E610 | I Spent 139K On Mentorship, Here's What I Learned

Doc Danny encourages viewers to watch the accompanying video on the PT Biz YouTube channel and take notes to get the most out of the training. The training covers various stages and elements of business, and he hopes that even if only some of it is applicable to the viewer's current stage, they will find it useful. With his experience and expertise, Doc Danny provides insightful and practical advice on how to take your business to the next level. 

"I spent $139,000 working with some of the smartest people on the planet and in this video, I'm going to break down exactly what I learned.'

This is easily the longest and most valuable video I've put out that isn't in our PT Biz coaching programs.

10 years ago, I didn't even have $1000 to spend on business education and mentorship.

If you're in the same place as I was 10 years ago, I hope this gives you an unfair advantage.....if you're willing to implement what I share with you in this video."

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Hey, real quick before we get started, head over to Facebook and join the PT Entrepreneur's Facebook group. If you haven't done so yet, we have monthly live trainings going on there. There's an opportunity for you to join in the conversation instead of just listening to what I have to say on this podcast, as well as the people that I bring on, and it's a really cool place to join about 6,000 other clinicians that are.

Honestly trying to change the landscape of our profession through these cash and hybrid practices. One other thing that's really cool is we have a guide in there that's a quick start guide. When you join, you can go and check this out. There's about seven videos that we've curated that are the most common questions we get and the best case studies that we've found to really help you start, grow, and scale your practice up to seven figures.

So if you haven't done so yet, head to Facebook request to join the PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group. You have to be a clinician. We're gonna check you out. We don't just let anybody in, but if you are head there, go ahead and get signed up. We'd love to have the conversation with you in that group.

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.

Hey, what's going on, doc Danny here. And I want to do a quick intro on this podcast episode. And this is another video that we pulled from our PT Biz YouTube channel. Now, this one is I would recommend checking out the video here if you wanna follow along with the document that I put together. But this is one that you can also listen to while you're doing pretty much anything else and we wanted to share here.

Also I think this quite possibly is the most high value. Training that I've really probably ever put together. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm just sharing exactly what I took away from the most investment that I've ever put into myself in a year in 2022. So this is from last year.

And I spent about $139,000 on mentorship courses, coaching just an extraordinary amount of money, the amount of money that most people spend on, getting their physical therapy degree. I spent in one year on business development, education and coaching. Why did I do that right?

Why did I spend so much money last year? What we were trying to do and what we were able, really able to do last year was really be able to put our company in a place where, we are the industry leaders when it comes to working with, cash-based clinicians. And what we wanted to do is really be far and away the best option and learn as much as we could about all kinds of other business models and become better just business people and educators of how people can effectively run a business, but also how we can coach people to get the outcomes that they want.

And a lot of that actually doesn't just have to do with the business model, it has to do with the individual person. And then we have to be able to disseminate that down to the team of people that we have at PT Biz, which is chock full of super smart independently successful entrepreneurs already.

And being able to lead those people in, in, in a correct manner is not always the easiest thing to do because entrepreneurs are notoriously difficult to work with, but they're incredibly effective at what they do, which for us is helping other clinicians really start growing scale cash-based practices up to the seven figure mark.

This is something that it's a little bit longer of a training. This might be one, like I said, you might wanna go to the YouTube channel and watch the video of me walking through the document that I put together for this, as well as maybe take some notes because this is the most money I've ever put into myself.

I just wanted to share this with everyone because I thought it would be valuable. You probably don't have the resources to be able to do that. No need to. You can learn, from from me. I hope you take a lot away from this. Some of this may not apply to you at all in the current stage that you're in.

And some of it might be exactly what you need to hear, but it's something that I feel like you could go back and reference honestly over the next couple years for most of you, and really still get a lot out of what I'm talking about in these different stages and different elements of the business and areas that we're trying to improve.

So I hope you like this one. This, like I said, it's very dense long trainings, about an hour or so of me going through the things that I've learned. And if you wanna see the corresponding like video and document that I'm going through for this, head over to the PT Biz YouTube channel and check it out.

So hope you like this one and I'll talk to you soon. Okay. This is the first time I've done this. This is something that I had somebody actually ask me about in regards to coaching and investments and lessons learned. And this is an area that. I have put a lot of time and energy into seeking out mentorship, seeking out coaching.

I, and I think, I hope this is helpful, but I think the hardest part is trying to figure out what it is that you don't know. Like you don't know what you don't know. And that is the hardest part when it comes to investing in coaching courses, masterminds, mentorship. It's hard to know where you should invest because oftentimes it's hard to know what you actually need to improve especially as you're newer into a business journey.

Anyway. Let me do a real quick intro. So I'm Danny Matt mate. I'm the founder of PT Biz. And it it's a company that helps cash and hybrid practices start, grow and really scale to create true businesses that they can they can grow past themselves, that they can autopilot, that they can sell any number of things.

And what I'm gonna talk to you about is not the money that I've invested over the last, probably nine years in business education in conjunction to, in relation to my cash-based practice. But in the last year, we've put the biggest investment we've ever put into coaching and consulting and masterminds for PT bis.

And I'm gonna take a lot of the lessons that we learned from that, which is a multi seven figure company. We grew by 58% from last year to this year. We made the Ink 5,000 as the 447th fastest growing company that's private in the us. And we've put a lot of time and energy and money and resources into trying to grow this company so we can help as many cash and hybrid clinicians be able to not have to really deal with insurance and be able to grow the type practice that they want.

So all the investments that we've made were specifically for that business, but it's the same core skills that you can apply to your business. So I know you may not have $139,000 to drop into coaching and masterminds and consulting. It's an extreme amount of money when I say it out loud. But when I look at the return on investment for us, like it's there and it's there in comparison to where we were at last year.

And I don't know if I'll have another year where I go this hard into, really trying to learn new skills and getting coaches because we have a lot to implement now. Like we've learned a lot. We have a lot to actually do and implement to be able to grow. But where we're at, we should be able to double the company.

Before we really run into any bottlenecks in conjunction with this, just not knowing the right skill sets and also not maybe being around the right people, which is another big part of Masterminds and in particular th that type of investment. So total $139,000 in investments in courses.

Coaches did masterminds in 2022. Like I said, we went 58% from, I'll just highlight this here cause I'm obviously not very good with word docs or Google Docs, but 58% growth from 2000 2021 to, compared to 2022. Our company size, we grew from eight to 18 people. And these are the skills that we learned.

These are the business skills that You know that I in particular the lessons that I took away for that extreme amount of money, which to be honest with you, 139 grand is probably what a lot of you spent on your PT school degree, right? To get your D P T. So we dropped that on business education in the last year and I'm gonna share my lessons, my takeaways from it.

So hopefully you find this valuable. It was an, it was a lot of investment and it's something that I learned more this year probably than I have in the the last, eight, nine years combined. Just cuz we had such a a large amount of information that we were gathering and implementing and just a lot of hard work, honestly.

I'm gonna break this down into a few different categories. So sales, marketing systems and product, and then people. So I'm gonna, I'll end with that and then I'll walk through some of this in more details. So first of all, sales. So sales is Sales is my thing. Sales is the thing that I focus on the most in our business.

Sales is the thing that I tend to help most of our clients work through the most. And, ironically, like you don't go to PT school to learn how to sell. I went to PT school in the Army, so they didn't teach us anything about selling. But it's something that I've found interested and I focus a lot on.

For you the big lessons that I took away from growing a team, a sales, actual sales team, and in a cash-based practice, your sales team is frankly your clinicians in a lot of ways. They're the ones that are putting forward the prognosis and the plan of care that they need to follow. Sales the first thing that I learned and reiterated more so this year than anything with, as we have more and more sales people, is stop highlighting your features.

So I'm right here. Stop highlighting features and keep focusing on listening and solving problems. Okay, stop highlighting features. Stop talking about, oh, we have blood flow restriction training and we do dry needling, and I'm an active release technique ninja, and I'm a postural Restoration Institute certified whatever.

No one cares. No one knows what that even means actually unless they're specifically looking for it. And in that case, for sure, highlight it, right? If you're like, I was told to see a P R I practitioner, you're like good news. I happen to be a P R I practitioner. Let's check this out. And and in that case, cool dig into it.

But in most cases, we are far too feature heavy and we're not listening to problems and solving problems enough. This for me comes to the second one, which is you must review your team's performance regularly. And you can't just track close percentage. So what I mean by that is you need to.

Sit in on initial evaluations with clinicians and see how they're communicating with people and what they're recommending. You can even like record parts of of the visit that you're using internally for training, where it's the sales portion of it. Here's what I recommend, here's why.

And going over those things with your team is really important. It's something I didn't do for a long time. You're just track tracking close percentage, but you could track that. You could say, okay, my provider's good. It's at 60%. He's 60% of people at the first visit, visit, buy a packaging, commit to a plan of care.

That's pretty good. But if that person says 60% with no focus whatsoever, no ongoing coaching, they probably can be at like 80% and you're just leaving that on the table because you're not actually developing them. You're not working with them to help improve their own skillset. This is the same thing with our team.

We're constantly having to review. Train give feedback and highlight things that, that we're doing, they're doing well and things that need to improve. You have to do that. You have to give continual feedback with your sales team for you, this is clinicians. Otherwise they were, they're gonna settle whatever percentage that's gonna be, but they could be quite a bit better, which ultimately means that you're leaving the ability to help people on the table like that.

That's the challenge. They're not committing to a plan of care. We know if they don't do that, then they end up dropping off. Following up is huge. You hear like fortunes in the follow up. That's so true. And, but it has to be multi-channel. So this is one thing that we learned this year is in particular, we look at a lot of the practices that we work with.

They would just follow up. They would send one email to somebody and they're like they didn't respond. I'm bothering them. No you're not. Like they, they literally asked you for help. And in order to help them, you need to follow up in them. You need to get them back in the office. So that includes, Following up on multiple channels.

So that could be email, text, even social media, direct messaging. People if you're trying to follow up with somebody like these, multiple channels are gonna increase your success rate dramatically. And the follow up is really with these businesses that are at least like smaller, new patient volume, cash-based practices and hybrid practices, like you don't need a lot of new patients, you need about eight new patients per provider, maybe 10.

If you have like more more discharge type patients that are going on, not enough, not as much continuity, but let's say eight to 10. You following up effectively can get you there really fast or you're gonna have to work really hard to get those people in if you're not following up at all.

So follow up is key. Follow up is huge and you can double the number of people that you bring in just by having an effect of follow up. Okay. Sales is hard, but it's much easier if you're selling to warm leads. I'll get to this in marketing more, but sales is not easy, especially what we're doing.

We're essentially trying to work with people to help with their musculoskeletal problems. They're probably putting it off as long as they possibly can. We ask them to do really challenging. Weird things. We do things that are uncomfortable it's hard to sell that, but it's so much easier to sell when somebody comes in and they're a very warm lead i e referral and, or they maybe know somebody that's worked with you or they've really vetted you in some way by watching your content and they've started to develop some rapport that way.

So these are categories of marketing that are really important that will help your sales be much better. So when you can get more warm leads into the, your funnel into your business, then you're gonna convert a much higher percentage of those people and those people are gonna be the most bought in.

So that's a really important key thing to focus on is try to get people warmed up as best you can, either through referrals or content's. A great way to do that. There's six primary ways to increase profit that supplies to every business that I can think of. So we'll apply this to a practice.

So in a practice you can do these, one of these six things, all of these six things. But the first one is charge more. So charge what you're worth. We constantly see this as a problem. People are still charging 120 to 150 bucks for a visit when they should be 200 to 300, somewhere in that range. Reduce cost.

So this usually isn't that big of a problem with practices. Sometimes we'll see that they have like redundant charges and things that are going on, or maybe they're trying to carry too much overhead with a space that they don't need. But usually this isn't the problem. So I'm not a huge fan of reducing costs at scale.

Yes. So if you're, multiple seven figures and you just got all these charges and stuff, and maybe you need to cut back on some things, but usually early on we're very lean. It's typically not the problem. Sell more often, so get people to come back more. This is continuity. This is ongoing recurring revenue.

It is the most important dollar you can make aside from a new client coming in. A recurring dollar is so important because it takes the burden off of your marketing and it helps increase the lifetime value of a client. So not just that first visit, maybe they buy a 10 visit pack with you of visits, but are they repurchasing that, are they seeing you on an ongoing basis?

Are they doing any other services? Remote programming, in-person training, semi-private training. Are they doing anything else with you that increases the lifetime value so you don't have to just keep going out and finding more business, and ultimately you're helping them achieve whatever their health and wellness goal is.

Upsells or upsells, downsells and cross sells. Upsell would be, let's say you have somebody that comes in, they're like, yeah, I'll just, I'm just going to, buy a six visit packages or whatever, and then you upsell 'em to a 10. That's an upsell. A downsell would be that, let's say you have somebody that can't come in for visits, but you say, Hey, we have this remote.

Programming option. We have this, remote training option and it costs this much per month versus this, that would be a down sell. It's less expensive per month for them versus coming in once a week. And then a cross sell. A cross sell would be actually like adding on other services, right? So it would be saying like, okay, we have this we have in-person visits, but we also have a coach over here that can bolt on remote programming for you as well.

Or, Hey, you can come in for an in-person visit, but if you wanna train with a small group over here, you can do that as well. That's cross-selling to other things. At the same time, it would be like saying yeah, you have a burger. Do you want fries with that? That's a cross-sell, right? So there's something that complimentary to it at the same time.

So you can do all of these, like I said, ultimately this is the biggest one. I think most people can focus on recurring revenue. And this one here charge what your worth. Okay. Okay. Building a base of recurring revenue, and I'm going back to recurring revenue, is how important it is. Building a base of recurring revenue is vital to your business.

Selling recurring services in a cash-based practice starts at the very first conversation. So you have to build recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is the dollars that come in without you having to go out and find it. That's really important. You don't wanna have to just go out and find money find new people.

You want those people to have a great working relationship with you, work with you as long as they can and help solve problems with them over an extended period of time, and they pay you for it. That's recurring revenue. So money that comes in with having to go out and find new business. Selling recurring revenue is actually something that happens from the beginning.

First conversation. How you bring that up with people. So if you're gonna add recurring revenue, you have to bring it up from the very first visit very first conversation. So talking about how you work with people and how it's different, how we work with people. To solve, problems, lifelong health and wellness problems, to create generational family health to talk about these concepts that we really do help people with achieving things that they didn't think they were gonna be able to do.

Again, that takes time. It takes time, habitual changes, and it takes somebody like us that understands pain, understands performance, and can function in that gray area between it to help them achieve those goals. That starts from the beginning, and that's them committing to us and us committing to them.

So continuity is, or recurring revenue is something that has to start from the initial conversation. Otherwise, here's what happens. People think that you're just like every other PT practice that they've ever been to, they're gonna see you a couple times a week for six weeks and you're gonna discharge 'em.

And it's because that's what the insurance wants you to do. And that's also probably the scope of most people's skillsets. They don't understand how to talk to people about sleep, nutrition, movement, stress management, build programs out for them. Train them ongoing. That's something that we get a chance to do, and it's a great addition to the business.

So recurring revenue, vital to the business starts from the first conversation. Okay? Effective sales is just like an effective initial evaluation. You should be doing more listening than talking. This is huge. So if you are getting better at communication, better at your initial evaluation, of course, obviously there's things that we have to do where we are asking questions or we're assessing things objectively.

But the first step is to understand them, understand who they are, what drives them, why they're there. And I want to ask questions and listen for what they're telling me is important to them. Listen, what they're telling me is what's going on, how long it's been going on, like solving a puzzle and piecing these things back together for them to then eventually be able to give them a prognosis of expectations of not just what's going on, but how long we expect for it to take for this to really, resolve and for us to make a lot of progress to get them back to the thing that they really like to do.

One of the problems I see with sales in particular is people talk too much, and I'm guilty of this. People talk too much about, they get excited about stuff and then they're spewing their opinion of whatever it might be on them, versus asking them, if that is what they're trying to do and understanding what's going on as far as listening, more, listening, especially at the end of initial evaluation over and over again.

Same thing at the end of a conversation with somebody that might be interested in becoming a client, if we just spew our opinions of what's going on with them versus. Give them our prognosis and be quiet and then listen to what they have to say. Listen to what their objections are, what their fears are.

You don't know what problem you're solving if you don't listen to them. So you have to be an effective listener, an effective sales, just like in the effective initial evaluation. Yet you should be doing more listening than you should be doing. Talking. Okay? Marketing. Marketing is a huge one. This is an area that we probably spent more time on than anything this year with just understanding these different variations of marketing and ways in which we can acquire clients, but also teach our clients how to acquire clients within the businesses that they work in.

So there's no more effective marketing than clients getting results. Share these results as much as you can. Okay, so I get this a lot. People are like how do I get more new clients? Get the clients that you do have the greatest result that they can imagine. And then use those clients in your marketing.

That's it. Focus on your clients. Focus on the results. You can't share bad results, right? Like you, you can't market that very well, but you have somebody that hasn't been able to pick up anything off the ground without hurting their back for 10 years, and all of a sudden they're like back to playing a sport or something that they really like and their symptoms are resolved or very manageable at this point, and they're just ecstatic about it.

That person sells what you do for you, but you gotta get that person amazing results first. So focus on your clients. Focus on getting them results. Focus on what can I be doing better? That's gonna help my clients win. It's gonna help my patients get back to what they wanna do faster, with less complications.

What is that? What is what are those things that you could be doing? What are those things that maybe you can't automate that you need to do more and more of to help with your actual outcomes, your customer experience? Like that right there is gonna help you with marketing more than anything else.

So client focus first, outcomes first, and then leveraging those results within marketing. The most effective email campaign that we have that I write this every single week. I write two emails, and then we have an email that goes out that has our content summary in there of all the content we've put out.

One is just a Friday email ride. Just write whatever I'm thinking. Wednesday is a client win Wednesday. And now we've had people in our mastermind test that says with just Google reviews that they're getting with people that are leaving those or maybe it's a video they had done or something like that and they're sharing these win.

These client win Wednesdays. On Wednesdays highlighting their people. It gives their them a reason to email their list of folks that have, they've worked with, or people that have, opted into something that they have. And it just shows highlights of what's going on. And it's one of the most effective ways of email marketing and effectively marketing the results you're getting from people.

Cuz it only works if you get results from people. That's it. And it may not be resonating with that person, but they might forward to somebody they know that has a knee problem. And you're highlighting somebody that just got over a knee issue and they're frustrated and next thing you know, they're calling your office.

So keep that in mind. Focus on results. Now there are six channels. This is a big one. Six channels for marketing. Okay? You don't have to do all of them, for this to work, you really have to focus on two, maybe three. Okay. Two, maybe three. And the. The ones that I recommend most practices focus on are gonna be referrals and organic content.

I would lump email marketing in here as well. Referrals, organic content, and email marketing. And this is the way that, that it works, right? So if you think of like organic content would be social media content. It would be blog posts. I actually even lumped that into like teaching.

So I look at teaching as a form of content, especially if you can video that and get clips of that. That's organic content. Organic content helps build your subject matter expertise in an area at you being like a, a thought leader in the area or an expert. You collect emails from people via content opportunities for opt-ins and or in person where people can exchange their contact information.

You follow up with them with like exercises you went over or something like that. So you're building your email list and those work really well together because you can follow up with those people over a long period of time and they become clients. Referrals. Referrals are an area people hate on this.

I don't know why. They're like, oh you're heavily, referral dominant in your marketing. What's wrong with that? It's people say that as it's a bad thing. But it's because oftentimes businesses don't have predictability with referrals. So if you can, in a predictable way, understand, okay, if I have this many clients and I can expect to get this many referrals from it because I have these touchpoints and these lead to this percentage of those people sending me a friend or family member, then I know if I get 10 referrals, I'm gonna close eight 80% of those.

So eight outta those 10 come in. And now you know your numbers in a much more granular way. So it's not a Oh, yeah, people send us their friends and family occasionally. It's a predictable referral channel. That's a big difference. So I actually really these three organic content, email marketing and referrals for in-person businesses in particular.

Now I, we do a lot of pay dads, right? But you gotta keep in mind, Our company is a online company. We work with people all over North America at this point within our mastermind and all over the world within our Rainmaker program. So I don't have a localized area where I can say, Hey, here's my footprint.

Come see me here. There's pros and cons to that. One of the negatives is I can't really do anything local. I have to do everything broad. And so paid ads is a big part of that. But paid ads, I think should be sprinkled on top of these other things because a number of reasons, and I'll get into that in a second.

But paid ads is one, you can scale up, you can scale it down, it can be really effective. Facebook, YouTube, Google, all kinds of stuff. You just gotta make sure you're tracking it and effectively doing this. We see a lot of people do paid ads. They think they're doing it, but when they really look at how much business is coming from it, it's negligible.

It's like nothing. They're basically wasting money. Cold outreach. This is one if you wanna get real scrappy. This is a good way of going about it. You can go cold outreach, you can find people that fit your avatar. Let's say you're into runners. You go on at the Atlanta Track Club Instagram page, and then you can see every single person that follows that page.

You can start to actually comment interact with these people on social platforms or in Facebook groups or something like that, and be super helpful. And put yourself in a place where they start to look at you like, oh, who is this? They're recommending this article that was really helpful.

Or giving some great advice. And they look you up and they independently, will start to realize what you do. And then you can start to have messages that occur within that context within that platform. Where are you're basically reaching out about, Hey, I saw your asking a question about your knee.

Mind if I ask you a little bit more? I'm a phy physical therapist. Here's what I do. I work with a lot of runners. But we see this a lot might be able to help you in the messages so you can actually be helpful in the messages and be very helpful in groups or on social platforms and prospect cold outreach.

This is called prospecting. It's where you go out and you find who you want to work with. You can be pretty scrappy with this, like I said, and you can use these social platforms to do that because you can see what people are into. And that's one of the best parts as far as marketing is concerned with social platforms, partnerships, this is a good one for local businesses too.

You could be partnering with a local gym or a local nutritionist or functional medicine doctor or something like that where you have this. Referral network. I, somebody come to see me, they need additional support here. This is who I recommend. You do the same. We create this little sort of collective health collective back and forth.

This is our preferred gym, it's our preferred functional med doc, whatever. And then you guys all refer back and forth to each other and you all have complimentary skills, right? It's a really good way of going about it. It's hard. The hard part is finding those people and finding people that are collaborative in nature and not necessarily wanting to silo themself completely.

Cuz that's what you're gonna run into as well. So partnerships can be great locally as well. Again, I focus typically with most cash-based practices on organic content, which also include like local stuff that they're doing as far as content and teaching. It's still content, they're just doing it in front of people live.

Email marketing as you build your list of people that are, opting into your content or they're going to your content and then referrals and being very specific about how you're gonna get referrals and ways in which you can do that. Alright. If you think you're doing a good job tracking, marketing effective effectiveness, you probably aren't.

So if you think you're doing a good job tracking, you're probably not. This needs to be very granular. If you're doing it. Otherwise, you don't know if what you're doing is worth the effort. So I, this is what I brought up with with referrals, right? So very simple. How many people are you seeing?

How many of those people are you asking to send somebody your way? What's the take rate on that? What percent of those people are doing that? What percent of those people that are that connect you actually come in? The people that you get connected with? And then what percent of those people end up committing to a p plan of care?

So being very clear about what's going on. This is why with Pay Dads, one of the reasons why most people are bad at this is they don't effectively track this well enough, and then they just think, I'll just let it go. It seems to be working. It's how people used to do a marketing back in the day. They would turn on a radio app, they would just see what their sales were, and then they would turn it off or they'd put a TV ad on and then they would turn it off and they would see if their sales went up or down.

And that's how they had to gauge of the effectiveness of their marketing. Which, in some ways it works, but it's also very inefficient and can, there's many other things that could be leading to changes that that are just coincidental. You gotta track this. You have to track your marketing track.

I'll get into this in systems and products here, but you've gotta know if you're making the right decision because if you don't have the data to do you're just guessing basically. All right. The more that I learn about marketing, the less I like paid ads. This has been a trend for me for years, but this year even more and mainly because it's mainly because of how quickly things change.

So it's not if I get really good at referral marketing or if I get good at developing partnerships locally, those don't change overnight. Those don't they don't change the rules of that overnight. They don't change the structure and the setup and those are, those have been going on for a long time.

They're very slow to change. But when paid ads, paid ad platforms can change like that, so fast. And it's also something that is incredibly tedious to track and learn. And ultimately, I don't know if it's as effective as people that market that they do paid ads, make it seem so, so if you.

The people that are the biggest proponents of paid ads are either the platforms that are running them or the people that are teaching you how to run it, or the agencies that are running it for you. So it's complex enough where you probably need somebody else to do it. I've run my own ads for years.

We've had three agencies that we've gone through in our own practice. Another three agencies with PT Biz that we've used. We are using one now that we actually like quite a bit. But even still, it's a small portion of what we do because I think it does help with reach, but it should, I would not build a business spec purely off paid ads.

I think it's a terrible strategy. I think that's a very sketchy way of growing. Because it can change so fast. Like we've had ads that we were running years ago killing it, just killing it. We were getting people in the door for $17, like new patients for $17 on average. Our lifetime value at the time was like $2,500.

Think about that. I would exchange that all day. There was like a money printing machine and it lasted like that probably for six to seven months. And then all of a sudden platform change. And then now you gotta try to adjust and try to figure out what's going on. And then now you have multiple groups.

So you have Facebook and YouTube or Google who owns them. And then you have Apple and they're all getting massive, but they all don't really like each other, so they're chipping away at each other. So Facebook is having Apple decrease the ability to see what people are doing on platforms.

Because Apple's saying, we wanna protect your identity, although on in the background, apple is actually working on their own paid ads on their on phones. So they basically wanna make money off the same thing that Facebook is making most of their money off of. And Google and app YouTube are doing the same thing, so they all just bash each other, right?

So they can change overnight what the other one is doing because they have such big market share. So you gotta keep that in mind if you're gonna do it. I think what you have to focus on is leveraging your best content and getting people to opt in for things that are very specific to your niche, right?

So let's say in our case we have a five day challenge for people that are looking to start a practice. I don't know who's gonna opt into that besides somebody that has interest in starting a cash-based practice because it doesn't really help anything else, right? So if I put that ad in front of somebody, somebody opts into it, then all of a sudden I have a really good.

Idea. This person's probably interested in that. And then that goes back to email marketing. So you can do the same thing, Hey Bulletproof Runner program or something like that, or guide or whatever, something that's specific to your niche. And then when they opt into it, you know who you're talking to, and that's where email marketing comes into and follow up, right?

But the more I learn about a marketing the more I dislike ads. So share your personality. It's a big one. Be yourself. Share your personality. Say dumb shit that you would say around your friends. Don't be an idiot. Don't be rude to people. But don't be afraid to have, just show some of your personality.

Talk about the things you're interested in. Make that part of your marketing, make that part of your email marketing. And I've had multiple clients this year that we work with. Tell me, Hey, I, you said something in an email that was just like, man, it sounded like something that really resonated with me.

And it didn't sound that normal. It sounded like just like a friend talking to me. And I instantly decided to jump on a call with your team and see if it was a good fit. That's what happens when you just be yourself, put some of your personality into what you're doing, whether it's your content, whether it's your emails, whether it's how you teach in person, whatever.

Just be yourself as best you can and you'll, people will gravitate towards you to the right fit and then it'll repel the wrong people. All right? The likelihood of a referral is strongly tied to the effectiveness of your service and experience that your clients have at your company. Effectiveness of outcomes, experience, and I would say experience is actually number one.

Outcomes is number two. If people feel like that you were honest, you did the right thing for them, you treated them right, like your intentions were truly at what was best for them. They will give you the benefit of the doubt. Not only that, they'll still refer people your way because it's rare.

It's rare for people to actually be genuine and care about other people. You can't fake that. You can't automate that. You have to actually care. Your experiences. Huge experience results equals likelihood of referral. That is the two most important things. Even if you don't ask for a referral, but you do awesome on customer experience and you do awesome results, people are gonna say, but other folks are whack.

Cause they won't be to shut up about you. But you gotta endure those two things systematically and on purpose. Okay. System, systems and products. All right. This is actually where I'm probably the weakest. I do the least amount here. And I'll talk about structure with this and why, but number one, and I'll go back to this track, everything, all right.

This is the biggest area of improvement I see in most businesses. Under a million dollars in gross revenue, most businesses under a million dollars in gross revenue can get by without having to track much of anything. Once they get above that and then their team is growing, now all of a sudden there's more people.

So it's harder to keep track of things. Keeping track of, your data of the ca key performance indicators that really drive your business and understanding those, that's huge. So you've gotta upgrade what you're doing with how you're tracking your business, number one. So number two, all right.

Better tracking and team functionality can be broken up into three areas, and this is how we break up our business. All right, so sales marketing primarily falls under me. I have two business partners. One, his name is Jared. He primarily does operations, so client success the sort of end of the business, systemizing things.

And then service would be the third thing. That would be our partner Eve, who's primarily in charge of delivering a great. Service and product. That's how we break these three things up. Now, you may not have partners like that, it might just be you, but you gotta think about, okay, what are these other categories where they fall under?

So sales and marketing's probably still gonna be you. The founder is that's usually the bread and butter of that person. Operations. This is client success and admin fulfillment. This is gonna be like your front desk your office manager, your admin. And this person's probably gonna need quite a bit of training.

Unless you're getting just some badass ops person that's could, probably, could be a coo that's probably not happening. Cuz they're gonna be expensive. So you usually have an admin person, a clerical position but you're gonna have to bolt on systems that they can follow to be able to deliver client success and administrative fulfillment.

That's gonna be really important. And the third thing is service. And this is where your providers come in. So your providers are the service element they're delivering, the service that people are paying for. And you know the client results are a big part is them. So you have to have these touchpoints that you're engineering for them about what does it look like to have a good evaluation?

How do you follow up with somebody? What happens if they don't follow up with you in a period of time? These are all things that you need as far as service is concerned, but you're building all this stuff out and other people are running those plays. All right? So high level operations employees or partners are incredibly rare.

You need someone like this on your team and they most likely are not similar to you. So high level operations. Let's talk about this. I'm talking about here ops. I'm talking about somebody that could be a COO and function in that role. These are people that think in systems. These are people that think of okay, in this scenario, this needs to happen.

This is how we create consistency. This is how like we. This is how we need somebody to request time off. This is what we look at in our hiring process. This is how we do a review. This is like the organization, the structure of of the actual business. Think of it like, like the founder usually is like the brain.

It's like the nervous system, the brain, the spinal cord, right? You need that for creativity and, functionality and to drive like the mission of the business. But the ops side of it, that's like the structure, that's like the bones and the muscles, like you need that in order to give structure to the founder, to whoever's starting the business in order to let that vision that they're working towards, move forward.

So finding somebody that's high level ops is difficult. If you can find something like that's gonna be your office manager, that's a home run because they're gonna be day to day in your business. Sometimes you have to be both for a while as a founder as well. But usually what's gonna happen is your skillset is not gonna really naturally be that of an ops person.

Normally, it's gonna be more sales marketing, and it's gonna be more ops. It's gonna be somebody that you actually bring on. So that's important. You're probably gonna have to hire that person but they're probably not gonna be like you. So you're somebody that's not gonna be just like you, not into the same things as you.

Maybe not that extroverted. They're probably gonna be a little more introverted. These are big things that you need to focus on when you're looking for somebody on the upside. All right, so track effectiveness with measures. We like the net promoter score. Nps, it's a zero to 10. One question, how likely would you be to refer a friend or family member to our business?

Zero. Not at all. 10. Like the highest score you can get. Nines and tens. Those are the ones you wanna ask for a referral. Anything eight and below, you wanna reach out to them directly? Hey, Where we mess up, what could we improve and try to get in front of those people before it's too late, cuz that's actually a great way of improving their customer experience and bringing them up to a nine or a 10, which increases likelihood.

They're gonna send somebody your way as well. That promoter score really easy. You should totally add that in. All right. Client success is the most important area to focus on if you're asking for referrals as one of your marketing channels, which probably is every one of you. Okay? So here are four things that you can do that will help with client success and ultimately referrals.

Okay? Simple things you can do. Number one, consistent and prompt communication with a treating with the treating clinician. Make sure you are responsive to these people. They reach out to you with an email, a question, whatever. You get back to them as soon as you possibly can. You follow up with them right after their initial evaluation with a summer email of what's going on so that they can show their spouse and tell them, what they're working on and why they just spent so much money with you.

Drop off tracking. Okay, this is looking at who has not come back in. For their next visit. Let's say you have somebody that's in the middle of a plan of care. They've done five visits with you, they have five left, and they just drop off. What the hell's going on? You might think, oh, great, never see 'em again.

And I get five free visits that I didn't have to fulfill. Wrong. It's a bad idea because maybe in the short term, a they might ask for a refund, but maybe in the short term, let's say that scenario, you would win financially In the long term you don't because that person's not coming in. They're not repeating, in with this, with more service.

They're not sending their friends and family. So you want to track that stuff. And you wanna have a list of these people and coordinate between your clinician and your front desk about what's going on. Give away great t-shirts. CrossFit killed this. Give people t-shirts that are comfortable that they wanna wear.

Give people t-shirts that are so comfortable they wanna ask for another one. They can give their wife. Like that right there. There's a walking billboard. Handwritten cards. These never get old people. Love getting cards. Handwritten card for your birthday. Thank you for coming in to see us. Initial visit.

Thank you for sending your friend. With a referral. Write these, like they're, it's a hundred percent worth it. All right. Last one here. The bigger your business gets, the more you need to understand money and finance. Okay? This is huge. Hey, get a good bookkeeper and a cpa. If your CPA says, I'm conservative you don't ever have to worry about an audit with me.

That means they're lazy. You should find a different cpa. Get a bookkeeper that's gonna stay on top of your books and have things cleaned up and books reconciled typically within a week into the following month. All right? It doesn't need to be the first day of the month. Give 'em some leeways.

Not that big of a deal. I see this. People will fire their bookkeeper. They're like, they didn't have it done first of the month. If they get it done within a week of the following month, that's awesome. That's a good bookkeeper. And if you can find them together and your CPA firm and bookkeeping is all in the same place, that makes it so much easier come tax season.

Okay. Look at your p and l every single month. That's your profit and loss sheet. It tells you how much money came in. Where money is going and then how much net profit you have at the end of the month. This is gonna help you clean up and understand where your percentages of allocation of finances going in your business.

Meaning are you spending too much on marketing? Are you not spending enough on marketing? Are you spending too much on your overhead? Is your staff salary too, too high for where you should be at? Are you going through a growth cycle? There's a lot of things on the financial side you gotta understand.

As far as PNLs go, that's huge. So you gotta understand finance. So increased cash reserves in preparation for hiring and expansion. So if you think you're gonna hire, you think you're gonna move into a new space. And there's only two ways really to grow these in-person businesses. And that's through space and people, you can bolt on some things that are remote and that's cool cause those can be really helpful.

But space and people are the biggest drivers as far as revenue is concerned. So if you're gonna move into a new space, you're gonna hire somebody, bolster those cash reserves a little bit in the process. Weekly, you should track your finances, but on a monthly basis, you should have a monthly financial meeting.

That means at this month, monthly financial meeting, you are paying your credit card off. You are reviewing cash flow as far as like how the business is doing and cash reserves needed. You are tracking profit like a hawk. You wanna know how much money you're keeping. There's no reason to start a business if you can't be profitable and make money.

You are checking out for recurring duplicate charges in some cases and cutting recurring revenue charges. Let's say you have two email service providers, something like that. Get rid of one of 'em. You don't need to. And then distributions at this meeting. So if you're paying yourself a monthly distribution to go along with your salary, this is when you would do that to make sure that you're not cannibalizing the business in the process of paying yourself a distribution.

So there's a lot there. We could go on. For hours and the finance side, but these are the big ones to take away. So make sure you are looking at your p and l. You get a good B bookkeeper and CPA that will help your p and l look really clean. Make sure you're increasing your business. Cash reserves if you're looking to expand.

And then on a weekly and monthly basis, look at your finances on the monthly basis. You're doing these things right here, paying your credit card, reviewing cash flow, your tracking profit. You're checking for recurring duplicate charges, and then you're distributing to yourself at that meeting as well.

All right people, this is a big one for us cause we actually grew a lot as far as number of people were concerned in the last year. So you and your actions set the tone for your company. Always. You must hold yourself to an incredibly high standard. Listen, whether you like it or not, if you start a company and you are the leader of that company, you need to act like a damn leader.

Act like a leader. If you say you're gonna do something, do it. If you say to be on time. Meeting starts at 10 and you're constantly showing up at 10 0 5 and people are waiting on you. You set the tone that showing up at 10 0 5 is okay. I'll tell you this much. If I show up to a meeting one minute late, I will apologize.

No matter what happened. Doesn't matter if I show up to a meeting five minutes late, people on my team start texting me to see if I'm okay if I'm hurt, because it's just so rare that I'm not early or exactly on time. That's a tone that we set in our company and I hold myself to that same standard. I ever hold everybody else to that standard like, yo meeting starts at 10.

What's up? Why are you five minutes late? This is the first time it happens. Don't let it happen again. We start meetings on time and we're not waiting. You gotta set that tone. That may not be the tone that you want, but that's the tone that we have. That's the tone that we have within our company. So the way in which we hold ourself accountable and our own standards, like you have to hold yourself to a high standard, whether that be.

Physically, you have expectations of being healthy and people around you, being healthy, being punctual, being professional about how you're engaging with people. Maybe it's a, it's more of a fun environment that you want to, create. It's up to you, but that tone that you set for your company is based on your actions.

So make sure that you're very aware of how you're interacting with people. Hire what you need, not just people that you like. This used to be something that I used to tell people only hire people you'd wanna grab a beer with. I think with a really small company, if you have sub eight people, then that's probably pretty accurate.

The problem is you need people with diverse personalities. You need people with diverse ways of looking at problems. People that are more cautious, people that are more cavalier, people that are in the middle. People with backgrounds in different areas that come from different parts of the country.

You need collaborative people in order to see progress. So hire what you need. Not necessarily just who you like, like you gotta hire for the position, the personality. Obviously you need to be around these people. Don't hire somebody. You absolutely don't want to be around. But often too often, I see people hire people that are just like him.

They're like, oh yeah, I love this guy. Of course you love this guy. He's literally just like you. It's the same skillset. He says the same stuff. It's the same background. How do you think that's gonna go when you need somebody that's gonna be helping on the ops side? That's not an ops person. This is somebody that is like you and you don't even like ops.

What do you expect them to do? You gotta hire people that you need, not necessarily just that you like. Be a dream manager, not just a boss. I'm gonna put this in here. Dream Manager is a book that I read years ago. I got this recommended from a friend of mine that was interesting guy. He started a music genre cruise company.

Basically he, he was a band manager for a fairly big, like nineties band. And he started hosting concerts for them, like destination concerts, and they started doing 'em on cruises. And then other bands started reaching out to him about setting these up. And eventually he ended up selling this company to Norwegian Cruise Lines, and then came on for a year as the dream manager at Spanx.

So Spanks is based here in Atlanta. It's Sarah Blakely owns the company. She's a billionaire at this point. And it's a very interesting company culture they have there. And they brought this guy in and he was their dream manager. And what that meant was his job was to work with their C-suite and talk them about how we could help them improve their lives.

Had nothing to do with work. And I thought it was a really cool concept. And a lot of it was just like, be better understanding people. What are your goals? What do you want to get out of being here? What do you wanna get out of life? Like, how can we help facilitate some of these things? What connections do we have and we can help you and really help them win at life, not just in your company.

So understand if you can help your people win at what they're trying to accomplish in life, they're gonna be great employees. Not only that, but some of them might move on and go do other things, and that's okay too because that's what they want in life. And you have to help. You have to help facilitate that.

So be a dream manager. Don't just be a boss. Alright. You are the Chief Reminder Officer in your company. This is a big one. Chief Reminder Officer. That means you are reminding people of core values and the mission, core values mission. What are we here for? What are we trying to do? What do we stand for?

Why is it important? Like, why is this meaningful work? You are constantly reminding, beating the drum of what your company exists for who you help and why. That is a huge part of your job. Like you gotta understand that you're motivating people around you. All right? People also, they want to work for the company in your vision.

Okay? So you might be here right now and your company's over here. This is a, it's an okay place to work. It's real small, not a lot of benefits, whatever. But hey, we're going over here. Like this is gonna be awesome. They wanna work at this vision, whatever that vision is, they wanna be a part of that.

They wanna be a part of that journey. And that's a huge advantage for a small business to be able to take people with them along that journey. That's what they want. So make sure you are constantly reminding them of the vision you have. Alright. Talented people will work for less money if they love the work they get to do.

We've seen this in the clinic. I've had numerous higher paid clinicians that have come to work with us. Because they have great population to work with. They have low volume, they have autonomy. They have a place where we expect excellence and clinical excellence is something that we want to chase and improve.

We want them to be the best people in their niche in the entire city. And that's appealing to a certain kind of person. They'll take less money with an opportunity to have all these other benefits, cuz it, I can't really compete with a health, a home health company as a cash-based practice owner. I just can't because they're making more money off those contracts and I can't match that because we're not making the same amount of money.

Think of the example of nonprofits. My wife used to work for a nonprofit called Operation Home Front. She started and she ran the Hawaii chapter. She worked in the Texas chapter. And this is an awesome oppor. It is an awesome organization. They help wounded soldiers, they help with morale events with military kids and events for them and things.

And she loved it. She loved it. And she got paid like absolute shit. She had terrible benefits. When we had our first, when we had our first kid, when we had our son, she got six weeks of unpaid maternity leave and she was right back working from home with, like at the six week mark. That, that's the challenge of those environments.

Like they're, they don't have a lot of revenue and if they do, they put it all into the mission. But people, smart people like my wife would, work for these organizations and probably would've kept working for these organizations if I hadn't drug her into our business. Because she loved the work.

She loved the meaning of what was going on with it. So keep in mind people, they want to be able to have something that they really. Find meaning in all right? And they will take less money in order to do that. Okay, so big takeaways for me this year. All right. So you need to know exactly what you want your life to look like and make decisions based on that.

This is like the end. I'm gonna finish with these. These are just big bullet points that I took away from all this coaching and all these masterminds that that that we were in this year. When I say we, I mean my, me and my two business partners. But a lot of it, a lot of it was me. A lot of it was me getting involved in these things personally, and I've, so I've had a chance to be in a lot of different mastermind groups and coach and have coaches.

And I, I can independently learn things from pretty much anybody. There's a lot of smart people out there, but when I look at what I want my life to look at or look like I want to find and seek out people that have done. And are doing things similar to what I'm trying to do, and that means be a successful entrepreneur, but that's actually on the, it's quite on the, towards the bottom of my list at this point, cuz I, I think in a lot of ways I've checked that box for what I felt like my own ego needed to accomplish.

So it's way down there. But I wanna be a successful entrepreneur, successful business owner with a healthy relationship with my spouse, with a great relationship, with my with my kids, with my family. I wanna be healthy, I wanna be happy. I want to have some balance in my life that hasn't existed for almost a decade.

And so the people that I seek out now are people, at least for me, visually on the surface before I get to know them, that is what they focus on, what they have achieved or are working to achieve. I am not interested in just learning from people that are worth a lot of money and they have none of these other things going on because it's, I don't want to chase what they have.

I don't want their life. I wanna work with people who are on the same path as me and ideally further along. So make sure that make decisions based on that. And this year, do not pick a mentor or coach or a mastermind that doesn't align with you and what you want your life to look like.

I've done this, I've made mistakes with this too, where I've joined groups or I've had coaches, and then I'm like, dude I don't want anything to do with any of this. This just isn't my, like, where somebody might go out or how they might interact with people. And the integrity that people have.

When no people can say one thing, but how they act when other people are not around or in closed doors and the things they say and the things they do can not be aligned. So I don't want anything to do with people that are superficially telling you one thing and then deep down, they're bad people.

Like they're just not doing the right things. So for me, like I always try to pick a mentor coach or a mastermind that aligns with my core beliefs and the person that's running that's incredibly important. Probably the most important thing. So non-negotiables for me at this point, after this year of what I've learned, these are non-negotiables for me.

I think you need to understand your own non-negotiables of what you're willing to say yes or no to as you go along your business journey. Number one, time flexibility to allow for tons of quality family time and a balanced life as much as possible for an entrepreneur. That's huge for me. I want I've been I've worked all the hours, all the years I've done a lot.

And it wears you down physically, mentally, emotionally. It wears your family down, it wears your spouse down. And in some cases, I think it's necessary for a short period of time. But you also gotta be able to understand how to pump the brakes and not necessarily just grind all the time because there's no end in sight if you do that.

So for me, like time, flexibility and and being able to have more balance, that's a non-negotiable. A sustainable work environment for our team. I do not want to run our team into the ground. I don't wanna drive our team so hard that they can't have balance in their own life. So we will take a step back in terms of progress and growth in profitability.

In the money we can make in a business for the exchange of longevity with our team, with work-life balance, with them being able to also have this great quality of life that's so much more important to us than, however much more money that we could possibly make. We don't want to burn out great people.

And I feel the exact same way with our cash-based practice. And I think that, most of us do as well. We want to be an employer. We wish we had. That's the way I look at it. I like be the employer that you wish you would've had. Cause you probably never would've left to start your own thing.

Sustainable work environment for our team is huge. All right. Truly helping people. Not just making money. So the last non-negotiable is I will not say yes to a business opportunity, an investment opportunity of something that I might have some involvement in. Unless it truly helps people and not just makes money, I will not I will not just go for a cash wrap.

I won't do it. I have invested in things that are not necessarily helping anybody. It's just an investment vehicle and I don't feel so great about it. But when I get a chance to do that and it helps people it's even better. And a lot of that is even invested in our own business. Like we truly get to help people.

Cash-based practices get to help people like these. This is us. It's such a huge advantage in so many ways. Personally, it's personally gratifying. That's what I've just aligned a lot with, is money. Like you, you can make a lot of money. I've made a lot of money. Like it's, and at a certain point it doesn't change shit.

It doesn't change anything. Nothing. And if you're sitting there and you're broke, like I fucking get that too. I've been there and that's one of the reasons why I worked so hard and I worked so hard for years, is because it sucks. It does. But I can tell you this much, having made money without necessarily truly being able to like, see that I can help somebody and see that their life's changing and then being able to make money and helping somebody truly change their life, or truly get the outcome they want physically.

Dude, it's way better over here. It's way better over here. The money will come. It, you just gotta focus on helping as many people as you can, and you're gonna feel so much better. You're gonna have so much more gratitude. You're gonna have so much more positivity in your life. And the money will be there.

The money will be there. It's not the only thing, it's not the main thing. So that's my last non-negotiable. So I'll leave you guys with this. These are my notes. You'll have the PDF of this. You can watch this turned out to be longer than I thought. That's like an hour. But again, we dropped $139,000 coaches, courses and Mastermind.

These are the lessons that I learned. If you can't afford to go and do that on your own, or maybe some of these groups, you just can't even get into because you don't have recommendations or net worth that allows you to be able to do that. I hope this helps you. I hope it helps you. Look, if you have a cash or a hybrid practice and you're trying to figure out how to start and or grow your business, and what I say here resonates with you in some way.

Please check us [email protected]. It's really straightforward. You can learn more about our team and what we do there. And if you don't, no big deal. I hope this helps you. This is just something that I wish somebody would've done for me. And I could have access to some of this.

Which, would've been awesome. Hopefully you can implement it and you can learn some of these lessons. And if you take a little, like one little bullet point from here, you can apply it to your business and it's positive, man, that's a win. So as always, guys, thank you so much for paying attention to anything that we do.

I hope this really helps you and I hope that 2023 is a great year for you and your business both personally and professionally.

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