E672 | Do You Have A Job Or A Business

In this episode of the podcast, Danny explores the distinction between having a job and owning a business as a physical therapist. He begins by introducing the "hit by a bus test", which prompts us to consider whether our business would still generate income if something were to happen to us. If not, we are essentially operating a job rather than a business.

Danny then explores the pros and cons of having a job or a lifestyle business. On one hand, a job can provide good income, low overhead costs, and flexibility to take time off. However, it comes with a low income ceiling and limited scalability or potential for selling. On the other hand, owning a business offers infinite scalability, no income ceiling, and the ability to develop passive revenue streams. It also allows for greater impact by helping more clients directly and indirectly through employees. However, running a business requires additional business skills such as hiring, processes, marketing, finances, and leadership. There are also more staffing and financial risks involved at a larger scale.

Danny emphasizes that it is crucial to align our goals with our chosen path, as some may prioritize flexibility and time with family over growth, while others view growth as a means to support bigger life goals. The key, regardless of whether one chooses a job or a business, is to build a structure that supports our desired lifestyle, rather than molding our lifestyle around work.

Ultimately, the decision between having a job or owning a business depends on weighing the pros and cons in relation to our goals. Both paths can lead to success, depending on the lifestyle we wish to achieve through our work. Tune in to learn more about the factors to consider when making this important decision as a physical therapist.

Up for a Challenge? Try our 5-Day Challenge Here! https://www.physicaltherapybiz.com/challenge 

www.physicaltherapybiz.com/apply

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

Are you a member of our free PT Entrepreneur Facebook Group? Join today!

Podcast Transcript

 Danny: Hey, real quick, if you are serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country, and it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.

Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skillset in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matei and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff PT. I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And to date, my company physical therapy business has helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale, their own cash practices. So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, because I'm here to help you.

Hey, what's going on? Dr. Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast going live in the PT entrepreneurs. Facebook group, if you're listening to this on the podcast and you haven't joined the PT entrepreneurs, Facebook group, head over to Facebook, look up PT entrepreneurs, like I do a search for it at your homepage, but the only ones we had about 6, 600 other clinicians that are in there all learning about business, helping each other grow their practices, asking questions, answering questions, and we do training in there on a weekly basis.

So today I'm going over. Whether you have a job or you have a business and I put together a word doc, that's going to go over what the difference is, the pros and cons. So I'm going to walk through this live in the Facebook groups. If you want to watch the actual video that goes along with the audio of this, those just in the podcast, make sure you head over to the Facebook group and go ahead and request to, to join.

So you can see this as well. And this is really spurred on from a conversation we had internally with our team. And it was a bit of a kind of back and forth of whether someone actually needed to grow a business, or if it was cool to just be, a solo clinician that had a single person practice and is that a good place to stay or does it really important to try to grow towards.

A bigger business with more people and all the benefits associated with that. So I want to go over the pros and cons of it. And to be honest with you, the very first question you have to ask yourself is what are your goals? What do you want to get from your business?

What life do you want your business to support? That's probably the most important thing to ask yourself. Because you can really, be happy with either of these, depending on what your interests are, what your interests are and what your goals are for your life and for your family.

Let me share my screen real quick and we'll go ahead and we'll actually go over this document. All right, number one. So if you have a job or if you have a business, there's one test that will tell you if you're like, I don't know what I have, Danny, I'm not sure. There's one test and we call this the hit by a bus test.

So the hit by a bus test is basically, if you were to get hit by a bus today, which let's all hope that doesn't happen to any of us Would your business be able to generate income for your family, your loved ones, the people that you support? And what this basically means is, are you the one doing everything?

And if you are that means you have a job. And if you have a team of people that are running, processes and systems in the organization of a business, that means that you've generated and created a business. So the hit by a bus test is something that for me. For years and years, I never could say yes to this.

I could never say yes. My family would have income and financial support if I got hit by a bus. Because I was doing everything right. And even now, like I still do quite a bit, but what I do is not directly. Fulfillment related, it's not directly related on operation side. I do a lot of forward facing stuff and to be honest with you, there's a lot of smart people that are in our company that can do exactly what I'm doing and would be just as good at it, if not better.

And this is a role that would be able to be filled by somebody else because they can run the systems that we've created or content creation for education things of that nature. So this is the first thing you have to ask yourself. If I was to get hit by a bus, would my business continue without me?

Would it generate income for my family? And if it wouldn't, then you have a job, right? So one other thing to keep in mind, and that is that everyone. Everyone starts with a job. You can't just skip, to all of a sudden you have a team of employees and staff, and they're all running systems that you have dialed in that are, that are really well put together.

Everyone starts with a job, unless I guess you buy a franchise. And in that case. You have a bunch of disposable income anyway, a bunch of money to invest in you. You're buying a business in a box. Basically you're investing in a business in a box. You want to own a Jimmy John's or something like that because, you don't want to necessarily be there.

You're going to hire an operator. And that's why there's a lot of value to those things, to be honest with you. There's why people will pay. 50, 60, 000 for for the franchise fee, plus another 10 percent on top of that forever in perpetuity, as long as they have the business.

And it's because they know that the likelihood of success is very high and they don't have to directly do everything from day one. So we will might do that, but a lot of people buy businesses as investments, and then they put operators in them and they just get a income stream from it. But if you don't have a ton of cash to do something like that.

Then your best bet is to actually start your own business because that way you can grow it on your own. You can build your own systems and you can essentially create your own variation of that, that you bootstrap. So everybody starts with a job though. Everybody starts. It's just you trying to get patients, seeing all the patients, you wear all the hats, you're the marketing director, you're the sales director, you are the website person, right?

You're you're doing everything, you're bookkeeping, you're you're the, director of the clinic, your senior clinician, you're the junior clinician, you're everything. So everybody starts this way and that's the way it works. So some people don't stay there, but other people do. But either way, everybody starts in the same place.

Now, the other thing too, is to keep in mind, not everybody wants to build a business. And I've talked to people about this. In fact, one of the first people I ever met was a cash practice owner. The first people I've ever met that were cash practice owners was a lady here in Atlanta. And she only worked like, it was like three days, three days a week.

oF clinical care, she intentionally was staying small and she just wanted to be able to offset her income working somewhere else five days a week. She worked like primarily like a lot of gymnasts gymnasts and dancers was their, her niche it's like hypermobility control niche.

And she did awesome, and I remember talking to her and she basically had replaced her income working three days a week out of a small office. And and she wanted to spend more time with her kids. That's what it was. She had two kids and that was her goal, right? So for her, she was able to actually make a decent amount more money.

Three days a week on her own. Then she was working for somebody else and she had no interest whatsoever growing that business. I don't know whatever, I never really kept up with her after that, but at the time, that's what she wanted to do. She just wanted to do that. She wanted to be able to be more involved with her kids.

And her husband had good benefits. So he had, insurance and healthcare and all that. So she didn't really need that. So she could take a chance on herself and create time flexibility for herself by doing so. So it depends on what your goals are. She didn't want to build a big business.

So keep that in mind, everybody's going to be a bit different, but I'm going to go through the pros and cons of a job. Or sometimes we call a lifestyle business versus a a business. Okay. So let's go through the pros first. So if you're saying to yourself, okay, maybe you've already started a practice and you're in this stage.

Maybe you're thinking about starting a practice. But you don't really foresee yourself wanting to grow into a bigger entity. The pros of a job or a lifestyle business are that you can make great money, right? So you can actually. Replace your income and then some, depending on what you want to do, right?

So let's do some rough math on this. And we'll say my friend at the time, I know she was charging 150 an hour. Let's say she was seeing six people three days a week. She's generating about 2, 700 a week, and let's assume she's working 44 weeks out of the year, which would be two months off. That means she's going to generate about 120, 000 in revenue.

And if she keeps her overhead really low at 15 percent or so, she'll make a hundred thousand dollars. So for her to see three people a week charging, at the time about 150 bucks, she probably could charge a lot more than that now probably at least 200 in our area, if not more. She could, after expenses be able to clear about a hundred grand.

And that's. More than she was making at at her clinic working part time, right? So you can make great money. If you're going to work five days a week, it can be a good bit more than that. We see people consistently in this stage of a business be able to make about 50% more than they're making working somewhere else for a clinic.

Now, obviously it's not guaranteed some people make more than that. Some people make less than that. It depends on how you set up your clinic and how you run your clinic. But on average, that's basically what we see. So if somebody is making, let's call it, 80, 000, then that means they're going to be making about 120.

So it's a pretty decent exchange, for. Low cost to start a high likelihood of success, at least moderate success. And not having to change careers either. So not having to go back to coding school or learn how to sell other things like software or whatever it is that you're going to do you can make great money. You can be very profitable, right? So if you're just running these by yourself, you can be somewhere between 80 to 85 percent net depends on, what your goals are. But if you're just trying to maintain this, you should be somewhere about 80 to 85%, meaning every dollar you make, that's what you're keeping before taxes.

And they're very easy to run, right? So if it's just you in this scenario, say you want to work three days a week and you only want to have a certain number of patients. Once you build your, your marketing channels and you're able to acquire Clients like that's really to start.

It's the hardest part, right? How do you find people to work with you? Then you got to learn how to sell. You got to price yourself. You got to learn how to work with people on an ongoing basis. But once you dial those things in, then it's just a matter of a lot of people that have small businesses like this.

They don't really even do much marketing. They might do a little bit here and there, but a lot of times it's all referral based. And if you're a really good clinician. Over the course of six to 12 months, you only want to have three, four days a week of work. You may not need to do much marketing.

If you're really good at what you do, people are going to send their friends and family your way. It's a great sign that you are good at what you do. And it's really easy marketing, right? It's just have an awesome product service. People will send their friends and family your way. So no need to do really much other marketing from there.

If you're just trying to stay small you have minimal to no staff concerns, right? So nobody's calling a sick on you. No, nobody's just not going to show up one day and you got to cover down, like you don't have these staffing issues that you might have. If you're managing other people, and some of you might be coming from a bigger clinic where you're like, I was a clinic director.

I don't want to manage anybody. I hate this. I just want to do my own thing. And that's where we'll see some people gravitate towards more of this job slash lifestyle business versus going and actually building another business. They, had a bad experience at another business. And then they carry that baggage with them and decide I'm not doing that again.

You can take time off whenever you want. You want to take off every Friday? Great. You don't want to work on Mondays? You don't have to, right? You decide what you want to do. It's your job, right? You decide what it's going to be. And then you can work as much or as little as you want.

That could be two days a week. We've worked with people that we've helped, in our clinical rainmaker program. They're just starting. And, we've had a decent number of people that are literally, they're like, I want to be a stay at home mom. I just want to work two days a week. And my goal is just to replace my income.

That's it. Like I just, I want the extra time. I want the time flexibility. I want to have to be at the clinic five days a week. And we've seen a lot of successful people go in that route. And that's their goal. That's what they want to do. And there's nothing past that. And that's they hit their mark at that point.

And then they're done. They're on autopilot until they decide maybe they want to change it. The cons of a job are pretty big in my opinion, depending on what you're trying to do. If you have a job or a lifestyle business, meaning you're doing everything, if you got hit by a bus, there wouldn't be any revenue that was coming in for your family.

It's as simple as this. If you don't work, you don't make money, right? So you're doing everything. You're really, you're doing what we consider trading time for money, which is, it sounds bad. Like it's not that bad. Okay. And lots of people trade their time for money, doing things they hate. I think if you're trying your time for money, doing something you love.

Hey, that's a, that's not a bad exchange. Okay. It's very hard to build to a business where you're not actually directly doing things that are, trading time for money. It's a tough thing to do. So for you, you're still doing that, you're active, you're doing everything. So if you don't work, you don't make any money.

So you could take a month off of vacation if you want, and you have zero income. So keep that in mind. It's not like you're having paid time off. You're literally not going to make any money for not doing the work. What happens if you get hurt? This is something that I was actually very concerned about.

And other, I think solo clinicians, solo entrepreneurs, I should say, are scared of this as well. I remember I had this real estate rep that I worked with. So he was a local realtor and I was talking to him about paddle boarding and he was like, no, I won't get on a paddle board.

I don't want to hurt myself. And I was you going to hurt yourself on a paddle board, dude? You're like. Fall into the water. And he's yeah, it's just me. Like I'm the only, I'm a realtor. I'm doing all the work. My wife stays home with our kids. If I get hurt, I can't do my job. And that's how we make our money.

And so he wouldn't do anything. It was like living in a bubble. I felt the same way for a while. I was like, man, I definitely, there are certain things I didn't do. I didn't play intramural sports. I didn't train any sort of combatives anymore. I w I just didn't want to hurt my hands.

I didn't want to hurt anything or have an injury that would stop me from being able to see patients. If you get hurt, then you get sucks, but we've had multiple clinicians that we work with that have torn their bicep tendons and, they're out for a while and that sucks because they lose revenue and they're having to recover or they're trying to work around that, and, but for a period of time, like they just can't see anybody and, They don't see anybody.

They're not making any money. There's minimal to no scale. anD you should know that, right? If this is what you want to do, it should be intentional. It shouldn't because you don't know how to do anything else. But you can't really grow past yourself. That's it. And you can't sell a job. So one of the bigger benefits to a business is the ability to actually Sell that business one day to have an exit, to build something of value that you sell. It's very similar to like building a house, right? You build a house, that house sits on land that you own, you sell it, and it appreciates over time. And you can buy a house and you can fix it up and you can make a lot more money because you put a lot of sweat equity into it.

That's like a business, right? Something that you can sell. If you have a job it's almost like you have a tent. So you could live in there. But you can't, you can't really sell it, right? You might be able to sell your list of people to somebody else that wants to buy it, but it's going to be a minimal transaction at best.

And most likely you're just going to shut it down one day. So this is really important. If this is you and you're deciding, I do not want anything to do with. Growing past myself, that means your business will not be a wealth building vehicle for you. It's going to be an income generating vehicle for you.

This is very important. Okay. Please remember this. If you're the only person you're going to generate income and that income needs to be invested in other places in order to develop wealth, meaning this is like preservation of your dollars. You've worked so hard for and things outside of here.

This could be investing in stock market, Buying real estate buying another business. There's like lots of things, right? But you got to do something outside of your business that's going to preserve wealth and build wealth. So you have to take those dollars that you've made in your job and you've got to put them into something else, right?

Just imagine you're sweeping it over into a mutual fund or whatever. You're going to invest it, something like that. Cause you can't sell a job and that's what you have. Let's talk about a business for a second. So what are the pros of a business? Number one, a business is infinitely scalable.

Recently I saw this picture of Jeff Bezos, like way back in the day with Amazon, and he's sitting at a desk and he has this really, cheap looking banner in front of his desk. And it says like amazon. com, on it. And it's just so funny. It's you look at that and you don't think to yourself, Oh, Amazon, oh, the people that change the way that we buy things. But that's how we started in this little office looking like a startup and your little office, it looks like a startup as well. Who knows? There's probably people listening to this podcast that are literally going to be, multimillionaires from their business and the things they did.

They're going to hire an enormous number of people. They're going to scale and solve a bunch of problems and they're going to grow. And they're going to, they're going to just be amazing entrepreneurs. Because when you grow past yourself, you have infinite scale. It could be as big as you want, as big as your vision is.

The only thing stopping you is your willingness to put the work in and the vision that you have. That's about it. There's no ceiling on your income. This is another big one. If you see. Let's say you see a hundred patients a month for X amount per month. And you're in this lifestyle business or job you create for yourself.

You can only make a certain amount and that's it. The only way you can go and make more than that is you charge more or more people. That's basically it. Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a long time listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast and please leave a rating and review this actually.

Very helpful for us to get this podcast in front of more clinicians and really help them develop time and financial freedom. So if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast

with this, there's no ceiling on the income because you can hire more people. You can bolt on more services and products, and you can really grow in a number of ways outside of Just yourself, right? And then there's other people fulfilling on things. There's other people that are developing things. Maybe there's other people that are like leading portions of your company as you really grow.

An Amazon is a good example. Jeff Bezos doesn't do everything. In fact, I'm involved at this point, but when he was running it, there's people that are like the vice president of sales and product and delivery and all this stuff. So you have no ceiling on your income. The other thing that happens is.

You can develop legitimate passive revenue. And this is a buzzword. This gets thrown around all the time. People are like, Oh, I just got to generate some passive revenue. Let me tell you how you do that. You either have to have a massive amount of money. That either is either inherited or you've earned over an extended period of time, or you win the lottery and then you have to take that money and you have to put it into things that create a yield.

Okay, that could be maybe you're putting into bonds. If you have 10 million and you put it into bonds that are generating 5 percent a year, you're making a lot of money. Okay, you're making a ton of money just passively. You could also buy businesses for that. You could, this is like back to our Jimmy John's example.

Let's say you have that amount of money and you want to. Buy a bunch of Jimmy John's and have an operator run at all. The rate of return you're going to get on that is significant. And you're going to have passive revenue mean money's coming in without you actively doing anything. The other way to do that is to build something yourself, build and create systems so that you can remove yourself from the day to day.

Maybe you're running it at a high level, but you could step away if you wanted to. And then you have a business that's generating passive revenue for you and your family. You're not actively. And if you were to get hit by a bus, your family's still making this money. This is the most challenging type of revenue to earn.

And it's the thing that people talk about the most, and yet it, it is something that is very hard to work towards. But it can be done with a business. If you build it to a point where you can remove yourself, the other thing you have is the opportunity to impact both more people and people as far as clients.

But you also have the opportunity to impact people in terms of the people you work with your team. And I got to say for me, the, this is the greatest part about building a business. It, I, this is not like income, passive revenue, scalability. This is a by product of what I think is the most awesome part of actually starting and growing a business.

And that is you get to help a lot more people, which is amazing because we actually do help people, we're not just over here selling fidget spinners, or whatever, some sort of e commerce business that nothing, you don't get anything personally from this. We're helping people on a day to day basis, get out of pain.

Get back to things they love with the people they love and do that for as long as they humanly possibly can before they die. That is really freaking important. It's that simple. It's amazing. And what we know can help people on such a level, such a tremendous level, to where we can help them live longer and enjoy the people around them and enjoy the world around them in such a meaningful way.

That's amazing. I, now I get a chance to help business owners that are helping people do the exact same thing. So it's just I jumped up a little bit and now I'm getting a chance to help all these business owners and all these business owners are helping these people directly. And I know what that's because I've been in, in the clinic for 10 years and I love, being able to help people get those light bulb moments and back to things they didn't think they could do again.

And that's happened all around the country, all around North America, frankly, with, People that we get to work with on a day to day basis. And in the last 12 months, physical therapy, biz mastermind clients alone have helped over 60, 000 new patients. Keep that in mind. If you saw 60, 000 people at once, it would fill up an arena.

That's how many people we get a chance to help. The impact is amazing. It's what gets me up in the morning, every single day, ready to work. Now, here's the other thing that's awesome. You get a chance to grow a team of other professionals. So now I have an opportunity to work with all kinds of other smart people, whether these are coaches, these are people who are helping us on the acquisition side, the operation side, the sales side.

Just building an actual business, including business partners that I have that are amazing human beings. And we get a chance to work together, to have a bigger impact with our clients and grow something that's fun to work together on with a mission driven business. And there's so many people out there that go to a job every single day.

They hate it. They don't want to do it anymore. They just do it because they have to buy groceries and have to pay their mortgage. And we get a chance to take those people that are super, super talented people. And we get to say, Hey. Come join this small team of ours that is going to be, creative.

We're going to work together. We're going to help these clinicians that we work with help all these people. You're going to get a chance to see that in real time. They get so motivated to want to be a part of the team that we have and the company we have. And that is special to me. The people that I get a chance to work with is the best part.

It's the best part between the people we get to help and the people that we get a chance to work with. The last thing, even when I was in the clinic, and I'd say this, goes back to those of you that are listening to this, that are growing past yourself in the clinic. My favorite thing, the thing I actually miss the most about, now that Ashton and I have sold our clinic and we're completely out of the day to day of that.

Is we actually, would look forward to our Christmas dinner with our staff and our staff retreats more than pretty much anything else. thEre's nothing more fun to me than sitting down at Christmas, staff dinner with everybody. And it's not like they're forced to be there, right?

Like they want to be there. We had to have a good time to go to a nice restaurant or hire a chef and have them come to the house and cook a meal for everybody. And enjoy being around the company of other people that are high level professionals that are trying to be the best at what they do and really are passionate about helping other people.

That is worth growing, in my opinion, past yourself just to get there. And I'll talk about the cons in a second, but just this one bullet point alone is the reason why I would never go back to a lifestyle business of just me, because I want to work with other amazing people. It's less risky in many ways, right?

If I was to get hurt today, it would suck. I don't want to get hurt. I don't want to get hit by a bus. But if I got hit by a bus, like my business is still going to go on. It's still going to run. It's still going to help people. It's still going to grow. And it's because we have such great people in the organization that are following proven systems that are working together.

And they're independently good at what they do. So growing past yourself in many ways is less risky, especially when you look at the key man risk of you as the individual that's running it. Now, sellability is the other thing. These are sellable entities have already sold one business, right? I've already, I've acquired other businesses.

The, these are businesses that. They have value. They prove that they're worth something via looking at a balance sheet and saying, and a profit and loss sheet and saying this made this much profit without direct involvement. We've seen this recently, even with clients of ours that have gotten letters and intent for their businesses to be sold.

So the ability to think about. Can you start a business, grow a business, and then sell a business? Yes, absolutely you can, but you can't be the one doing everything because you can't sell a job. Now, this is where there's a big difference between, we go back here, where you, if you have a, if you have a job, you can't sell it, you have to invest heavily outside your business.

If you have a business, You should not be investing heavily outside your business for a long period of time. You should be investing in your business and doubling down on that. And I had, I got this advice from my mentors, Kelly Shoret, and he told me, cause I had been in, a avid investor in retirement vehicles from the time that I was like 20 years old, I started a Roth IRA super early.

And I just been doing that every year, just chipping away. And he was like, Danny, don't put any money towards anything besides your own business. It's the smart, it's the best financial advice I've ever gotten in my life. And I thought he was crazy. I was like, what's he talking about?

What about my retirement vehicle? And he's don't care. Stop putting money into it. Everything goes into your business. It's going to be the most valuable thing you can possibly grow. And he was so right about that. And here's why that's important to remember. You're building net worth in the vehicle of your business if it's successful.

So do the math on this. Let's just as a rough estimate, let's say your business is worth one X. Your top line revenue, just to make our math simple. Let's say you have a business that is worth a million dollars because you have grown the business to be a 1 million a year, annual business, that business, you could sell to somebody else for a million dollars.

Now let's say it took you five years to grow your business. At that point, if you think about saving, what would you have to put away in order to have a million dollars in five years, if you were putting a set amount of money away each year, and it was just the same each year. It would be 200, 000 a year.

You would have to put away into some sort of savings vehicle to then have that same amount of money five years later for something that you're actually able to pull income out from the whole time. And you're not getting taxed on that business as it grows in value because he doesn't get taxed until you have an exit event.

And even then it's a pretty tax efficient way of growing your wealth. So keep this in mind. I know maybe this is a little bit too technical. I'm sorry if I'm nerding out over here on the financials of this, but this is one of the greatest wealth building. Opportunities, it's probably the greatest wealth building opportunity in the United States, for sure, because of the way that we're structured with entrepreneurship and businesses.

So as you make the decision to grow past yourself, you've got to keep in mind that one of those big decisions is that you're growing a vehicle that you can exit one day and have a windfall of money that, and you can move on to something else, or you can invest in things and actually generate what that elusive passive income, if you want to from that as well.

Now let's talk about cons of a business. Number one. It requires much more business skill and knowledge versus a job. It is so much harder to grow a business. You have to know how to, hire people, processes, sales, marketing, finance, be a good leader, systemize your business, be organized in detail, track the right things, make the right decisions and do so over the course of years and years.

It's a marathon. It's not a sprint. You can't do this overnight. So it requires a tremendous amount more business skill and knowledge than just, creating a job where you're working a few days a week, trying to see enough patients to replace your income. You don't really need a ton of business savvy and skillset in order to do that.

You need some more so than working with somebody But to work past yourself, you need a lot more staffing issues. This is probably the thing. Like I said, this is my favorite part of a business. It's also sometimes the worst, okay? Because you can have staff turnover. That's that those staff can turn into competition.

They can steal your clients. They could steal money from you. I haven't had this happen in any businesses that I have, but I know plenty of other business owners that have had staff members stealing from them. Isn't that crazy? And sometimes they've been there for Five to 10 years stealing from them.

And it happens. It happens. People are messy. People are multifactorial. They got their own shit going on. They're going to prioritize what's important to them over what's important to you and your business most of the time. Okay. You want to find high integrity people, obviously. You can work with, they're trying to be the best in the world at what they do, give them an opportunity, to have an amazing job in security and to be able to be hands off with them and let them do their thing and be creative and solve problems and like really shine in the thing that they do well.

But S but sometimes it doesn't work out that way, and even sometimes it's for great things. Here's a good example. Let's say you have a staff member that is pregnant and goes on maternity leave. That's an amazing thing to have a baby, to have, your family grow.

Like it's one of the biggest parts of my life. My family is so important to me. And our kids are so important to me that I would never think to myself. I hope that. Staff member, like I wish they wouldn't have a baby because you're being a selfish business owner. Cause you got to think, Oh what do I have to do during that time?

I have to find a replacement or I have to like, pick up more staff hours or whatever it might be. And so like for this, whatever three month period postpartum. You might be doing more work and that might be hard for you or maybe you have to go through the challenge of training up somebody that's going to be their part time replacement.

And then maybe you don't know when they're going to come back and maybe they don't come back. And these are all the things that you have to deal with. But these are also for amazing purposes. So we can't be selfish about that. And if you don't want to have to deal with some of these things that come along with dealing with our human beings.

Then you should just keep your job, stay small. But these are things that we do have to work with that can create some stress, can create some complexity, some challenges. Let's say somebody gets sick. We've had this happen before too. It's Oh, their parents sick. They have to be a caregiver for a while or whatever like a family member.

Like it just creates a burden on the business that sometimes you have to step in. And deal with, but you've got to know that's what happens with human beings. And it's, we don't know what's going to happen. We just know that there's going to be things you're going to have to deal with. People are gonna have to manage people.

Don't get along with other people. It's going to happen. It happens all the time. This is where you have to learn how to be a better leader, a better manager of people. And if that doesn't sound like something that's appealing to you, you gotta not do it. Don't do it. You're going to hate it.

You're going to hate it if that's not what you want to do. If you're not willing to become a better leader, don't try to grow past yourself. It's not worth it. More risk, both financially and legally. Look, the bigger you get, the bigger of a target you have on your back. I've found this out firsthand, right?

I've had this happen both with our local practice and with PT biz where. You're, you do something, you don't realize that there's like a trademark term or something like that. And there's infringement on intellectual property. Next thing you know, you got some letter from somebody's lawyer that's yelling at you over the letter about all the things you're doing wrong and how they're going to sue you or whatever it might be.

Maybe you have more staff. Now you have more liability because people are doing things like dry needling, or let's say they're doing, techniques that maybe are a little bit more higher risk. You're taking on more liability personally. And yes, you can have these entities in place like an LLC or whatever, to give you some protection.

But even still like people will figure out ways to get around that stuff. Lawyers are smart. You're taking on more risk financially as well. Maybe you have to take out more debt to expand. Let's say you're growing into a bigger space. You need to take on debt to pay for equipment, pay for a build out, all kinds of things.

And that might really sketch some people out. And if that's something that you absolutely want nothing to do with. Then a lifestyle business or a job is the way that you should go, right? So there's definitely some risk associated with it. There always are, especially as you try to grow past yourself to ultimately listen here's the thing.

You need to build the business and pick the vehicle that supports the life that you want. Everybody has a different view of what the ideal life is for them. But what I see is most people their life that they're trying to build is secondary to the job that they have. And I said, so they fit what they want for their life in the time periods that they can.

They don't build a business to support the life that they want. Let's say you're super into snowboarding and you live out in, I don't know, Colorado somewhere. And you're like, listen, I love to go snowboarding, but I'm in the clinic five days a week. I got all these notes, I'm working 60 hours a week, whatever and then you don't get a chance to go.

And on the weekends, you're so tired. You never go. But now all of a sudden you decide, you know what, screw this. I just want to work with snowboarders, snowboard athletes, and I know I need to see this number of patients, this number of days per week. But during the winter season, I want to get on the mountain every single Monday.

Monday is a snow day for me. So you can do that. You can do that with a lifestyle business or a job. That's all that you want. You could also say, Hey, over the next five years. I want to grow my company to a point where I can go and I can, anytime there's a powder day, I'm out there. I'm taking the day off.

I have ultimate time flexibility. There's passive generation of income services being rendered without me directly being involved. And I'm just cutting out for the day. Cause I want to take my kids anytime that, they can go during the week or you want to go by yourself, whatever, but let's say that's your, that's like what you love the most.

That's what you love doing. That's your movement meditation. It's where you find peace and enjoyment. And you can build a business that allows you to do those things more to do the things that you really enjoy more to fit your lifestyle, not necessarily to try to fit your lifestyle in around a job that you have.

So please keep that in mind. Ultimately, you need to build a business supports the life that you want. If you want to make a, grow a business to, multiple locations and sell it for 10 million, because for whatever reason, that's a goal that you have, whether it's financial or just to see if you can do it.

That cannot be done with a job that can't be done working for somebody else. And there's a lot of trade offs you may have to make in order to do that too. Are you willing to take the risks? Are you willing to work on yourself and become a better leader? Are you willing, to really be.

Better at managing people and hiring people and curation of talent. Like these are the things you're going to have to do. If you're not willing to do it, then I wouldn't do it. But if that's really what you want to do, then you have to go to the vehicle of a business. For me, this is the reason that I I chose a business, right?

So I chose a business because I wanted to impact more people. I've already talked about that. The people we get to help directly, indirectly through the people we're working with now, all the patients that are getting actual great help from clinicians. I wanted to build net worth. I knew this was like one of the best ways to build a long term wealth, generational wealth for my family.

That is important to me. I want them to have opportunities that I didn't have and, but also to understand in order to get where we're trying to go you have to put a lot of work in, you have to. Be able to take a chance on yourself. You have to work on yourself. And I think there's nothing that I've found with with my family in particular, with my kids is the way in which they view what I do is normal.

They view me reading all the time as normal. They view me, going and actually like. Doing business activities as normal. They've see what Ashley and I do and the, what our work week looks like and the flexibility we've generated, and they see that we can come and drop them off at school or at school every day, we can come to any of the events that they have.

We can show up at all their practices. You can go to all their games and they don't see everyone else's parents around. Especially not both of them. It's very rare. So I wanted to put our us in a position both financially, but also time wise to where we could enjoy our family more than most people will get a chance to without doing something similar where they're generating time flexibility.

And the last thing is I want to generate passive financial security for my family. Because the only way for me to be able to go and coach both my kids, basketball teams and go to all the games and, go to all their school events and. Be there when they get home to be able to spend time with them and help them with their homework.

The only way I can do that is because I have built something that generates passive financial security for my family without me having to fulfill on every single thing. And that was super, super important to me, worth the risk that we took with the business. And also, frankly, I like the game. I like it.

I want to play it as a high of a level as I think I can without sacrificing my health, my relationships my, my mental health, my balance with activities that I like to do outside of outside of business. And it's very easy to end up going too far down. The path, one direction, or you're solely focused just on your business.

So for me, that's a that's a big deal, right? Like I won't make the trade offs for, more money. If it means then I'm not going to see my family as much as I want. Or if I don't have the opportunity to be as healthy and active as I want to be. And that's honestly a lot of people that we work with.

Like they fall into the same camp and it's a slippery slope. For those of you that are in business right now, I'm sure you see it. You're going to say yes to a lot of things that are going to move the needle forward in your business. And guess what? You're saying no to, you're saying no to that date night with your wife.

You're saying no to your kids, soccer practice. You're saying no to that workout, you should be doing in the morning. You're saying no to a lot of things at the expense of those. Variables in order to grow a business. And I said no to a lot of stuff early on, wait, probably way too much.

But for us, one of the things that when we get a chance to work with people, this is huge, we're like, listen, we want you to have business success, but all these other variables of your life, your relationships, your health, your relationships with your family, your mental health your community giving back, being able to be a well rounded person that has success.

In these variables so that you're not lopsided and you're like, Oh, great. You made a bunch of money, but you're divorced. You're obese. You never talk to your family. Your kids have no relationship with you. What a failure that is. And sadly, that's a lot of people that are in the entrepreneurship space because they get sucked into, the work, they get sucked into the growth and the next goal and the next zero in their bank account when they don't realize they're ruining everything else around them.

So for us, when we talk about business success, it's not just business success, it's life success and life success comes down to being able to be successful in all these other areas, that surround surround your business and your business should support that, but never become your life.

That's very important. I think that's the ultimate failure, honestly. So for me, that was my goals. But I tell you what, I was very close to staying small. I remember if it wasn't for my wife, it wasn't for Ashley. I would probably still be treating patients in a subleased office in across the gym on the West side of Atlanta.

I got comfortable. I got so comfortable. I was making good money. I was working with people that I like to work with. I was enjoying my day. I was working less than I was in the army, which can work some long hours, especially when you have sick call times in the morning. And I thought it was awesome.

I thought I hit the freaking lottery. I was like, this is amazing. I just want to make a hundred thousand dollars a year working with people that I wanted to work with, check those boxes in year one. And all of a sudden I was like. I'm playing with house money. This is awesome. And then as we started to grow the business more, I started to have to work a lot more and try to learn things I didn't know how to do.

I felt very inadequate. I've been making a lot of mistakes. I felt like I was risking our family's sort of financial position by trying to take this big jump. And for me, ultimately that led me to really develop myself and hire mentors and learn more and more about. The business side of things. And, going down that path, I found out I really liked it.

I really enjoyed it. And I really enjoyed teaching other people about it as well. But if it wasn't for my wife, I would have stayed small. I would've gotten comfortable. And that's something to think about. If you're listening to this and you have a job and you just realized I got a job, and he says, I have a job, the hit by a bus test tells you, you got a job.

Do you want a job or do you want a business? Because for me, the life I wanted dictated, I needed a business. But at the time I was so comfortable with my job that I didn't want to leave it. And that might be you. So as you think through this, ask yourself, what do you want your life to look like? And what vehicle do you need in order to achieve that?

Because what I wanted for my life might not be what you want for your life. What you might want is something very different. Maybe it's more simplicity, maybe it's just a lifestyle business. Like my friend, I told you about that worked a couple of days a week and really just want to focus on her family.

Amazing. That's exactly what she wanted. It's exactly what she built. You got to know when to say enough, this is enough for me. I'm content without being complacent. That's a hard thing to do. So in summary, the number one question to ask yourself is if I got hit by a bus today, does my business still generate revenue?

If so, congratulations, you have a business. If not, congratulations, you have a job, but at least, and then you have to ask yourself, what do I want my life to look like and what vehicle do I need in order to get there based on the two that we talked today? aBout, and that's it. There's nothing wrong with either of these, by the way.

If you decide, I just want a job. I want a lifestyle business, stay small. That's awesome. If that leads you to be happy with what you want to do, go for it. If I got to grow a business crap. Now what? You got to get some help. You gotta learn the skills that need it in order to get there.

It, this is a shameless plug for what we do. Listen, if you're a clinician and you're trying to grow past yourself and grow a business to generate legitimate. Wealth and the ability to have a sellable entity or create passive revenue, we've already done this. Already done it. We know the path. We know how to look around the corners.

We know how to systemize it, what you should hire for, what you should be paying, how to grow a business in a successful way to where there's profit, how to be able to systemize a business, to create passive revenue and, or to be able to sell it. We can help you with that. If that's what you decide you want to do after going through these exercises.

And if you do go to physical therapy, biz. com and check out what we do. Look at all the case studies of people that we've worked with. Check out our team. Look at our team's practices at that. Look at the people on our team and see what they're doing. We have more seven figure business owner cash practice owner coaches then.

Anybody else in the industry? These are just our coaches. These aren't even our clients. These are just people that are amazing. People that are working with people day to help them with their businesses, as well as successfully running their own businesses. Look at that. Look at the depth that we have.

We have an all star team of amazing people. So if you're looking to get help. And in 2024, it's the beginning of the year. There's no time better than now to actually focus on doing what you need to do, getting the help that you need, learning the skills you need, and in particular, the skills that you need can never be taken away from you, that's the coolest part of it, right?

It's like the investment you make in yourself to learn how to sell, how to market, how to understand the finances of a business, how to actually grow a practice and hire people and find the right people and systemize that these are skills you carry forward forever. In perpetuity, the ROI on that over at whatever long your career is, let's say 20 years.

Let's say you invest in yourself for a year to learn this stuff. Oh my gosh, what a compounding return that is. If you really add it up over a long period of time, it's the greatest investment you could possibly make. So if you have goals to do this and you don't have the skills to do it.

You can either try to figure it out on your own, or you can work with somebody that's already done what you're trying to do. It's up to you. The fast path, obviously get somebody to help you do it. It's already done it the slow path. And maybe for you, you think I just want this extra challenge. If that's what you want to go for it, it's going to be fair on your own.

And I'm sure you can do that too. It's going to take you a lot longer. It's going to take a lot more money resources, and it's going to be a lot more stressful. But if that's what you feel like you need to do, that's up to you. But I'll finish with this guy's number one. You got to know where you're trying to go.

You got to know what you want your business to support. That's super important. What lifestyle you want. And then you got to know, if you either have a job or you have a business and if you want to grow into a business, you got to build the skill set to get there. And if you want a job, cool and stay small, enjoy it.

And don't, there's no shame in that whatsoever. Stop the screen share real quick and we'll finish it out. But as always, Hey, I really appreciate anybody in the Facebook group watching, if you're listening to on the podcast, so much as always. We. Are incredibly thankful for anybody that listens.

I hope that you get a lot of value, everything put together. I hope that this helps you grow your practice. And if nothing else, at least see where you're at and have a better understanding for what you're doing, where you're at and intentionally moving towards the life that you want. Not necessarily just floating around and getting where you're going to go, no matter what, like you want to have a.

Direction, and you want to have intention and where you're trying to go that way. Life is on your terms and it's not a surprise because you may end up somewhere you don't want to be. So as always thanks so much for listening and we'll catch you next week.

Hey peach entrepreneurs, we have big exciting news a new program that we just came out with It 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.

We get you crystal clear on the number of people you're going to see and the average visit rate you're going to need to have in order to replace your income to be able to go full time. We go through three different strategies you can take to go from part time to full time. You can pick the one that's the best for you based on your current situation.

Then we share with you the sales and systems that we use within our mastermind. That you need to have as well. If you want to go full time in your own practice. And then finally, we help you create a one page business plan. That's right. Not these 15 day business plans. You want to take the small business association, a one day business plan.

It's going to help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and when you're going to do it to take action. If you're interested in signing up for this challenge, it's totally free. Head to physicaltherapybiz. com. Forward slash challenge get signed up there. Please. Enjoy. We put a lot of energy into this.

It's totally free It's something I think is gonna help you tremendously as long as you're willing to do the work if you're doing the work You're getting information put down and getting yourself ready to take action in a very organized way You will have success which is what we want to head to physicaltherapybiz.

com forward slash challenge and get signed up today