The Clinician’s Compass Part 1: Is a Lifestyle Practice Right for You?

If you’re thinking about starting or growing your own practice, but you don’t necessarily want to scale a big team or manage a bunch of staff—this episode is for you.

Doc Danny kicks off a 3-part series based on his new book, The Clinician’s Compass, by diving deep into one of the most practical and overlooked practice models out there: the Lifestyle Practice.

This isn’t just theory. It’s a proven model for clinicians who want to make great money, serve people they love working with, and have full control over their time—all without chasing the “bigger is better” mindset.

What Is a Lifestyle Practice?

A lifestyle practice is a clinic where you, the clinician, are still actively involved in patient care. It’s lean, low-overhead, and focused on your niche—whether that’s athletes, moms, post-op patients, or anyone else you truly enjoy helping.

You’re not trying to remove yourself from the business. You're intentionally staying in the driver’s seat—but doing it your way, on your terms.

Who Is This a Good Fit For?

There are two types of people who thrive in this model:

1. Clinicians at heart – You love treating patients, solving movement problems, and staying sharp in your craft. You're not interested in running a massive team or building complex systems.

2. People who want more time freedom – Maybe you're raising a family, pursuing other passions, or just want more flexibility. The lifestyle practice allows you to structure your schedule around your life, not the other way around.

Doc Danny shares a great story in this episode about a woman in Atlanta who runs her own Pilates-based rehab practice two days a week—and fully replaced her old full-time income. She’s able to stay involved with her kids, avoid burnout, and still do work she loves.

The Trade-Offs You Need to Know

Let’s be real: this model isn’t for everyone, and it comes with a few important caveats:

• No passive income – If you stop working, the money stops coming in. It’s a job you own, not a business you can sell.

• Risk of injury – As a solo provider, your hands are your livelihood. If you get hurt, you’re out of commission. That’s why things like disability insurance and outside investments matter.

• Limited scalability – You won’t be building a multi-location empire. And that’s okay—if that’s not your goal.

But here’s the upside: You can still earn a very solid income (we’re talking $150K–$200K+ annually) while doing meaningful work, with full autonomy over your schedule and who you work with.

How to Make It Work

If this path sounds like it fits, here’s what you need to focus on:

• Charge what you’re worth – You're delivering high-level care. Don’t underprice it.

• Keep overhead low – Avoid unnecessary staff and space until you’re truly ready.

• Invest outside your business – Since you’re not building enterprise value, invest profits in assets like real estate, stocks, or retirement accounts.

• Protect yourself – Consider disability insurance and be mindful of risky hobbies or activities that could sideline you from treating.

Final Thought from Doc Danny

“Your business should create the life you want—not become your entire life.”

That’s the heart of the Lifestyle Practice model. If you want to build a business that supports your life instead of consuming it, this may be the perfect race to run.

Want to Go Deeper?

This episode is part of a larger series based on The Clinician’s Compass, Doc Danny’s newest book. The next two episodes will explore the Autopilot Practice and the Home Run Practice—two other paths to building a thriving business as a clinician.

In the meantime, here’s how you can get started:
👉 Book a Free Discovery Call

P.S. Know your race before you start running. You’ll get there faster—and enjoy the journey way more.

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Ready to elevate your practice? Book a call at the link below with one of our expert consultants today and start your journey to delivering unparalleled physical therapy.

Podcast Transcript

Danny: 

 Hey, Danny Matta here, founder of PT Biz, and I wrote another book

today. I wanna start a three part series, uh, on the new book that I wrote, the Clinician's Compass. Now this book is really, it was an internal resource for our Pt Biz clients, and it's based off of a presentation that I gave that that is a presentation. It has. It's probably the best feedback I've ever gotten from any presentation that I've ever put together.

And the reason that I think it was, it hit, hit the spot with so many people was because it helps clarify a couple things. So number one, understanding, uh, what the end goal for your business is and which. Business vehicle, which I'm gonna go over three of those aligns with where you're trying to end up.

Um, I go through some exercises of how you can actually develop your vision, how to understand if you're making the right decisions, how to have a framework around that. Because for a lot of people, they're like, well, I kind of just go off my gut and whatever. And, and maybe that that's. Been pretty good for you so far, but I think there's better ways to go about making decisions.

And one thing that I've learned in particular with, you know, the, the last 10 years being involved in as an entrepreneur in multiple businesses is the more we make the correct decisions, the the less friction we have with getting where we're trying to go. I mean, it's just that simple. It's like you're driving a car somewhere and if you make the right turns, you end up there faster than if you make a bunch of the wrong turns.

Okay. So. With this book in particular, uh, the goal is to really establish these three different vehicles that we see people at Shark clinics be able to, to, uh, use and to build, uh, a specific type of business that aligns with what they're trying to do with their life, because that, that's really the important thing.

So I want you to keep this in mind. Your business should create the life that you want. In most cases, entrepreneurs, they start a business and that business becomes their life. And that sucks. That is not the goal of this, right? The, the goal is that you create the life that you want with the business vehicle that aligns with that.

Now, I'm not saying it's not gonna be hard work. I'm not saying that you're gonna have to make compromises. I'm not saying that, you know, everything's gonna be, uh, smooth. You're not gonna have any bumps in the road. I'm not saying any of that because this is very hard. Uh, nothing is guaranteed. You're gonna be very challenged in many different ways, no matter which option you pick.

But I'm gonna go over three. There's a lifestyle business, there is a autopilot practice and a home run practice. Okay? And the first one that we're gonna go over is the lifestyle practice. Okay? So the lifestyle practice, in my opinion, um, is actually a really good fit. For many clinicians, and my views on this have changed some because my, my views were that if, if, if you didn't have a business that functioned without you, if you didn't have a business that generated money without you, that it was a worthless endeavor, you know, you've created a job for yourself.

Um, and that just wasn't the right vehicle for me. Okay. When I look at a lifestyle bus, a lifestyle business is basically a a, it's a clinic that you're heavily involved in that allows you to work with the population that you wanna work with, the niche that you find a lot of value working with, that you enjoy working with.

It allows you to replace what you're making working somewhere else, and in many cases a good bit more. Um, and it's not something that ever becomes a passive entity that has any true intrinsic value to it that you could potentially sell one day. Uh, but what it does do is it allows clinicians that are deep down, they're a clinician at heart, right?

This is what I. Uh, thought I was until I really started to un understand that I, I'm very fascinated with business and the game of business and understanding all these variables, but you know, if you had asked me early on in my career, it's like, no, dude, being a clinician is the most important thing in the world to me.

I'm obsessed with outcomes. I'm obsessed with learning more. I'm a lifelong learner. I go to so many Con Ed courses, it's ridiculous. And that was me, right? And. If that sounds like you, a lifestyle business might be a really good fit for you. And I'm gonna kind of talk about the pros and the cons. So some of the benefits of a lifestyle business are this, number one, I.

They're very low risk. Uh, you, you really don't need to take out any loans to get started, any debt to get started at all. Um, you know, you can build up slowly. Uh, you can keep your overhead really low and, and have a very, you know, profitable clinic. Now, you're not gonna, you're not gonna have as much total revenue as you would with bigger clinics, but you know, you're gonna have a lot of.

The money you're making left over because you don't have a whole lot of overhead. And when, when we look at this type of a vehicle, I think it works really well for a couple different subsets of our, of our, uh, population. I. If you just love working with people and you wanna work with a very specific niche, and you wanna be heavy, heavily involved in clinic care for the rest of your career, and that's just what you wanna do.

You don't want to have to manage anybody. You don't have to build a bunch of systems, uh, you don't wanna have to get really, you know, advanced as far as sales and marketing are concerned. I'm not saying you don't need to learn those things. You need to learn those for yourself and to build your own schedule up and understand how to like run a single person clinic, maybe even it's more than a single person clinic, but you're still very, very heavily involved in the business on the patient care side.

So you're not taking a step back. You're not trying to create this passive entity, but it allows you to work day in and day out with the population you love working with. It allows you to, to be the artist that you are, it allows you to use your skillset in a way that is so pure with another person and help them get, uh, an outcome that you are uniquely capable of helping them with.

You know, these are the people that. I would want to go see, right? These are the people that, they're not the best business people. They are the best clinicians, and they love it, and this is their life's passion. That is the people that do really well with this, right? The, the mistake that happens sometimes is people that start a lifestyle bus ev, everyone starts a lifestyle business.

You can't necessarily jump. To hiring five people. And I mean, you could try to do that, but it's probably not the best way to go. Like you, you probably wanna start a lifestyle business, get your schedule busy ex, and then scale up into these other businesses. But everybody starts here and sometimes we get people that are these purists, they're these clinical, you know, experts that they just love working with patients and they feel this obligation to then go in.

Start a, you know, a bigger practice and to employ people and it's, they find themselves so drained by now all of a sudden they have to look at, you know, CRMs and they have to look at digital marketing and they have to do sales training with people and they have to manage people and hire and they all these things that go into owning a business.

They don't like any of it. None of it. When in actuality all they really wanted to do was work with people that they love working with and, you know, have a bit more control over their time and their schedule and make a bit more money. That's a pretty good compromise for this population, right? Like if that's you and you don't want all these other things, you don't want all this other risk, um, then a lifestyle business might be a perfect fit for you.

And the whole point of this book, right, the whole point of the clinician's compass. Is the help you get clear on where you're trying to go before. You start the race before you get get to where you're running, right? Like it's like you join a race but you don't know how far it is or where this finish line is.

You gotta know that shit first before you start running. Otherwise you are not gonna even know when you get there. And sometimes you have to backtrack and go do something else. And that's what we want to help people try to avoid, is get clear on what you're trying to do. The other subset of the population that the lifestyle practice is very good fit for is people that don't want to work full-time is for people that want to have.

Uh, you know, maybe more balance in other areas of their life. This is a perfect fit for people that want to be more involved in their kids' life or they wanna have a family. You know, the first lifestyle business that I saw that I felt like, man, this is a really just like a smart way of going about this.

It was, uh, someone I met here in Atlanta that was. It was like a friend of my father-in-law's, uh, somebody that he coached with, or his high school he coached with. And she, uh, she worked with a lot of, uh, people like, couldn't do more Pilate style rehab. Um, but she only saw people like two days a week and it was, you know, six, seven patients a day each day for those two days.

So she was seeing, you know, somewhere between 10 and 15 people a week in that range. And, but. She had offset her entire income working somewhere else full-time. She had a very small office, very little overhead, and when I talked to her, you know, she. She said, this is what works with our life and allows me to still be a clinician, but still be heavily involved in our kids' lives.

They had, I think it was two young kids, but if you can imagine if your husband is like a teacher and a coach, uh, they don't have a lot of flexibility in their schedule. And as a clinician, we don't really either, right? Like we have. People booked out for months sometimes, um, on our schedules. And if you, if your kid gets sick and you have to reschedule all these people, it can be really challenging.

So for her to be able to work two days a week. To have flexibility in her schedule. Whe while her, her spouse did not, it was a great compliment for their life, but yet still allowed her to work in the profession that she really enjoyed, be able to offset her income a hundred percent instead of working full-time somewhere else.

Her working two days a week for her herself and, and obviously she had to be able to get patience in that stuff, but, but she was, you know, booked up. And she had a wait list, and it allowed her to then take these other days and focus on her family and be there for all the things that she wanted to do with her, her kids, and with her husband.

And this is something that, you know, I saw as what a, what a unique, what an elegant solution to a problem. Right? Um, and, and, and she seemed very happy with her clinic and what she was doing. And she still, she didn't have to leave the profession to find the flexibility that she wanted, which is what a lot of people do.

Right. So these are two subsets of the, the clinical world that I see that a lifestyle practice makes a lot of sense for. Now there's, there's some drawbacks to a lifestyle practice as well, and. Yeah. When it comes to a lifestyle practice, you have to keep in mind, it's not like it's a business. You start a business.

It's not a true business in my mind. Like a true business is a business that passes the hit by the bus test. So if you got hit by a bus, would your business still make revenue? Would your family still get income from that business? Would it still continue to function and even grow without you? Like you have a team that's following systems mm-hmm.

And they know what to do. If that's not the case, if you get hit by a bus and that does not happen, you've created a job for your style yourself. And a lifestyle clinic is basically a job. It may be a job that you love. So don't, don't think of this as a negative thing. It's only a negative if you think you're building a business that's gonna create potentially passive income or it's going to have.

Uh, enterprise value that you can sell one day, and that's like a big part of sort of maybe your financial planning. The lifestyle practice is not like that. So what do you have to do? Well, you have to look at it like it's a job. You know, you can't sell your job one day. That's not how it works. Right. Like, it just, you stop working and they stop paying you.

Uh, if you have a business that you grow and it grows past yourself and it has a lot of value to an investor, and you could sell that business for, you know, life changing amount of money, that is, uh, the end result of, uh, different types of business, different types of clinics that we'll talk about in a separate, uh, podcast.

But the lifestyle practice, the lifestyle practice is a job and you have to treat it that way. So that means. That you look at it like an income stream and you have to take money from that income stream and invest it other places outside of your business. A lot of people that start other types of clinics, other types of practices that they're, they're trying to grow, they're trying to accelerate the growth of it.

They wanna scale it. They want to, you know, have, you know, whatever, you know, multiple seven figure clinic or, or somewhere in that range. They have to reinvest a lot in the business along the way to grow that. So instead of taking money outta the business and investing in other things. They have to reinvest it in the business.

So with a lifestyle practice, that's not the case. You have to take that money and you have to then put it into other investments outside of the business. That might be equities, that might be real estate, that might be who, any number of things. I'm not here to. Talk to you about investing, but you have to invest outside of your business in order to create financial security and build wealth because your business is not a wealth generating vehicle.

If it's a lifestyle business, it is an income generating vehicle, and that vehicle goes away the day you stop working. That is how it works, and that is one of the biggest drawbacks that we see. The other thing is there's inherent risk associated with being the only person. That is generating income from this business.

Because if you're employed by somewhere else, somebody else, and you get hurt, uh, then you know, it's not like they can just fire you because of that, right? You're still getting paid, you know, maybe there's some insurance that they have on you or stuff like that. But, uh, if you work for yourself. And you're a service-based provider at that, right?

Like we do the thing about if you're a manual therapist, you do anything with your hands, which is pretty much every single physical therapist I've ever worked with. Like, you're assessing people, you're using your hands to do, you know, some sort of hands-on, uh, treatment or, or, or whatever. Like it's a physically, you know, demanding job in a lot of ways.

Well, what if you get hurt? What if you break your hand? What if you break your wrist? What if you tear your bicep 10? And we've had coaches at PT biz that have had serious injuries and they've had to reschedule, uh, you know, weeks if not months worth of people that they just can't physically work with because of injuries that they've had.

And if they're in a solo practice, it would be a real problem for them. If they have staff, then cool, they've got it covered. So if you're in a lifestyle business, if you're a solo provider. You've got to look at this as there's inherent risk associated with it. So you need to be aware of that. You need to maybe, you know, there's certain things you just don't do.

Like when I was, uh, when I, when it was just me in a clinic by myself, I did very little like anything outside the clinic that would be considered sort of like physically, um, challenging. Like, I mean, aside from working out, but like. I had been training juujitsu in the military and I stopped whenever I got out because I didn't wanna get hurt.

What if I hurt my hand? What if I hurt my neck? I didn't play any intramural sports, you know, like I just was like. Concerned that I wouldn't be able to work and create an income stream for my family, which is I, that that was all we had, you know, and it was very stressful for me to do that. It's one of the reasons why I grew past myself, is because I wanted to actually be able to do shit that I like to do, um, and, uh, and not be concerned about, you know, an injury that might happen to stop me from able to work with somebody.

So the other thing you have to look at is insurance outside of, uh, the business that protects you. So that could be short-term, long-term disability insurance. These are things that cover you in case that there's an injury that you sustain and they produce, they, they create an income stream for you. When you can't do it for yourself for a period of time.

So you definitely need to look at ensuring yourself, uh, in a way that you may not need to do quite so much if you have other people and you've grown a bigger business. Um, so these are just ways you can protect yourself. So number one, you have to invest outside your business and you have to offset risk through insurance, uh, and maybe through limitations of certain activities that you really like to do.

You know, if you like to do base jumping, you know, you like to do rock climbing, uh, maybe you hold off on that shit, uh, while you're, while you're in a lifestyle business because if you're the only. Person to bring income into your family. Like you have to safeguard that and make sure that you're able to continue to take care of them, uh, even if that means that you're, you know, reducing some of the activities that maybe you like because they're higher risk.

So that is one of the drawbacks for sure. But this can be a great fit for many, many people. And the thing with the lifestyle business is you have to keep in mind. That this has to be a fit for the life that you want, right? So if you want to stay involved in clinic work, you wanna work with a certain subset of population, you don't want to have complexity of running another bus or running a business in people and all the things associated with that.

If you're okay with the fact that you're never gonna have. A valuable asset you're gonna be able to sell. If you're okay with the fact that you know, you're the only person, and if you get hurt, then maybe there's some negative implications with that and you get, you're able to insure yourself outside of it.

Um, you know, and if you have no desire to play the game of business at a higher level, you just want to be a clinician that works with the population that you love, that gets paid, that makes more money. And controls your time, uh, this could be a really good fit. And, and on the monetary side, kind of talk about that for a second because, you know, if, if you want to go this route, it's up to you to really establish yourself as an expert and charge what you're worth.

And, and if we do some quick math on this, right, if you get to the point where you're seeing, let's call it a hundred patient visits a month, which is very possible for somebody to do in, in a sustained manner for like years and years and years as a solo clinician. And let's say you cap it at a hundred and you charge.

Uh, on average, let's say you're making $200 an hour, if you make our math easy, which is what the average is with a lot of the clients that we work with all across the country, that means you're gonna make $20,000 a month, right? Averaged out across the year. Unless that means you're gonna make roughly $240,000 in the year top line revenue, right?

So let's say from that you have $80,000 in costs, which is a bit, you know, aggressive. Could be less than that. Uh, it's probably not gonna be 40, it's probably be somewhere between 80, 40 and $80,000. That means that you're gonna have somewhere between 180 and $200,000 pre-tax that you can keep as a solo.

You know, clinician, if you want to hire a, uh, you know, maybe a part-time administrative assistant that helps with some of the administrative burden to help free up some of your time and take that off. Cool. So maybe you're around that a hundred and, you know, 60 to $180,000 range, if that's what you're seeing on a, on a monthly basis, that's still.

A lot of money for a clinician that's way more than you're gonna make working most other places, right? There's very few places that you'd ever find that are gonna have that amount of, uh, income potential, uh, and still allow you to be heavily involved in clinic care. You'd have to be like a, maybe a director or something like that, or, or a regional director, uh, in our profession.

And that means you're gonna see very few people on the clinical side. So the income potential is. Really pretty good, uh, for the trade-offs that you're gonna have for the negatives associated with it. That's up to you to make the decision if it's right for you. But this is a lifestyle practice, and this is one of the three races I talk about these like races in this book because I think of it like starting a race and you need to know if you're running a five KA marathon, a half marathon.

Like you need to know what you're getting yourself ready for and why you're picking that and why it aligns with what you want. And and half the book is really deciding what you know, what you want and why, and getting very clear on that. And then the other half is the options you have in order to get there.

So this is one of the races that you can pick the lifestyle practice, and for some of you it could be a fantastic pick. Now, in the next, uh, two iterations of this that we're gonna do in this series. I'll go over the autopilot practice and I'm gonna go over the home run practice. And for some of you, those might be a better fit.

Uh, but either way, getting clear on what you want is the first step and should be the first step. But rarely actually is it For most people. Most people just get going and then all of a sudden they're like, where am I going? How far am I running? Like, what's the finish line? We don't know. So if you know what that looks like from the get go, you're at a huge advantage.

We'll drop a link below as well. If you want to get a copy of the book, uh, along with some of the resources that we've provided and some, some, some cool bonuses that our team has put together for this, uh, specific book, click the link below. You can get yourself a copy of it down there. Um, and if you wanna just hang around, wanna talk about these other, uh, clinic options, stay, uh, stay with us.

We'll be doing that in the next couple episodes. So thanks again for watching and listening, and as always, I'll catch you to the next one.