What To Do When You’re “Stuck” With Jamey Schrier, PT Of Practice Freedom U

Owners will, at some time in their experience, get to a point where they’re feeling stuck or “languishing” in their business – things aren’t progressing, things are “OK” but could be better, and they may feel lost and unsure of what to do next. It’s at those times where it’s important for the owner to recall their purpose, generate a vision of what they desire, continue to learn and grow, and take the time to work on your business. Jamey Schrier of Practice Freedom U joins Nathan on the podcast to discuss exactly what owners need to consider when they feel like they’re “stuck” in order to get out of that rut.

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I have a returning guest. Jamey Schrier is a physical therapist and the CEO of Practice Freedom U . He had been on a few times . Thanks for joining me again. I appreciate it.

I appreciate you having me back.

It’s good to talk with you. As both of us are working with PT owners. You through Practice Freedom U and me with the Physical Therapy Owners Club . I was excited to talk to you because you brought up the topic of helping owners get unstuck. I think both of us see that as PT owners reach out and finally start getting some help and support, they are usually at this place of being “stuck,” would you say?

This topic came from the idea of, “Look at the world the last couple years with COVID.” What happened? Everything slowed down, a lot of things stopped and we got used to this pattern of things. Most of us stayed in business on some level, whether it was telehealth or reducing our schedule, but we try to stay and do whatever we can.

We got into this place where perhaps we are feeling stuck. We are feeling like we have taken so much energy to keep this business moving and keep it from falling and failing. We are now coming back maybe to where we were maybe a little bit better, but we are still stuck and trapped either physically or mentally.

I’m noticing it with so many people that I have talked to and not just practice owners, but people in business or people in general, feeling that way. You are seeing it a lot with this whole Great Resignation thing that people don’t want to feel that way anymore. I thought it would be a good topic to talk about with you.

It seems to be at that point where owners finally reach out, they recognize either I have hit a barrier of some kind and either I don’t know what to do or I’m in fear of what the next steps might be. I don’t know what that looks like or what that’s going to entail from me in order to get past that.

Adam Grant wrote a great New York Times article called Are You Feeling Blah? It’s a good article. What he talked about is people are not really depressed, but they are not high either. You are in this world of blah. Things are happening all over the place. Out of our control. More is even happening with the war breaking out and he turned it to languishing. We are feeling languished. I was like, “What a great word.” It’s a word of, “I’m not high. I’m not low. I’m just there.” I thought that was a good intro to where we are going with this. I felt that many times over the last couple of years, more than I want to count, I was not depressed but I was not up either.

I’m a pretty up person. I’m a pretty glass half full, abundance mindset. It was not easy to keep that mindset. There were a lot of times, a lot more than I could ever remember, that I was in this blah mode. I know there are so many other people out there feeling that way. That affects how you build your business, how you look and engage with your team, how you market and how you treat patients.

I look at this world of we are there and some of us are stuck. You mentioned fear. I think fear and worry play a big part in this. We could talk about this a lot. The media and what we are hearing on the 24/7 news cycle play a big part in this. It affects who we are and how we build this amazing thing that we are trying to build. It keeps us almost running in quicksand a lot of times.

I can see what you are saying even in my own experience in that. I had owned my clinic for a number of years and I did not have a major catastrophe as you did to rethink how I should run my business. I was doing okay financially. I was running with my head cut off in terms of my ownership, treating patients, running the business, all the HR responsibilities, you name it. I had a young family that I did not see very often. My vacation sucked because I got calls from the office daily while on vacation. When I finally made the decision to make a change, it wasn’t because I had a financial strain. The money was okay. That wasn’t a big burden.

I hadn’t looked at my life to see if this is what I want. When I finally sat down in front of a consultant who was willing to work with us and shared with us the price tag of what would it take to get some consulting to improve our businesses, I remember telling my wife, “I’m not sure if this is the right step. All I know is I have got to do something different.”

When I finally stepped back and looked at my life and things are okay, I could tell then that I was languishing. I was not necessarily progressing. I had the same gross revenues probably four years in a row. They were not bad but they were not improving and they were not great. That’s when I finally made a decision to make some changes.

The word is okay. Okay is good. Okay is not good. It’s better than not okay I guess. I say “I guess” because “not okay” lights a fire under your butt to move you forward. Does “okay “do that? Okay is a dangerous word. People came up to me and say, “How are you doing in your business?” “I’m doing okay.” Is “okay” moving you to where you want to be?

This is not necessarily about the business itself. It’s about you and what you want, and what your vision is. Some of the senior-level people that I work with are in their 50s or 60s, it’s more than just a business. It’s a legacy. It’s about, “What am I leaving and creating here?” I think when we tap into that, it can re-energize us.

It can also scare the living crap at us. There’s a fine line between the two. Fear can be a motivator or it can be a detractor. Many times, we look at fear as a detraction. Fear stops you from doing something. You and I have had conversations, versus the fear of being okay, the fear of staying stuck, the fear of languishing.

For you and me, it was the fear of just being okay. I’m like, “When have I ever in my life settled for mediocrity and okayness?” I could not get into PT school with that mindset. I could not do some of the sports that I did with that mindset. I could not have the guts to ask my wife to marry me with that mindset. I’m doing okay or whatever. Has any of us used that mindset?

We get into business. We get into this foreign world that we don’t have an education in. We weren’t taught in school this. We are in a world which we don’t know, and when you don’t know something, the fear of the unknown is sometimes worse than the fear of the known. One of the things that contribute to this okayness and stuckness is looking for comfort and protection. It is an interesting oxymoron because you are looking for comfort by staying in your little bubble of the zone, but the world is changing. You are not staying comfortable and stable by staying what you think is comfortable and stable.

The world evolves. Let’s say, financially, you are making $100,000. Your $100,000 is now worth less in the last months. If you buy milk, bread and gas, you are now $100,000 is worth less, and yet if you are taking insurance is you can’t charge more. They are cutting your rates as well. For a lot of people, that may cause them to get smaller and constrict. What I say is no. More than ever in human history, now is the time to grow and expand because there’s one thing that has not changed, Nathan. You are a human being. Your body is built to fall apart.

Fear can be a motivator or it can be a detractor.
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My body is built to fall apart and the more active we are, the more it’s going to fall apart and the more we need people like us to fix it. There’s not a lack of people. Nothing has changed on that level. If you look at everything that’s happening, that still remains and we are in a great profession because there are 300 million people to choose from. We want to choose the people we want to help. It’s not because there’s not that. It’s because we get caught up in our brain that keeps us small, content and okay.

I love the book Good to Great and it’s been an influential book for hundreds of thousands of people, and it caught me in the first sentence. I read the first sentence and I put it down. I told my wife, “This is awesome. Listen to this one sentence, ‘Good is the enemy of great.’” That’s the first sentence and I thought about that. Being good, safe and okay is going to keep you from doing so much more.

There’s the next level to that. I wrote my book The Practice Freedom Method . People got copies of the book and I signed it. Here’s what I used as a quote, “The enemy of thriving is arriving. The enemy of good is great.” Many people want to convince themselves that they have arrived. “I’m here. I’m doing okay, Jamey.” They start fighting for their own limitations.

I’m sure you have heard that with people. Fighting for your own limitations. Convincing yourself you are okay. Finding things out there to prove I’m doing well. Comparing yourself to other people and saying, “I’m doing well. I’m doing as good as them. I might be doing better,” instead of focusing. This is a question that I asked from the beginning, “What are you doing this for?” and then I shut up.

What are you doing this for? Don’t tell me to help people just like your admissions person in PT school said, “Next. Give me more than just wanting to help people.” All of us have a deeper reason for why we are doing what we are doing. If we don’t tap into that, if we start playing superficial, instead of going deep with that, when things get difficult we kowtow, we get small, and we look for the comfort zone.

We hope and pray things are better tomorrow, but there’s nothing we are doing to make them better tomorrow. We blame circumstances such as declining reimbursements, the government, the Medicare. I’ve read that someone was blaming the APTA for something. We can always look to blame anybody we want, but change does not happen until you look in the mirror and you say, “What are you truly about?”

Once you dial in on that, it’s like a power source. You start taking some of the how-to stuff that people love to grab. “There’s a fancy new strategy. Nathan came up with 42 ways of marketing,” but you have not done two of them. “Jamey came up with 99 ways to marketing,” but you have not done even those. You start becoming reactive to everything that’s happening to you instead of owning that power yourself and dialing in what this is about. It is not sexy but that’s how you get unstuck.

You got to figure out what the spark is in you that was used to fight for PT school. Think about this, people have sacrificed hundreds of hours studying. Academic school stress beyond belief that C students can’t understand. They sacrifice social and all that stuff for the opportunity to pay $100,000, maybe $150,000 now or $200,000 with no safety net and no guarantee you are going to pass the boards and become a licensed therapist or that you are going to get a job.

You did it because there was something deep inside you that all you focused on was the price. You had the courage and the grit to move through it despite all of the ups and downs. What’s interesting is we get out. We work for a little bit and then people like you, me, and 20,000 or 30,000 people say, “I want to do my own thing. I want to create the life I want.” They go into business with pretty much no education and no experience. Maybe they read a $14.95 book. If they did, I appreciate that and hopefully, The Practice Freedom Method was that book.

You then get fearful because you are smart intellectually and academically with physical therapy, but you don’t know what you don’t know. That might be the first time in a long time you have felt that way. That hurts individuals and us as a profession to be high and mighty. That fool of yourself and conceited that you think just because you know something about this topic, you should know about all of these topics.

“I’m a doctor. I’m a physical therapist. I should know how to run a business. The guy down the street runs a business fine, and why can’t I?” We are all very high-achieving smart people.

That’s our Achilles’ heel or our kryptonite. It’s almost like your superpower, if not properly used, will be your biggest weakness. It will be your kryptonite. Your superpower or this magic that you have, if it’s not properly harnessed and used in your business and your life, will become your kryptonite. If you are so smart about stuff and you are so great at learning, applying, treating, and all that stuff and then you go into this world of the business of physical therapy, which is very different from being the clinical expert in physical therapy. You will apply that information and it will not lay on the same. You will have a tremendous amount of struggle.

As we know by sheer numbers and percentages, most people don’t escape this self-employed, being an indentured servant to your business, and trading time for money. All you are doing is increasing the time but at least you made money. I can’t tell you how many financial dashboards I have looked at and I’m like, “You are not even making any money.” They are being miserable like an attorney. A lot of attorneys are miserable. At least they make a bunch of money but they are miserable making money. We are not making any money and we are working a ton. There’s something wrong with that model. That’s BS. That’s not right.

It’s obvious that so many owners go into ownership and continue to wear the physical therapy hat. They don’t consider that once you start a business, you are no longer a physical therapist first. You are an owner first and a physical therapist second or maybe third. They fail to apply that learning. I love how you put it. They don’t put that learning into, “How do I run a business? What does it take to be successful?”

If they applied the same learning from their physical therapy school, training and internships to business training and knowledge, then these very smart people can be very good businessmen and women. Don’t you think that owners that can be successful in the physical therapy space are good, small business people?

There are industries with much higher profit margins where you don’t have to know your KPIs super well. You don’t have to know the nitty-gritty. There are a lot of leeways to still stay afloat. The business owners in physical therapy that are good at maintaining a decent profit margin in physical therapy are good business owners because they are smart.

You brought up some great points. I will hit on the last point you brought up. My Nostradamus prediction is there are two kinds of people that will be left when all the dust settles. There will be the business owners and there will be everybody else. Meaning that because of the razor-thin profit margins and the complexity of business, the intelligence of our customers, the technology that is making things easier to access, AI that will take a lot of the roles of what we think is our secret ingredient, which is going to be some app. Right or wrong, it’s happening and it will continue to happen.

Being a good business owner of physical therapy, being hip to that stuff, understanding what KPIs are. There might be people on this show that don’t understand what KPIs are, what system or marketing is, and how marketing is different from advertising, what a P&L statement is and why you should be looking at it and not just nodding your head, “I know what that means.” They don’t even know that it stands for profit and loss.

The fear of the unknown is sometimes worse than the fear of the known.
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This is not about, “It’s no longer an option.” I grew up with some successful people in Maryland, that I heard about since I was in PT school. These were big-time people. I like to ask questions and dive into what was going on at the time. This was in the ‘80s and early-‘90s before HMOs hit. They were not some brilliant business people. I respect them but here’s the deal. Could you be brilliant making $200 a visit full boat of what you charged and having zero competition from orthopedists because they did not own their PT places yet? They had to refer.

All you had to do is go to their office, hang out, get some dinner, and you would get a ton of people. You would make money hand over fist. You don’t have that luxury now. None of the people has that luxury. Some people don’t realize it and they think staying small and having a time for money trade is great and that’s the secret. No. If that’s what you want, that’s fine, but we are talking to the people that want more.

You have got to learn how to do this. As you said before, “We are the perfect people to do this.” We’re smart. We learned anatomy and neurophysiology. We know stuff and if we applied 1/10th of that grit, determination and effort, I don’t know about you, but this stuff is nowhere near as hard as what I thought physical therapy school was. I felt it was 100 times harder.

Here’s the deal. It does not cost anywhere near that and unlike PT school, in which you had to wait twenty years to maybe recoup your investment. Student loans for most people linger forever. Learning about business, you get to apply right this minute and you get to see if it’s going to help. You get to see a return. Once you do it, you can continue to do it. You continue to evolve.

When I had my practices, we gave about $1,200 to $1,500 in continuing education. What was interesting is as business owners, if you took that same money and instead put it towards your education on treatment, which as you said, you shouldn’t be doing that anymore. You know plenty and whoever is selling you that is making money. They might say it’s for the good of the profession. I’m not going to argue it’s not, but for the good of the business of the profession. Knowing a lot more about how to treat someone is not the solution.

You need to put and invest that money in yourself. We need to develop you. Your skills, ability, communication, rapport building, your ability to look at metrics and understand marketing. Every time I put a survey out and say, “What’s the number one problem you are having?” Marketing does not come up. There are 300 million people. How is it that that’s still a problem and it’s been a problem since day one? It’s because you have not learned it. Is not that hard. It’s people in relationships and the last time I heard, we are good at that.

I love what we have covered so far in terms of those people who feel like they are stuck, paralyzed and don’t know what to do next. Let’s think about what your why and purpose is, why you want to do this and what it’s all about. Your business is an extension of your individual purpose. It’s also an extension of your family’s purpose. It’s an extension of you and your purpose.

Figuring out or recognizing that you don’t know everything about the business. If you are stuck, you probably don’t know much about business or you are too scared to implement it. As a connection to that why and purpose, people lose track or maybe they have not even considered their vision. Where do they want to be?

I find it hard for me to coach clients and maybe you have come up against a few of these as well. They will complain about what they are doing in their team and where they are at and that stuff. I will ask them, “Where do you want to be? What’s your ideal scene? Where do you want to go with this?” They are like, “I don’t know. I just want to be better.”

I look at those people and I think, “I can’t help you.” I cannot coach someone who does not know where they are going, what they want to do next, or what their end goal is. People sometimes don’t take the time to think about where it is they want to go. What does that look, smell and feel like? What do you see when you are in your ideal space when you have reached it? If they have to iterate it, now they are responsible for it.

I dove into Psychology and Sociology. I was failing these courses in college. I had dove into that because how many classes in your undergraduate did you fail? How many questions on tests percentage-wise did you get wrong?

At least 10% to 20%.

Chances are there are people now that it’s 5% to 10%. We push that number down. Let’s face it. I don’t know about you. There’s no way I’m getting in school nowadays. It’s as clear as day, not with a 90th, 80th of GRE score. Luckily, my school did not require that for that one year. Think about the hard wiring that has been implemented and put in our brains. The hard-wiring is this. You have been rewarded for being right. If I say I’m going to create this type of vision, revenue, team and service for my business, what I’m worried about is what if I’m wrong?

I am not wrong. I can’t be wrong. I would not have gotten to school. I would not have gotten to be a licensed professional if I was wrong. Here’s the problem and we see it all the time. Look around your neighbors. I guarantee you know one or probably more than one that’s probably a not-so-bright guy or gal that is extremely successful in their business.

You sit there and you are like, “I could run circles around what I know compared to what you know.” There lies the problem because they are smart enough to realize they don’t know, so they have to rely on other people. That means they have to get over this idea of letting go and not being the smartest in the room. For very intelligent people like we are, that is not easy to do because it’s been ingrained in us for so many years of our lives. That’s my theory.

It was Simon Sinek who recommended if you are in a group and if you want to learn and progress, find a group in which you are the dumbest in the room and don’t be afraid to admit it. If you are the smartest in the room, there’s no room to grow. I love how you are talking also about networking, reaching out, finding other people and joining masterminds, groups and clubs to ask questions. People are more than willing to help.

My son goes to Gonzaga College High School in DC, not the one in Washington State. It’s the oldest Jesuit school in the country. These Jesuit and Catholic schools are all about values just like we teach, “What are your core values?” They have their core values. One of their values or mottoes is, “Advocate for yourself.” They push it to the limit on that.

You are having trouble in school. You come to the teacher. The teacher won’t come into you. It is to the nth degree. I can get into some perspectives around that. Sometimes it might be too much, but then I look at people in our profession, business owners, particularly. How many people are advocating for their financial well-being and success in life? How many are advocating for their family and what they want versus thinking of someone else’s responsibility, being the victim, not the victor?

I use that story and I love to share that story because they are teaching this to my seventeen-year-old son, which I love. I’m working with 30 to 60 something people that still have not learned to advocate for themselves. Don’t sit back and wait to condemn or complain to somebody else. What are you doing? One of my favorite songs of all time is Michael Jackson’s Man In The Mirror. It’s you in the mirror. What are you doing? As you said, there’s a whole world willing to help you. There are a million ways to do it. There is no one way to do it. Stop trying to find the golden chalice, the secret to all. The secret is there’s no secret.

The secret to all the secrets is there isn’t a secret.
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It’s interesting that you bring up being an advocate for yourself. Are you having trouble with your family? Good. Stand up and be an advocate. Your business is a vehicle to create the life, the lifestyle and the legacy you want. That’s what it is. How you do that and the people you help, you get the makeup. As you said, “What is your vision?” You make it up.

A mentor of mine once said, “Here’s what we do as entrepreneurs. We make it up, we make it real, and then we make it happen.” We are all making crap up. That’s what we get to do. We get to make it up. You are not going to find a double-blind study in the 99.9% of the stuff we do. Do you know what your proof is? Your bank account. The smile on your face. The smile and retention on your staff. The five-star reviews from your patients. Those are the KPIs.

Too many times we go around and like, “I want to learn the proven thing out there. There are so many darn variables with that.” There are three things that you need. I call it CST. C stands for concept. The concept is a principle. The concept is a 30,000-foot view. We all need to have that perspective. Too many times we get lost in the weed and we don’t have that perspective. That’s dangerous. The S stands for strategy. The strategy is timely. The strategies that you and I are using to teach business owners how to generate referrals or work with their staff are timely. Meaning that they change with technology and new research that’s being put out there. They are timely for today. They will change tomorrow.

The T stands for tools or tactics. A particular software, a form or some plugin are specific things that you can use to help you implement your strategy. Out of those three CST, concept, strategy and tactic, there’s one that people miss. It’s the one that I love to talk about. The one that I feel that it’s who I am and that is concept. It’s the bigger picture. It is seeing what we are in. It’s getting above the fray and understanding what this is. It’s understanding what marketing, hiring, connecting with people and what they are looking for is.

When you understand from that view, like the fish story, you begin to know how to fish instead of someone giving you the strategy, which is basically giving you the fish. You rely on that until the strategy changes, but you don’t know that until your results start to go down. You then look for the next strategy and the next strategy, but you failed to see what’s going on. When you start to look at things like that, it becomes a whole lot easier to make decisions. A whole lot easier to know where you are going and what you are trying to accomplish.

I wrote down a couple of things and we already mentioned a lot of them. We talked about getting unstuck and we talked about, “What do you do?” One thing we do is we need to take care of ourselves. The best way to start getting unstuck is to double down on your well-being. It seems counterintuitive, but taking time away from your clinic, unplugging the phone, and not responding on the computer. How about you start with the weekends? Start on Sundays. No looking at your stuff on Sundays. It starts to die down some of this angst. We already talked about this one, think bigger, whatever bigger means to you. It does not mean you have to have a $100 million company, but think bigger. Get out of the present.

When you think about the future, it lets you make decisions in the present. The third one I have is to find your purpose. Whether it’s finding your why or superpower. Discover what it is about what you are doing that connects with you. Get out of the superficial stuff. Get out of what everyone tells you to say and what you read. Get out of that stuff. “I’m trying to help people. I want to make a difference.” No. Be selfish. What are you about? You got yourself a story. There’s a reason why you are doing this.

The more you tap in, the more you start to connect with people. Let’s face it, Nathan, that is what our business is. We connect with people, whether it be patients, doctors or staff. You can’t connect with people as well if you don’t know what you are about because then you become an amoeba and you start being everything to everybody and you don’t even know who you are. That causes stress and keeps you stuck.

I had a meeting with a client and they asked me a great question. They said, “How are you doing with negotiating and what not?” “I noticed that we have talked about a number of things and you guys have made a lot of changes, but you are not setting aside time to work on the business. You are still treating full-time and expecting things to change on your off-hours. You don’t take the time necessary that your business needs.” I like to call it like this. Your business is a love language. If it had a love language, it’s quality time. You need to give your business quality time. The more you give it quality time, the better it will become, especially intentional focus or the time that’s not paying bills, catching up on notes, fixing the toilets or crap like that. You are more than likely the handyman at your business. It’s focusing on your business.

I recognized how, number one, it can be a fear point for some owners because they don’t know what to do with that time outside of catching up on notes and cutting checks. Number two, they no longer have the immediate exchange of, “I treat a patient and I know what that’s worth.” It’s exchanging time for money. To think that I can get a return on admin time, it’s above their mindset. With all the things that we have covered, if I were to tell people to do one thing, there are plenty of things they can do. Start with the why, get a vision, and start reaching out. Boots on the ground, maybe it’s something you can do. Stop treating for half a day. Put all the things that we talked about into a 4 to 5-hour block and start working on them.

First of all, I’m going to steal that whole love language and the time. Remember, good artists borrow, great artists steal. I’m a great artist. I’m stealing your stuff. You will see it everywhere. You said the word quality time. You did not say just time. Quality time does not mean 30 hours a week. It could mean a couple of hours a week. I love when I’m asked the question, “How much time is this going to take,” which is a traded time for money. That’s immediately where their mindset is coming from. I said, “It will take as much time as it takes.”

How much time is it worth for you to get what you told me you wanted? How much time is it worth? Is it worth 1, 2 or 3 hours? Whatever it is, it does not matter, but to sit here and overthink it, over-analyze it and wait for the perfect, “I could do two hours. Maybe if I do this. Let’s talk about this in 30 days. When can we schedule a time together? I can’t schedule a time because I’m not sure. Let me get back to you on when I can schedule a time to talk about how I should utilize my time.” It’s a perpetual procrastination type of thing because we don’t want to lean into what the real issue there. There’s always a level of fear on some level.

One of the things that I started asking people is what’s your fear? Is it the fear that you are going to fail? It’s because you have not failed anything in your life. Let’s say most people in our professions are not only successful in academia and their vocation, but a lot of them are successful athletes. There has not been a lot of “failing,” or it’s the fear of success. What happens when you take the excuses away? What happens when you can drive the Mercedes instead of making fun of someone else driving it and saying, “You are good. I don’t need that car. My Prius is fine.” What happens when you start leaning into the wiring that’s in your brain that needs to be upgraded. You need an iOS update.

That’s what we do here. I know that’s what you do and that’s what we do. That’s what every successful person on the face of the planet has done. They have upgraded their wiring. They upgrade how they see things and how they look at things, and then that leads to taking specific actions and all of that. If you don’t upgrade your wiring, which is what I talked about with CST. That mindset, that view and that concept of how you see things.

If you don’t upgrade that, then you are always going to be looking at the how-to of something and never understanding it. This means you are always going to be reliant on the next thing that then puts you in a position of not power. It’s a position of weakness. It scares the crap out of people. I know I felt this way when someone asked me that question, “What are you afraid of?” I said, “Success.” “Why?” “It’s because it would make me come to grips that I’m letting go of my previous identity.”

As long as I treat right before I stopped treating and it was an evolution. It took me nine years to “stop treating.” I stopped treating on purpose. I wanted to stop treating. I kept on three patients. I could not let go and I have dove in a lot with my own psychologicalness. In my mind, I was still a treating physical therapist. Once I let go of those people, I own being a business owner. “Jamey, what do you do?” “I own a rehab business in the area. I’m an entrepreneur and we help athletes and people get back.” I started to change how I answered the what do you do question. Prior to that, you will never guess what I said. Nathan, what do you do?

“I’m a physical therapist,” totally disregarding the fact that you own a business.

Find your purpose, find your why, find your superpower, discover what it is about.
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You started to narrow down who you are by your license. You are so much more than that. If you own a business, lead with that. The easiest way to generate more referrals is to stop telling people you are a physical therapist and start telling them what you are. Communicate where they go and start asking questions. It is how we think of ourselves. That was one of the things that I see as fear.

That happens to a lot of people when you start to get to that $1 million mark. I have this talk 7 Steps to a 7-Figure Business. People that I have worked with cross over that $1 million to $3 million. Especially that $1 million to $1.5 million, when you have a team in place, you are generating revenue, there’s profit in there, you have to start letting go.

You are letting go as a therapist. You start to let go of yourself as a manager. All of us suck at managing. If you want to be a clinical director, go work for somebody else. Don’t be a clinical director in your own business. It’s the worst place to be. It’s horrible. I start to hear from people that they don’t want to let go. It was hard enough letting go as a therapist. Now, I’m letting go as the clinical director because you are letting go of that whole identity and you are having to start to own being a business owner. Now you are questioning what people think of you. That most likely for us is for another discussion.

It goes that deep sometimes. People are starting, if you get someone that has a couple of hundred thousand, they need to speak tactical how-to at that point. You start learning mindset. You start getting more complex in working with staff. It’s all about how you see things, and that does not happen by you reading a book, necessarily. Reading is important, but implementing it and having people that care for you that help you curate along this journey, that’s how you make this thing go faster. You have got to go through the bumps and bruises, but it’s better than to slaughter.

It’s the languishing. It brings us back to languish. It all came full circle there.

We always bring it back right to the beginning. It’s getting unstuck.

We spent plenty of time there hashing it out. Thanks for your time, Jamey. It was awesome having you and having a discussion like this.

I appreciate that for sure and you having me. Can I do a quick plug on a quiz I created?

Yes. I was going to say, if people want to get in touch with you or what are you promoting, please do so.

If you are reading this and you are feeling stuck in your business and you want to go to the proverbial next level. Maybe you are treating more than you want to or maybe you are like, “I want to make some money doing this and stop being someone that should be working for the little sisters of the poor. I want to provide for my family.”

I created a quiz. You can go to PracticeFreedomU.com. It’s right there. Take the quiz. It’s the first step in getting the answers and help that you need. In order to get that, we need to know information about where you are right now. It’s a quiz. It takes five minutes called the PT Practice Quiz , and it’s the first step in helping you get unstuck and helping you start moving your business to where you want it to be.

Can people reach out to you specifically through your website?

Yeah. You can reach out to me at Jamey@PracticeFreedomU.com. Feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to talk to people and see what we can do to help.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you, Nathan.

A graduate of The University of Maryland Physical Therapy School, Jamey specialized in orthopedics and manual therapy. He was the sole owner of a multi-clinic practice for more than 15 years.

Jamey’s passions are basketball, tennis, golfing, and reading. He and his wife, Colleen, and their 2 kids live in Rockville, Maryland.

The post What To Do When You’re “Stuck” With Jamey Schrier, PT Of Practice Freedom U appeared first on Physical Therapy Owners Club.