E567 | How To Have A Successful 2023

Welcome to the final episode of 2022! We all have big plans for 2023 and today I wanted to give you my thoughts on how to crush 2023. It all revolves around organizing, planning, and visualizing the future. Happy New Year!

• Doing more than just hoping for the best
• Avoid letting fear drive your actions
• Did you progress in a meaningful way?

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So one of the best ways to improve your customer experience, which we know will dramatically improve your business, is to have clear lines of communication with your clients. And that's something that can be really hard with these multiple channels between email and text. And what you really need is to centralize that in one place.

And that's something that we've been able to do as we switched over to PT everywhere within our client's accounts. We can actually message right back and forth with them. They can manage their home exercise plan within there, and it allows us to really compartmentalize the communication. That we have with those clients, instead of losing an email in the inbox or missing a text and then you're, it's very hard to dig yourself outta that hole because they feel like you're not very responsive, with them.

And for us, it's made a really big difference. It helps make our staff more efficient. It helps us not miss things as much with the volume of people that we're working with. And it's a really smart way of really compartmentalizing your communication with your clients so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the channels.

You have communication with family and friends and things like that. So I think it'd be. Huge for your practice to centralize it the way we have. Head over to pt everywhere.com. Check out what our friends are doing over there. I think it's really cool and 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 Mate, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Dr. Danny here at the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today today's the last podcast of 2022. It's the last Thursday of the year. Next week we'll be January and we'll start 2023. And we'll obviously keep having podcasts that come out on Tuesday and Thursday. But this is the last one and I wanted to share.

Some thoughts with you about going into next year, on the last podcast day for me of this year. And what I wanna talk about really more than anything is planning's. Not something that I really ever did. I'm not a planner, I. I'm the, whatever the opposite of that is, is what I am. I had.

It's I'm the guy, I'll jump out of the airplane and build a parachute on the way down. That's that's my plan. And it's not good to do that necessarily. It's good in some ways to be able to start things quickly, and some of you are very probably very much like that. You're you get excited about an idea and you just go for it.

And there, there's obviously some benefit to that. There's some negatives to that too, because you can miss things. And you can be less intentional about things that maybe you're trying to get better at or to achieve. And by the time you get to the end of a year, you can look back and be like, man what actually happened?

Did I just tread water the whole year or did I actually make progress to wherever you're trying to go? But if you don't know where you're trying to go, how do you know if you're going in the right direction? Y you don't, right? Like you just, you're just hoping that you are getting to wherever that you know that place is, whatever that goal is.

And if you're like me and you don't really plan too much, I. I hope that you can take what I'm gonna talk about, today, and in a very simple way, apply that to your, 20, 23 goals and and what you're gonna work on. And I think from my experience, it's good to break up what you're trying to accomplish into both career and personal.

Goals. Now we have, when we do planning with people with PT biz, which we do quarterly planning, every three months with everybody in our Mastermind. And part of it is business related and the other part is personal. I am not gonna necessarily get into all of the categories because there's about eight or nine different categories that we look at.

And what we want to know and what we want people to be able to do is to be honest with themself I, if they are content or if they're complacent within those categories. So if you are, let's just talk health, so your physical health. You're either content or you're complacent. Are you good with where you're at?

Cuz there's nothing wrong with being content. You have to know like, when enough is enough or what is success? And being complacent though is a very different thing. Being complacent is just letting things happen. Having no direction ha having no, Goal that you're trying to achieve.

But hey, if you're sitting at 6% body fat and you're content with that, and you're in good, physical shape, and it's a habit that you don't have a hard time keeping up with now, maybe you should point your attention somewhere else. You getting down to 5% probably doesn't. Change your life a whole lot, right?

But let's say in the family bucket, you're not doing so hot. You don't have a great relationship with your kids. You work a ton and you're missing out on that part of your life and you're just complacent with it. You're not making any intentional progress there. That might be something that you want to focus on and really understand what you need to improve.

And for this purpose, we're only gonna really talk about two categories because I think you can simplify it down even more if you really want to. And this is something that even that I'll sit down with my kids and I'll talk to 'em about. And what you need to ask yourself is what is an, is a home run for you next year?

What is absolute, you look back at the end of the year, excuse me, you look back at the end of the year. And you say, man, this was an absolute stellar year. I crushed it. What do you have to accomplish in order for you to at, January, at the end of January, or I'm sorry, end of December of 2023.

So on December 31st, 2023, you're sitting there and you said, how'd my year go? And I'll do this year as well. I'll look back and. Figure out how did it go? Did it go the way that I wanted to based on what my goals were? And if it didn't, then obviously you need to adjust your course somehow.

And simplicity and understanding like where you're trying to go, is probably the most important thing. So if you ask yourself, Hey, what is an absolute home run for me? That if I do these things, I've accomplished, you know exactly what I want by the end of the year. And I like to look at it as a personal goal and a career goal.

So career, I think career is far easier. And for us, this all typically business, right? We're looking at revenue, we're looking at employees. We're looking at achievements, things like that. Like we set out this goal last year or this year I should say, and we wanna make the Inc 5,000 list for PT Biz.

And we did. And that was a big, huge achievement for us, which meant we had to have, certain revenue numbers. And we had to be able to, submit for this for this award and to ha then to, and to be, have enough growth over a period of three years where we would actually apply and achieve it.

And we're able to do that. And that's something that we're really proud of on the business side. That's a career goal. That was a career goal for me, with the, with PT biz. And on the personal side, that's an area that at least for me, I tend to I struggle more with being very intentional on the personal side.

And it's because I get so excited and I get so much personal satisfaction out of the people that I get a chance to work with the businesses that I get to work with and the company that I have, the. The honestly just the honor to lead and be a part of, in a significant way that it feels like a hobby to me.

It's enjoyable. It's something I really like a lot. And a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of people listening to this, you're probably like this too. You'll get wrapped up in your work, and it can come from one of two places. Early on in my career, it came from a utter like debilitating fear of failure.

Like I just. Didn't want to fail. I couldn't think of anything worse having, leave leaving a what was the beginnings of a career in the military? Making rank, checking all the boxes that I needed, getting all the positive ratings that I needed, the awards that I needed, like all these things that are pointing towards.

Promotion, and climbing up the ranks as an officer in the Corps that I was in, in the army, and leaving that to then go and start a practice where I didn't take insurance in a, the corner of a CrossFit gym in a city I wasn't even from. That's basically what I did. And I had such a just terrible fear that I had made a mistake and many people had.

Told me that I, this dude, this I think is a mistake. And if I, as I say it out loud, I think, yeah, this is maybe not the most well thought out plant. I was just terrified of it not working, not so much on the financial side because I knew I could always go get a job. I could, always just use my degree in a way that I could, get a job and provide for our family.

It was really more in the perception of how people would look at what I did. And I'm potentially a huge mistake that I made. So for me, like working hard at the company that we had started at, like building this practice, that wasn't hard for me. That, that, that was actually, I would wake up every day almost like somebody was chasing me down because I had this strong fear that.

I might fail and just how embarrassing that would be and how bad it would look that I just, basically gave away this pretty stable, pretty good opportunity in the military to then pursue, what a lot of people thought was a, was a bad idea. So fear can drive you, but it's not a great thing to.

It's not a great fuel to use for a long period of time because there's a lot of side effects associated with that. Like constantly being in a fear state, in a stress state, it, all it does is it just deteriorates your mental and your physical health. Like I remember getting, I would take blood panels proactively looking at certain biomarkers usually every six to 12 months when I was in the army.

And so I have this, years over a decade at this point of blood panels looking at certain biomarkers. And I remember the first year after I had been in business looking at my same blood panel that I would get and just being shocked at how bad some of my numbers were. In particular, just some of the inflammatory markers and looking at in particular, just something like testosterone.

My testosterone levels dropped. To probably that of an 85 year old man within a year of me just being. Overworked poorly in a stress, fear state for the whole first year. And it was honestly probably like that for the first five, if I'm being honest. Like a very long time. And that can just wear you down.

It wears down, wears the people down around you as well, because you can see it in somebody else when they're, it's just like something is off. Like they're not the same person. They're missing something and. The sooner you can go from fear driving, like fear being your fuel to like being intentional and not being scared, but like understanding the meaning of the thing that you're doing and why you're doing it and understanding like from a deep reason why you're putting so much time, effort, money, energy into the thing you're doing and being grateful for the opportunity to do so versus being fearful.

Of the outcome that might happen from it. Like it's such an important switch to make and to understand that you can't, you cannot be reactive and plan where you're trying to go. Like you, you have to be intentional about that. That will help decrease a lot of the fear that a lot of you probably have or that is fueling you right now.

And don't get me wrong, that fear fueled the shit outta me for years and in a lot of ways, built. The infrastructure of what we have today, the foundation of what we have today. But I tell you what I wouldn't go back and do it again. I just wouldn't, it was too hard. It was too stressful on everybody just around me, my entire family.

And I, you, there's a better way. There's a better way than, what I did, which is what I'm trying to share with, with everybody. Right now and with the people that we work with, because you don't have to burn everything down in the process and put yourself in a terrible health position for years just to have a fucking company.

Let's be honest, like just to have a business like that. That's not it. It seems like a super important goal. It's not that important in the grand scheme of things. If you exchange a successful business for a terrible Marriage, no relationship with your kids and awful health. That's an awful exchange.

You should not make that exchange. And I see, yeah, I see people do that all the time. All the time. And it's because fear is driving them to take these actions, not necessarily. Coming from a positive state of helping other people, of moving towards a future state that is, something that you're grateful for.

And if you think about next year as what's an absolute home run for you from a personal standpoint, maybe it is being able to do some sort of physical event. Maybe it's being a certain weight or body composition, maybe for you it's being able to. Take care of yourself mentally more.

So maybe it's working with a therapist, maybe it's being more present around your family, especially. And this is an easy litmus test, I think for a lot of you. Cause see this is something I struggle with for a very long time, is when the holidays come around. Are you actually able and the hot laser passed, were you able this year to be present mentally?

Present with your family while you're physically around them. You're sitting around the Christmas tree or you're sitting around the table and you're eating some honey baked ham or whatever it is that you get and you're just there or you're not. And be honest with yourself. You're there physically, but is your mind there or are you often another fucking dimension, another world thinking about all this stuff, all the problems, all the things that you need to do, all the stressors that are happening because of the business that you're trying to build, and you're trying to improve and achieve these things that are driving you, but yet with the people that probably matter the most to you.

At a time of the year where they all get a chance to come together, you're not even there, you're not even enjoying it because you, you lack the understanding of how to even deal with your own stress and your mind. And being able to shut that off. And that's a very challenging thing to do, but it's an important thing to understand whether you're either it's either yes or no.

Yes, I'm completely there. I can play with my kids. I can have fun with my parents or whatever. Whoever you're around or, no, I'm literally sitting here eating mashed potatoes, thinking about how do I get more new patients? That's a shitty Christmas. If that's your Christmas, I'm sorry cuz I've been there.

That's the personal side. You gotta understand what is a home run for you? It could be as simple as, man, I just, I wanna be present this year. I want to be here for the people that I'm around and not somewhere else, while I'm physically around them. On the career side, like I said, the career side's easy.

What do you want your business to look like? What do you want your career to look like? Maybe you don't have a business. Maybe you're working towards something else within the scope of using your skills in your career. Whatever that is. Defining that and defining an objective me measure of that, and this is why with a business career goal, it's so easy.

You might say, okay, I was at $200,000 in revenue in 2022. In 2023, I want to grow to $500,000 in revenue and here's why, and here's how we're gonna do it. And you can start to reverse engineer that. And we typically take such a fine tooth tooth comb to our career goals where we will say, all right, I need this number of new patients.

I need this much revenue per quarter. I need to hire somebody at this point, if I'm gonna actually achieve these things, here's the stepping stones to be able to get there by the end of the year when I can sit there on December 31st and I can say, oh man, last day of the year we hit.

We have $500,000 in top line revenue this year for the practice. We hit our goal, hit our career goal, and, but laying those things out is important. It's important for you to know what those are so you can know what each month is gonna require, what each quarter is gonna require, what you know, help you need, what other people you need involved and what you're doing and defining that.

Is very important versus just going about your business and trying to figure things out as you go with no plan as to what you're trying to do or accomplish. Have a plan, create a goal. Understand what a home run for you and your business is, but do not forget about the personal side cuz there's two sides to this and they're both equally as important.

Please do not spend. A significant amount of time trying to plan out what you want your career to look like next year and neglect the personal side because it is gonna be harder for you to define personal success. And maybe for you, what you need to do is ask people around you, ask your spouse, ask your brother, your sister, ask your friends.

You're like, Hey, be honest with me. What things do you think I suck at right now? Nobody's gonna want to hear that, but if you're at least willing to get some feedback, that's a huge step. That's a great thing to, to do, to get feedback from people you trust that don't want to hurt your feelings.

They don't want to, to say something that maybe you're not gonna but better to hear it than not. Dude you suck at this right now. I text you and you don't fucking text me back. Why are you doing that? You don't have call anymore. You don't we never hang out.

You're not even, you're not in our fantasy football league anymore. You're not X, Y, and z whatever. Things that maybe seem in insignificant to you but to relationships around you are very important. And how they, they show that they still care about each other, right? And it's so easy to drop those things on the personal side, especially as you get wrapped up in your business.

And if I can leave you with anything. At the end of this year, and things that I feel like what I hope to do with this podcast is to be able to share lessons learned that I've experienced things that things that, that I've gone through and positively and negatively because most of you listening to this, as far as your business is concerned, I don't know, and maybe even in life I'm probably a couple steps ahead of where you're at, where, wherever that means, whether that be.

Personally, professionally family, whatever, may, maybe you're far better spouse and parent than me. You probably are. But I do have kids, I have a spouse and I've been married for God shit, 16 years. And we have a business and multiple that have, we've been able to grow significantly and.

That's cool and all those things are all awesome, but those things are fucking hard. All of those things are hard. Raising kids is super hard. Having a spouse for that long, super hard, having a business that you run very hard. These are all hard things and what you want to make sure that you understand and that you get right at as you plan for your life is to be intentional about the decisions that you're making, cuz it's not gonna be easy.

And if you're gonna take the hard path, which you're deciding to do, this is not easy. This is the, this is so hard. I had dinner with friends last night and, listening to them talk about what, who they work for bigger organizations, most of them. And they have their own problems.

Like they're typ, they're mainly managers of people at this point, the level that they're at in their career. And there's things they dislike and but there's this low level of stress that you have when you are self-employed or an entrepreneur or you have a company that you just can't, most people cannot understand because it doesn't ever really go away.

You just get better at dealing with it, and you can't relate to people necessarily on that level because the path is different. I wouldn't pick a different one, but this one is hard. It's hard. It has a lot more upside. There's a lot more opportunities that can come from this. Just even the simplicity of financial security, of I don't even like the ability to look at a menu and I just order what I want and I don't really care what the cost is.

I'm just gonna get whatever. I'm like, yeah, that sounds good. I want that. I don't really even think about it like, And that hasn't been like that for that long. I remember not just, I just, you would get the cheapest thing you possibly could or just not go out cuz you couldn't afford it, and now just to even be in a place where it's like financially something that simple is like a day-to-day stressor that most of my friends have to deal with.

Just money, always being tight not ever having enough. And I, if you're successful in business, And you're somewhat intelligent with how you use your money personally. You should not ha ever have that problem like that. That goes away and, but yet the stress is there in a number of other ways, in very significant ways.

So you have to learn how to deal with it. You have to learn how to be intentional about what you're doing, to be grateful for what you've accomplished, and not necessarily just trying to achieve more and more. Cuz it doesn't ever end. Doesn't stop. It's not like you get to I used to think, oh man, once we hit a seven figure business, this is gonna be like, this is it.

I've made it. You know what happened? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Five seconds of momentary satisfaction onto the next thing. That's it. These achievements are meaningless. They don't mean shit. It has to do with the things that you're accomplishing, the people you get a chance to work with, the people you get a chance to help.

And having gratitude for those experiences, for those opportunities and really being intentional about being grateful for those things and not necessarily just trying to continue to achieve and achieve, which you could do forever. And in the process, you'll lose a lot of other things along that path.

So to wrap this up, and I feel like I've gone in many different directions with this, so I'm sorry if it's a bit scattered and rambling. But to finish the year, I want you to start off the next year with a clear idea of what it is that is a home run for you. What is, like something you'll be so proud of to look back at the end of next year and put some thought into this What does that look like for you?

Like in detail? How's that feel? What does that look like? What things do you need to do along the way for you to sit here on the 31st of December, 2023? And you can say to yourself, man, I had a great year. I accomplished exactly what I set out for myself. I didn't float through the year and just put out fires and manage shit.

And then now at the end of the year, you're one year older and you still haven't. Actually progressed in a meaningful way, in an intentional way. You just, maybe you get there, but maybe you don't, and at least you need to know where you're going. So sit down and think about it, like what is a huge win for you personally and professionally, career, and personal.

Put some thought into that. Write it down. And then as you go through next year, go back to that. Go back to that and make sure that you're trending the right direction, that you haven't forgotten about the things that are important to you when you actually had the time and the bandwidth to sit down and decide what you wanted your year to look like, because.

The people that I know that seem the happiest or that are the happiest, that are the most fulfilled, that have the most success on paper that I see, that seem like they have all their shit together. They don't go about life in a unorganized, frivolous, just, a way where, oh, this will happen if it happens.

They know where they're trying to go and they may not always get there, but they at least have a very clear idea of what they're trying to accomplish and what is important to them and why. And defining that, just defining that. Increase the likelihood that you're gonna have a in incredible 2023.

If you just take the time to sit down and think about that for a little bit. Go on a walk, think about it. Do something. Do something that's like repetitive movement related, listen to some classical music, get a whiteboard out and whatever. Whatever helps your brain just like synthesize and stuff and spend some time on that.

Write it down and then keep it and put it somewhere where you can reference and you can see that, and make sure that next year you end up where you're trying to go.

What's up, PT Entrepreneurs? We have a new exciting challenge for you guys. It's our five day PT biz part-time to full-time challenge where we help you get crystal clear on how to actually go from a side hustle to a full-time clinic. Even if you haven't started yet. This is a great way to get yourself organized in preparation for eventually going full-time into your business.

So we actually help you get crystal clear on how much money you're actually gonna need to. Replace with your business to be able to make a lateral transfer. How many people you're actually gonna need to see based on what you should be charging. We're gonna tell you three different strategies you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you get to pick the one that seems like the best fit for you for your current situation.

We even show you all the sales and marketing systems that we teach within our Mastermind for people that are scaling to multiple clinicians, past themselves that you need to have in your business to be able to go full-time. And the last thing is we help you create a one page business plan.

This is a plan that's gonna help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and drive action. That's what this is all about. We want you to win. We want you to take action, and in order to do you have to get really clear on what you need to do next. So go to physical therapy biz.com/challenge.

Get signed up for the challenge today. It's totally free. We think this is gonna be a game changer for you and are excited to go through it. Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one-way channel.

I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about 4,000 clinicians in there. That are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country.

I do live trainings in there with Yves Gege every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside of that group.So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.