E872 | Christmas Tree Lots, Steaks and Why The Work Should Be Hard

Dec 09, 2025

cash based physical therapy, danny matta, physical therapy biz, ptbiz, cash based, physical therapy, how to start a physical therapy clinic, hybrid physical therapy, physical therapy website

The Christmas Tree Lot, the Greatest Steak Ever, and Why the Hard Part Matters

If you own a clinic, there’s a good chance you’re in a hard season right now.

The growth is slower than you want.
The numbers feel tight.
The buildout is taking longer and costing more.
Maybe you’re wondering if it’s supposed to feel this way.

In this episode of the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, Doc Danny Matta shares a story about a Christmas tree lot, a Texas Roadhouse, and the greatest steak he’s ever had—and uses it to explain why the hard part is exactly what makes success worth it.

First, a Quick Win: Stop Letting Notes Steal Your Life

Before the story, Danny hits something every PT feels:

Most satisfaction surveys show the same thing:
Clinicians hate writing notes.

It’s the part of the job that makes you want to quit at the end of the day. It’s definitely not what you want to do when you get home.

That’s why he talks about Clair, an AI scribe trained specifically for physical therapists:

It listens, tracks, and writes your notes—often better than you would.
It’s like having a student in the corner meticulously documenting everything.
You stay focused on your patient.
And you don’t go home with a pile of unfinished documentation.

The whole point: reclaim the time you’re wasting on notes, and you can put it toward the people and things that actually matter.

Then he pivots.

Because time freedom is great—but there’s another layer most owners need to hear.

The Christmas Tree Lot in Columbus, Georgia

Danny takes us back to his high school years in Columbus, GA, when his dad was stationed at Fort Benning.

He and his brother landed a job at a Christmas tree lot off an access road. It was:

Cold
Manual labor
Long hours after school and on weekends
Run by a guy who literally lived there in an RV

And the deal?

“I’m not going to pay you unless you’re a hard worker. And you won’t get paid until we’re done selling all these trees.”

Sketchy.

His parents were worried they’d get ripped off. The boys weren’t sure either—but they took the job.

They spent weeks:

Unloading trees
Cutting them with chainsaws
Hauling them around the lot
Tying them onto cars
Working all day once school let out for the holidays

And right across the street, teasing them every single day, was a Texas Roadhouse.

Smelling the Steak You Can’t Afford

Every shift, they could smell:

Yeast rolls
Steaks
Grilled everything

But they couldn’t afford to eat there.

So they made a plan:

“When we get paid, we’re going to go eat like kings at that Texas Roadhouse. We’ll order the most expensive steak on the menu.”

They worked.
They froze.
They sweated.
They worried they might never see a dime.

Getting Paid and Crossing the Street

On Christmas Eve, the last tree sold, it was time.

No paycheck yet.
No guarantee.

They went up to the owner, ready to confront him if he tried to stiff them.

Instead, he pulled out a huge wad of cash from his pocket.

Counted out what he owed each of them.
Then threw in an extra hundred dollars each as a bonus.

“Y’all worked real hard. I appreciate it.”

The relief and satisfaction of that moment were huge.

Then they did exactly what they planned:

Walked across the street.
Sat down at Texas Roadhouse.
Ordered the most expensive steaks they could find.

And to this day, Danny says:

“That is the greatest steak I’ve ever had in my entire life.”

He’s eaten at “better” steakhouses since.

But nothing has ever topped that one.

Why That Steak Meant So Much

It wasn’t the chef.
It wasn’t the brand.
It wasn’t the cut of meat.

It was the story behind it.

The hard work.
The cold nights.
The uncertainty about getting paid.
The smell of a restaurant they couldn’t afford… yet.
Finally earning the money and spending it on something they decided they were going to do together.

The steak was a symbol of everything they went through to get there.

Without the crappy parts, it would’ve just been another meal.

With the struggle, it became unforgettable.

What This Has to Do With Your Clinic

Now to the real point.

Clinic ownership is your version of the Christmas tree lot.

Your “hard parts” might look like:

Not getting enough new patients yet
Stressing over revenue and cash flow
Dealing with staff who are still learning continuity and retention
Buildouts that are slow and over budget
Loans, risk, and uncertainty

It’s tempting to think:

“Maybe I picked the wrong path.”
“Why is this so hard?”
“Shouldn’t this be easier by now?”

Danny’s answer:

No. It shouldn’t be easy.

A successful clinic:

Changes your family’s financial position.
Gives you more control over your time.
Forces you to grow as a person and a leader.

Why would something that powerful be easy?

If it were, it wouldn’t mean nearly as much.

The Hard Part Is the Point

We forget this all the time.

School feels great when you graduate because it was hard.
Big lifts feel great because you worked to increase the weight.
Race PRs feel incredible because you suffered to get there.

Business is no different.

What makes the “steak moment” so sweet is the grind that came before it.

If someone had just randomly taken teenage Danny to Texas Roadhouse one night and bought him dinner, he probably wouldn’t even remember it.

But after weeks of work, uncertainty, and delayed gratification?

That memory stuck for life.

Your clinic will feel the same when you look back:

The struggle to hit your first $10k month.
The terror and relief of hiring your first clinician.
The moment you realize you don’t have to go back to a job you hate.

Those are the steaks you’ll talk about.

Why You Need to Celebrate the Wins

Danny admits he’s been bad about this:

He would hit a goal… and immediately move on to the next thing.

No pause.
No celebration.
No acknowledgment.

Just grind.

But if you never sit down for the metaphorical steak, you rob yourself of the meaning that comes from the struggle.

You need:

Markers that say, “We did it.”
Moments where you stop and actually feel the win.
Positive reinforcement so your brain connects “hard work” with “worth it.”

That doesn’t mean you stop growing. It just means you give yourself time to appreciate how far you’ve come.

Reframing the Hard Part

The simplest, most powerful shift from this episode is this:

Instead of asking:

“Why is this so hard?”

Try:

“This is supposed to be hard. That’s what makes it worth it.”

Once you accept that, your relationship with the struggle changes.

You stop treating difficulty as a sign you’re failing.
You start seeing it as proof you’re doing something that actually matters.

A Practical Challenge (and a Next Step)

Here’s how you can apply this right now:

Pick one hard thing in your business that’s frustrating you.
Write down how that challenge will make the eventual “win” more meaningful.
Decide on a “Texas Roadhouse moment” you’ll give yourself when you hit a specific milestone—revenue, hire, debt paid off, whatever.

And if you’re still in the early or side-hustle phase and want a clear plan, Danny points you to the:

PT Biz Part-Time to Full-Time 5-Day Challenge (Free)

Over five days, you’ll:

Get ultra clear on how much income you need to replace
Figure out how many people you need to see and at what visit rate
Learn three strategies to go from part-time to full-time
See the sales and marketing systems PT Biz uses with its mastermind clients
Build a simple one-page business plan you can actually execute

👉 Join here: https://physicaltherapybiz.com/challenge

Final Thought

Your version of the Christmas tree lot and Texas Roadhouse is playing out right now.

The long nights.
The doubt.
The “is this worth it?” moments.

If you stick with it, there will be a day when you sit down, look around at what you’ve built, and realize:

This is the best steak I’ve ever had.

And it won’t be because of the steak.

It’ll be because of everything it took to earn it.

Do you enjoy the podcast? If so, leave us a 5-star review on iTunes and tell a friend to do the same!

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: [00:00:00] Hey, what's going on? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today I'm gonna tell [00:00:05] you a story about a Christmas tree lot, a steak, and [00:00:10] why the hard part makes everything worth it.[00:00:15]

So [00:00:20] we recently got our Christmas tree. From a, [00:00:25] uh, I guess a nursery here in Atlanta. And as we were going to pick out our [00:00:30] Christmas tree, I told my kids a story about a Christmas tree lot that my brother and I worked [00:00:35] on, um, in Columbus, Georgia. So my dad was [00:00:40] stationed at Fort Benning. We'd only been there for a couple months.

Uh, we moved it during the summer, my [00:00:45] junior, going into my junior year, my brother's senior year. And somehow we got this job at a [00:00:50] Christmas tree lot. You know, I, I can't actually remember how it happened. Normally it came to a football coach. It's probably [00:00:55] the connection, but towards the end of, uh, you know, uh, the, the year [00:01:00] from basically right around Thanksgiving until, uh, [00:01:05] Christmas Eve.

We worked at this Christmas tree lot off of an access road in [00:01:10] Columbus, and this was a job where the guy pretty [00:01:15] much straight up told us, he's like, I'm not gonna pay you, uh, unless [00:01:20] you're a hard worker and, uh, you won't get paid until. [00:01:25] Like the, we're done selling all these trees because I gotta cover all my costs and whatever [00:01:30] else.

Very sketchy deal, by the way. Very sketchy. I wouldn't, I would tell my kids how to [00:01:35] take it. My parents were worried that they were gonna get, my brother and I were gonna get ripped off. So we went [00:01:40] basically, you know, every weekend, every day they, that, uh, that we could go [00:01:45] after, uh, after school. And then when, when, uh, school was out, we worked the whole day, all [00:01:50] day.

You know, every day with this Christmas tree lot, this guy lived there in an [00:01:55] rv, and this RV was in basically, uh, or the, and the lot was basically in a, [00:02:00] um, just like an empty section across the street from a Texas roadhouse. So imagine [00:02:05] this, imagine, you know, working in this Christmas tree lot and having to [00:02:10] smell Texas Roadhouse, yeast rolls, you know, [00:02:15] steaks every day.

But that was an expensive meal for [00:02:20] us to try to go over there, and we never did. But we said, my brother and I said, Hey, here's what we're gonna do [00:02:25] when we get paid. We're gonna go eat like kings at this Texas Roadhouse. We're [00:02:30] gonna go get the most expensive meal we can possibly get there. So. [00:02:35] We work through the season and it's hard.

Our we're unloading Christmas trees, we're, [00:02:40] you know, putting on people's cars, using chainsaws, all kinds of, it was, it was a, it was a [00:02:45] difficult, like it was a manual labor job basically. It was mostly moving trees around. That's basically what they used us for. [00:02:50] And, uh, and you're just outside. It's cold. So it was miserable.

We didn't wanna do [00:02:55] it. And not only that, keep in mind this guy wasn't paying us. We actually didn't know if he was going to pay [00:03:00] us the very last day. Some of the last trees he's about to close up. You know? We're like, okay, if he doesn't [00:03:05] pay us, what are we gonna do? And trying to figure it out. [00:03:10] So we go up and, and talk to him and we're like, we gotta confront this guy.

Like, he hasn't paid us yet. [00:03:15] And he pulls out a huge wad of cash from his pocket and he starts counting out, you [00:03:20] know, money for each of us. And he gave us the money he owed us. Then he gave us like an [00:03:25] extra a hundred bucks each. He said, y'all did. Y'all worked real hard. I appreciate it. You know, you're welcome back next year if [00:03:30] you want a job again.

And, uh. It was so satisfying [00:03:35] to get that cash right, to like to put in hard work, get that cash. But here's what [00:03:40] happened next. We walked across the street to Texas Roadhouse. We sat down and we ordered the most [00:03:45] expensive steak we could get on the menu. And to this day, that is the greatest steak that I've [00:03:50] ever had in my entire.

Ever, and I've been to many other steakhouses since [00:03:55] then that people may say are objectively maybe better, subjectively better [00:04:00] than Texas Roadhouse. But I, I, I can promise you this, I've never, ever had a steak as [00:04:05] good in my entire life, and I bet you my brother. If I [00:04:10] brought the story up, I think he would agree that that was probably the, his favorite [00:04:15] steak he's ever had as well.

Now, what was it about the steak? Was it the fact that [00:04:20] it was, you know, phenomenal meal at a phenomenal restaurant with a phenomenal chef [00:04:25] or whatever? It's like, look, Texas Roadhouse is legit. I would eat there tomorrow if, uh, I drove by one. I would go [00:04:30] there any day. It's fantastic. Um. But that wasn't what made it right.

It [00:04:35] was the fact that we had literally put in [00:04:40] all this work. We worked really hard and every day we were there, we were smelling this [00:04:45] place and we couldn't afford to go there ourself. Like we couldn't afford to go eat there ourself. We didn't have any money. [00:04:50] Um, but man, when we got some and we were able to pay for our [00:04:55] own meals after the hard work we put in, it was fantastic.

So what does this have to do [00:05:00] with physical therapy and business? Because essentially that's, it has to, let me tie that in somehow. 'cause [00:05:05] that's what this podcast is all about, right? I mean, here's the thing. When you do hard [00:05:10] things, it's more meaningful whenever you get a chance to reward [00:05:15] yourself after the fact.

I'm sure you can apply this in many ways in your own life, [00:05:20] but we forget about it sometimes when we're getting frustrated [00:05:25] by business. When we're getting frustrated by, um, lack of [00:05:30] progress that, you know, we're seeing things aren't happening fast enough, [00:05:35] I'm not getting enough new patients. I'm not ma making enough revenue.

My new staff member's not getting enough, you [00:05:40] know, volume. They're not keeping people around for continuity. This new build out's taking longer. It's costing [00:05:45] more money. I'm having to take loans out, whatever, you know, like. There's [00:05:50] always something that's gonna happen. And the perspective of that, [00:05:55] that I think the, something that I forget, and I, I think this was a good reminder and that I wanted to share with [00:06:00] you, was the fact that if you don't have the shitty stuff, then it [00:06:05] doesn't feel very good whenever you get the good stuff like it, that it's, it's pretty much that simple.

You [00:06:10] know, like you need the perspective. It's like if somebody had, let's, let's say somebody just [00:06:15] decided they were gonna take us to Texas Roadhouse randomly, uh, hey, I'll just take you out to [00:06:20] Texas Roadhouse. Cool. That would've been great. Probably wouldn't have even remembered it. But the fact that [00:06:25] we, we worked for so long, didn't know if we were gonna get paid, finally got paid on the last day after [00:06:30] smelling this place for a month, and then we got to go and pick out exactly what we wanted.

And it was just [00:06:35] like. I gave the waitress a big tip, man. We were freaking killing it that night. [00:06:40] And like that is different because of the shitty side that [00:06:45] we dealt with. We with the hard work we had to put in. And if you [00:06:50] are in business for yourself, like, or, or, or even school, [00:06:55] maybe you're listening to this in school.

School feels great when you graduate because it's [00:07:00] hard, you know, like it wouldn't feel great if it was easy. You have to put work in, [00:07:05] you have to put time and effort in and, and stick to something. With a business, it's hard [00:07:10] and it doesn't get easier, like you just end up solving harder problems. [00:07:15] So. But, but there's moments where it's really hard.

There's moments where it's really challenging, [00:07:20] and then there's moments where you have a big win and you should celebrate those things. I think that's really important, and something [00:07:25] I've done a really bad job of historically in my career is when we accomplish something, [00:07:30] I typically just move on to the next thing.

You know, act like you've been there before, [00:07:35] be a professional about it. Go move on to the next thing, whatever. But I think it's helped [00:07:40] and it's very important to celebrate those wins. It's, it, it, it's what helps you, you know, keep going. [00:07:45] It's like going and grabbing that steak dinner after you got paid, you know, and, [00:07:50] and, and, and actually like celebrating what you've done.

'cause it is hard and it is not something that everybody can [00:07:55] do. And it, it is something that you stuck to and, uh, and, and, and you want to reward that, right? It's, [00:08:00] it's positive reinforcements and that's something that you should really definitely do. But that's [00:08:05] usually not what happens. In fact, most people, when it gets really hard and it's really challenging, they think [00:08:10] about, oh man, well maybe I'm doing the wrong thing and maybe I should give up.

It's like, no, it's just. That's part of it. [00:08:15] Anything meaningful, anything that's going to be, you know, something that changes your [00:08:20] life in particular, like, think about this. A successful clinic will change your life. It'll change your [00:08:25] family's financial position. It will change your ability to have time freedom.

You know, it will [00:08:30] change you as a person because of who you have to become. Why would that be easy? [00:08:35] Why? Why do you think that that would be easy? It's, it's silly to think that that would be [00:08:40] easy. And if it was easy, it wouldn't be as meaningful once you've accomplished those things. [00:08:45] I hate to say it because it's fucking hard.

It's really hard. Super hard is to [00:08:50] start grow any kind of business. I have a massive amount of respect for anybody that decides that [00:08:55] that's the path that they didn't want to take. But it shouldn't be easy. It can't be. [00:09:00] So once you realize that and you realize [00:09:05] that basically it's just gonna be hard. Then lean into it, accept it, and [00:09:10] just be like, all right, cool.

This is hard. This is gonna be hard. But you know what's gonna be awesome when [00:09:15] you're successful and you get to celebrate that when you're successful and you get to, [00:09:20] you know, enjoy at least a moment of celebration [00:09:25] because. It will get harder again, depending on what you move [00:09:30] on to next. Right? Until you decide that you, you, you've gone as far as you want to go in your business venture, whatever [00:09:35] it is, and then cool.

You can just chill and uh, and, and, and you can maintain that for [00:09:40] as long as you want. But if you can just reframe that, why is this hard [00:09:45] to, this is supposed to be hard. I think that will help you out. In a significant way, [00:09:50] and it'll help you realize that like that's actually the part that's important. It [00:09:55] should be hard, so you can feel amazing about what you've accomplished after the [00:10:00] fact.