E427 | Business Lessons From A Video Game

On this week's Thursday episode of the P.T. Entrepreneur Podcast, we are talking video games.  Yes, we're talking video games.  These games are sneaky effective at teaching you business lessons within them.  One game in particular, Roller Coaster Tycoon, is amazing at doing this.  I recently played this game with my son and I talk about the valuable entrepreneurial lessons it can teach you as you play.  Enjoy!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: All right, so you're just getting started and you're thinking to yourself, man, I'm just gonna use Google Suite to manage my cash-based practice as I get going, look, I did the same thing, and here's what I can tell you. When I finally had to switch over, it was a huge pain in my butt to try to move all the notes and all of the documentation that I had over to another platform so I could stay compliant.

Do yourself a favor. Start with a platform that you can scale with that makes you look more credible. When you're trying to book people on Google calendars, come on guys. That's not what a real business does. A real business has something that actually helps support it on the backend and it is branded to you.

It looks like your company. Check out PT everywhere. If you're just getting started, they're doing something really cool. For cash-based practices, and I really love this. We're one of the features that they're doing. If you're new, they actually will charge you less. As you're getting started and as you grow your membership, your actual dues each month for the platform, it goes up with your practice growing so you can actually save money upfront if you're just getting started, but yet have a platform that you can grow into.

I think it's amazing. It's the only company I know of that's doing that and go figure. It's owned by a cash-based practice owner, which we love as well. So guys, head over to pt everywhere.com, check out what they're doing. If you're just getting started, I highly recommend you check. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Zach, Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we're talking about a video game. That's right. I don't play video games very often but my son is super into them, especially Minecraft. I dunno if you guys are familiar with Minecraft, but it's actually pretty legit.

It's basically like virtual Legos, I guess a good way to to put it. But he build. It's unbelievable. Like some of these things that make like houses and yachts and these worlds or whatever. So anyway, this weekend I I met up with a buddy of mine, his family and my family met at a pool that we go to and we started chatting.

He's somebody that I've known since middle school, actually. He's probably like one of the oldest friends that I've ever had, just cuz we moved so much. And he lives in Atlanta and for whatever reason we started chatting. About this game that we used to play in school, it was called Rollercoaster Tycoon.

Now, I don't know if you guys ever played this game, but this game was awesome. It was like Sim City. But you had to build like theme parks and you could make roller coasters and stuff like that. And but you had to manage them. And this is I forget about this this game, but it's sneaky effective to teach you about business.

So I come home, they have this for the Nintendo Switch, which is what my son has and I buy it and we spend the better part of. I'm gonna say four hours together learning how to play this game and playing this game. So the whole goal is you go from being like a novice to an entrepreneur, to a tycoon based on the value of your company, how much money the amusement park is making.

Many different factors. We're playing this game and I'm just like fascinated by how many like real life sort of examples of things they have in this that actually relate to business. So here's a good example. I asked my son, and this is I'm totally, hopefully like subliminally or subconsciously teaching him the stuff.

He may never remember. This, I don't know. So maybe this is gonna backfire me, but as part of this game, you have to get more people. Into your amusement park. So how do you think you. Marketing, right? And then you have to say, okay, what kind of amusement park is this? Is this a bunch of little kids rides?

Because you can advertise in a college magazine, a parenting magazine, or a national paper. And so if you have a bunch of little kids rides, you probably don't wanna. Advertised in a college magazine, parenting magazine is gonna be better. So I'm asking my son all these things and he's working through these problems independently and it's really cool to watch.

So anyway, we build these roller coasters and these, whatever, little rides and stuff like that. And then you can put food and drink stands in there. You can have little stores and what happens is you have to run those park and as more guests show up, you have more operational problems.

And this is. Accurate, right? So we'll get more guests coming in. Oh no the, I don't know, the ding bat ride or whatever rollercoaster is called. It breaks down. Now we've gotta hire a mechanic. Ah, crap. Now that we gotta pay that mechanic and that mechanic's not happy. So we have to train that mechanic and we have to give him reviews and all these things.

And now all of a sudden he's happy, he's more efficient, he's fixing the ding bat roller coaster ride, and and everything's going well. Next thing all. You wanna have enough bathrooms now you gotta put more bathrooms in. And all these things are costs. And there's a financial profit and loss sheet as part of this game.

And I'm sitting there with my son and with, within about like 10 minutes of us, looking through some of these operations things, he starts to realize he was like, We're not making too much money off of ticket sales for these rides. So we look at it and all these rides are like super cheap.

They're like a dollar to ride, right? And we're like, we're not gonna make any money doing this. So we bump it up to five bucks. What happens? No one comes. Because we're charging way too much for for the roller coaster ride. So we bring it down to $3 and all of a sudden we're at a sweet spot and we're making more money.

And it's funny to me how relevant this is because the vast majority of businesses we work with, one of the original like first things that we do is we help optimize their price structures and like how they should be pricing and offering their services. And this little game, my son caught this really quickly, he is oh, I'm not making enough money.

Off of rights. Like we're, the income from this versus the mechanic that we have to pay is just, it's not like we're not profitable and he's independently seeing this in reading a p and l on this video game. I think people think video games are terrible. I don't think they're maybe the greatest thing in the world for you.

But damn, you can learn some cool shit from this one. So if you got kids check out Roller Coaster Tycoon. Or if you're just like an adult and you like to play video, Check it out. I thought it was I thought it was awesome because you had to dive into financials. So we, a p and l, you have to look at like the cost of the actual food that you're serving.

Now, so you might have $150 in sales, but it's costing you a hundred dollars in, in a material like for the food, actual, like actual costs of the goods. And so now you gotta raise your prices and you gotta hire somebody to run it. Now what do they cost? And all these things go into the profitability of it.

You can take a loan. So you can take a loan at a certain interest rate. Let's say you want to build a roller coaster. Here's a good example, right? You gotta build this, I don't know, ding, bat number two, bigger roller coaster or something, right? And. You, it costs $5,000. You only have three. So you decide, all right, I'm gonna take a $5,000 loan out in order to pay for this roller coaster, but how much is it actually gonna make me?

And how soon am I gonna be able to pay this loan back if this is a, a good ride? And what if it's not? Do I go bankrupt? Cause you definitely can. So you have to kinda weigh that. And for me to sit there with my nine year old. As we're like weighing the math decisions of this in real time is awesome.

I think it's, I think it's just such a good way of learning about this stuff and then paying the loan back so you don't have interest payments on it. Again, hiring employees and what the costs is of that. How to effectively price things, where to put things, because of like where are people at?

Where are they gonna? Need different facilities. So all these things are like super, super cool and I had a great time with him. We're, shit, we'll probably play this for quite some time, but just like him independently looking at some of these things and being like, oh, how about this?

Or why is this low? Or why is this costing so much? It's that's it. Like that is business. That's business in a nutshell. It doesn't have to be as boring as like a textbook about accounting and profit and loss. Like the vast majority of business is basically a. Addition and subtraction, and multiplying and dividing occasionally, like it's really basic math, but understanding the basic fundamentals of how to have a profitable business.

If it co, this is obviously in the context of a video game, but there's so many things that correlate, right? So okay, let's say you want to build out a new facility. This many people that we're working with are doing this right now. Do you want to use all of your own cash to do that? And I asked my son this yesterday, I was like, do we buy this roller coaster?

It was $5,000 for this roller coaster and we had 5,000, like $500 in our operating account. And I was like, should we use all our cash or should we take a loan? For $5,000 to build this. And he was like, we should definitely take a loan. And I said, why? He was like what if we're wrong and we use all our money and then we lose the game.

And and I was like, exactly, we should use somebody else's money so that if we are wrong and we go bankrupt, we can file bankruptcy and if not all of our own, cashing, it gives us a longer runway to be able to be successful with this. So if somebody's doing a build out, I'll tell you from experience, don't use all of your own capital for this.

I, I bankrolled our our build out with cash on hand, and it was a terrible idea because what they told me was gonna take six weeks. It never takes six weeks. By the way, it's always gonna be longer than that. It tell you six weeks. It took us six months before we were actually in the facility that we were supposed to use paying rent for the vast majority of that time, equipment that we'd already pre-purchase, we were expecting to be able to use to help increase our revenue.

Employees that we'd already hired, that we were expecting to have space for all these things. We burned through our own cash reserves in the process versus getting a line of credit versus getting construction loan using somebody else's money. You definitely want to go that route. Yes, it's a video game, but there's so many things that are similar to real business with this, and I thought it was great.

So if you have kids, I was gonna share it with you and they're begging you for a video game. Man, get 'em something cool. They're gonna learn from it. Maybe they'll learn how, the nuts and bolts of running a amusement park, a digital amusement park, a correlate to whatever kind of business they want.

And it's just so interesting to watch these little light bulb moments of these kids, cuz they're just sitting in school learning math. They're learning these dumb ass math equations that don't do anything for them. And they seem so quickly realize oh, we should charge more for this. Or, oh yeah, maybe we should do this to get more people in the door.

And it's it's so relevant to actual. Circumstances that they're gonna have to function in as adults. That, anyway I just thought it was great. So I wanna share with you guys and hope that my my video game lesson you can take something from it as well and and apply it and maybe play a game with your kids.

So as always, guys, thanks so much for listening and we will catch you next week.

Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about 4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our.

Profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country. I do live trainings in there with Eve Gigi every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside that group.

So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.