game changer. it’s just, yeah, I think we can undervalue what we actually can do in that sort of foot and ankle space as physios, yeah.
Michael
Yeah, we can undervalue what our learning means to someone that’s been treated in different way. You think that it’s going to be the same, but it’s not. the fact that you took the risk and actually hired people meant that you’d learned something you wouldn’t have otherwise known and saw the world in different way. What other further challenges you had to overcome now with podiatry? That’s two things. Any other obvious challenges you’ve had to overcome as well?
Nadeena
Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, 150, it’s an ongoing challenge even to this day is because our senior podiatrist is part time, I think quality control is really important with any service or any product. And the best people to keep quality control to a high standard is usually the senior physiotherapist within a clinic who can actually go in and analyze themselves. We don’t have that as much because we have got to do different strategies. I’ve got to sort take on feedback sometimes about like, oh, I’m struggling, one of the podiatrists might be, oh, I had this sort of foot in, actually maybe even a dermatological case, and then I’ve got to sort of park it and then come back to it when, let’s say, and call Eunice and be like, hey, this popped up, what’s your thoughts, could you give the podiatrist a call? So there’s just sort of those lag times that we see as a result of that.
Michael
Right.
Nadeena
One thing again business numbers wise that we did see and this is always going to happen when we have such a volume of hours done by a graduate cohort is our rebook rates did drop down in podiatry compared to previous years because we had a senior clinician who’s really popular and we have now graduates coming in and that was anticipated. With rebooking in podiatry, especially with dermatological care, actually usually lifetime care. So it was really teaching communication skills with these podiatrists with, this person’s coming with this dermatological condition. And yeah, they may say, oh yeah, I’ll book online, but you don’t, how are gonna communicate that to make sure that you do get a booking then and there in that session? Because at the end of the day, they might forget in 10 weeks time, eight weeks time when it comes around. Just having that appointment reminded there keeps them within our infrastructure. And it allows us to be more proactive as opposed to them forgetting in 10 weeks than presenting at the 20 week mark with really advanced ingrown toenail or calluses or corns that are really deep.
Michael
Yeah. And how have you overcome that challenge and what steps have you seen change in this period of time?
Nadeena
Yeah, so I think a few steps that we’ve done is we’ve always provided that’s one of our sort of KPIs on our dashboards that we constantly provide to the clinicians so they know where they’re at. We’ve educated them on the understanding of that KPI as well. Communication training too, how do you communicate this, Making sure that, again, with the patient journey, things like care calls are being conducted, that they’re also asking for active feedback from clients to see if they can get some critical feedback regarding our is what I’m doing well, this is what I’m not doing well, then being open to critical feedback as well. The good thing is with this bunch, with this podiatrist, they’ve always been open to critical feedback, they never get offended. We’ve created a culture where either conflict or criticism is openly taken, we’re not offended or anything like that. So just looking at that and always just looking to get better in that has helped. Yeah.
Michael
I mean, I guess that’s an even different question as well. What steps have you put in place to build and nurture your team? Because it sounds like there’s quite a lot happening in the background to really have that cultural cohesion in your physio podiatry team.
Nadeena
Yeah, 100%. So let’s say when I first started in my first couple of years of being a business owner, I’m not gonna lie to you, a lot of that came on me. One thing that I actually felt was a really good thing to communicate to the team was I actually myself as a leader never try to look perfect. I also try to show them that I’m always learning, that I’m always open to criticism. I always ask them for critical feedback on myself. I’m never defensive. I’m trying to set that example for the rest of the team of this is the example of how a seniorish clinician should look like. I don’t call myself a senior clinician just letting you know, only four or five years in, but at that time I had to be. And just setting that example of, okay, this is the behaviors and the traits of someone who’s trying to advance in their career. This is what it looks like. And I think that’s been put on board. Then this is more happened within the next nine months. We have a very, very, strong leadership team now. The leadership team, they emulate those characteristics as well. They are always asking for critical feedback for themselves. So then when we provide critical feedback back to the team member, they know this is reciprocal. Even last month, we had a lot of one-on-one meetings where we were having a lot of hard conversations, but they were all taken well because this is our culture, who we are. We are open to feedback. We actually almost invite healthy conflict in a way.
Michael
Yeah.
There’s nothing wrong with inviting conflict. mean, if you, if everyone just keeps things under the table, unfortunately the problems aren’t actually solved. They’re just deferred to later.
Nadeena
Yeah, 100%, yeah. It just brews and becomes something worse. We want people to talk and we want people to verbalize some things that they’re not happy with or things that they disagree with.
Michael
Absolutely. I guess the next question as well is when you opened up, you had the one podiatry centre as well. When you opened up this one, you didn’t start with podiatry here in Brunswick as well. When you established the second place, was it the same different to the first place in terms of podiatry services? Was just about getting a couch in and the right person or was it a little bit more than that?
Nadeena
Yeah, it was a bit different take on it. So it was a whole different ballgame. So this clinic, no patient flow, there was no pre-existing service. We technically knew that the service could develop here from analyzing the area, the demographic, and this is a place where a pediatric clinic should be, but we had no existing flow. because of that, one, we had to create that existing flow, and two, we have to be reasonable in the sense that if we open up a full-time caseload, it’s not going to get busy. Podiatry is very different to physio. It’s not like, I’m reviewing this person once a week or getting a lot of book, like even like those prompt 24 to 48 hour reviews with your manual therapy work, that’s not what happens. It’s again, your lifetime care. You see this person now and you’ll see them in eight weeks. So within that one to eight week range, there’s no repeat review. So your book is pretty much built on initial consultations that we I looked at him like look we don’t need full time with our existing podiatrists in Moonee Ponds and this came out down into a personality profile as well and when we’re looking at job design and you hear me talk about job design a fair bit is they like variety they like not doing the same thing over and over again what something they would like is just a change of environment once a week okay and this clinic’s only what three kilometres away from our other clinic let’s get them to do a shift here, okay, to establish that service within the first year. So they did that. And the feedback will be like, yeah, I actually like coming to Brunswick during the week, okay, just breaks up my week, okay. And so, yeah, that’s how we, again, almost strategic in a way, look at what’s our current assets, what do they want, okay, and can we make this work for the business needs as well. And we did that with two of our podiatrists and yeah, they love their midweek break in Brunswick.
Michael
Yeah, fair enough. That’s a very clever strategy as well. Just one last question. If you had to do it from scratch again, so if you were Nadeena two years ago, what would you do differently? Because in hindsight, everyone knows what to do.
Nadeena
Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s been go, go, go. This sounds bad, But I think business owners would get that. think it would be actually, one, with behavior that’s not ideal for the culture, he’s actually pulling people up on that early, talking about that early. At the start, I didn’t want to upset anyone, I definitely didn’t want turnover, I was almost scared of that. But now that I have a few years experience under the belt. know if let’s say someone’s not providing the behaviors to the team that we want, we talk to them about it straight away. We don’t let that fester as well. I think I’ll let a few things slide that it shouldn’t. We’re going quality control, we’re going patient management, and I think just having those conversations earlier would have been good.
Michael
Yeah. that is always easiest is a stat, depending on the personality type, but it’s always easier say than to do. It is hard to have hard conversations that are emotional, because they are, they can go either way, you don’t feel comfortable, the other person may not feel comfortable as well. They’re super important to have. I I’ve heard many times is you grow at the pace at which you’re comfortable to have tough conversations. And it’s always easy to say it as a great teaching line, so much harder to actually do.
Nadeena
Yeah, 100%. And it comes under the fact is over the last couple of years, I’ve had a lot of tough conversations. Those first few tough conversations, and again, this resonates with a lot of business owners out there, is it has been letting people go from the organization. In the last few years, I’ve let three people go from the organization because it was just not working out, it was just not a fit. But just having those conversations then, also having other conversations with even my existing staff in recent months,has allowed me to have the self-belief to have those conversations on a more consistent basis. And then at the same time as well, it’s also put into perspective, because I think we fear things like what happens if this person has an outburst or what happens if this person leaves the organisation. And one, that rarely happens, even in all the conversations I’ve had. And even if it did happen, what does that say about that person? Yeah.
Michael
Yeah, absolutely. It’s not a good reason to avoid having a tough conversation. It is the reason why we avoid having a tough conversation. Any other last thoughts on the end before we wrap up today?
Nadeena
Not really to be honest. think yeah, it’s good to sit and reflect the last few years. that’s pretty much it.
Michael
Fantastic as well. mean, you know, it’s a tough path between employee to owner and leadership and, you know, having to know that you’re the one having the tough decisions and you’re the one responsible ultimately for those tough decisions. The outcome of those, whatever they are, good, bad, ugly, whatever it is, it’s a skill-based hat that you learn over time as well and super important.
Nadeena
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it definitely is. look, actually one last thing I would actually like to say is more that all the employees that we have at the moment, like, I’m so proud of them. I’m really, really proud of who they’ve become, what they’re doing, what they do for their patients each and every single day. And yeah, just say thank you all the time to your employees. Because I think sometimes they do get under, anyone, just say thank you wherever you can.
Michael
That’s a really superb piece of advice. It’s a small gesture. It feels like, oh, it’s only a small gesture, but it’s often huge coming from someone who really leaves your position down to anyone else. It’s a really big deal. Thank you very much for your time, Medina. It’s been great insights as well. And I hope everyone can learn something more about running their allied health business from our conversation today. Thank you very much.
Nadeena
Thanks, Michael.
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