E847 | Foundation Repair, Ass To Grass Squats And Word Of Mouth Referrals

The 20% Rule: What a Foundation Sales Rep Taught Me About Health & PT Businesses

At PT Biz, our mission is clear: add a billion dollars in services to the cash-based physical therapy industry. That’s a big goal, but one conversation reminded me why it matters so much—not just for our profession, but for people’s lives.

The Squat That Started It

I was meeting with a foundation repair sales rep, a 67-year-old retired realtor and builder. Out of nowhere, he dropped into a perfect ass-to-grass squat and popped back up like it was nothing.

He said, “I need something to do, man. I gotta learn, move, and use my body. If I sit around, I won’t be able to do this.”

Then he told me something that stuck:

• About 20% of his friends are like him—active, sharp, still challenging themselves.

• The other 80%? Overweight, inactive, checked out. He said it’s “hard to watch.”

The Choice to Stay Healthy

His message was simple: health is a choice. You have to choose to move, to learn, and to stay engaged—or risk sliding into complacency.

And here’s the kicker: he didn’t even know I was a physical therapist. This wasn’t a sales pitch. It was a reminder that most people don’t know what’s possible for their health—or that clinicians like us even exist to help them.

What This Means for PT Entrepreneurs

For your clinic, here’s the lesson:

• 20–30% of people are already health-minded and might actively seek you out.

• 70%+ aren’t looking—not because they don’t need help, but because they don’t realize how much their life could change.

That’s where you come in.

If you only market to the people actively searching on Google, you’re fighting over the smallest slice of the pie. The bigger opportunity is building a reputation in your community—the kind that makes people say:

“My PT helped me—maybe they can help you too.”

That’s how you reach the 70%.

Reputation is Everything

The sales rep told me, “I’ve never gotten a client from an ad—it’s all referrals.”

That’s the truth for most small businesses. Your reputation is your marketing. And when you treat patients like family, word spreads. People will go out on a limb to recommend you—not just for athletes or injuries, but for everyday issues: bad knees, back pain, limited mobility, or just wanting to stay active.

When you earn that trust, you don’t just fix pain—you change lives.

The Ripple Effect

Think about it:

• Someone who rehabs a knee surgery properly can go from avoiding vacations to running a 10K with friends.

• A person who thought exercise meant pain discovers what it feels like to live comfortably again.

• A 67-year-old can still ski, hike, and squat like a weightlifter—all because they stayed committed to movement.

That’s the ripple effect of what you do as a clinician and business owner. It’s not just sessions. It’s freedom, longevity, and community.

Final Thought

Don’t underestimate your role. The services you provide aren’t just treatments—they’re the key to helping people avoid becoming part of that 80%.

Build your reputation. Connect locally. Ask for referrals. Treat every patient like family. If you do, your business will grow—and you’ll help more people live like that 67-year-old sales rep: active, sharp, and thriving.

Resources & Links

• PT Biz Website  – Coaching & training for cash-based clinicians

• Join the 5-Day Challenge  – Learn how to go full-time in your practice

• Download the PT Biz Manual  – Lessons from 1,000+ successful clinicians

• PT Biz YouTube Channel  – Weekly videos on growth, sales & marketing

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

Podcast Transcript

Danny: [00:00:00] Hey, Danny Matta here, founder of PT Biz, and I got a story for you about a foundation repair sales rep that helped me reframe [00:00:10] how important health actually is. So I had to get somebody to look at. Foundation in a property, and [00:00:20] this was somebody that was, uh, a sales rep that walked around and told me what crawl space issues we're having and why we were seeing settling and lots of, lots of, lots of stuff, right.[00:00:30]

Uh, and. I did not tell this guy that I'm a physical therapist, by the way. So what I'm gonna tell you completely unsolicited as far as, uh, him talking to me about this. [00:00:40] But he was 67 and he was a retired realtor, um, and home, home builder and, uh, and realtor. I guess he did 'em both. [00:00:50] Um, but he said, you know what, I'm 67.

I need something to do, man. I gotta learn things and I gotta use my body. Then he proceeded to drop down into [00:01:00] a, as to grass squat immediately on the ground. Like he dropped down and he popped back up and he was like, I can't do stuff like that if I [00:01:10] just sit around all day. And I started laughing. I was like, you are.

A fantastic example of what it takes to stay healthy long term. [00:01:20] Right. And I asked him, I said, are you an outlier or are all your friends just as healthy as you do? They have the same mentality? And he goes, oh no. He said, [00:01:30] about 20% of my friends are like me. They're active. They keep learning stuff. They're, they're reading, they're, they're challenging themself.

They're [00:01:40] physically, you know, active every single day. And he says about 80% of my friends are unhealthy. And it's hard to watch, man. That's what he said. He goes, it's hard to watch. I [00:01:50] talk to him about it. They don't listen. They don't care. They just sit around. You know? He's like, they're all drinking and eating bad food.

They're getting no, you know, overweight. They're, they're, uh, their, [00:02:00] their mind isn't as sharp as it used to be, you know, and they're all about the same age. You know, and he, he said, you just gotta make a choice. He, the thing is, you gotta make a choice to be [00:02:10] healthy. You gotta make a choice to, to learn things and to use your mind because it's such a slippery slope once you go down.

That path of inactivity and complacency to dig yourself [00:02:20] back out of it is so hard. And, uh, you know, I thought to myself. A cool conversation. I love talking about stuff like this. Great reminder for myself to [00:02:30] stay on the path of constantly trying to not die or, or, or not, not get so old that life sucks, let's put it that way.

I, everyone's obviously gonna die, but I just look at it like, [00:02:40] you know, I don't want to just be. Reserved not being able to do the shit that I want to do with the people I wanna do it with. And this is exactly what he said. He's like, I like to hike. You know, I like to, I like to go out [00:02:50] west and I like to go skiing.

And uh, he's like, I gotta be physically able to do those things. And that doesn't come without a lot of work, especially as you get older. And [00:03:00] for the businesses that we run, and this is why I bring this up. This isn't necessarily just for me to tell you a story about the guy that I met that told me I had to spend a bunch of money to fix the foundation.

This [00:03:10] is to remind you. That 20% of the people out there, this is probably legitimate and maybe it's a little bit higher of a percentage when people are, are [00:03:20] younger because I think health trends are, you know, more commonplace in a younger population. But 20% of the people out there, maybe 30% [00:03:30] are pretty squared away from as far as health is concerned.

And this is just generally speaking, but that means that 70% of people out there, they a, have [00:03:40] no idea. What to do potentially. They have no accountability. They, they say no to things that they want to say yes to, but they physically [00:03:50] can't do it. It's probably quite frustrating for them. They probably feel like they are, uh, you know, just, this is the way life [00:04:00] is now and they just have to live with it.

And that's just not the reality. We all know that. We all know that it's never too late to try to make a positive [00:04:10] improvement in your health, in your mobility, in your mental health. Uh, you know, in, in, in your ability to do the things in the world that you wanna do, the people you wanna do those, uh, do those [00:04:20] activities with.

It's, it's there. Maybe have a harder time improving at 67 than you do at 37, but [00:04:30] you still can do it. And to me, what this says is I. There is a, there are a massive number of people out there that don't even know [00:04:40] that you exist and that you can help them. Everybody wants to fight over this little percent of people that know what you do and that you can help them, and they're looking for it, right?

[00:04:50] They're searching for it. That is a sliver of the people out there. Actually could benefit from you and the services that you provide and the education that you give people [00:05:00] and the accountability that you give people. These are valuable things. You might undervalue them because you don't see value in it until you're stuck in a recliner and you have to say, no, [00:05:10] I don't want to go on a vacation with our family because I can't walk around.

Like, these are things that people do all the time. And it's sad because we know that with the right inputs, people [00:05:20] can feel a lot better, lots of things can be much healthier and. Our job in a lot of ways is to get people moving better. Step one, get 'em out of pain, get them back to being [00:05:30] able to like actually be physically active again.

And step two is to help educate them on how to change their life for the better. So they can be like this guy and they can drop down [00:05:40] into a squat, which was very strange, by the way, for me to like unsolicited asked a grass squat, but quite impressive. Uh, he was in zero drop shoes, by the way, which made it even more [00:05:50] impressive.

And. Just like, you know, be that person. Don't be a outlier to your friends. You know, make more people be like that instead of it being 20% are like [00:06:00] that around him. What if it's 40%? That's twice as many people like, and that's, that's a huge group of people that you can market to. You know, that, that it, it [00:06:10] may not come your way from Google Ads.

It comes your way from having conversations with people that you work with. And that's the other thing this guy said. He said, Hey man, I don't. I've [00:06:20] never gotten a, a client from an ad. It's all a referral, right, in which I wanted to, I didn't wanna have to talk to him necessarily about his business, but the, either way, he's talking [00:06:30] about reputation and how important that is.

And if you have a really good reputation, don't forget to ask people. Yeah, if there's friends or family members that [00:06:40] they have that are limited from activities that they want to do, that could benefit from your help as well. I used to get this all the time when I started saying this stuff to people, [00:06:50] and they'd be like, well, my brother, he's not like an athlete though, you know?

And I'm like. If you have a body, you're an athlete. That's the way we look at it. Like what is he struggling with? What can we help with? Let's [00:07:00] have a conversation. Let me talk to him. See, see if it's something he's even interested in. Next thing you know, you have somebody who's apprehensive to do anything.

It's avoiding things 'cause they, they have a knee surgery that never got fully rehabbed. [00:07:10] All of a sudden, that starts to resolve. Next thing you know, we're having a conversation about something that he's always wanted to do, which maybe is running a 10 K. We start building a program for that. Now he's in a running group.

He's [00:07:20] traveling to do half marathons with friends. We've changed this guy's fucking life. That's what's happened. Like that's the truth. We get a chance to do that stuff, but you gotta put yourself [00:07:30] out there. You gotta tell people what it is that you do and who you help. And you gotta get involved locally in your community because people are not searching on the internet for your business that don't even know you exist.[00:07:40]

These kinds of people are gonna come your way because you're establishing local relationships. You're establishing a reputation that's pristine, and someone's gonna go out on a [00:07:50] limb to recommend you to somebody that maybe they don't even think is a great fit for it. And if you can do that, not only will you have more business, but you're gonna help [00:08:00] a heck of a lot more people.

Be like this guy today who is skiing and hiking and is squatting for random strangers on a job site, [00:08:10] and able to do so without exploding his knee in front of me. The way most people that had to do a dropdown asto grass squat, like he was doing a fricking snatch, uh, [00:08:20] would probably not be able to do or get back up off the ground at his age.

So impressive, so excited to have met this person, and there's a lot more people out there that you can help be just like this guy. [00:08:30] But you gotta put yourself out there. You have to do the right thing for your folks. You have to treat everybody like they're your family. You have to have a reputation that is above everything else is stellar, [00:08:40] where people want to take that chance to refer their friends and family your way.

If you do, your business is gonna do great, but man, you're gonna change a lot of lives in the [00:08:50] process.