The Clinician’s Compass Part 2: Is the Autopilot Practice the Right Fit for You?

Welcome to Part 2 of our Clinician’s Compass series, based on Doc Danny's latest book. In this episode, we dive into one of the most powerful (and popular) business models for clinicians: the Autopilot Practice.

This model is all about creating a business that runs without you—giving you time flexibility, financial stability, and options for the future.

What Is an Autopilot Practice?

An Autopilot Practice is a clinic doing $500K–$3M in top-line revenue where the owner has fully (or mostly) replaced themselves in daily operations. You’re no longer the one treating every patient, managing every system, or answering every email.

Instead, you’ve built a team and systems that allow the business to grow—even if you’re not in the room.

Why This Model Resonates

Most PT Biz clients who read The Clinician’s Compass resonate with this practice model more than the Lifestyle or Home Run practice. Why?

Because time freedom is the goal.

This model allows you to:

• Be more present with your family

• Travel or take time off without guilt

• Start another business

• Pursue passion projects or community work

• Or just... breathe

Key Advantages of the Autopilot Practice

• Time Freedom – You get to choose how involved you want to be. Work on the business, not in it.

• Sellable Asset – This model creates enterprise value. It’s attractive to investors, and it’s something you can sell.

• Stable Income – Even when you’re not working, the business keeps producing revenue.

• Options – You can return to patient care, stay behind the scenes, or step away entirely.

Trade-Offs to Consider

This model isn't without challenges. Some trade-offs include:

• Lower Margins – You’ll keep less per dollar earned since you’re paying staff, operators, and reinvesting in systems.

• Harder to Build – It takes strong leadership, systems, and culture to successfully step out.

• Less Emotional Satisfaction – If you love treating patients and being in the day-to-day, this model could leave you feeling disconnected unless you re-engage in a different way.

Still, the hourly ROI on your time can be significantly higher than in a lifestyle practice. And the long-term value of the business—both financially and in freedom—is hard to beat.

Who This Model Is For

✅ Clinicians who want to stop trading time for money
✅ Entrepreneurs seeking scalable, sustainable income
✅ Parents who value flexibility and presence
✅ Builders who eventually want to sell or exit
✅ Anyone tired of doing everything alone

Real Talk from Doc Danny

“Your business should support your life—not become your life. The Autopilot Practice gives you freedom and options. And that’s real wealth.”

Ready to Build a Practice That Supports Your Life?

If the Autopilot Practice sounds like the model you’ve been searching for—and you want help making it happen—let’s talk.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny:  Hey, Danny Matta here, founder of PT Biz, and we are on part two of our Clinicians Compass series, which is based off of the new book that I just wrote. Uh, and today we're talking about the autopilot practice. So for many of you. This practice model in particular is gonna be a pretty good fit. So in the clinician's Compass, I talk about three different types of practices.

Think of this as. Three different races, right? You show up at a start line and you say to yourself, okay, I either wanna run a 5K, a half marathon, or a marathon. Depends on your training, depends on your goals, depends on many things, right? But not only do you decide on the race and the challenge of the race, but you get to decide how you get there.

And you know what the finish line looks like for you. And that's, and that's the importance of thinking about what you want from your business before you get into business. And I can tell you for sure I did not do this. No one talked to me about what do you want the business to support? What do you want your life to look like?

It was just like, I need to make money. Like I got. Uh, two kids under the age of two. I just left, uh, a stable salary with great benefits, and now I need to like, make some money because I need to replace that. I wasn't thinking about what life I was trying to support, so, but if, if you can think about these things before you get going, you're gonna have a much easier time getting where you're trying to go and not maybe going and running the wrong race and then turn around, having to go back and, and backtrack and then end up going the right direction, which is what so many people do.

So when we look at number one, the first type, which, which we just, uh, went over, go back and watch that or listen to that. That's about the lifestyle practice, right? A lifestyle practice or a lifestyle clinic is typically small. It's just you usually, um, and it's gonna be higher net profit, but. Lower total amount of revenue, you're gonna keep more of it, but there's gonna be less of it that you make.

But you have a lot of control over who you're working with, how you're working with them, and you really wanna stay heavily involved in patient care. So when we go to the second option, it's an autopilot practice. Now, the reason that an autopilot practice is so appealing to so many clinicians, and I would say, you know, as we pull people within our, uh, PT Bs Mastermind, which by the way, this book.

Is an internal resource I wrote for them, and we had such great feedback from it that we decided that we would actually share this with people outside of our, uh, of our mastermind group. And overwhelmingly the option of these three lifestyle practice, home run practice, which would be the last one, autopilot, which is kinda in the middle.

The, the one that most people resonate the most with is this one, the autopilot practice. And we'll get into the home run practice in the next, uh, in the next, uh, part of this series. But the autopilot practice resonates with people, I think, because it is all about the creation of time freedom, the lifestyle practice.

I. Is in a lot of ways it, it creates freedom of how you work with people and, and allows you to still stay in the profession and make more money than you do working somewhere else. So it can be a really great fit, but for a lot of people, especially people that have a family or want to have a family, a autopilot practice makes a lot of sense for, for alignment with the life that they want.

So lemme kind of detail out what an autopilot practice is real quick. So an auto, an autopilot practice is gonna be a clinic that's somewhere between half a million and $3 million in top line revenue. Um. You know, and, and half a million may sound like a lot, but I'll, I'll explain why. You need a lot of revenue.

It's really not that much revenue, top line revenue for a clinic, and it depends how efficient you are. But you can make it work for as small revenue as 500,000. But really, you, you probably need to be somewhere in the range of at least seven figures, low seven figures, but an autopilot practice. Is a practice in which you have essentially completely replaced yourself, you replaced yourself, uh, both as you know, the ability to replace yourself clinically, the ability to replace yourself administratively, um, and, and potentially even for all of the leadership side of things as well, depending on how much you want to remove yourself.

But it gives you options and it allows you to create a lot of time. Freedom time, flexibility to do what you want with that time. Now, that might in turn be just going back and working on the business more and working on things that don't require you to be there day to day. Maybe bigger picture things.

It may be that you want to be more heavily involved in your kids' school. It may be that you want to be more heavily involved in nonprofit work in your local area. Uh, it it could be that you want to. Like, pursue another business potentially. Uh, it could be many different things. Whatever it's that you wanna do.

If you just wanna meditate three days a week, uh, cool. Like, doesn't matter. It's what, what do you wanna do with your time? And the whole point of an autopilot practice is to create, is to create an entity that runs without you, but to do so in a sustainable way because. You want to create stability. This is creating time, freedom, and a revenue stream for you.

Now, here's the thing about an autopilot practice that may not align with people as much as maybe, you know, taking a really big swing and doing something like a home run clinic, which I'll get into in the next video, is it's, it's not gonna be as fast growing, right? It's gonna be slower growth in a lot of cases, very stable.

And you hit sort of a threshold where. You know, you can't really grow past that without you being more directly involved, which kind of removes the autopilot part of it. Right? Um, so there's that, like, that could be a potential financial negative for you. But there's still intrinsic value here. And you can sell one of these clinics.

These clinics are very sellable. You know, like I sold a clinic that was like this and the reason that it, that it had value is because someone saw that I didn't have to be involved day to day for this thing to still be. Effective and profitable and have sticking power, right? Like that clinic that we sold still exists today, right?

It just had its 11th year anniversary of being in business and it's continuing to grow with the new owner that we sold it to. That is a very valuable thing, right? And that's something that you can sell for a, a significant amount of money, which you cannot do with a lifestyle business because you've essentially created a job.

So. When we look at the, uh, appeal of an autopilot practice, it's this, it's that you can create a stable income stream for yourself. You can remove yourself as much or as little as you want. So keep in mind it gives you options. You can say, you know what, I'm fully removed. I'm gonna go live in, I'm Ireland.

Okay, cool. I bring an operator in and I just collect a, a check for being the owner every single month. You could take it as far as that. You could also say, okay, I've removed myself, but you know what I really like to do? I really like to treat patients, so I don't want to run the business per se. I have an operator.

I've brought in this person that's maybe like an operational, uh, element to the business and a clinic director. And guess what? Now I'm back to, uh, treating patients again because that's what I love to do and that's what I'm gonna use my time on. And that's, you can do that if that's what you like. It's up to you.

You know, you make decisions on that, but yet you still have this business that if you decided not to do that has a lot of value, still generates income for you and your family. And it creates a lot of security in a lot of ways for, uh, the financial position of, of you and your family because you know, you have an entity that has value.

You could sell. You have something that is. In, in most cases, very passively generating income for you and your family. Um, and it gives you options as what you wanna do with your time. Okay. Uh, for, for whatever it's that you want to use that for. I see a lot of people that set up practices like this, they, they do one of two things.

They either really double down, sort of on family time. Involvement in the community, things like that. Or, um, a lot of people end up just starting another business 'cause they kinda like that. They like the building part and then once they sort of get it established, they go and do something else. This is what happened with me, right?

Like I built a business, I made it to the point where like I didn't even need to really be involved on a day-to-day basis. Um, and it had a lot of value. Something that other people saw value in, were able to sell it and I could focus, you know, on helping other clinicians do something similar, which is.

How PT Biz was born really, right? Like it was through my ability to create timeframe for myself and then reapply that time into something else, which I'm fascinated with, which is businesses, right? So not everybody's like that though. So it depends what you know, you, uh, what you're interested in. Uh, but when we look at these businesses, there's a few things that are big hurdles, big roadblocks for people that are trying to build these.

So, number one. You have to look at your business as an entity that you need to reinvest in. You can't look at it as just taking all the income out of the business because as you're growing the business, you have to reinvest into a space, into people. And, and technology and probably vendors as well, right?

And vendors would be people you're outsourcing work to that are doing that work for the clinic, but they're not, they're not an employee. Right? So you can think of it like a marketing agency. So if you want somebody to run ads for you, you don't wanna be the one doing it. You don't have in-house marketing director, you not, don't have the size for that.

Then you have to leverage vendors. You know, same thing with like your CPA, you may have an in-house accountant or bookkeeper. So you might leverage a outsource bookkeeper and accountant that are fractionalized to your business as your vendors. So you're gonna have to get. Efficient with using these other pieces of, of the business that maybe aren't all in-house to keep the business efficient.

So, you know, you have to become a good business owner for this to happen. The other thing is you have to be really good at building systems that you can step away from and people that are going to independently. Lead and run the business even when you're not around, right? This is the culture that you set.

This is the, uh, the systems you put in place. This is how you track things. This is how people know if they're doing the right thing or not, right? And the way in which they get feedback and the way in which that they're led, like that is a very difficult thing to do, especially whenever you take a step back.

And the way you have to do that is to empower the people in your business to be able to make decisions based on the core values that you have. And, and the. The way in which you've established what you want your business to stand for, right? Like the core values are basically the way people act when you're not around.

And that means that, that comes from the top down with how you act as, as a, as an individual, right? So as you move yourself more and more away from the day to day of the business, you can't do it too fast. 'cause you, you'll basically ruin the ability for you to, to step back. Like you just, you need to build people up over time and then slowly remove yourself, remove yourself doing it quickly.

I've seen work out very poorly in most cases for businesses that, that have, that have done that. And, but if you do it right. It allows people to move into more leadership roles. It allows people to have, feel like a lot of ownership over what they're doing within the clinic, um, and to even make day-to-day decisions, uh, for you.

Now, the, the negative of this is because you remove yourself more and more from the business. Uh, a couple things can happen. Number one, you can remove yourself from the, the culture that you're such a big part of and yet you enjoy. Um, and. If you do that, you might find, oh, well now I feel less satisfied because I'm not as involved in the business.

Well, that's probably a pretty good key that you should be more involved in the business. Now, maybe you don't have to do all the work directly, but you should be more involved in the business day to day from more of a, you know, 30,000 foot view and, and, and doing more leadership based work, more development of the business, right?

Because you find enjoyment in that. The other thing is your profit margins. The, the net margins, which is how much money you're keeping of each dollar that the business generates. Are significantly lower in an autopilot practice than in a, uh, lifestyle practice. Now, you know, would you rather keep 25% of a million dollars generated or would you rather keep 75% of.

$200,000 generated, right? Like there's a delta difference there where you're still making more money, but you might make less for a period of time as you're building the business up to a stage where you have enough revenue to be able to remove yourself. 'cause you're replacing yourself with other people.

And technology, which is obviously has a cost associated with it. So you know, there is a trade off there, you have lower net. Revenue than if you're obviously doing everything yourself, but you have far more time flexibility, and that's the trade off that, uh, people have to decide if it's worth it for them.

You know, for me, I, I'll tell you, my uh, time is far more valuable than dollars right now. There's definitely been times in my life where. I just needed money, you know, like money was worth way more than my time. Um, and, and. Everybody goes through that, right? As you're building your business and, and if you put yourself in a position where you're saving money and you're, you're building wealth and security, uh, then you, obviously time starts to become more valuable to you.

But if you think of the end in mind, like my ability to coach my kids' teams to take my daughter to school every day, uh, to be able to, you know, go and do things with them. During the day, the ability, if I want to, you know, go and, uh, meet up with some friends, you know, to do something during the week, uh, or do something with Ashley, with, with my wife during the day and just like an impromptu lunch date maybe, or something like that.

Like, that's so valuable to me. And it's something I definitely didn't have whenever I was seeing all these patients myself in a clinic. And what would be considered more of like a lifestyle practice. So the autopilot practice for a lot of people has so much value because they. They want that time flexibility, and maybe they see where their life is going and they know that it's gonna be even more valuable to them as they hit different stages of their life.

So the, the autopilot practice is all about time freedom. You can absolutely have a great income associated with that, but it's not gonna be, uh, it's not gonna be as high per se as if you were doing a lot more of the work yourself, because you're bringing other people in to be able to run a business instead of you doing everything yourself, which in a lot of ways can get to a place where it increases your income, but it won't feel like that at first.

It'll feel like you're, you're, you know. Your investment, which is back into people space and technology, uh, I is decreasing your, your take home pay, which it will for a while, right? But you have to look at the amount of work you're putting in per, you know, how many hours are you putting in to generate that income.

So your dollar productive activities, your tasks, you know, if you're, if you're working in that business 10 hours a week and you're making the same as somebody who's working 40 hours a week, like you're making four times as much of them per hour, is the way to look at it. It's the way that I, I think about it.

So it's all about, you know, being able to have something that is, uh, running without you. It's a safe place to be too. Like what if you get hurt? Well, if you get hurt, you still have income, you know, you still have an entity that has a lot of value that your, you could sell, your family, could sell your family, family continue to own and have perpetual income from that, that is a pretty damn valuable thing to many people, especially those of us that have, you know, people that depend on us.

So that's why this is such a valuable, um. You know, type of business model that a lot of people see, see as the right path for them. The last thing is these are sellable. So when we talk about the idea of, uh, enterprise value or the, the ability to sell a business, this is something that to me, whenever I first heard about this concept, it was kind of strange.

Like I'd never met anybody that had sold a business. Um, you know. People sell houses. That's about the only thing I could equate this to. But the reason that people buy a business is because they view it as a way in which their money can get yield, or they view it as, uh, something that maybe is undervalued, that then they can grow and, um, that money it, it has a better return.

So for instance, if I'm an investor. And I see a clinic, and let's say that clinic makes $200,000 in net profit. And let, just, just to make my math easy, let's say I just, I have a million dollars to buy this business. And I say, okay, I'll give you a million dollars for this business. And that business has a track record of being able to generate $200,000 a year.

With me having to do no work really in the business, uh, I can maybe sort of passively manage and it's, it's, it's functional. It'll continue to do that. Then to me. Like after five years, I fully returned my investment and I'm making $200,000 a year of income from something that also has the potential to grow and that I could resell for the same amount, if not more money than I bought it for.

So that is what's considered like a cash flow investment. And there's a lot of people that buy businesses like that because they want to have a perpetual income stream. This is what a lot of people do with like real estate is like this. A lot of people that have a bunch of resources or PE. Pull money together with private equity, and they do this, they buy real estate because.

They know people need a place to live and there's a yield on their money, right? Uh, associated with the building, based on how much rent they're getting and the cost to run it. The other thing that happens is people might look to buy a business and then merge them with other businesses, because that creates a bigger total value.

So if I, let's say I have, uh, one clinic like this, and let's say that clinic is making a million dollars and $200,000 in net profit, well. If I can get three of those, then now I have top line, $3 million net profit, $600,000, and that might put me in a different bracket in terms of what somebody's willing to pay for it.

So maybe in somebody, somebody willing to pay five times net profit, now maybe I can sell it for seven times net profit, because it's bigger, that means it's probably, it's gonna be more stable. It's gonna attract investors that have more money that are willing to pay a bit more because they want more yield.

Right. So in that scenario, people might put those together. They call these roll up strategies. They might buy multiple and then they resell it and they, they resell it at a higher multiple and they make money that way. Right? So the whole point of this is you're building something that other people find value in.

That's the key. You may find a tremendous amount of value and never wanna sell it, and that's totally fair too. You may not wanna do that, it may not align with what you wanna do. Uh, I think holding on a business is long term is probably the best option, honestly. Uh, but if you look at the ability to sell something, if you want to, I.

Like for me, I wanted to move on to solely focus on this, so it made a lot of sense for me to sell that to somebody that I trusted so that they could take our business and put a hundred percent effort into it to give our staff better opportunities. That is the number one reason why we sold our business.

We didn't have to, it would be great to have a passive income vehicle that we didn't have to spend a lot of time on. But we want our staff to have better opportunities and we needed somebody that wanted to grow that, which is what we found. And we're, we're very thankful and happy with the decision that we made and the person that took over that business for us.

And, but if it wasn't something that had value, nobody would wanna buy it. So when you're building an autopilot practice, one of the greatest disadvantages is that you have options. And sadly, most people start a business, just close it one day. I was just talking to an electrician. We had to have come out, um, to do some work on some circuits in our house that, uh, had gone out and they had to replace.

And he had been an electrician for like 30 years. Um, and he just was about to retire there. He, he couldn't sell his, his, uh, his business. He's basically him and another guy doing all the work. Um. And he's just gonna shut it down, you know? And this is a business that does over seven figures of, uh, revenue a year.

And this guy just didn't even know what to do with it, right? Because he didn't, he hasn't created something that isn't dependent on him. So there's not as much value there and there's not a lot of people interested in buying that versus buying something that can run without you being involved. So this, one of the greatest advantages to an autopilot practice is it gives you options.

You can hold onto it, it can provide perpetual income, you can get as involved. You as you want, or you don't want, uh, based on whatever your goals are and what aligns with your life, and then ultimately you have an asset you could sell for. You know, a life changing amount of money. And for a lot of people, they may want to do that and just say, cool, I, I'm done working now, I'm now, I'm, I'm retired.

I just wanna play golf every day. And maybe I, I volunteer at a golf course as a starting al or something like that. And like, this is, I'm just gonna cruise into the rest of my life. And that's what they want to do. And now they have the financial means to do so because they've created this entity that has value to somebody else in a way that.

A lifestyle clinic or practice just does not, right. So this is the autopilot practice. Uh, this is the, the, the clinic, like I said, that most people. Really a align the most with, and when, when you look at the, the book that, that I wrote, you know, the back half of this book is really all about these three different, these three different options.

So lifestyle clinic and autopilot clinic, uh, or a home run clinic, which is what we're gonna get into in the next episode. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about who that's appropriate for, who it's not. And the goal of this is for me to help you clarify what, uh, challenge you wanna take on. What race do you wanna run in business?

Get clear on that so that you have like the idea of a clinician's compass is, you know, you look at your compass, you're going, okay, I'm going north. I know I'm headed the right direction. Right? And even if you get lost along the way, you can look back there and say, ah, shit, I'm kind of going the wrong direction.

You know? Correct course. Going the right direction and end up where you're trying to go and not end up, you know, running the wrong race and ended up in the wrong place, uh, because you thought that's what you were supposed to do. Right. Maybe now you hear me explain some of these things and you're like, damn, a lifestyle practice makes the most sense for me.

But I just thought that if I do that, that means that I haven't made it like a real business or whatever, and it's like that's not the right way to look at it. A right way to look at it is what do you want from your life, and which business vehicle supports that in the appropriate manner and allows you to live the life that you want?

'cause the business should not become your life. The business should support your life. That's the key. And that's not what most entrepreneurs end up with. They end up with this behemoth of a thing that runs their life. And if you're listening to this and that's you, you know what I'm talking about. And I've been around enough entrepreneurs that are on their third marriage, they're stressed out.

They have terrible health, they have terrible relationships with their family. They have friends and they have one thing that's going well for them, and that's they have a, you know, a business that makes money. That ain't what I want. All right. That's not the life that I signed up for. And you know, if, if you can be intentional about what you do, then you can get where you're trying to go without failing every other aspect of your life at the same time, which, which is traditionally, you know, a lot of what we see in the entrepreneurial world.

So, um, this is the autopilot practice. Again, this is the one that I think resonates the most with the people that we work with. Maybe it resonates the most with you, maybe it doesn't. Um, but this is the one that, uh, for us, we actually chose this option unintentionally. I didn't know this was a race that I was gonna run.

Uh, it's just where we ended up with our clinic and, uh, it's a fantastic business model for these types of clinics. So in the next one, I'm gonna talk about the home run clinic. What that looks like, who it's appropriate for. And then after that, you'll be able to make your decision which one's right for you.

So as always, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next one.