E697 | Is It Too Late To Start A Cash-Based Clinic?

In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Danny addresses the common concern among healthcare clinicians, specifically physical therapists, who feel that they may have missed out on the opportunity to start their own private practice. He provides a different perspective on this issue, explaining that although the landscape has changed over the years, there is still a large untapped market of individuals who are unaware of or not actively seeking out cash-based or hybrid practices.

Dr. Danny compares this untapped market to a pie, where only a small slice represents those actively seeking cash-based care, while the majority of the pie consists of individuals who either don't know they have a problem that these practices can solve or don't know where to find a solution. This highlights the potential for growth and success in this field.

He also emphasizes that the time spent working at other clinics or in leadership roles is not wasted, but rather builds valuable "invisible infrastructure" of relationships, skills, and experience. These assets can greatly benefit clinicians when they decide to start their own practice, as demonstrated by the example of a clinician who achieved significant success in his first month due to the strong relationships and goodwill he had developed over nearly a decade at another clinic.

Dr. Danny shares his own experience, explaining how his initial goal was to match his military income, but his practice exceeded expectations and achieved multiple six and seven-figure revenues within the first year. This showcases the immense growth potential in cash-based and hybrid practices.

The podcast concludes with reassurance that it is not too late for clinicians to start their own practice, as the opportunities in this space are still vast and largely untapped. Dr. Danny encourages listeners to focus on building their skills, experience, and relationships, as these will be invaluable assets when they decide to venture into their own practice. Starting from a foundation of strong relationships and expertise can lead to faster growth and progress.

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Podcast Transcript

 Danny: If you think it's too late, it's not, you still have plenty of time. There's still plenty of opportunities within within our, unique niches. And whenever you decide it's right, the time is right for you. The time is right for you, and and that's up to you, your family, your certain, situations and what your goals are.

Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skillset in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name's Danny Matei and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession. I've been a staff PT, I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist.

I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice and to date, my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale, their own cash practices. So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, cause I'm here to help you. What's going on? Dr.

Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast. And today we're talking about. If it's too late or not. So recently I've had a few conversations with clinicians. They were either just getting started with us at PT biz or that we're thinking about doing their own thing. And what I found interesting was many of them had this conclusion or had come to this conclusion that they'd missed an opportunity.

They like missed this this opportunity to start a a clinic of their own, especially if they're going to go the more like cash pay route or hybrid route. And they're like, I wish I would've done this five years ago. And, as I've had, some of these conversations and some of the things that I've been able to get into with them is just this idea of like feeling like they have, Squandered an opportunity or they've wasted time by staying at a job that they're at before going and starting their own thing.

And there's kind of two ways to look at this, right? So five years ago, when we look at these practices the bigger difference, and I would say five to 10 years ago in particular, the bigger difference was you had to educate people on why they might want to come and work in a a clinic that didn't directly.

And that was a difficult conversation to have that was a lot of education, now there's far less of the education side of things. There's more competition. There's more clinics. But frankly, There's just a lot of people, way more people than we could ever work with, because only a small percentage of the population is actually even aware of clinics like this, or is looking for a solution to a problem that we might be able to provide for them.

So there's still like the vast majority of the population is unaware of what you do, unaware of what I do. And and there's a lot more. So if you really look at it like a pie, like there's like this small sliver of the pie that is removed, that is the people that are actively looking for a solution to a problem.

But the whole rest of the pie is people that are either unaware of a problem or unaware. They know they have a problem, but they don't know who can help them with it. So that's a lot of people, way more people than people that we're currently working with. The other thing is. People, they, they think to themselves, Oh if I would've started this five years ago, I could be in this place now or whatever it might be.

But it's not like you're wasting five years if you're working somewhere else. Especially if you're going into like leadership positions, you're developing your skillset in the clinic, your skillset in the ability to hire and manage people to be a better leader, to develop Relationships in your local area.

What we see is actually that is, it's almost like you're building infrastructure. So you can't see it, but it's just this invisible infrastructure of relationships and skills that you're developing where, once you decide to go and do your own thing, the people that are, they like delay that longer.

They actually tend to have much faster growth and they also tend to be better leaders in their own business because they may have had to, function in a leadership role within another company, which is helpful because you can learn a lot of leadership mistakes in someone else's company versus your own.

And usually you have more like guardrails and guidance around that as well. So your ability to grow past yourself is actually better than somebody that, that hasn't been in any positions like that, that then goes and starts their own practice and they may have a fast start and they might be able to grow fairly quickly cause they're good at sales and marketing, but they may struggle with the the ability to grow past himself because they've never really had to lead people.

They've never been a leadership position. And that's a challenging thing to learn and you're within your own company. So there's definitely pros and cons to it, but I hate to think of any sort of time that you're spending within a organization as a waste of time. It more than anything, it's just you're building infrastructure and pressure for you to be able to then have this faster growth on the other side, whenever you just go into your own thing.

We saw this recently with a mastermind member that we that we work with who had worked at a private practice clinic in his area that was more of a sort of out of network cash based clinic. And, within The first month of him moving over to start his own thing. He was at like I want to say it was like 110 between 110 to 120 visits for the month And which is extraordinary by the way to have month one over 100 visits is so fast So you're going from you just start your business and in month one, you're doing something like 20 to 25 thousand dollars in revenue Which is It may be more if they're selling packages up front or whatever but just from a earned revenue standpoint, like that's an incredibly fast start.

That doesn't typically happen for most people until the end of, the first year for a lot of folks. So the reason that he was able to do that though, is because he had all these preexisting relationships, all these, network relationships had built so much goodwill in the community by working as a clinician for almost a decade in one, specific Location that when he went to do his own thing, he had this huge bowls of people that wanted to support him and follow him and refer to him.

So you got to keep that in mind. If you feel like you're, you've missed it. You haven't missed anything. You know, we're good. I feel like if you look at it like a baseball game, I feel like we're in like the second inning if you really think of the growth potential that businesses like this actually have.

And it's wild to think about what we thought was. Maxed out. Like I thought, if, Hey, if I could make a hundred thousand dollars in my own company. Cash based practice, I get, that could be my take home salary. That was a home run for me. That was my entire goal when we started our practice.

Like when my wife and I started our practice, like we just wanted to be able to make a lateral transfer from what I was making in the army, which was at like, at the time it was maybe 80, 000. We want to make that lateral transfer and, plus a little bit of money. Yeah. And we were totally content with that.

Totally happy. We were used to living off of that for, as long as we'd been together and typically a lot less than that, because that was, I had just become a captain not too long before that. So I had a raise, a pay raise. And so we were ecstatic to make 80 grand, within our first year we broke a hundred thousand dollars in revenue.

It was, that was our goal and we hit it in year one. And now we're seeing people do that. Multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars in year one. And we're seeing these practices be able to grow to, multiple seven figures, multiple locations that are that size. And all kinds of business opportunities around that, that are being bolted on because the population, there's a lot of people that want to be healthy and stay healthy.

That are really, they really fall between the age groups of 30 to 60. It's a growing population of people that are health minded, their fitness forward individuals that they want to stay healthy and active. They want to invest in themselves to stay that way. And they want to partner with clinicians that want to help them really optimize their health and wellness movement, efficiency their injury reductions, the performance, all of that, things that we, are inherently really good at.

I think that you've got to really keep in mind that there's a huge opportunity still we've barely even got it started, gotten started. Many of these clinics are only a couple of years old that are really starting to become more sophisticated. And if you're in a clinic and you've been there for a decade or more, like you are a great clinician that has a lot of experience, a lot of clinical confidence.

And then probably some mentorship and leadership experience as well. That if you decide that it makes sense for you to do your own thing, which does not necessarily make sense for everybody, but if you decide that's the direction that's right for you, then you have this underlying infrastructure.

You can't see right now, but I'm telling you, it's going to help you. Much, much more than you think. And you'll have faster progress because of that than somebody that's just out of school is going to have to learn how to be a great clinician and they have to learn how to be a leader at the same time, all in their own business.

And that can be a challenge. Not to say that people can't do it. We definitely see that that happened, but they're having to really learn a lot at the same time. Whereas you have a lot of skills that you come, to the practice with, to your new business with that that maybe you don't even realize that you have.

So if you think it's too late, it's not. You still have plenty of time. There's still plenty of opportunities within within our, unique niches. And whenever you decide it's for the time is right for you, the time is right for you, and and that's up to you, your family, your certain, situations and what your goals are.

And and you're the only one that can really decide that. But if you're worried. That, you've been passed by a golden opportunity. You haven't, there's still a lot of room to grow.

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