E597 | Why You Need Business Owner Friends

In this episode, Danny delves into the importance of having a support network of entrepreneur friends to aid in the growth of your business. He emphasizes the value of having individuals to discuss both the successes and failures that come with entrepreneurship.

Danny cautions that business owners should be mindful of how much they discuss business problems with their spouse, as it can lead to exhaustion and fear. Similarly, speaking with family members or employees about business problems can be counterproductive, as they may not have the necessary context or it could impact their decision-making.

Danny suggests that entrepreneurs should seek out a network of like-minded individuals to talk to, whether it be locally or virtually. This can help to better understand the struggles and successes of entrepreneurship.

Additionally, Danny recommends joining a mastermind group to help with mental health, relationships, and business growth. By participating in a group of entrepreneurs, it allows individuals to connect with others who are going through similar challenges and can offer support and guidance.

Overall, Danny emphasizes the importance of creating a support system of entrepreneur friends to aid in the growth and success of a business. Having a network of like-minded individuals can offer valuable insights and support, as well as help entrepreneurs navigate the challenges that come with running their own businesses.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Hey, real quick before we start the podcast episode, I want you guys to check out our new YouTube channel for PT Biz. We are putting out a weekly video on the most common questions that we get, and we are breaking those down in a way that's more engaging. Where you can learn better and really focus on one thing at a time.

So if you're interested in really learning more skills to upgrade your cash and hybrid practice, head over to YouTube. Subscribe to the PT Biz Channel and check out the weekly videos that we're coming out with to help you win in the cash-based practice game. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't want to work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on, guys? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we're talking about why you need a group of entrepreneurs around you to help as you grow your business. And there's really two main reasons that I think it's incredibly valuable to have entrepreneur friends. Now, this might be.

In a community like ours with our pt with our PT Biz Mastermind, this might be locally, you meet up with some other entrepreneurs that you know, that you've met, that maybe some more patients or something like that, and you guys can, sit down and chat once a month about business and how things are going.

Because you begin on a zoom call with some friends of yours that are that are entrepreneurs. But there's two areas that I think really entrepreneurs really struggle with because they don't know who to talk to about these things. And one is the wins and one is the failures. And I'll start with the failures because the challenge with entrepreneurship, there's a lot of failures.

But who do you talk to about that? Is it your spouse? Probably. It might be the right person, but you have to be very cautious about how about how much time you're spending explaining your problems to your spouse, their business problems to your spouse, and here's why. It's exhausting for somebody to actually hear you, describe the problems that you're having.

And it, it can create a lot of fear as well, because they may not actually understand. How serious it might be or not, and they don't know how to react and it's do you want 'em to just listen or do you want 'em to give you advice? This is what you have to figure out with your spouse.

I think it's probably not the best person to drop a bunch of business problems on and frustrations that you're having because you end up souring your relationship in other ways because they're carrying that negativity that you're dropping on them around as well. And trust me, I know I've done this, it's a bad idea in my experience.

You gotta talk to other people about those things. Your spouse you need to talk to about shit that you guys have in common besides a business that maybe you're having some frustrations. So can you talk to your family about it? Maybe. But they may not understand what you're talking about. Can you talk to your staff about it?

Hell no. You can't. The reason you can't is because they are employed by your company. And if they even have the littlest bit of fear that your company cannot sustain. Salary, they start looking other places. So you have to be stoic about handling problems that come your way in your business.

You cannot let that show to your staff. It's the last thing you can do. This is something that they harp on this whenever I was in the military about, you cannot show fear emotion. With things in a leadership position in the military, if it's going to negatively affect somebody's like decision making or cause fear in those people.

So you have to just keep it to yourself. This is like when we got our clinic shut down in 2020, just like everybody else, right? When no one knew what was going on with businesses and health and it was. Terrifying as a business owner, honestly, to, am I making the right decision?

Am I not? I didn't know. But Assure sell wasn't. Going to tell my staff that we didn't know what the heck was going on. We, the whole point was that we were just focusing on the things we could control, get the best information we could get, saying, up to date on it, talking to the people that we felt knew the most about everything and just being as calm as possible.

You have to do that with your staff, but you can't just hold that shit in either. And I can tell you, I think that's bad for you as well, long term for your own mental health. You can't just push that down forever and it not create other problems for you. So who do you talk to? You gotta talk to other entrepreneurs because they're gonna understand what you're going through.

They're gonna understand, to how to relate to that. And not just the failures, not just the negative things, but also the wins. And on the negative side. What's great is you, if you have other entrepreneur friends, you can talk to them about the frustrations you have. They can look at it from a completely different lens, a different perspective.

Cuz they're not in your business. They may have relevant business experience, but they may be in a different business, sa, same business, different area, whatever. But they can at least relate to that and they can. Look at that from a different perspective, right? And they can actually help give you some guidance on have you thought about this?

Or what about this? Or Let me connect you with this person. And this is the benefit of a network of other entrepreneurs. This is one of the huge benefits of the mastermind group that we have now and the size that it is. We have so many people in different areas that we can connect people with that have either done what they're already doing or have relevant information on it, or they can connect with them and share resources and things that are working in real time.

That's the negative side, right? It's like I'm struggling with this, but what about wins? This is the other thing that I think people forget about and it's not, it's hard to celebrate wins in business cuz they typically are financial in most cases, right? I hit, oh, I hit a half million dollars in revenue this year, right?

You can't necessarily go to your staff meeting and be like, Hey guys, good news. We hit a half a million dollars in revenue. This year great job. Because there's no context to that. That's top line revenue. I remember I had a friend of mine ask me my, most of my friends that I've known for a while, they never really talked to me about business stuff.

They, we don't really have that in common. We played sports growing up together. We were in college together doing stupid shit. And that's what that's what we talk about. But I had a friend ask me one time about our company and he was like, how's the company doing? Like, how much revenue are you guys doing?

It was like a very specific. And I answered his question based on gross revenue, right? As I would talk to other business owners about it, be like, yeah. And at the time we were doing about 2 million a year in revenue. And I remember I told him that and he was shocked, couldn't believe the number and I had to like quickly Stop and redirect the conversation to teach him to basically explain net profit versus gross profit, which didn't really help me that much either because then I was trying to explain how much of that we actually keep, which was still like a significant amount in most people's eyes.

And from then on it's like I always have to pick up the dinner bill if I'm ever around them. And it's funny because. It's the only time they've ever asked me about that. It's now I don't wanna talk to them about. Our business because it, I just feel like a dick. I, it's not something that I'm interested in just bringing up.

I'm not trying to brag about things or make them feel bad about, what, whatever they're doing. So I just can't have conversations with non-business owner friends. About certain things in the business and some of that is wins. If you want to highlight the fact that like you, you hit your revenue goal for the quarter, or hired these team members and you built out this other arm, or you dropped your hours down and you've gotten to a place where you know you can run the business and half as much time as you used to or whatever.

These are all things that if your friends just work other places, they're gonna look at you the way, what you're saying in a different lens than somebody that's actually struggling to try to build a business themself. It's great to have business owner friends, a community of business owner friends that are there for both the wins and the losses.

And this is actually something that we do, e even within our own within our own coaching groups, where we actually have people highlight those on a monthly basis with the people that they are working with in small groups. And it's because you, it's good to highlight that stuff. It's good to share that stuff, both the wins, the losses, the progress you're making, the challenges that you're facing, and be able to.

Do that with somebody else that is going through the same thing and has the same perspective on it. Because it is just so frustrating to try to hold in all the negative things and then never share the positive things because your family doesn't understand, your friends don't understand not in a bad way.

It's not that they just don't have the relevant experience that, that you do, that you're going through and they don't have perspective for what you're having to do to earn what you're actually building. So my advice for you, if you feel isolated, you feel you can't talk to anybody about this stuff.

Like you gotta, you just, like I said, find friends people that you respect locally even that maybe you don't know that well, that you can meet up with and you can have some of these conversations. Like I said, you can meet with people virtually. You can also look at something like the, what we have, like the PT biz mastermind.

You go to physical therapy biz.com check out, the. Courses that we have, the different programs that we have. But that's one that we get all the time. And, it's always, it's so interesting to me to go to these live events that we put on and now we have about, 200 or so people that'll show up to each of these events.

And we have about closer to like 240 businesses at this point that we're working within that program. Overall. So almost everybody comes to them, a very high percentage of 'em. When I'm there and I'm talking to people like I, I just am always shocked about how many people tell me that. Like the group that, that we have the mastermind group has like significantly helped their marriage.

Significantly helped their own mental health significantly helped. Obviously the business has improved, but that's not really what they, that's not what they highlight so much. It's funny. It's yeah, it's important. You want the business to grow and you want to have success as far as revenue is concerned, because that's what, that feeds the business.

No money, no mission, but. That's not what I we're talking to people about. It's like I had a dozen conversations with people and even some of their spouses about how, the way in which we organize things and we set things up to where the business owner. Can actually function in a more efficient way and have people that they can, engage with on a level that they probably aren't getting from other people around them, where they can share these wins and losses and it doesn't get dumped on their spouse.

It's like basically, made their marriage so much better. And it's not something that I actually thought of when we started working with business owners. The last thing I thought of, I was like, all right, we're just gonna help you increase revenue. And it's all numbers and math and it's very black and white to me.

Over the years, it's not that, it's not that simple. There's a lot of gray area, there's a lot of, there's just a lot of personal shit that. That we deal with on a daily basis. And you never tell, you never talk to anybody about it, and it becomes a real problem for you. It becomes a mental health problem. It becomes a relationship problem because you're dumping your negative, whatever interactions and problems with the business on the wrong people.

You're highlighting wins with the wrong people and creating a lot of friction in relationships that you have versus if you can understand how to compartmentalize that stuff. It's like you, if somebody showed up on one of our master. Group calls or an individual call and they just wanna talk about fantasy football, we'd be like, yo, dude, what the heck is, what are you doing?

You're wasting our time. Here's what we wanna know about. Talk to me about these things. Versus if you went to your friends who you play fantasy football with, and you start talking to 'em about your key performance indicators and on the business problems that you have, they'd be like, yo, dude, what are you doing, man?

We wanna know who you wanna draft in the first round. Why are you talking to me about this? It's just the, it's a mismatch. And if you're missing that in your life as an entrepreneur I think you really need to seek that out somewhere, whether it's with us or somebody else, doesn't matter. You need a relationship a group, like that in your life to really help compartmentalize the right information, the right conversations, and to get support from the people that actually know what you're talking about.

Like when I if I talk to, A business owner, right? And they're like, oh man, we hit half a million dollars in our practice this year. I'm like, awesome. That's great. What's what's next? What do you wanna do next? Do you wanna double it? Or do you like it where it's at? Are you trying to autopilot it and get a lot your time back and maybe focus on family and make hobbies and things like what's next?

I'm excited to talk about. Awesome. Congratulations, that's a huge accomplishment. What do you wanna do next? Not, Hey man, I, my business did a half a million dollars this year. Awesome. I know who's buying dinner like that. That is not the reaction that you necessarily want, and you're talking to the wrong person If that's the interaction and the feedback that you're getting.

So find the right group of people. You gotta find your tribe. It's so true. The community side of it's so important because you gotta have the conversations with the right people and stop having the wrong conversations with other people that matter to you in your life, cuz you're really probably stressing those relationships with your spouse, with your friends, with your family.

It took me a long time to understand this and be able to batch or not batch, but compartmentalize the right conversation with the right people. And as soon as I did that, man, my life got a hell of a lot better. All my relationships got better. And I just stopped pissing off the wrong people unintentionally.

And and I really started to understand who I could talk to about which things. But you have to talk to about somebody. You can't just hold it in. So hope this helps. Find your tribe guys. As always, thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next week.

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The one that seems like the best fit for you for your current situation. We can show you all the sales and marketing systems that we teach within our Mastermind for people that are scaling to multiple clinicians, past themself that you need to have in your business to be able to go full-time.

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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. 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 Eve Gigi every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside 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/pt entrepreneur or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur, and we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that name.