E572 | Decision Making and Leadership

Welcome back to another edition of the P.T. Entrepreneur Podcast! This week, we talk about how to best approach opportunities and the importance of making decisions that are beneficial to the long-term success of a business. Enjoy!

• Leveraging opportunities for maximum momentum
• Dealing with saying no without burning bridges
• Effective team management strategies for business owners

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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 card. 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, I highly recommend PT Everywhere directly integrates with a. 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.

Hey, what's going on guys? I wanna do a quick intro for this podcast. This is a podcast that we actually recorded on the PT Biz Annual Planning trip. We do this in January every year, and it's to set goals and to really get clear on what our what our direction is to take the company in.

2023 for this year. We do this every year, and we're test, we are testing out a new travel mic, so this might. Sound a bit different than the audio that I have in my traditional setup. And it's hopefully something that is gonna be a bigger part of this podcast. I think the in-person stuff is just really helpful to to have conversations and be able to, have a bit more of in-person report people this podcast.

Like I said, if there's some audio differences, that's what it is. We're gonna try to clean it up as best we can. But this podcast is all about decision making and leadership, and how to make decisions, what to say yes to, what to say no to and how to know if you're saying yes or no to the right thing.

So this is with myself Eve, Gigi and Jared Moon. And we go through how we make decisions on that. I think that this is a really important topic that you're gonna have to make more and more tough decisions about what you say yes to, and more importantly, what you say no to as you become more successful in business and have more opportunities.

Hope you guys like this again, apologize if there's any audio differences and hope you like it. All right. What's up guys? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and we're testing out a new mic, so we'll see how this sounds. If it sounds a little different, that's why we're on our offsite snowboard trip slash annual planning trip in.

Big sky Montana, which is awesome, by the way, probably the best mountain that we've ever been on. Yep. It's huge. Tons of different places to go and just like all kinds of like different areas to explore. It's really neat. But, we're towards the tail end of this is the last evening that we're here and one thing that we've been talking about a lot and really the, I would say the.

The reason that we're here is to clarify what we want to focus on for this year and as well as the first quarter of the year. We'll we'll plan these things out. We already have, and we'll detail out what we wanna work on. But more than anything, what we end up doing is trying to decide on what we don't want to do, which I think is Probably the hardest thing to do, and this is also something that we've seen now on an ongoing basis with communication we have with our mastermind members.

And some of you might be listening to this and this is gonna probably hit home. And it's how do you say no to the wrong opportunities and stay focused on the right work, the right tasks and go towards the right opportunities that you have in front of you because the more that, the longer you are in business.

The more other people see that and the more that there are opportunities that come your way because it's mutually beneficial for you and other people because you have shown that you can you have sticking power, you can make it work. And that's not that common. A lot of people, they fail in business.

They can't manage themself, they don't know what to do, and. When someone sees that it's very common to want to form partnerships and things like that, or create opportunities or to have people come to you to, hopefully that bumps them up to be able to do other things. So being able to focus on the right things is, I think really hard.

So we're gonna talk about that a little bit and what I'd like to do is, I'll start out with this. We can go around cause Eve and Jared both are gonna chime in on all of this. And the hardest thing, and I have a really hard time with this too, is saying no. To the wrong things, even though they might be really cool opportunities or it might be something that you are interested in.

So I guess we'll start with you Eve. So like when you look at decision making, and I think of all of us, you probably have more opportunities that you work on than any of us. And, but juggle them in a really successful way. That's like probably the thing that I just, I don't think I can do.

You do a great job of, so how do you go about making decisions of what you do and don't do? Yeah. It's definitely something I've been in a lot of different things, right? I did insurance based practice, cash-based practiced, did a startup have a, online fitness company sell a band, and there's there's a lot of opportunities out there.

And it was definitely in the beginning, one of the hardest things to do was figuring out what to say no to, and I think it's still a challenge, but ultimately the biggest filters that I encourage our Mastermind members to do and that I do is what are you first of all most passionate about and what do you actually enjoy doing?

That's gonna be a huge filter for me who do I wanna spend my time with? What am I excited to work on? Those are big ones, and. Second would be financial, right? Like financially, is this going to help me in the short term? In the long term, what does that look like? And the third one in no particular order also is my time freedom.

Is this gonna allow me to continue to still have time freedom and spend time with my family and work on the things again that I want to work on? And am I gonna be able to still take Liam? To soccer practice and still go to Holland's hip hop dance recit, right? I cannot en cringe on that stuff.

So those would be the three filters that I would go through to make sure that this is an opportunity that I want to pursue and figure out what I want to say no to. Yeah I agree with a lot of that. Like I, I feel like I'm. I've become pretty good at saying no, feel like I'm, I am typically the no guy.

I'm like, I don't know if you guys feel that way in our partnership, but I'm just typically nah, I don't know, but very helpful. Yeah. Yeah. And the reason being is because me personally, like the difference between Eve and I, Eve is actually really good, like phenomenal at being able to juggle multiple different things and do them all well.

And I cannot do that. I can only do one thing well, so the biggest thing that I look at when new opportun opportunities come up is the attention cost. So is the attention I'm going to focus on this new thing going to be worth the lack of attention? Or is it gonna cost more for having a lack of attention in another area?

And some, if the answer is yes hey, if I move my attention over here, But this thing will grow and it is a bigger opportunity than over on this side. And you guys know I've made that decision, like even in, in my multiple businesses, I've been okay with that because I'm like, this is worth pursuing.

This is what I want to do. But attention cost is everything that I look at. And then making sure that you're asking the right question because I'm a problem solver. I'm a problem solver everywhere, like in business, in my family, like I solve the problems if there's a problem. So people come to me with a problem and I used to just be like, Let's solve it shit.

We gotta solve this shit. But now I stop everyone as soon as they come to me with a problem. And it's the same with opportunities. And you just, I just have to ask are we solving the right problem? Is this problem worth solving? Is it actually a problem? Is there a better way to do it? To look at it?

And it's the same with the opportunities because when we get approached by Mastermind member and they're like, I have this new awesome opportunity. How do I do X, Y, Z? My response is not, here's how you do X, Y, Z, because I know my response is, Should we be looking at this as a current opportunity for you or not?

And that normally helps people reorient their decision making process to something a little bit different. Yeah. I think that for many, this is at least for me, the way that I looked at opportunities. So as I remember like at one point in time we had our main office and we had two, we may have even had a third satellite office at the same time, and.

The way I looked at that was like anybody that offered me an opportunity to have space in their gym was like, I have to say yes to this. Cause if I don't, it's if I say no equals less money was like the I, I guess the mentality that I had, it was like, oh, if I say no, then it's like less opportunity to make money.

But what happens is it actually just splits your attention and. You have more problems and probably make the same amount of money. Cuz even when we shut our satellite offices down and we brought everything back to our one office, we made more money and we had way less problems. It was so much better.

And it's something that I talked to our mastermind members about all the time, but it's funny to see some of them go through the same things and then all of a sudden they, they have to learn the lesson the hard way no matter what I say. Because they're like, yeah, but you don't understand. This is a great opportunity.

And I'm like, cool. Maybe it is. Here's my experience. I'm just giving you, that as an experience here, take it as you want. And in some cases, like it works well. In other cases, all it does is it turns into significantly more. Of a problem that they have to organize and they don't realize like how many more problems, additional locations or additional people that aren't in the same area as you can actually turn into because of the communication breakdown that's associated with that.

That's like the hardest part. So having everybody in person makes a lot of sense, but I look at it like leverage too. So if you can be really focused on. What you're trying to do and just do that one thing. It's I look at it like a teeter-totter. If you say yes to a bunch of stuff, it's like you're sitting closer to the middle of the teeter-totter.

Like you have to be way heavier or try way harder to push that thing down versus if you can say yes to the right things and just focus on those, you end up having this longer lever arm. You have more fulcrum effort or power that you get to put out so you can actually like, have more momentum that you gain.

Because you're actually working on the right things, and that really snowballs much faster than, splitting your attention. But the challenge is it's hard to say no to things, especially when you've been grinding and everybody's been turning you down. Now all of a sudden people are like, Hey, what about this?

What about that? So I know you guys have all been in the same place because now we're in a place where we actually turn down the vast majority of opportunities that we have. And it hasn't always been like that. In fact, it's very much been the opposite. So like, how do you deal with. Saying no without, in particular, without burning a bridge.

Cause I think that's a real problem that a lot of people have with local businesses in particular. How do you do that? Yeah. I think just to your point, I think early on in entrepreneurial career, you're like, it's useful to say yes to everything. Just like you said, it's useful because, it's yes, I wanna meet and you're just out there and you're doing a lot of stuff, and then it definitely becomes less useful.

As you become more established and you should just really start focusing on the one thing, right? And it's so easy to get distracted, but to answer your question, saying no in a tactful way and maintaining a relationship can be definitely really difficult. Ultimately, the easiest way to do it, the way I can frame it is try to make it.

Their idea, make it their idea that this is not a good fit for both of us at this time. Like you need to make sure that they don't know that you're saying no because it's not the best opportunity for you. It can be simply to the fact of Hey, we've got a lot going on. You want to grow this and so do I.

The best thing for both of us is to do it, is this way, and make it something that's still mutually beneficial. That's answer. What do you think? Yeah, I'm very open and honest with people if I don't want to pursue an opportunity and let 'em know that's just not what I'm focusing on right now.

Normally I'll put it on me a lot more than I would them too. Like mentioning a second ago that you're way better at juggling opportunities and I suck at doing that. I can only ever have one. But that's the same kind of framework I can put with someone presenting me with an opportunity. They're like, Hey, we should really do this thing.

I'm like, I would, but to be honest, I can only ever focus on one thing and do it well. I think if I were to do this, I'd be bad at what I'm currently doing. And then I wouldn't serve you very well either. So like I just, it's probably not a good fit. So most of the time I'll just put it on me and give it all a, no, it's not me, it's you.

Bring it on the girlfriend and the communication has to be fast too. Excuse me. That's one thing that I've learned probably over the last couple of years is I used to sit on decisions for a long time, like a long time. I'd like just let it ricochet around in my brain, think about it, journal like all this crap and then, but there's no more information coming most of the time.

Huh? So you just need to sit there and be like, there are pros and cons. If it's a gigantic decision, maybe we need to spend a week on it, but most of the time I can make a decision an hour or less and weigh every pro and con and be like, this is a no and I don't need to wait on it any longer because the more you wait, again, going back to attention, the more mental space this decision is is in your taking up in your brain. Cuz I know what happens to all of us, you're not sleeping at night because you're thinking about this thing, or it's in the shower or on your run. Let's get rid of that. Let's get rid of that shit and move it out of our brain. Say no, and then your brain has closure on that and you can move on and again, get your attention back.

It's also you end up taking something away from another part of your life, right? So if we, if for instance, let's say if I said yes to whatever, three other opportunities that we have. Then that means that I have to say no to other things in my life that also are, incredibly important.

So that means I, I can't coach my kids' team, whatever it might be, as an example. So I was like, okay, I'll start this business or do this business venture with you, which is ultimately just gonna be a cash grab for me in most cases, unless I have an absolute like deep desire to want to, whatever this business does to like, see that work.

And you have to have that too, but, It. In most cases people say yes because they think it's a monetary oppor, it's a monetary opportunity that they don't wanna turn down. There's scarcity around what they think they can do from a, from a revenue standpoint. But you gotta say no to other things.

So then I have to ask myself, okay like how much money would it take for me to say no to coaching? My son's basketball team, we would be an extreme amount of money considering. Like what we make from our businesses is more than we probably ever thought we would make. And also because like our lifestyles are not crazy.

It's easy for us to say no to those things and we don't continue to move the goal post, all the time. And I think that's really important too, because then you have so much more power to say yes or no to things versus. If you get yourself in this like golden handcuff situation, you almost have to say yes to things to keep up with a lifestyle that you really are outpacing what you're doing, and then you end up having to say yes.

So I have to look at it from that lens too, and I think that's a really good way to look at it, cuz it's okay, is it that? Is it you know, your time of your spouse? Is it health, mental health, physical health, whatever it might be. But some of those things are going to drop at the same time. And when you start your business, I don't think you can do it in a way where it's balanced.

I just don't. In fact, I was boxing I was like voice messaging with one of our mastermind members about a blood panel that he had just gotten and how bad it looked. And he, cuz I brought this up a lot in terms of mine had looked bad for years as we started our business. And he's what do I do?

I go you're towards the tail end of the stage where it's really rough and then you can start really just like getting yourself healthy by doing these things that I recommended and. You have to say, okay, cool. Am I willing to take a short-term health hit in order to start this business?

This is gonna really challenge me mentally and physically, and it's a lot of hours. And I think we all said yes to that, but we don't really want to go back there cause it sucks. And I, it, I don't know if I would do it again. Like it was really hard. And I don't think you realize how hard it is until you do it.

And then once you're in it though, it's almost shit, I'm here now. I'll have to figure it out. But if you actually knew how much pain it was, I don't think a lot of people would start, would actually start a business. If you knew how hard it was gonna be, would you do it again? If you just take it that context, definitely not like with no guarantee.

Yeah. That anything like just start from square one. You don't know anything again. No. The beginning stages were terrible. So bad. Yeah. Like I didn't want to go out and market and build relationships at all. That was not my personality and that's now like the thing that I do. Yeah. And it was terrible for the first year, like it was a very steep learning curve.

Yeah. So it's a good point. Yeah. I feel like there you have to be a certain level of naive. To totally to start business, because if I knew everything I knew Now, going back, I would want to be an entrepreneur and start a business again, but just knowing oh shit, there's a, there's Everest to climb here and I'm at the bottom again.

Like that. That's tough. Yeah. And it's really tough. And so I do think that you need some of the blinders on, not knowing certain things is helpful. You think it's all gonna work out, and then you just realize through, trial and failure and all this stuff that what works. I don't know.

I felt like that through every stage in my life though. Like military, everything up. Like after I finish and accomplished something, I'm like, yeah, I don't wanna do that again. But I'm so glad that I did it every time and I've done this multiple cycles in my life, so I always wanna be up to the challenge.

But yeah it's tough to back. Good point. I think everybody can relate, most everybody can relate to school. So like when I graduated from Baylor, I was like, this sucked right? I would never do this again. And it just was like, So hard. So it's such a stressful thing to go through with a condensed program, and almost every PT school is gonna be really hard, and it's hard to get into.

Cause it's not it's just that, it's like the stage leading up to it. You have to do a lot of work. And so it, it's very similar to that, right? You look back and it's man, I don't know if I would do that again. And but ultimately I think what you have to look at is, there's pain involved with it, and it's not necessarily, it doesn't have to be like that forever.

It does have to be like that early on. I just don't know any way to skip that. And you wouldn't also be able to to appreciate it. It would be like winning the lottery versus like actually earning, the equivalent amount of money you would have so much more respect for what. What you've accomplished and you would be a better steward of that versus just blow it on shit because you just have no perspective for, it just came to you easy and it goes away easily.

I don't know. I think that for a lot of people, this is a difficult stage for them because it's the stage where it's like you're not struggling necessarily. People are seeing that you're having success and then they're like, oh, hey, you should. Do this, or this, or have you thought about this?

Or have you thought about bolting this little thing on, you could add an extra couple thousand dollars a month, but it's a completely different business model. So I think it all comes back to core values and just understanding what you stand for. And we talk about this a lot, right? What are you making decisions on?

For us in particular, at this point, I think a lot of it is about family. It's does this create more meaningful time with friends and family? If it doesn't, then it's just, it would have to be just like an. Exceptional opportunity, both from a core value standpoint and a monetary standpoint because, and with a deadline like it's only gonna be bad or whatever for this amount of time, knowing that would be helpful.

I think for a lot of people too, they don't realize just like how insignificant more money after a period of time a certain amount actually is. And for most of us, we don't know that because we've never made more money than what a physical therapist makes. And as you do, You realize there's such a diminishing rate of return for what you get from that.

So you say yes to all these things and it takes all this effort and time, and at the end of the day you're like, okay, I have this extra X amount of money. How much different does that make your life, in a meaningful way? And for most of us it's not much. Yeah. I do know if you're at the very beginning stages, sometimes, like you were saying, you have to say yes to a lot of different things.

I think when I got outta the military, I had six different streams of income. Which sounds cool, but they were all like tiny. They were like, I was a contractor here. I was a writer here. I was working for a person here. I had a job here. I was running my company here. That was just a lot, and my attention was so split.

And so what you were saying, sometimes people take all that on, but all of that just equated to a pretty decent salary doing all of those things. And so then I was terrified to always take that next step of Removing an opportunity and getting focused more on one. And that can be really hard, but it's true almost no matter who you ask, once you go all in, you know you are able to grow those things and start to, to be able to say no, you don't have to say yes, but there probably will be a time period where you have to gain experience, you have to learn things, taking on more opportunities.

But you have to know also that it comes with a cost and it comes with an upper limit. And that upper limit's not gonna get capped until you do focus on just one of your opportunities. Yeah, I think where people get messed up a little bit, like a theme that I see is like this idea of passive quotation marks, passive revenue, right?

Hey, I'm gonna start this other clinic in this other state, and I'm just gonna coach this person. It's gonna make me a bunch of money for the rest of my year. Or I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna invest in. This other thing and it's just gonna be amazing. And like most of the times it's not passive.

It's very active once you do it. But it's so alluring to do that. Like that's where people get I think just distracted when they could just do. The one thing they do really well, which is probably go out, see patients market and get more patients, get a bigger space, get more PTs, and make a million dollars that way, like that's probably what 90% of us should do from a clinic standpoint.

We shouldn't grow. We talked about this earlier, like growing horizontally or growing vertically, right? So growing vertically is just adding more patients. Getting them to stick around longer, getting more cost per visit and just doing that as opposed to Cool, I'm gonna have massage. Cool. I'm gonna do, go to multiple different gyms and clinics.

Oh, cool. I'm gonna, sell supplements. Now it's just like all these things. By the end of it, you're so confused. You can't really lead a team anymore and you're frustrated. Yeah. When you could have just stuck to the one thing, like you said, when you consolidated. You felt a lot better.

And Yeah. That's gonna be typically the easiest thing to do for 95% of the entrepreneurs. Yes. I'm doing a lot of things right now, but frankly, I feel like I've earned that. And I've got these team of people in all these businesses that are helping me do this thing. It's not like I'm juggling everything at, of one of these businesses.

Yeah. You kinda do the same thing in all of them. That's the other thing is your skillset's the same in all of those. It's not like you're Run and point on everything. Yeah, and it's like the whole phrase of, do you want half a watermelon or a whole grape? It's like you don't have a hundred percent of any of those, you, you have a percentage of those and. Be, it works because you have partners that are good and work in a cohesive manner. I think you're dead on though, to go back to what you were saying about passive income and horizontal scale. This is a huge mistake that we make.

And actually it's the reason that this business exists. But I, looking back, I think it's an, it was a mistake for our practice because I started doing like business consulting work with people because they started asking me and I would just respond to emails, lengthy emails. I would get on calls with people and just like to help them.

And it started to take a lot of my time and as I started to do more of that and started charging for that, what happened was the focus of the practice, it just diminished significantly because my attention wasn't focused on it so much, and then it went into maintenance mode, which was fine because we actually grew to a stage where that would be, that would actually work.

If you're between half a million and a million dollars a year in top line revenue in your cash-based practice, You can make that work, you can autopilot that you have enough people, you have enough revenue. But for us, what that did is it took away from our ability to grow that one business because we just focused on it.

Other things. If you're gonna do that, I think the only time that you really should is if you feel like you've capped out your opportunity with what you're doing, which is actually probably not the case for most people. They haven't actually hit the limit. So it just gets boring. It gets boring.

And I think for a lot of people, they struggle with sticking to the same thing long enough. But this idea of passive revenue, I think is actually like terrible for most people. And I've looked into this plenty myself, right? It's like everybody, you hear this and it's oh my gosh, you gotta have this much passive revenue, this much passive revenue.

If it equals your expenses, then you're financially free, which is true, but the only way to gain PA Pass true passive revenue that has staying power, which is a huge difference versus a little bit of revenue here from this little digital thing you started, but it could just go away overnight If Google changes their algorithm and then you have nothing to show for it, right?

It's if you buy big commercial spaces that have a small percentage of return that, that go with that, and it's like an anchor tenant you're selling to like a grocery store that's gonna be there for 20 years and you own the property. Okay, cool. But you, it costs 12 million to buy that building. You can do that.

People that have built a shitload of wealth in an actual business that they focus exclusively on for a long period of time. That's how you get there. You can't do it really any other way. I don't know other way to do it aside from the business side, which would be growing a business and then autopiloting that, but even then you're still mentally involved in so many other ways it, you're still thinking about, you still have risk involved.

I think it's just a bad methodology for people to chase that versus. Build a rock solid business. Cause that's hard to screw up, especially locally. You think back pain's going away anytime soon. You think shoulder impingement going away, you think people are just gonna all of a sudden get healthier and move more?

No, the opposite, like we're trending their other direction. So you know, if there's job security for anybody, it's the people that listen to this because you can build a business around helping people stay active and it's really gratifying. It's a great business and you have clients forever. Like it's just not gonna go away and it doesn't change fast, either.

So I totally agree with you. I think the idea of. Passive revenue. You should stop thinking about that. You should think about stable revenue. That's the, I think the better way to look at it. What businesses can I build? What things can I get involved in that are super stable and maybe they don't grow as fast as a tech company or something, but they don't crash really fast at all.

They, it, they would take years to screw up a really good cash-based practice. Yeah. I had a mentor who, on the passive income thing, like I would follow them around the country. They do all these speaking engagements and. They had a lot of passive revenue. They had hundreds of single family homes. And so they'd always do talks about them and people would ask How, what do I need to do to get started?

And his response I always glossed over for years was his response to everyone was, you need to go get really good at your job. And that would only, that'd be the only thing he ever said. And I'd be like, yeah, okay. We all need to be good at our job. Yeah. Whatever. But he's basically saying, you need to go get so good at your job that you're making so much money.

And that's what they did first. They worked for 15, 20 years. Yeah. Became amazing at what they were doing, the top of their career field. Then they started to sink all of that revenue aggressively into buying real estate. But no one wants to talk about that 15 to 20 year time period where they're just grinding and really don't have one source of income and all that other stuff everyone wants to focus on.

Oh, you can do whatever the hell you want because you have all this passive income now. And it's not true. And nothing's truly passive, and I think to, to Eve's point, y when can you say yes to an opportunity? And I think that comes from leverage in leadership. Once you can leverage yourself out, like I would only ever focus my attention somewhere else if I had hired such a badass of to, to take over and they can do so well that I do not feel like my attention is necessary, at least in this area of the business because this person's so amazing.

That might be when you can say yes to other opportunities. It might be just opportunities within your current business. It doesn't have to be like a new business, not that aggressive of a jump. But once you have leverage and leadership in place, then I feel like that's when you can say yes to opportunities, not when you're struggling, barely able to do what you're doing now.

Try to take on another thing, wait till you get to that leverage opportunity, and then maybe give a yes somewhere you. Told us that, I think it was like a year ago. We've had multiple inflection points in PT Biz where we could have done different things or done different routes. And I remember specifically, I don't know what the problem was at the time, but you were like, our biggest opportunity is our business right now.

Like why are we now putting all of our time and attention into that specifically? And I still remember that. And it's funny, just before you talked, I was like, I wanted to bring that up. I was like, talk about that. And you literally just did. And so I think that's for everybody. I did. And the last mastermind talk, I'm like the best thing that you can do right now.

Is get more new patients, get them to stick around longer and charge more. Focus on your business solely. And it's funny how that hit home to everybody, right? Even people who are clinicians and are still in it, right? There's, it's so alluring to go do something new, just like you said, right? I think you did a reel or something.

You're like, I have all these books and I'm finished. Really, any of these, right? Yeah. It's so easy to start something. It's. So difficult to finish something to the end. And that's what I want people to do who are listening to. It's finish it to the end. Get really good at your job. Absolutely crush it and then earn it.

You've got this excessive cash flow. Cool. Go pour it into something else. Yeah. And it's boring. I think it's the other thing you'd be, keep in mind, yeah. It's if it feels boring, then you're probably doing the right thing, right? Because like it's exciting to do to start new things and to, the beginning stage is exciting because, you're figuring things out and you're, that's why people become these serial entrepreneurs that are just constantly starting stuff and it's because they really enjoy the, like adrenaline rush of the, of starting things.

Which is cool cuz some people actually are great at that stage of it and then they exit and that's like what they focus on. But that's not most people. And if you just have one thing that really works, that's, and it's not even, doesn't even have to be that big if you really think about it, like I'll put it in, I guess I'll put some context with that.

Before I ever had a seven figure business, I thought that was like an impossible thing to do. So if I say like a clinic, getting to a seven figure business is very possible. It is. But you may be listening to this and be like, no way. That's the most money I've ever heard of. A business that we're making and.

It's really not. It's just math, right? It's just you need a certain number of people, a certain size space, a certain price point, and a certain number of, clients that are coming in, and then boom you're basically there. If you could do that over a long enough period of time, but you're not doing that in one year, that's not happening.

I see a lot of people though, that will, a year in, they're starting to get frustrated. It's not exciting anymore. Like the actual appeal of it has worn off because now all of a sudden it's just It's just effort over extended period of time on the same boring stuff. And and then they turn their attention to something else because they want to feel like they're making progress.

Again, when you are making progress, it's just not as, it's slower. It's slower and it's just boring. But if it feels boring, you're doing the right thing. That's actually a great place to be, like, have a boring business. That's predictable. Yeah, that's ideal that some of the best businesses in the world are super boring and they have very few products or services, but they just do a really good job of repeating that and scaling that and and growing.

And another thing to keep in mind too is just it's not necessarily about the business. If you focus on that's boring. If you focus on the people that you're helping, this is something for us. Like we have a social proof channel where we actually see oh, so and so is sharing with us what their business is doing right now with your clients, you're seeing, oh, Tammy's back to playing baseball again or whatever, and that's not boring.

The outcomes are actually the exciting part. So instead of focusing on like the business and tangibles of things you need to focus on, it's really the outcomes. The people are the exciting part, and that's what keeps you motivated, not the. Profit and loss sheet and looking at your marketing sprint for 90 days and all of the stuff that you don't really probably like.

It's all about the people you get to help and the outcomes you get to get. That's actually where the excitement is and I think that people forget that and they just turn their attention to other things and it ends up ruining their business in most cases. Yeah. I lost that gene. I don't have the, that entrepreneur gene.

A lot of people do. But when once a business gets boring, I'm like super happy. I'm like that's where I want it to be. I'm like, because it's not, and I've started multiple and I know like during that stage it's, there's anxiety, there's stress, there's, what am I gonna do? You're throwing shit at a wall, hoping something sticks.

But once things are starting to stick and you're getting the social proof that you're talking about, people are getting results. You know how to get new clients. That's, it's starting to get boring. It's, you've turned it into a machine that's like the best place to be. So if you are feeling that, Hey, you can do you can have your entrepreneurial a, d, d, like just do it in like marketing, try a bunch of new marketing campaigns as opposed to screwing your entire business up by trying to change the model.

Or add something that doesn't have any business in fitting. Try other things that can be more exciting and need to be changed frequently that aren't gonna screw your business up by pursuing the wrong opportunity. Yeah, I think one thing that's helped me a lot, cuz I definitely have the opposite gene, where I just want to do as many new things and just, just I do enjoy that.

So I have to work to manage that. And what's really helpful for me, Is goal setting. Like it's just if I know I'm trying to reach another goal and I'm trying to get after that helps that part of me quite a bit. That's why I loved, cause I never did it really till I met you guys, like really consistently early in my business.

I didn't have goal setting. I just I just need more new patients. That's all more, this is the goal. That's it. That's the only goal, right? Like just more. And so now it's cool, what's my focus this quarter? What's my focus this year? And doing that all the time really helped me a lot to like.

Just feel like I'm being challenged, but focusing on the things that I know that are gonna be impactful in the business. And that's just, that's been so helpful for me personally. Yeah. And it's also the people in those businesses too, right? So it, if you're looking for excitement, try and work with.

Try to get another human being to do what you want them to do. That's a very difficult thing to do. Like they're just luck. They're very multifactorial. They have their own intentions. They have messy, parts of their life that they drag into work. And you have to be able to like, to be able to get to a level where you can mentor someone in a way where it's beneficial for them, but also get them to do the things they need to do within a company that you have, where you have a goal for that.

That is next level. That's really hard to do. This is something that we run into constantly now with people in our mastermind that are trying to scale these businesses in on the leadership side of things, because ultimately you scale through space and people in these businesses. Space is not that hard to find.

Space is, it seems scary, but like it's way less difficult to find a commercial space and build it out than it is to talk to another human about. Pay structures and continued education opportunities and where you see them, in the company going forward and how to like, deal with somebody that maybe is like going through something that they're bringing into work in their personal life.

Or maybe their goals don't align with what yours are and understanding if it's the right person to continue to work with or to let them go. These are all really hard things and if you're looking for ways to feel excitement, I think it's through momentum. It's just through like progress and growing.

And that's an area I think pretty much. I don't know if you ever really get to a point where you master that. I don't think you do, but you probably suck at it right now. Unless you've had a lot of experience with working with other people and in leadership roles and in leadership roles with varying different types of people.

It's not a skill you can just read a book about. And that's the, I think that's the challenge we get. We get people that ask for what? Tell me some leadership advice. I'm like, Tell me how to build an airplane. Like it's so much more complex than that. I could see it flying, but it's I don't know it would take so long and that, that's, I think the area that you really need to focus on as you're growing is, yeah, stay focused on your business, but then it's all about your people and it's your people and it's you becoming a really good leader and understanding how to, how you relay information.

If you can understand this is actually was huge for me. The way that I like receive information is not necessarily. The same way in which I would give information and the, and most people are the same way. So you can be pretty direct to me, but I'm not gonna be really direct with other people unless I know that they're a good person to be direct with.

Because you be direct, you can be direct with the wrong person, and they quit the next day because they've never had anybody yell at them, or they just don't know how to take that, or they think you're mad, or it's oh my God, it's gonna be so awkward. We're gonna see this guy on Monday. And like I, it's like there's so much tension or whatever, right?

It's What the fuck? Like I just told you something that you needed to be better at and just take it as that. No, don't take it the wrong way, but that's not how they perceive it. So like just, that right there can keep you busy for years, so if you're bored, just focus on that and problem solve, yeah. Leadership 1 0 1, just getting started down that path. When anytime Mastermind member asked me about it unfortunately, leadership is not a checklist. Now we could come up with a checklist to help you like get better at it. But it's not a checklist. You can't, okay, while I'm at the office, I'm gonna do these 19 things I've been told to do and that will make me a good leader.

And so when people ask me about it, my first question in response to any question about leadership is, would you follow you? That's it. Can we just sit on that for a minute? Would you follow you? And it shouldn't take a lot of thinking if you're like, I don't know, okay, like, why wouldn't you follow you?

Like what? Go ahead and pick that apart. Like why wouldn't you follow yourself? Is there, is it something about your personal life like that you don't think you have your shit together, so why wouldn't anyone else follow it? Or, whatever communication styles. So those are like big red flags for you right away.

Problems you need to fix if you want to go down this leadership journey is, would you follow you If it's an instantaneous yes. When you get asked that question, then you can start playing leadership at a different level. But it starts with yourself. You have to be able to. Master yourself.

Whether that's discipline or killing comfort or whatever it is. You have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations and grow and lead yourself through your life. Yes. To all of that foundational, just do that that never stops. I think for all of us. That's like a core tenant for all of us at PT Vaz, right?

Is we talk about it all the time, like you gotta work on yourself. Self-development, developing your skillset? I think from like a, to go into the tactical stuff a little bit, the thing that I learned was, what I've seen a lot is. The number one thing that your employees want is your time and your attention.

Like they want a guide and they want a mentor, and if you don't do that, they're going to leave eventually. So that's like a big one, like company culture and all that. And to follow up on that, what I see a lot is man, I told so and so once I gave them, I told them that you do better in selling packages.

And I told 'em what I do, and I had this one meeting and it didn't get better. Are you kidding me? Like one time think how long it took you to get good at selling. So it's, it never stops, right? It's like Al, it's like it's gonna always be there. You're gonna have to constantly remind people over and over again.

Like when I was leading the Made to Move team, a week did not go by where we did not talk about marketing or messaging or sales. It just was interwoven in everything that we did, and so I just think that's, A big failure. It's like they think they just need to say it once and they're just gonna absorb it for the rest of their life.

No, that is not the case. It's so hard. It's hard not to get frustrated. And in these types of businesses, you have the clinical side. So you have people that clinically you're having to probably mentor or talk through things clinically with. Patients they're having a hard time with or successful things or the new ConEd course that somebody went to and we're sharing ideas and going over whatever application of that to a case study.

So you have this like part of your brain that you have to be okay with on the clinical side, especially early on because you probably are the most senior clinician that you have. So you can hire more seasoned people. But then you have to also look at what metrics line up with us being able to have this clinic, to be able to.

To be able to treat people in the manner that we do because it's very, there's a reason why most clinics don't see one person in an hour, and they can't focus on like more performance based things. And it's because it is challenging. It's challenging to market, to sell.

It's much easier to just take insurance and get in-network with whoever and then just dump patients on you. But it's not necessarily the right way to, to work with people in our opinion. So you have the business side, so then you're teaching your staff about here's how you do a marketing event.

Here's how you teach these things. Here's how you, here's how you need to talk to somebody about a plan of care and why they would want to commit to that with you. Here's how you talk to your front desk about, follow up and things of that nature. So you have this sort of Bifurcation of your tension, that what happens is and eventually you become less and less of a clinical expert and more and more of the business expert as you start to have to see fewer and fewer patients, and then empowering your staff to be the clinical experts.

This is the direction that everybody ends up having to go, otherwise they stall and they can never really build a team around them because they're just focused on the clinical side. And that's what we all get into. But if you want to build a team in a business that can really grow past yourself and you can be as involved in the clinical side as you want.

You have to be able to focus on both those. I think this is where people would really struggle and they feel really comfortable and confident in the clinical side. Cause that's where they focus so much on. And what they don't realize usually is just how little they focus on the other side, the leadership side, and there were terrible clinicians when they first started.

They forget that like you, you forget how awful you were and how you just thought about sensit and sensitivity and specificity of all the shoulder tests you did to somebody that they didn't need instead of. Like having a conversation about what's going on and better understanding goals and getting buy-in and all these things we know matter a lot more, but you get there over time in reps and then with leadership and with training people, it's the same thing.

And communication. It's frustrating cuz you're right. They forget and you tell them and it's like being a parent and you can be like, this is a grown adult. Why aren't they just doing their own shit? It's because. This isn't as important to you or to them as it is to you. And you can't expect that level of ownership, with somebody.

That's just not gonna happen as an employee. So I think balancing that is really hard, and getting past that, I think it just takes time. I don't really know if you can shortcut it, that I would love to say, I can shortcut your leadership. I can tell you what you shouldn't do, but it doesn't mean you're not gonna do it.

Cuz in the moment you're probably still gonna get mad and talk to somebody the wrong way and then they're gonna leave and then you're gonna find somebody else. Lesson learned. Communication. Yeah. That's the biggest thing I think. And to your point, Eve, like I don't like meetings. I think you guys know that unless everyone knows I don't like meetings, but you have to earn the right to not like meetings.

Because yeah, you need to meet frequently, like Eve is saying, you need to dive into people. Yeah. And whether that's daily or weekly, I actually had this conversation with Mastermind, remember about a month ago. And she was asking if, I forgot what the frequency she wanted to go down to. Also a meeting hater, obviously, but she was like, can I do like once a month?

And I think she was reaching out to me as the person who was like, he'll say yes, cause he hates meetings. He hates meetings. And I was like, absolutely not. I was like, you have like new staff. No way. Like you have to at least keep it weekly. Right now you have to dive into your people and make sure they're doing things right.

You can't just hire 'em and think everything's gonna be. Like taken care of. I think that was one of my biggest mistakes once I actually hired employees was like, I was like, okay, great problem solved. We'll meet once a month. You're gonna do everything I told you to do and you'll do it well. Yeah, and none of that's true.

They'll barely know what the hell you're talking about. That was one of my biggest things is like I was such a poor communicator, cuz I also thought that people just understood how to do what I could do and I was just like, you need to go do X, Y, and Z. And they'd be like, I don't know how to do that.

Especially not to the level that you're doing it. So what do I do? Can we like, have a little bit more time here? And so the communication thing is huge and you have to dive into your people. But on the flip side, I do think if you have an extremely talented type a like person who can just get it done and you are meeting with them daily, you might piss 'em off and also they would leave.

Yeah. So that's the true, the intricacies of leadership is like you really have to know who you're dealing with because. If I came to work for you and I was pretty squared away and I don't need the meetings and you wanna meet every single day for an hour, I'm gonna be like, fuck this, I'm leaving. I'm gonna go somewhere where they'll gimme a little bit more autonomy.

So you need to know who you're working with, whether the person who needs the frequency or the person who doesn't need the frequency. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's the biggest challenge potentially as a business owner, because you're working really hard and just like Danny said, you're doing clinical things, you're seeing patients, you're running the business, you're doing accounting, you're doing right.

You're this sole. Entrepreneur and to have the bandwidth to go in and talk to somebody and communicate with them and spend that time and learning how they take feedback and how they give, it's just a it's challenging to cleave off that time. The amount of people that we onboard in the mastermind who don't even do weekly staff meetings, not because necessarily they don't want to, but they just don't think they have the time.

And Ryan just like getting them to cleave off that time. That emotional, that bandwidth to spend it important to their people. It's just like you just have to, I have to tell 'em you have to, and then they pay the dividends, but it's just not where their brain goes to, right? The brain goes to, I need to grow.

I just need to see clients. This is how we make more money, and getting them to switch to say, no, you need to do less of that important to your people because you can spend this hour. This is something I use all the time. You can spend this hour, you can make $200 to see a client, or you could train your team how to sell packages better, and you can make $2,000 that day.

Do you know what I mean? Like where's your time better spent? It's gonna be into your team bottom line. Totally. Why? I think the other thing is people, Most people don't even know how to run a meeting because they didn't go. They were never taught that true. They were never taught how, what they should be doing, what they shouldn't be doing.

What should they be tracking what's not important. And really focusing on those things and being able to share relevant information with your team, but not oversharing. That's a challenge I think for a lot of people because they're used to being, they're used to being a part of the clinic team, the staff, maybe they were a clinic director, but even still, they're not.

They don't own it. They don't see all the, everything behind the scenes. And so they don't know what to do. So they don't do anything. Or what they do is just the wrong stuff. And like people need structure when you're leading them. They don't need like micromanagement, but they need to know that they're working with somebody that's going the right direction.

Otherwise they're gonna wanna look for another boat to get on. Cause like this is gonna crash so I better go find another one. Cuz this guy's doesn't know what he's doing. And then incompetence, we'll drive away really good people. So part of that, and that's not necessarily their fault either, right?

Get a lot of this comes down. They just, you just don't know enough about business because you didn't go to school for business. None of us did that are talking about this right now. It's just the amount of effort, time, like money that we've invested into like actual business education and just spent on that exclusively.

It's the reason why. I don't see patients anymore, and I'm just not that good at it because I haven't spent any time with that in years and it, but before that, I was obsessive over it. But if you can take that same obsession of being great in the clinic and being great with your business, you can totally do it.

You know how to learn, you can build those skills. You just have to, you have to focus on the right skills and building the right skills. I think that to summarize and we'll finish it up here so that we can go get. A beer and maybe try to find a pretzel.

I would love to find a pretzel. It's that'd be great pretzel weather. I don't know if we're gonna be able to do it. It's pretzel weather. But pretzel number one, you gotta say no to a lot of things. At a stage where you're coming out of people saying no to you a lot, which is hard.

It gets flipped eventually. You gotta stay focused on the right opportunities. Usually that means fewer, ideally, one thing that you control and make sure that you're really focusing on making that as good as you possibly can and as boring as you possibly can. And the more you say yes to things you think are potential money opportunities, the less money you'll probably actually end up making.

It's funny, it's like it's opposite of what you think because you're going to. Divert your attention to other things and you're not actually gonna gain mo very much momentum in what you're trying to do. Stop getting fixated on passive revenue. That shit takes a long time. Just build a business that can support your family and makes more money than you know what to do with.

Then you can focus on what do you do with this to generate passive income? That's how true passive income gets gets actually generated. And then, Leadership at a certain stage is gonna be the most important thing that you work on. And a lot of it's gonna come from boots on the ground, on the job training, there's definitely many things you can do to improve it, but even still, it's like you can read a book about fighting somebody, but it doesn't really do a whole lot for you until you put it into application.

And you get your butt whooped and you're like, okay, that didn't work. That chapter. Didn't hit home for me. Let me try, lemme try that again. And you iterate. And that's normal. It's normal to have to go through that. Anything you guys wanna summarize and end it with No try harder?

I think give it more effort in a lot of these areas. I do think you bring up such a good point, like with the don't, like diversifying and investing sounds like a great thing, but if you only have a hundred bucks a month to diversify. That's not gonna be a good idea. No, it'd be better to put all the a hundred dollars in one thing.

And I'm not actually talking about investing here. I'm talking about your attention. Put all of your attention into one thing, watch it grow, and then say no to all the things that don't have a bigger opportunity than what you're currently working with, than when you wanna start saying yes. Make sure that you have the leverage and leadership in place to be able to say yes to the opportunities I got two of them. I think number one, what I heard a lot I feel like. We're all gonna fail. We're all gonna fuck up. So like the key thing that you need to have as an entrepreneur is the resilience to mess up. Pick up and do it again. The amount of failures and money that probably the three of us have wasted is probably massive.

Yeah. And we earned that right to get here. I think that's just a key thing that you need. If this is the journey, entrepreneurial journey is what you want. And number two as you guys said it, I realized it even more, but Be bored in your business, get to the point where your business is boring.

If you can do that, you have one. I still remember specifically, I remember the time place and where I was when I was, when I worked at Made, or when I was in, made to move, and I was like, man, everything's taken care of today. Somebody's answering the phones. Somebody seeing the patients. I have nothing to do right now.

I remember the first time as an entrepreneur that happened to me and it was like, it was actually very anxiety provoking as opposed to helpful. Yeah. But at the same time, that has really driven me to build systems, get to the point where I am bored in my business. It's the best place to be. It means that you have won.

Yeah. It's such a good point. You made such a good point. Yeah. I need to finish it off build a boring business, but do fun shit with your people like that. Did you want They do fun stuff with them. But build a business that's like super predictable and boring. It's like this, right?

Like PT Biz, at this point we have two things that we offer. That's pretty much it, right? One, to help you get started, one to help you grow. That's it. Those are, and we could do many other things and we don't because it's, it would com, it would add complexity. When we look at what we've created, it's very predictable.

It is a boring business. But then we get to do stuff like this where we go on a, a snowboard trip to plan for. For that business. We get to take our team to do fun stuff. We get together a couple times a year with everybody at these live events, and we just, we have a good time, and I don't need to find excitement in my business.

I need to find excitement in other areas and be able to enjoy things with people in the business that are fun. Not necessarily try to create fun through, just like things that are unpredictable and exciting because they could also lead to significant negative outcomes. For the business that's, there's difference between something that is dangerous and something just evokes fear, right?

We don't want to pick up a snake, okay, maybe we do need to like have this talk with somebody that is uncomfortable and that's fearful, right? Understand those two. Stay away from the one and then move towards the other. So we'll leave you that. Do fun. Stay with your people.

Build a boring business. That's it guys. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next time.

Hey, Pete, entrepreneurs. We have big, exciting news, a new program that we just came out with That is our PT Biz part-time to full-time, five day challenge. Over the course of five days, we get you crystal clear on exactly how much money you need to replace by getting you. Ultra clear on how much you're actually spending.

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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 connect with other clinicians all over the country.

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