Reality Episode With Avi Zinn, PT – The Benefits Of Annual Strategic Planning

Avi Zinn , the owner of Druid Hills Physical Therapy , did an Annual Strategic Planning Session with Nathan Shields in early 2022. He developed a clear Purpose, Values, and Top 5 Priorities for the upcoming year. Although visit numbers aren’t where Avi expected, Avi has seen significant improvement in the foundation of his business – clinic director development, front desk program with policies in place, and marketing strategy with the help of a marketing assistant over the past eight months. Now he’s ready to grow and expand in a way that will be stable with staffing capable of stepping up. In this episode, he shares what he’s done to get there and how it benefits from annual strategic planning. Tune in to this episode to grow and expand with Avi Zinn!

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I’ve got my returning guest. We do a reality episode with him every so often. We’ve been tracking his progress as a relatively new PT owner over the past couple of years. Avi Zinn has been part of the reality episodes that I’ve done. Thanks for coming back, Avi.

Thank you. It’s good to be back.

You’re how many years into business ownership now?

We are five years in 2022 from the end of 2017.

We started touching base about two years or so into it. You made some amazing progress from being in the clinic treating to now being out of the clinic treating and seeing significant growth over the last few years. An opportunity that I had with Avi was in February 2022, being in Atlanta. Avi owns Druid Hills PT in Atlanta. In February 2022, I met up with him. One of his leaders in training was to do an annual strategic planning session. It was a 6 to a 7-hour session where we sat in person to talk about where he wanted to go over the course of the next twelve months and what his top priorities would be to focus his business and hit the most important things that he needed to accomplish in order to set himself up for further growth.

We did that in February 2022, and we haven’t really talked much since. I left you up to your own devices and with a strategic plan to follow over the course of the next year. Let’s start there. That was back in February 2022 and it takes us almost close to where we last visited with you on the show. Tell us about your 2022 and how that annual strategic planning session fits into what’s happened over the course of 2021.

It’s been an interesting 2022. When you came in February 2022, where we were coming off of a great year. 2021 for our company was our best year. We had doubled in size compared to 2020 or 2019. Those years were the same cause of the pandemic. Going into ‘22, things were pretty strong and then bringing you in. It was cool and exciting to start focusing on some of these priorities to set aside what the priorities are and coming up with a plan is how we’re going to achieve and set goals for those. Liz was in training. She joined the strategy session with us. One of the priorities that we had set was to develop the management team for the company.

Since then, she has now officially been promoted to clinical director. That has been amazing for the company, but for me as well for a lot of reasons. One) Being that I was still in this mode of doing everything, all these roles weren’t exactly set. Once she became the director, it almost immediately took all these things off my plate because that was now her role. She was in charge. I would get the report from her and I didn’t have to like spend all day trying to figure out where we were. It took 10 hours a week of stuff to a 45-minute meeting with her where she just held me in on everything that had happened.

That’s one of the priorities that we set up. We had five. One of them was developing a leadership team. This is something that is common, I wouldn’t say necessarily an issue for owners, but to transfer, delegate and trust someone to take over some of those leadership roles and responsibilities, comes down to they don’t know exactly what they’re going to turn over, what that training process looked like and how transitioning that mantle of responsibility over to another person looks like. First of all, when you say she was in training, you delegate or designated, you’re going to be trained over this period of time. Did you set aside a certain period of time and, “These are the things I’m going to train you on,” over that period of time? Did you have that laid out?

It probably wasn’t as laid out as it could have been, but when we brought her onto the team, the idea was to eventually become the director. She knew that from when we talked about her joining the team.

We eventually got to a point where if someone was going to be a clinic director, we gave them the title of clinic director in training before we actually gave them the clinic director title. Is that something that you did as well or was it understood everyone knew that she was in training?

We did that exact thing. First, when she was just a PT to learn the staff, the team, the way things go, to get her numbers up and caseload, then we transitioned her into director and training. We had a team meeting. I told everyone, “Liz is the director in training, which means that she is now your direct report.” I’m still above that and working on these things with her, but we made that transition where the team would start going to her for certain things.

Some of these things are coming back to mind from our February 2022 meeting that you had some things, and maybe we worked through a few things of, we need her to start learning this, that, and the other thing. You maybe had a skeleton structure of things that she needed to learn while she was in training and things you needed to train her on and hand over?

As with a lot of the things we’ve talked about in these interviews, a lot of what I learned or know what to do is because I’ve reached out to coaches. When I was going through that process, I asked my coach for some advice and guidance on what to do. Ultimately, what we did was we hired another coach specifically for Liz, and that’s Michelle. It was a great fit because she’s worked with you and will basically as the director. She was training Liz and me on how to set this up. What was cool was that because Will is my coach, I knew that what she was saying to Liz was in line with what I was learning from Will. it worked out well.

The cool thing about Michelle is she was our vice president of operations in our clinics. She was, at that time, in charge of training the leaders and training them up. Now she’s doing the same thing for other owners. That’s cool to hear that she was working with you. I didn’t know that, but for her, for her to speak to, to, for her to train your directors and training is a huge benefit too. I’m sure you appreciated the third party doing the training on your behalf, so it wasn’t all coming from you.

There’s something about when you have that authority. Essentially, if you’re up further up the organization and training someone below you, it’s almost like there is a little bit of a lack of authenticity. Whereas if there’s a third party that comes in, they can be a little bit more honestly open. You know what I’m talking about. Is that something that you felt was a benefit?

It certainly was a benefit to have a third party for what you’re saying, also for the fact that I had never done this before.

You didn’t have to do it.

That’s why in a lot of ways, what you’re saying resonates in having in the same way that Liz is the director and there’s like this layer between me and then the team general. There’s this layer between me directly saying things to the team and it goes through Liz. It just comes across from her like she’s part of the team. I don’t know if it’s exactly the same thing as what you’re saying from Michelle or I have someone who’s training Liz and it’s not coming directly from me. It does help out with some of that.

How long was she the director in training?

It was intended to be three months. It may have taken 4 or 5 based on how we needed to iron things out.

I love pointing this out to somebody because most owners, myself included, would be like, “You’re the director in training now.” there’s no process to it. There’s no timeframe. Who’s to say if that person can even lead other people? The beauty of having that, I might call it a buffer of being the clinic director and trainer training gives you the ability to delegate some responsibilities and see how they do with it. Have some people on the team go to her for certain issues and she sees how she handles them.

If it doesn’t work out, 1) She never became a clinic director. 2) You never had to give her the salary increase that comes with being a clinic director. It gives you and that director in the training trial period, “Let’s work on this together. If it works out, great. If not, great. Let’s move on together.” You’re happy now because there’s so much now that’s off of your plate. It’s rather her reporting statistics and issues up to you in a weekly meeting and maybe occasionally during the week, but it’s much more of a report in a reporting process instead of you having to go and look for things.

It allowed me to then focus on some of these other priorities that we are setting and trying to do to grow and develop the business.

Another thing I want to ask you about this clinic director thing that I get asked quite a bit by clients is how you set up her schedule and what are your production expectations from a clinic director. Treating 40 hours a week and then I’d asked her to do the supervisor work on top of that is not going to work out too well, and there’s going to be burnout and upset. How have you scheduled her to set up?

She does not have a full load, but sew a caseload, and we’ve set aside admin time. We are working with our coach. We’ve come up with the equation of, I think, we did vote maybe a half hour per FTE or provider for her to do to have some time to do stuff for the front desk. I’m working with the front desk, and then we have a meeting. She has a meeting with her coach, and then we have set a time set aside some time for her to work on some internal marketing stuff. She has about 6 days and 7 hours of admin time to work, not to work on stuff other than treating.

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That sounds about in line with what we did with our clinic directors. They had a full Tuesday afternoon. That might’ve been gone into the morning on some weeks if they had other meetings to attend. About 34 to 35 hours a week of patient care and the other 5 or 6 with the admin. Whether that’s coaching or interim, I love to know that you have been promoting some internal marketing. That’s amazing. That sounds about right 34 or 35 hours a week of production.

I think it’s 34 hours.

If you had a little bit smaller team, maybe that’s 36 and it’s 4 hours, but for people who are listening, how many, how many people are, is she managing three other providers plus the front desk person? I love the formula, ½-hour per FTE, 1 hour with you and with her coach, and then a meeting probably with the front desk to oversee that. That comes out to about 5 or 6 hours each week. Congratulations, because developing a leadership team is huge. The value of your clinic just went up a little bit more as you’re looking at long-term things if you’re ever looking to sell. Having that leadership in place and not you running things on the day-to-day makes your clinic just that much more valuable in terms of what its value is monetarily, even though you might not see it in your gross revenues. What were some of the other priorities?

We talked about this in a lot of ways in other interviews, but art was to diversify our marketing plan. In the past interviews with you, we’ve talked about how I’ve used Google ads to grow the company. We did not really rely on that many doctors. We’ve, we’ve had a few doctors here and there. Some of them have dried up. Some of them have started their own things. We had a good orthopedist who would always send us and opened up their own PT in their office. They stopped sending us. We’ve relied on Google Ads for the history of the company, but sometimes they don’t work, something happens with Google’s algorithm or sometimes they plateau.

What we had talked about in our strategy meeting was to diversify the marketing plan, to focus on internal marketing, the doctors, past patients and current patients. That’s where we set aside that time for Liz to have some admin time to focus on internal marketing. That’s where that ties into the priority of diversifying our marketing plan to not just rely on getting Google Ads and bringing people in. That’s been a process. We’re still building it out. Some of the things we have focused on so far are starting from just the beginning of gaining agreement, just doing powerful evaluations, making sure we’re getting buy-in.

Another thing we did in the strategy session before we did the priority is we talked about our purpose, vision and values. We’ve been working a lot on that as a team. Now that we have some of these values and we can tie what we do to those values. If we talk about accountability or teamwork as a value, we can now translate that to when our patients come in to gain agreement.

It’s where we talk to our patients and we get their buy-in by letting them know that this is a team effort and we’re going to hold them accountable like we’re going to hold ourselves accountable. We’ve been focusing a lot on so far with the interim marketing, making sure our patients are buying into their plans of care so that they schedule all their visits. We don’t have to focus on bringing new people in because we already have our patients. We got to get them to get to their visit.

I love how you took not just your values, which I’m big on developing your purpose, values, living that, expressing it and talking about it with your team. I love how you took that a step further and used those values in your evaluations with the patients. If you were to say, “One of our values here at our clinic is accountability and teamwork, and that means you as a patient. Now we’re going to hold you accountable and we’re going to work together as a team to accomplish a goal.” That’s awesome.

When we all come together as a team to create those values together, it comes naturally or more authentically from the providers when they say that to the patients because they’ve already agreed that is their value. It’s not like I’m saying, “That is your value.” We’ve all said together, “These are our values.” When they say it, they’re thinking, “Those are my values. That’s why I’m saying that to our patients because I believe that accountability is my value.” It’s very natural and authentic. I think it works.

You mentioned that things have been not bad but a little bit slow. Have you noticed, however, an improvement in patient compliance metrics, whether that’s a frequency per week, arrival rates or something like that, because of your insulin marketing efforts?

2021 was a great year. 2022 started off good when you were here in February. March 2022 was the biggest month that we’ve ever had in terms of visits. The last three months after that weren’t slow. It was just flat. Our numbers were the same as they were in 2021.

2022 and 2021 summers were about the same.

We had anticipated growth, so we were overstaffed. It felt like we were slow, but we weren’t slower. We just hadn’t really grown. Since I believe it’s connected that we’ve started this focus on gaining agreement, talking to our patients and holding them accountable, our numbers have been going up. That has a lot to do with it. We’re doing a good job of making sure people come to all their visits, scheduling them out and making sure they understand why they’re coming in.

It’s silly that you have to explain to a patient why they’re coming to physical therapy when they’re already there. We have to ask them, “Do you want to get better? If you do, which is why you’re here, you have to do all these things that we’re saying, and that’s the only way it’s going to work. You have to get people to understand that’s the only way it’s going to work.”

One of the gaining agreement questions is, “Do you want to get better?” That might throw some patients for a loop.

You would think that everyone would say yes, but you never know.

This also coincides with some insert your internal marketing efforts and holding patients accountable, but you’ve been doing some of Dee Bills’ programs for your front desk training. Has that coincided with some of these numbers and improvements as well?

With Dee Bills, the Front Office Guru, we decided to use her as a consultant. That was part when we didn’t feel like our numbers were good. I look to the first call or the front desk like, “What is happening?” The ads that I’m talking about that aren’t working maybe have to do with us converting them when they call in the first place. I don’t know if that’s exactly it, but certainly, that’s what led me to start talking to Dee and then to bring her on.

We’re still pretty early on in her program, but it is definitely making a difference in how the front desk is talking to new patients or current patients when they call. We are converting more patients, even patients that are out of network or doing self-pay. We are getting more and more of those patients. It has to do with what Dee has taught us on how to approach, talk to, relate and initiate that relationship with our patients.

You’ve focused on internal marketing. I’m assuming your Google Ads are the same. In my mind, there are four buckets. There are current patients and past patients. It seems like Liz is working on some of that. You have your Google Ads, which is marketing to the community. Have you done any more work than working towards marketing physicians and developing those relationships?

It started. We haven’t done too much of it. We’re trying to create some systems. We don’t have doctors who are really sending us patients, but most people that come to our office have some doctor. We get direct access, but then eventually, we’ll get them to a signed plan of care. What we’re starting to do is if we start seeing that we get a lot of folks from the same doctor where we’re making a note of that, but we’re creating a list essentially of the physicians. What we want to do is start reaching out to physicians. If we see a new doctor in our system, do something to reach out to them, maybe drop something off in their office. We haven’t done enough. We’ve reached out to the doctors who we’ve already had relationships with, but we haven’t done any do stuff. We’re working on that.

Is something like a marketing assistant you’ve kicked around or considered recently to do with some of that or no?

I’ve hired a marketing person part-time to do exactly what we’re talking about. We made some flyers and she’s going to go to the doctors’ offices. She does a lot with this local urgent care. She knows this area well because she’s done a lot of marketing for them. She already knows all the places to go. She’s doing local stuff, then also starting to go to some of these doctors, drop off flyers and try to get us the referral list, the preferred providers or whatever.

Unless marketing lights your fire and gets you excited, getting a marketing assistant is a better idea because then it’s going to happen consistently. You can just hold them accountable to getting it done.

Instead of just doing it when numbers are low, like, “I got to do some marketing,” and then the numbers come up and then you stop it because you’re like, “I don’t need to do it anymore.”

One of my best hires was when I finally gave marketing responsibilities over to somebody else. I was like, “Finally.” I hate that stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I had some good relationships with doctors who I considered friends, but I hated going. I never wanted to go into marketing. That was horrible. Tell me a little bit about some of the other priorities that you feel like you’ve been working on or someone you still need to work on.

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One of the priorities was to manage by stats, especially with getting the director in place and I’m getting this director’s report every week, which includes the report from the front desk and the patient care coordinator. She gives her information and her report to Liz then I get all of that. Honestly, I don’t know if we’ve taken it to the next level of managing by stats, but we have an organized way of looking at all of our stats. Now we’re using that to be able to project or at least know ahead of time if we don’t have it dialed in that. We’re using those numbers and making great decisions, but at that point, we now have that foundation and can start doing it. That’s progress, for sure.

Don’t give yourself too little credit there. You’re kind of there. I’m not sure exactly what that vision looks like for you. When you’re managing by stats, you’re simply looking at the stats. If you haven’t done by now, I’m sure Will or Michelle will train you guys, but looking at the previous trends, where is the trend going and how do we respond to that? Do we need to keep doing what we’re doing because things are moving in a positive direction or are things going in a negative direction and we need to change our operating basis? If you’re not doing that, you’re 95% of the way there. That is managing by stats.

I think we are getting those numbers and we are, “We have to do something or we don’t,” but the last part is like, “What do we do?”

It’s a little bit of training, but it’s not a lot there. You get the yellow training on that then you can look at those formulas whenever the trends are going in a different way.

Another way of managing my stats is paying attention to the P&L because what I’m finding out is you can have months of a lot of visits, you look at them cancels or no shows, but ultimately it comes down to the bottom line and maybe you have a month where you don’t bring in as much, but your expenses are low. I’m just throwing out scenarios.

It gives a much better picture of what’s going on in the business instead of thinking you know what’s going on, “Our numbers are up. Our visits are up. We must be doing well.” You look at the P&L like for us and one month we were not as good as I thought, but you look at the changes in what we’re doing. We ramped up our budget for ads and spent a lot more on this. Those are things we had to do, but at least it gives us an explanation of why the numbers are there.

Where did you learn how to read a P&L? Was that something that you knew beforehand?

When I started, I had a weekly or monthly meeting with the bookkeeper and had him show me what to look at now. Now I can go into QuickBooks and run the reports. You can change that compared to the previous year by percentage or by change. I don’t necessarily know all the things, but I can go in there and play around with it to get a good idea of what’s going on.

For that reason, owners should know, “Why do I have a negative profit so far this month?” instead of just looking at the account and what the number says in your savings and checking account. Look at the P&L, why is it negative? “We had three payrolls this month. That explains things. We’re not going to hell quickly. Everything’s okay.” That happens. I’m glad you brought up the P&L thing because there are plenty of owners that have been owners like me who were owners for 8 to 10 years and had never looked at a single P&L. They didn’t know their financials or what the balance sheet was.

When I finally had to ask my CPA, I said, “We’re going to meet monthly for one hour. You’re going to show me what a profit loss statement is and how to read it, and then show me what I need to know from it because I don’t know what I don’t know,” then he would start showing me like you said, “This year compared to the last year, since we’re August 2022 to August to August of 2021 or this month compared to last month, what is the quarterly trend?”

If he’s a good CPA, he’s telling you how much to set aside for quarterly taxes, so you’re not surprised with a tax bill at the end of the year. Looking at that on a regular basis is imperative for an owner. Even if it’s not necessarily directing what you’re doing financially and it should occasionally, you’ll have a budget or a performer that you can build out upon that, but at least it tells you why, “Why are we where we are? Why was there $1,000 in office expenses? This month compared to every other month when it’s $200?”

Looking at your bank account. This happened to me and I still do it. I looked at my bank account and I was like, “I don’t understand it, but we had switched over to an S corp. I started paying myself through payroll. It’s not a huge amount, but now I’m going through payroll. Whereas when I wasn’t an S corp, I was taking distributions. I’m like, “Why is this month so much different?” It’s like, “That’s because I’ve already paid myself. Whereas usually, it was like at the end of the month, where you get distribution.” That’s just the point out that you can’t just look at your bank account. That doesn’t tell you the whole picture.

I’m glad that you brought up the P&L thing in terms of statistics because you don’t usually tie your financials with your statistics and the operating the business, but it is a huge part of it. Any other priorities that you want to point out?

We did manage the management team and marketing plan. One of the other was to focus on recruiting. When I was transitioning Liz into the director, I had a call with my coach. I was trying to figure out like, “Now that I’m making Liz the director. What’s my role??” He laid it out into a few categories of things that like I should be focusing on. One was recruiting, making sure policies and procedures were good and also, and focusing on the purpose and the vision.

When you came in February 2022, we talked a little bit about that. We talked about how I was going to start focusing on recruiting and not just like, “We’re busy, let’s hire someone now,” but more so having people that you’ve already networked with, so when the time comes, you have people that you can be like, “We need to bring someone on. We talked a few months ago it was a good fit. Are you ready to come on?”

I did that. It didn’t end up working out, but I had someone that I had networked with and the timing seemed to work out. It didn’t end up working out in the end, but I could see how that would be great in the future. Whereas it is like, “It is the time. Our numbers are up again. We need to hire. I already have this person who I talked to. Let’s make the call and have him come.” Now, if we get busy, I have to just start the whole ad process over. It might take two months before we find the right fit. Whereas, during that time we’re super busy. We’re losing patients and are not being able to schedule them.

From a bigger picture, some owners, I don’t know if fear is the right word, but a state of unknowing of like, “If I give these responsibilities to a clinic director, what am I going to do? What do I do with my time? There can be a little bit of fear behind that because I’ve been training my whole life to be a physical therapist, and now I’m not doing any therapy.”

The question of your purpose comes up. “What do I do as a CEO of my business with middle management in place?” That’s where you’re looking at bigger picture items, “What is our recruiting program look like? What am my financials look like?” You should be doing that whether you’re a CEO. You’re always the CEO of your own business, but whether you have middle management or not, you should be looking at your financials.

Now that you have a marketing assistant, you should have a marketing strategy. You have some with your internal marketing. Now, this marketing assistant is doing some other things. You have your Google Ads, but it should be a little bit more developed and refined, and there should be marketing systems. Now you have recruiting systems, policy and procedure manuals, and you’re establishing that in place with a Dee Bills’ program, so you don’t have to create it from scratch and make sure that’s implemented.

All of these things are tied to the purpose, values and making sure that’s being laid out. I’m sure now that you have some time, you’re also looking forward. You have the time and mental bandwidth to look forward on your calendar, like, “Such and such is coming up,” whether it’s a holiday, an event, or October. It is National Physical Therapy Month, “What are we going to do as a clinic for National Physical Therapy Month,” instead of remembering on October 4th that, “It’s Physical Therapy Month. What are we going to do?” You have that brain space to look forward on the calendar as well.

That’s something that I realized in December 2021, the holiday season or during the summer. As we went through it, I realized that, “Now, moving forward, I can prepare for it a little bit better.” I realized when you’re not prepared for it, how it can hit, and then it’s too late. If we can prepare ahead, especially for the holiday season in December, knowing that we’re going to have plenty of cancellations or that it’s a season where it’s different. However, we decide we plan for it, but at least we are putting that in some type of we’re thinking about it and we’re trying to do something to either prevent it or to not always prevent things, but to act when we can’t and know ahead of time.

Any other priorities that we didn’t hit on?

The only other priority that we talked about that I didn’t mention yet with its cash-based services to create additional revenue streams. Honestly, I haven’t gotten anywhere with that. We have self-pay patients, but it wasn’t anything else. We were trying to think of maybe adding additional revenue streams like massage or some of these ancillary services, but that’s on the back burner for now.

Is that something that you think you might address? If you’re going to say this is a twelve-month program, is that something you’d consider in the last quarter of 2022 or even in the first of 2023 or do you think of follow-up priorities?

I did put an ad out for a part-time massage therapist. We’ll see what happens with that. I’m not really spending too much time on it, but we were talking about it because I have this space and don’t do anything on the weekends at our office. Why not bring in a massage therapist? It’s extra revenue. We make a deal with them, split or however we decide that. Why not use the space? It’s not the primary focus with all these priorities. That’s why I mentioned it last, but if I spend a little time, we can get something going.

Where do you feel like you’re spending a little bit more of your time in your CEO seat now that you have this clinic director?

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Recruiting because that’s what I’ve had to do, not for PT.

You have a front desk person.

I approached her about the Dee Bills, I wanted to make sure that she knew that this wasn’t like me micro-managing, but it was more of a way that we could get this coaching, consulting and the system’s to make her job easier so that we can help her out. She told me that she was concerned because she had mentioned it, and then she told me that she was planning on moving to North Carolina. She was like, “Are you sure you want to start that program when I’m still here?” We did end up starting the program, but I then had to spend some time trying to get the right person in place for the front desk. In my back office, I had two people that I knew that they were in the Master’s program and there was a part-time job.

I knew that they were going to end up going back to school anyway. It happened all at once. I had to look for all these admin people. It was recruiting. It wasn’t the exact recruiting that I would like to be doing beforehand, but that is what I was spending a lot of time on. Honestly, a lot of it is still working with the director. Now that she’s the director, she’s meeting with the team. She’s coming back to me like, “We’re not clear on the authorization process. Who’s communicating to who or what?” We can come up with a plan, then she can then go ahead and address it. Other than that, marketing is what I’ve been trying to focus on.

Where do you see your next steps? Where might I direct us as towards where do you see your next leader coming from? Where do you see a leadership void that you want to fill in the near future or are you focused on other things now?

The void is that we don’t have an office manager.

When you say office manager, it is someone that oversees more of the front desk.

Front end and back.

Also, some of the more HR-related issues.

Maybe it’s not office manager, but taking away all the things that I still do that are HR-related, payroll or some of the stuff interacting with the billing company. Some of those things that I don’t need to be spending my time doing would be much more useful for me to focus on our vision, values, recruiting and continuing to develop our policies and procedures so that we can continue to grow the business. We’ve made huge gains in growth in terms of our foundation that we have this management team that we’re building this front office with Dee Bills. We’re building these whole policies and procedure manuals for the front. Once that is kind of solidified and maybe we get someone to take some of those HR things off my plate, I will be ready to grow the business to the next level.

Maybe you don’t want to share all your secrets, but are you looking at maybe expanding to a larger place or finding a second location?

Our building was purchased by a new company. They bought our building and they let me know their intentions of knocking down the building. The thing is, I have seven years left on my lease. They came to me and said, “This is our plan. If we need to help you or motivate you to leave, we want to talk to you about that.” I’ve got plenty of time to look, but it’s interesting that you asked that because the question and the answer to that are I have to look for a new location. There’s no reason to wait for seven years. I have to get out.

Especially if they’re going to “incentivize” you to find a new location.

Hopefully, that’ll work out. They are dimensioned like, “We need to help you with the move,” or whatever it is. I’m not going to try to use that against them. If they can help me with the costs for moving and maybe that loss of business or they are a real estate company, maybe they can help me find a place to move it.

Even though the numbers haven’t significantly increased, I think you can look at your company and say you made tremendous strides in 2021 in terms of your growth.

I’m glad that I know that I feel that because if I was just looking at the financials and we’re doing okay, it’s not like what I was thinking it was going to be compared to2021.

Especially since you’ve been accelerating and growth the past few years.

When 2022 was a little less or slower, it would have been easier to get feeling down or sad about what was going on. I know that the work we’re doing with the foundational growth plays at the director and the front office is huge growth. I can feel it. Everyone in the office felt that we were a better team. Our schedule is completely full. It’s great. Now it’s like, “We got to hire someone. I wish I had someone to bring on right now and have I ever spending that time recruiting.” Hopefully, it stays that way and we get back to it growing like we were last year.

You are much more positioned to accept that increased growth, whether there is an expansion or in one way or another, having laid the foundation, you’re prepared to grow, whereas if you hadn’t done some of this, then that growth just exposes a lot of flaws and doesn’t turn out well for most of the team.

That’s what I’ve always felt cautiously or intuitively, that I always wanted to not grow too fast. I’ve always wanted to make sure the foundation was there because I always felt like if we got too big that I wouldn’t be able to handle it if those things weren’t there. I feel that way that we’re much more ready for this growth now that we have some of these foundational things set in place.

Congratulations on your growth. It’s exciting to catch up with you.

I’m glad to do this again. It was awesome having you come to do the Strategy Session. If you don’t mind, I can put a little plugin for you for your readers. Having Nathan come for the Strategy Session was very powerful. It was awesome to think about what needed to be done, how to think about how we’re going to go about doing it, setting those five priorities, and setting mini goals along the way to get them going not. That I’ve made all this progress on all of those things, but I know if I hadn’t had those five priority set, I probably wouldn’t have done a lot of these things that I’ve done. It was super helpful to have you come and do the Strategy Session. It gave me an idea of a blueprint of what to do in 2022.

I’m glad you had a great experience with it because those things can be powerful. It can be hard for small business owners because you have so many things coming at you from different directions. It’s important to know how to filter what is important and what is not out of all of those distractions. Some of them are more urgent than others and may need to be dealt with, but when you have a free moment, you’re like, “What do I focus on now?” Having those five priorities can be easy to take you down the path where you know you’re getting important things done. Thanks for your plug. I appreciate it. It was great working with you. I’m sure we’ll be checking in with you here again. Good luck.

Thank you very much.

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The post Reality Episode With Avi Zinn, PT – The Benefits Of Annual Strategic Planning appeared first on Physical Therapy Owners Club.