E496 | The Long Term Approach To A Successful Business

This episode covers the areas I think you must focus on to build a long-lasting practice based on our experience. This is not the only way but it is what we did to lead us to where we are today. I hope it helps you. If you want to see the video for this podcast, head to our Facebook group.

• Playing the long game and earning trust
• Effective sales and constantly improving
• Educating in person

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So there's all kinds of hidden fees within your business that are just part of doing business. One of those is credit. Processing and for us, we didn't even realize how much we were paying in credit card processing with the first management software we were using for our practice. And when we switched over to PT everywhere, we just realized we were saving literally hundreds of dollars a month with credit card processing with their partner with Card point versus who we were using with our prior.

Software. This has made a massive difference. It's more than paid for itself. It allows us to decrease our overhead. It allows us to have more cash flow to reinvest in our people, in our technology, in our facility, in marketing and everything that's gonna drive the business. So don't get abused by credit card processing companies.

Make sure you're paying what you should pay. And if you're looking for a management software, highly recommend PT everywhere directly integrates. Processor makes it very easy and their rates are super, super competitive. So it's saved us a ton of money and it probably will do the same for you if you don't know what you are getting charged.

So head over to PT everywhere. Take a look at what they've got. I think you really like it. 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.

Guys, doc Danny here with a PT Entrepreneur podcast, and today I put together a little visual. I'm just gonna drop this in the PT Entrepreneur's Facebook group. So if you are not a member of that, definitely go join. It's totally free. It's super cool group, about 52, 5300 people in it. They. Cash-based or hybrid based clinicians of some sort that are looking to either start or grow that.

So a pretty cool spot if you're trying to do that yourself. And what I wanted do today was talk about how to win long-term in local service businesses. My wife got me this iPad with one of these awesome iPad pencils. For Christmas, and I haven't really done much with it. I wanna do more visual training with it.

So I put something together, just my thoughts on how to win long-term from what we've done and from what we've seen other people do that we work with. I'm gonna share that. So if you wanna see the visual aid go to the group, I'll drop a video in there. And then if you can just listen, I'll try to explain it as best I can.

So let me share my my screen real quick.

All right, cool. So this is how I think that you can win the long game or win long term with a any, really any local service business. But in my experience, it's as a physical therapist, right? So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that. But this could be an ice cream store. This could be, I think an ice cream store would be actually very easy if you have good ice cream.

Great. Very easy to sell, way easier than physical therapy, right? It could be a dentist, it could be anything. It could be a toy store, whatever. It's a local business of some sort, right? So how do you win long term? With this sort of visual aids treat the business in the middle.

And then there's four things around it that I think are really important. And then one last thing that is ties it all together on the back end of these things. So these four things are your reput. The service you provide, your local presence and marketing and local presence and marketing can be hand in some ways, but they're slightly different.

So I broke them out. So the first thing is I'm gonna start with your service. So this is the one thing that you can do everything else, right? But if your service sucks, then nobody's gonna come back. You have to be a great clinician. You have to help people get results. This isn't necessarily even.

It shouldn't even be part of it really. It should be just a check the box. It's an assumption. It's an assumption that you get people outcomes, that you get people better. Otherwise I doubt you would go into business for yourself if you weren't doing that. This is for me, again, a check the box.

I think you have to just assume you're gonna get people results, but it has to be more than that. It has to be consistent. So consistency is something that is underneath your service. It separates businesses in a very dramatic way. If you look at, it's like restaurants, right? There's a reason why there's chain restaurants all over the place, or franchises, and it's because it's familiarity and consistency wherever you go is it's actually a very hard thing to do at scale or even really in one location just to be consistent with how you're doing things.

So think about being consistent. Are you working with one person? Is it the same as how you're working with everybody? Do you have certain things that you feel like make your service better than average? What are they? Detail those things out and make sure that you're documenting those so that you can then have consistent.

Repeatable, services with other people that you bring on other providers that you bring on as well as administrative staff that understand your methodology. We have to be above average. I think this is it's funny, I don't even have to write this in here, but being above average as far as.

Your customer experience, but also your clinical outcomes. So great clinicians that also create a great service environment a great experience, crush it. And they crush it long term without having to really rely on a ton of new patients. So they have to work really hard to get they just get more people because.

People have a great experience and they get great results. So they come back. It's if you have a great restaurant, you probably don't have to do much marketing because if you have great guacamole, people are gonna come back in cause they love guacamole. It's that simple, right?

Just be really good. Your service has to be really good wherever you're providing. Make sure it's also experience-based. So yes, they want to get their back pain resolved. But they will remember the experience that they had while they were with you as well. Are you on time? Here's a great, here are two super easy things you can do.

Number one, use somebody's name whenever you greet them. Whenever they leave, at least once or twice more in the visit. Don't use their name every two minutes. That's gonna be weird, but use username frequently especially whenever you greet them and say goodbye. It's a very easy thing to do. That's been proven to increase people's experience with businesses when their name is used.

It just shows that you know them, that's you're familiar with them and you have a cheat sheet in front of you have your schedule right there. You should know their damn name. It's not that hard, right? That's the first thing. The second thing is be punctual, be on time. It is free. These two things are completely free.

There's lots of things that can cost money and time in the business, but these things are free. And if you can be punctual and be like on time, basically every single time apologizing. If you're a minute late, that is not normal, especially with Medical visits. Think about that. The average medical visit, you go there, you show up early to fill out a bunch of forms.

Then they have you sit in the waiting room. It's usually like 15 minutes if you're lucky, past whenever you're supposed to be seen. Then they take you to another room where they put you in there and they close you off, and now you're sitting in there not sure when this person's gonna come in. It's probably 30 minutes after that while you're sitting there, on your phone or counting all the cotton balls that they have.

You don't know what's going on. It's a bad experience. But what if your dog came. You showed up to do your paperwork and then they saw you on time. Actually on time, you would be shocked. The same thing happens with us. They used to assume that our, that we're gonna be late. They assume this is how it works with all medical experiences at medical business not the case.

If you can be punctual, that makes a massive dish difference to people. Username be on time. Constantly improving. This is a another one in your service. I think you have to just continue to focus on if you wanna win long term and that's not getting complacent with what you're doing, what could you do that's better?

What could you do that you can improve? Can you get feedback from people that you're already working with about what they would like to see improved? Because some of these things may not be realistic. Some of them are, and they may make a huge difference. So constantly trying to improve, utilizing the feedback from the people you're actually working with.

Not necessarily guessing what people want, but actually asking them and then trying to fulfill on those things if they're reasonable. The last thing I have in here is also that you want as much recurring revenue as possible. So in your service, and this is this is the, what you're selling you, number one, you have to have effective sales, right?

So being able to effectively sell what you're. So having conversations with people about problems they're trying to solve, be a problem solver, not just a a a practitioner. People will pay to have their problems solved and on the front end, that's usually gonna be something like committing to a plan of care or a package.

Now recurring revenue as people that are coming back in on either a structured or semi-regular basis that are filling your schedule or your staff member's schedule without you having to find new business. And this can be many different variations. Service options doesn't really matter which one it is.

It just matters that you're trying to snowball as much recurring revenue as recurring revenue as you can because it is going to stabilize your financial position in your business. So if you have a great service, people inherently are way more likely to want to come back anyway and work with you on an ongoing basis, and that's gonna help with the recurring revenue or the revenue that's coming in without you having to go out and try to find it.

So that's the service side of a business in a nutshell. Your reputation is another big area, one of the four that I wrote. So your reputation, there's a few things that you really need to do on an ongoing basis to make sure that you have a strong reputation in your area. For the long haul, the first thing is to do the right thing.

I don't even know why I have to say this, but I do, because. Doing the right thing is hard to do on an ongoing basis. Doing the right thing for people. Following up with people, when you say you're gonna follow up with them, connect them with the people you say you're gonna connect them to. Giving somebody a refund if you know you should, even though it you, you're hurting for cash cuz you're just starting your business, doing these things that are the right things.

Are what separates people as far as their reputation goes, and you only get one. And I've talked about this on the podcast before you only get one reputation. You damn well better manage it as best you can and take pride in that. And take ownership in the things that you are screwing up on.

Apologize when something isn't right. Again, I look, I'll apologize if I'm a minute late. To for somebody's visit. I'm like, man, I'm so sorry. I'm running a minute behind today. I'm usually dead on time. The morning has gotten away from me like, who apologized for being a minute late? Somebody that is obsessive over being punctual cuz they respect other people's time.

That is reputation. That's something that's gonna carry forward where somebody's gonna feel significantly more likely and trust in you to wanna refer their friend or family member, that is a sensitive thing for them to do. That's a vulnerable place for them to be cuz they're putting their reputation as a person who recommends things on the line.

And if you have too many times when your recommendation hasn't gone well, I listen to you anymore, they, you've lost credibility. You've lost status with them as somebody who is reputable. So keep that in mind. Do the right thing. Play the long game. Make these decisions based on long-term relationships.

One thing that we do, And have done from the beginning is if we see somebody who comes in for an evaluation and they do not belong in our clinic, let's say something's going on where they need to go see primary care, something's going on, where it's, there's obviously something more significant and it needs to be addressed by a orthopedic surgeon, potentially imaging something to that effect.

We refer people those, we refer those people out. We connect them directly with where we want them to go. Either via email, we'll call sometimes to help them get set up, give them direct. Who they need, get in touch with what they're gonna need to do. And then we do not charge them for that first visit because we were not able to help them in a manner where we're utilizing our skillset in that office and they're the right fit for us.

That is actually our fault for not having ruled that out on the phone to help get them to the right place first. So even if they're there for the full hour, we will not charge 'em for that. They're not they're not in the right place yet, so we have to make sure. Are appropriate for us. And we've done that from the get-go and we get so much positive feedback on that.

People are always, That we're not charging people for that as customers. And I just never thought anything about it. I just thought this was the right thing to do, and that has helped create a very strong reputation for us as a place where people can trust our opinion and we'll, steer them rights direction, no matter if it's the best thing for our business or not.

So again, you have to earn their trust. This is another one underneath your reputation. This isn't something you can just do this once. You have to do this on an ongoing basis, and you have to really focus on. Making decisions that are best for people long term and earning that trust. And the thing with trust is very difficult to earn and very easy to.

Remember that trust is very difficult to earn and very easy to lose, so you have to stay on top of it. You have to continue to do the right things for people long term. Otherwise, that trust is lost and you're gonna see a big drop in number of people that are coming your way organically because other people have trust in you that you're gonna do the right thing and you have to lead from the front you.

You also have to realize that like you're gonna. Employees at some point, and they're actually, they're watching exactly what you do. So if you tell them something or, Hey, this is how we do things here, but you don't do that yourself, it's the easiest way to lose the trust and the. The cohesiveness of the employees and the staff that you have, because they just aren't gonna respect what you have to say because you're sit, you're telling 'em something, but then you're going and doing something completely different.

So you have to lead from the front. Keep that in mind. You decided to do this. This was voluntary. No one shoved you into this. Into this company that you decided to start. So you have to take the good with the bad. And sometimes I don't look at this as a bad thing. Like it forces you just to be a better leader, to be a a better person to hold yourself to a very high standard.

And remember, to hold yourself to a high standard, but to be patient with others. So be very strict with yourself and patient with others. They're not necessarily you and they shouldn't have to do that. You should hold them to a standard, but have patience with them along the way because everybody, deserves that.

Especially employees that you're working with. They need mentorship, they need support, and they need a leader that they can look to, as an example, not as somebody of what not to do. The next few things really come down to marketing, and this comes down to getting people in the door. So this would be your local presence and marketing.

So I'm gonna go through your local presence first. And this is actually an area that I see a lot of people try to avoid or skip. So your l your local presence is it's do other people know who you are? Do other people know who you are as a business owner? Do they know about your business? And in particular, I think other business owners are one of the better groups of people to really get involved with and have a network of.

Because even though they may not be healthcare practitioners or something like that, like they still are connected, highly connected within a local area. So number one is just getting involved. So this could be a number of things. This could be a local B and i group. This could be a a bigger business group.

It could be a chamber of commerce, it could be something on a local stage as far as business owners go. That's a group of people that I very un much underestimated until I started to get involved in those communities and realize just how powerful that was. Make sure you're getting involved.

Make sure that Talk to your neighbors. Like this is something that I always found really interesting is, do you know who your, the people around you are? And maybe they turn over and there's other people that you know that come in or whatever, but you should know who the other business owners around you are, other business owners in the community.

And that's sometimes as easy as just like going and saying hello, and just, Hey, what do you guys do here? I'm interested, we may have people that are come to see us that could be a good fit for what you guys do. Who doesn't wanna talk? There's somebody about that, about their business and what they do so that they can maybe get some clients from that.

And then eventually, you get a chance to tell 'em what you do. So that's a great strategy. Super easy, completely free. Just takes your time and takes a little bit of effort on your part to go and talk to these people. So me and network, other business owners, this falls underneath getting involved in my opinion.

Like I said, it could be b in I group, could be local business group that, that you get involved. There's even like subsets of that where it's like local health and wellness providers or something to that effect, or business owners under 30 or whatever. There's all these different groups that you can start to get involved in and just be a part of that community.

Giving back is a big part of local presence as well. This isn't something that we. I don't think that you should just flaunt this on social media. I think you should give back and work with people in a manner that the people that you want to help in a manner that is is just because you want to do it.

Not because it, it makes your business look like they're altruistic or you're willing into Phil philanthr philanthropy. If you're into that, just be into it. You don't have to tell everybody about it, but just do it, and you'll meet people in those settings as. Organically that you get a chance to know, but more than anything, you get to give back and help out local organizations as well.

And your team can get involved in that, which is great from a standpoint of really cohesion of that team long term. Again, leading from the front, which goes right back to to your reputation. So giving back, getting involved locally as far as that goes, and then be part of the community.

So now this really. More to do with your niche and the things that you're interested in. So let's say that you're a you're working with runner. And you like to run on your own. It's like your movement meditation, that's your thing. But it would very be much be beneficial for you to start getting involved with local running groups, meetups being part of that community.

Maybe it's. Helping coach a middle school cross country team or a club team or something like that where you're involved in a slightly, more significant way in the community. But being a part of the community is huge. And I always find it so fascinating that people aren't ne necessarily doing that.

And maybe it's because they're busy and they have a lot going on. They feel like it's, it's the one thing they can cut out. And I get that having, I've been there young kids. Starting a business and traveling a ton for another company I was working for it, it can be hard to find the time, but being a part of the community is very important because that's how really help your reputation, your business, and make you visible within that community as well.

I was heavily involved in the CrossFit community when we moved to Atlanta. And we really built our business off of that niche. And a lot of it had to do with people knowing who I was. By being a part of the local community and working with a lot of local competitive cross CrossFit athletes.

I definitely wasn't one myself, but I worked with many of them and I was at many competitions. Working with them and as well as other teams and working as a consultant in some ways for for teams and and with programming. So involved in the community is something that, you really have to figure out what your niche is and who you want to work with, and then be involved in that community and do that on an ongoing basis.

That's one of those things that you. It's hard to turn that off and still have your pulse on the what's happening in that community and for people to be aware of you easily, you can lose that if you are not a part of it. So the last part is marketing. So as far as marketing goes, one thing that I see a lot, I see a lot of businesses that are just constantly chasing new business, and it's somewhat exhausting.

Especially if they're solely focusing on digital marketing, which changes really fast. And I think there's a place, there's, there is definitely a place for digital marketing. But if that's all that, if that's all that you are focused on, I think it's a sketchy kind of place to be without.

Foundation and stability of local referrals as well. So I think it's really better to stack that on top of a really strong foundation of a local presence and local referrals. Number one, I think the thing that can set you apart, In your area long term is educating people in person.

I've found massive success with this. It's something that a lot of people are unwilling to do or feel uncomfortable with. If you're willing to go and educate people, do workshops, do lunch and learns go to those people now maybe you couldn't have done this a year or two ago, but.

Definitely now you're, you're able to get back in gyms, get back in businesses even on Zoom calls. I did this, during 2020 I did a bunch of lunch and learns on Zoom calls with with businesses that we're just looking for people to fill time. You gotta keep that in mind.

Like they're trying to find relevant Concepts that they can teach people that help improve their life you can do that. I've done presentations on lots of things workshops for people on lots of different things. And we can help people in many ways, especially people that are in the office in very desk bound.

So think about that as far as educating people in person. This could also be over Zoom, or whatever platform that is that you want to use. It's still a live. Education event of some sort and get really good at teaching people simple, like simplifying things in a way. Where you can take the complex things that we know, simplify them down and make them actionable.

For your average person that's not in the healthcare system to understand and implement, that will go a very long way. People will remember that not especially if it's in person. Very few things in person happen the way that they used to. And if you can leave an impression on somebody in person, they may not turn into a client of yours.

Maybe they do. They may feel very confident referring somebody to you, oh, I saw and like you've been talking about how your ankle's been bugging. You should totally go see them, right? And they may not even be in a client, but you've built a lot of reciprocity with them in that capacity. And doing that on an ongoing basis builds a massive bank of people that are a very familiar with you.

Let's say you, you teach, two, two workshops or education events. Every month, and you do that for a year and let's say 20 people are at each of them. Just to make my math easy, right? You're talking 40 people that you've gotten in front of in a month, and then 480, so almost 500 people that you've gotten in front of in a year.

Now, let's say you do that for, years on end, that's a lot of people that are aware of you in a very intimate way. Versus just like seeing a social media post or reading a blog, which I think are valuable too. But I think the local education side of it is just super potent and it works really well.

So become a thought leader online and to your list. So this is something that you definitely need an email list, people that you've worked with and ways to try to build that. And you want to be able to not just have that, but also to be able to educate. In a way where you are helping them learn things that are relevant to them, or maybe it's curating content that's relevant to them.

So if you can create blog posts or video content that you put on YouTube that's helping people like. Understand concepts or maybe manage some of the things they have going on as far as musculoskeletal stuff goes. You can build a lot of trust that way. Just imagine if you help somebody with their shoulder pain from a video.

This is why Kelly Tourette blew up. He had all these people that were doing these things that he had come up with for them to do for these injuries, and they were seeing like gains from it. They're like, holy crap, SLE helped my shoulder, didn't even touch me. Of course I'm gonna, do X, Y, and Z that he has after.

That's why he had people flying in from literally, halfway across the world, people flying in from Asia to work with him for an hour to San Francisco. That's nuts. And that comes from the thought leader platform that he has built and still has from teaching online. So this could be in blogs, can be videos, but then make sure that you're following up with people on a regular basis, sharing that with them and curating, other relevant.

On an email list, and you're doing this on a weekly basis, you're staying in front of them in a helpful way. You're not asking for anything. You're just helping curate content for them that they're gonna want anyway. And they're gonna be much more likely to open it. They're gonna be much more likely to want to be interactive with that and become a client or come back in if they were a prior client.

So make sure that you're sharing what you feel like, your unique sort of skillset is as far as knowledge. Online and you're sharing that with people that are on your list their prior clients or people that are, have interacted in some way and exchange their email digital ads to drive even more leads.

So I, I alluded to this. I think digital ads are awesome. We've never had a more predictable marketing channel in history. If you were running radio ads, people will still do this, but they were much more popular back in the. You're running a radio ad it, all you could really do was run it, see if your business increased, and then turn it off and then see if it decreased.

And then that's when you could, that's like roughly how you could tell how effective it was is like how many more sales came in, or how much your business increased over that period of time. Which is, it's not very visible, right? It's not very transparent. I think if you're looking at this and you're looking at the way that Facebook and Google do things and Google and I throw YouTube into that cuz they own them as well.

It's incredibly transparent. You can see exactly how many people clicked. You can see exactly how many people decided to take action on the next step. You can see exactly what's working, what's not working and it's great. It's great to be added on top of what you're doing locally. You, I don't think you can have great success with one without the other.

You can have great success with local marketing and a strong local presence, and there's plenty of people that have built very big, very strong businesses off of that alone, exclusively. With no ads whatsoever. And when you look. People that build like purely digital ad based businesses, they're typically like e-commerce or online learning platforms.

And they're not necessarily local service businesses, which is what, most of you are building. So you really need that local presence, that local reputation because that's gonna help improve your digital. Conversion people that are more aware of your business or that you have more social proof on a on referrals and reviews and things like that's gonna help with conversions of people that are clicking on ads and looking at offers that you might have because they're more aware of your company and they can learn more about it.

And it looks like there's more of a positive reputation there. So you really have to have the one before you do the other. So I like digital ads to layer on top of a really strong local presence in local market. And the other thing with digital ads that can be a little bit tricky is it changes really fast.

Teaching a workshop or going to a networking event like that hasn't changed in a long time. I don't think that's gonna change anytime soon. But the Facebook algorithm of how they. If they run ads and what's working and what's not working, it can change quickly. And the things you learned six months ago could be obsolete today if you're not staying on top of those things.

So I definitely think at a certain stage in particular, if you're not, if you're not even at $10,000 a month in revenue yet, I don't even think you sh should be touching that. I think that's the best to be layered on, especially to help build the schedules of providers you're bringing on. And that's a great way to use it.

And I think it's. Incredibly predictive and helpful if layered on correctly. So digital ads to drive even more leads once you have your base of new patients that are coming in on an ongoing basis. And then the last thing would be the review king, be the person in your area that just has like an overwhelming amount of reviews compared to everybody else.

If a friend that owns a a home inspection business and you don't think. Home inspection business as a company or as like a business that has a ton of reviews. I really think like service businesses and restaurants and stuff like that they tend to have the most, if you look at like Google or Yelp or something like that.

But I have this friend that has a home inspection business and he has like hundreds and hundreds probably at this. Thousands of reviews from for his home inspection business, and it's astronomically more than everybody. So many more. And this was an intentional marketing strategy of his that he like really tried very hard to get reviews.

And one of the biggest drivers of business to his business is people that look up home inspection businesses. And most of 'em your realtors gonna give you recommendation, right? So that's usually how it goes. Your realtor says, go here. It's like that person's buddy, or they have some deal worked out and.

For him, he was like I don't wanna play that game quite, quite the same way. And he wanted to have a strong presence on search and knew that people were gonna just look at reviews and he's a hundred percent right. So he's you go and you look up, home inspection in the area that he is, and you'll see this.

It's just, it doesn't even look right. It just looks like it's so many more than everybody else. And the feedback he gets from people that come to work with him of many of them, that's exactly how they find him. They look it up in their area, he pops up for it. They see that he has, 10 times more reviews than everybody else.

And they get intrigued. They click on it and they're like, wow, all these strangers, I don't know, they can't all be wrong. They can't all be fake. And then they end up working with him and he's built a very successful business off of that. Just. Local reputation and review being the review king in the area for that.

So make sure that's a big part of your local marketing cuz that is an asset that's gonna be there and continue to grow and not necessarily go away. Assuming, Google doesn't go anywhere. So the last thing is really pulling it all together with your finances. And I think a lot of people struggle with this.

They don't know what to do. They don't know how to pay themself. They don't know what they should do with their money afterward. This is a complex topic. All these are massive topics, right? This is just a generalization that I hope gives you a framework that helps. But when we look at finance, the, it's what pulls everything together.

I had somebody tell me once as a friend of mine that had got burned on real estate investing and. He said anything times zero equals zero. He's very conservative and what he means is so let's say you think you're gonna get a 20% return on something, but it turns out to be zero.

The money you put into that is now worth zero, right? Being conservative I think is A better path than being ultra aggressive. And some of it depends on what your goals are, right? If your goal is that you wanna scale really fast and you wanna have this, multi, million dollar exit then maybe you need to be very aggressive and you need to grow fast and you take on debt and you need to run super thin margins.

But just focus on growth. If you're trying to attract, private equity, A venture capital money that's gonna buy you out and then you're gonna ride off into the sunset and do whatever you're gonna do after that. I don't know. For me, That's not really my goal. Yeah, I'm very conservative when it comes to this stuff because I know how hard it is to start and grow these businesses.

And the last thing I wanna do is screw it up by being a dummy with finances. So being conservative, it being conservative is something that we we tried to push with everybody that we work with. So that comes down to number one, starting with building and maintaining three months of cash reserves.

And those cash reserves are based off of your expenditures. So whatever your overhead is, and I include what you pay yourself. All your staff salary, everything whatever you're paying out every month for the business, you should have three months of that on hand, cash on hand in the business. So let's say you have $20,000 in, expenses every single month, including what you pay yourself, then you need $60,000 in your bank account.

Now, but let's say your business grows. Now all of a sudden you have $40,000 a month expense expenses because you have way more staff, payroll and overhead. Now you need to have $120,000 cash on hand in the business. And I think a lot of people will look at that and they'll say, whoa, I could do a lot of stuff with $120,000 for sure.

You could do a ton of stuff with $120,000, but you'd be much better off to leave it there in case you need it in case you want to expand or grow and you need cash in order to do that. Cause maybe you're not gonna be running very profitable for a while. Or I don't know, maybe a global pandemic happens.

Who knew that shit was gonna happen? Nobody but the people that we work with all were fine. Many of them were covering six months of cash reserves in the business and the, their ultra conservative and they were totally fine. We were running about four months cash reserves whenever it happened.

And we knew we, we didn't have to let any staff go. So cash is king. Cash is very helpful. You gotta have it in the business. Make sure you have cash reserves. It is your safety net. Running profit first is also another recommendation as far as finance goes. This is a book that's picked up a ton of steam for a finance book.

I don't know if that's like a po I doubt it's a popular read for most people. But the, as far as profit first goes, it's a great read. It's a little complex. I think that there's a little more of a simplified way of going about it. I really prefer just to have, your operating account where all the money is coming, coming in and out for the business, and then having a profit and a tax account that you slide money over to based off of money coming into the business.

So you have a percentage of that going to both taxes and profits so that you're. Proactively towards those things. The last thing you wanna do is get caught not having any cash and having a tax bill that you have to pay, that's a problem. And then you wanna start to develop the habit of allocating money for profit in the business.

Cause you wanna have a profitable business. It forces you to do that. If you run in the traditional way, there's a lot of other accounts involved. I think if you just do that alone. You're better off than 90% of businesses out there. Honestly, most of them are just look at the bank account and if they have more money in the account at the end of the month than they had before at the beginning of the month, then they're good.

They're good to go. Although it's just not very transparent and predictable especially if you're looking to grow or hire people, like you really need to have a better grasp on your finances than that. So if this stuff, bores you, I'm sorry, but business. It involves money. So we have to understand finance so that we can make intelligent decisions so that we have a business long term.

And it is very much more important once you start to have other employees. The last thing you wanna do is screw something up. That then has implications of other people not being able to provide for their family. There's a lot of responsibility associated with that. So definitely something that you wanna make sure that you are focusing on.

And then the last thing that I would say, and I was debating whether, I don't even put this in here because I think people sometimes they take their eye off the ball too early. But taking active income from the business and turning that into passive income outside the business is the last step that I think really safeguards people as far as making sure that all the hard work that they put into their business, it's not the only place that they have.

They have financial stability. I personally know business owners that have just doubled down on their. Consistently and double down on their business and double down on their business. And then something happened that ruined it and they really had minimal to not, nothing to show for it outside of that.

They basically just had to close their business down and then go work for somebody else or close their business down and try to restart something else. Because they never actually took any cash out of the business. They never really took any profit and paid themself. And then put that into things that were going to grow as well.

Once you get to a stage where you have profit in the. And you're stable and it's different for everybody. You can really start looking at this as early as you want, but if you have growth goals and you want to really get to the point where you're growing past yourself and you have other providers involved I think for a lot of people, once they get to the stage where they're somewhere around, maybe like a half a million gross revenue business.

And they have some other people involved. They have some passive revenue in the business because they're not necessarily fulfilling on everything, but they're still very active in it. It's a great time to really start looking at, okay, what things outside of the business can I put money into that are gonna help create.

Passive income. So non-active income for me. Cuz that's really, that's the game right there, right? It's take this active entity and then take profit from that active entity and put it into things that are, very conservative, tried and true, investments that produce cash flow, produce passive income for you outside of the business.

And then you have this entity that is basical. A cash positive business that could also be sold one day. And then from there you can move that into other assets as well. Or you decide not to do that at all just, and just keep the business and make it as active or passive as you want it to be. Really it's up to you after that point, but just don't make the mistake of just continuing doubling down your business and then, maybe you bet wrong one time and again, any.

Time zero equals zero. So you do not wanna make that mistake. And being conservative by pulling money out of the business as you go and having profit necessarily just cannibalizing your own business, but pulling profit out of the business as you go and putting that into things outside that are not correlated to your business whatsoever.

That is a a really good way to hedge against any sort of negative thing that may happen in your business. And who knows? And like I'm again, if it. Obvious, I'm incredibly conservative when it comes to finances. I just know how hard it is to do this, how to start a business. I have so much respect for people that do it.

And I just don't wanna see them. I just don't wanna see them have nothing to show for it in the end, because it should be something that creates generational family. Financial change, and whatever scale that might be for you, it doesn't really matter, but it's something where you have that opportunity, please don't squander it by being too risky, I think is probably the best way for me to put that.

In summary, I'll go back over this real quick. This is if you wanna have a bulletproof long-term business, not trying to make a quick buck. Not trying to flip something and turn it around. We're talking about, long-term ownership of a service-based business. You have to have a strong reputation.

You have to have an amazing service above and beyond everybody else, which includes the experience people have. When they're there, I really think it's 50% outcomes, 50% experience that people have with you. You need to have a local presence. People need to know who you are. It's not about who you know as much as who knows you.

That's a local presence. Being aware of who you are, who you're, who the business is, probably is better, better put and to have repeatable, consistent marketing that is based off a layer of foundation of local market. Education and then layered on with digital advertising on top of that and being the review king in your area is huge.

And then from there, being conservative with your finances, having a minimum three months cash reserves, utilizing profit first to really help you allocate cash effectively. And then moving money into passive vehicles passive assets, passive investments outside of the active business with the profit that you have.

If you do all those things, you should have. Solid business for as long as you wanna have a business. And that's the goal really. You should have an entity that is I wouldn't say stress free business is just stressful in general, but is fairly low Stress to run is predictable and is something that can last for a very long time.

Generations, if you really want to do that. Something that's such a solid business that somebody else would actually wanna buy it. That's pretty rare too. Most businesses just close, no one buys them because they're not really ver, they're not very valuable. There's no value there at all. They basically typically just run off of one person and there's no systems or anything like that.

So these are all things that you can build in your business when. Long term. So I hope this helps. I hope that if you have a service business, you can apply some of these things to what you're doing. And if you wanna get some support and some help on this, I really highly recommend reaching out to us and having a conversation with our team.

If you go to physical therapy biz.com you can see what we do. At this point we're literally working with hundreds of clinicians actively all over the country that are starting, growing and scaling cash and hybrid practices. It's a pretty amazing thing to see and to be a part of.

And it's changing in a very positive way, the profession. And really they're changing their, they're changing their own lives on a daily basis. And I just think it's something that's, if you are in that stage where, you're either starting or you're growing and trying to scale it's.

Essentially an unfair advantage to have all the information and access to all the people that we work with. Just that, compared to you trying to do it on your own, I just don't see how you even, can get to the same place as, as quickly and with the least amount of risk is the way I look at it.

We decrease risk, we help, you'll make better decisions with proven systems that are working all over the country, small markets, big markets, even in countries where their socialized medicine is still worse. So if you're interested. Head to physical therapy biz.com. Take a look at what we're doing. You can literally sign up to talk to one of our folks on the first page and just book a call with them.

And I think we could help. If it sounds like, if we sound like somebody that could help you, I think it's worth jumping on call with us. So thank you so much for for listening and watching, and we'll see you soon.

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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 Yves Gege every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside of 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.