WHEELING — First Settlement Physical Therapy has seen slow and steady growth in the greater Ohio Valley area over the years, and its success is a credit to its approach to serving more patients.

Simon Hargus, owner and CEO of First Settlement Physical Therapy, said the family business has always put its patients first with the same kind of small-town, personal service that provided the initial spark when his parents first started it over two decades ago.

“We’re a family-owned outpatient physical therapy practice,” Hargus said. “We take all insurances, and we’re really a community clinic. We really try to see any type of patient that comes through the door.”

The business started in Marietta, Ohio — known historically as the first U.S. settlement in the Northwest Territory. Because of this, a lot of businesses around Marietta take on the name of “First Settlement.”

Hargus noted that in town, there was a bakery, there is a bank and, of course, there is a physical therapy clinic — among other businesses — that use “First Settlement” in their names.

“It was the classic small business scenario,” Hargus said. “The parents took a small mortgage on the house and took a risk.”

Hargus said his mother is a physical therapist and his father was an engineer by trade, but changed careers to run the new family business. That was 25-plus years ago, and since then, the business has grown and expanded to locations throughout the region.

“We have 49 locations and close to 300 employees,” Hargus said. “The part that we’re especially proud of is the fact that my family still owns it. We’re not backed by anybody, and the company itself doesn’t have any debt.”

In light of FSPT’s substantial growth and solid reputation, larger companies and health care organizations have tried to acquire the business, according to Hargus, who said his family has no intention of stepping away from the roots of their success.

“I get offered to sell probably once a month, but it’s not ever going to be part of the plan,” he said. “We think this type of business does better when it’s owned by the people doing the services as professionals. I’m a physical therapist, my mother is a physical therapist. It’s better when the owners are the providers.”

Locally, FSPT operates several locations, including those in Wheeling, St. Clairsville, Bellaire, Moundsville, Barnesville and Cambridge.

Hargus said First Settlement Physical Therapy can help guide patients to improvement with anything that has to do with movement, targeting everything from the muscular-skeletal system to balance, strength and more. The business serves a wide variety of different patients, from those recovering from strokes to athletes who suffer sports injuries and patients in post-operative care. FSPT provides services “from head to toe.”

And there is an increasing need for these services. The world of physical therapy has seen huge growth in recent years, Hargus said.

“I think the growth is mostly out of this concept happening in health care where it both saves money and is a better patient experience when you have the right care at the right time,” he noted. “One of the reasons that our profession is growing is the concept that we as a country are spending too much money on health care, but a lot of that is because patients aren’t having the right care at the right time.

“They’re having the most expensive care down the road when small problems could have been diagnosed quickly and fixed before they became big problems. And that’s what a lot of physical therapy is all about,” he added.

Hargus said sometimes people wait for years before finally seeking health care for a problem after it really starts to hurt and becomes overbearing.

“If you get in at the right time, you save a lot of downstream costs before problems become worse,” he said. “This isn’t just for physical therapy — it’s for all front-line care. Preventive care is a big part of the solution, and we’re a big part of what that is.”

Physical therapy is a relatively low-cost treatment approach that can help nip these kinds of progressively worsening problems in the bud, Hargus said, noting that for the cost of just one MRI, a patient can receive two or three one-hour outpatient physical therapy sessions every week for six weeks.

“It’s very cost effective compared to most interventions,” he said. “It ends up saving a ton of money when it solves the problem — it’s just a really low cost intervention compared to other medical procedures.”

One limiting factor for the profession as a whole is the availability of skilled physical therapists.

“We can’t supply the demand for physical therapists if we aren’t getting graduates,” Hargus said, stressing that funding for schools and continued support for the education and training of the next generations of physical therapists are vital for the future.

“Schools must be supported — they’re a fundamental feeder for the whole industry,” he said.

The demand for physical therapy is high, but for FSPT, the continued growth of the business is not limited to the demand.

“I know there is a need, but our goal is to grow and to do it sustainably,” Harus said, explaining that the business has grown at a slow and steady pace.

“We feel like we did it the right way, and that’s kind of the trajectory we’d like to stay on. Unsustainable growth is a trap we’ve avoided for 25 years, and we want to continue to avoid it.”