Traits Of Rockstar PT Owners – A PT Owners Club FB Live Event With Adam Robin And Nathan Shields

On a recent Physical Therapy Owners Club Facebook Live Event, Nathan Shields and Adam Robin discussed the traits that they see in rockstar PT owners. They talk about what sets them apart from the rest and lends toward their greater success. Based on the years of coaching and business ownership that they have, Nathan and Adam filter out what these fundamental traits are so listeners can know what the successful owners do – and it’s not that hard to mimic.

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Let’s jump into it right away. We don’t want to keep people waiting for the content. We’re talking about the habits of rockstar PT owners. What we found over the years defines a rockstar PT or the PT owner who is unstoppable, who gets things done, meets goals, continually expands, continues to improve, and is successful in the clinic and the results but also financially. What are you seeing? Especially as you’ve been coaching the last couple of years and through your own experience, what are some of the fundamental characteristics, traits, and habits of rockstar PT owners? 

I love this topic. I did jot down a few things. Maybe we get to them all or maybe we don’t. There’s a difference between people who make it and people who don’t. Not everybody makes it. Ninety-nine percent of people in our program typically make more progress than they expect. However, some shoot off the charts. Some are in that middle tier. What I found is it has very little to do with talent. I can tell you that.

What do you mean by talent?

Savviness or your ability to have marketing skills, sales skills, or just skillsets. It’s not a particular skillset that I’ve noticed. I think it really just comes down to habits and routines that are very unique.

Success has very little to do with talent. It is all about savviness, skill sets, and habits.
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I’d even go not to override you at all but to even take a step back because a lot of the rockstar people maybe don’t have the initial habits, but they have the willingness. They have the desire to structure their lives and to make sacrifices to get crap done in order to establish those habits. I look at someone like my partner, Will Humphreys. I think I’ve told him this so I don’t think it’s a surprise to him. I did not hire him because he was a good physical therapist. He’d been out of school for a few years. He’d done home health. He worked a little on outpatient, but I’m not sure. 

He was going into an orthopedic outpatient setting. He didn’t have a lot of experience, but I knew that Will had the personality. People are going to like him. He’s going to attract people and people are going to like him. He also had a desire to get stuff done. It wasn’t just, “I want my own clinic someday because it’d be really nice.” I could tell that he wanted more out of life and he wanted to do more. Willingness is a weak word for it, but an inner desire. I saw it in you immediately when I started coaching you. That was, “I want to rule the world.” 

That’s different from Will. He wasn’t like, “I’m going to have clinics across Arizona.” I knew he had an innate desire. I could see a lot of myself in him. He just had an innate desire to do more, be more, and expand. The clinic owners like you who do really well and and the owners in our group are the ones who you can tell have a drive. It’s not just, “I want my clinic to be better and I want to provide really good physical therapy.” It’s more than that. I can’t really put my finger on that exact word. Maybe it’s grit. I know that’s one of your values in your clinic, but they just had that innate desire to do more, be more, and the status quo wasn’t cool enough. 

I find that everybody has those core priorities in life like, “These are the top three most important things in my life that I’d be willing to die for. I would die for this.” Your, faith, family, and business. There’s something above that like, “I like to work out and exercise and stuff. I like that too.” There’s almost like a fear of failure or hunger and a desire that’s just built inside of you that really can’t be explained all the time. It’s almost like you have to force yourself to stop working. You want it so bad like, “If I got to work on the weekends, I’m going to work on the weekends. If I got to work, I’m going to do whatever it takes to get it done.” 

There is that attitude. I want to talk a little bit about the people that we’re not describing. I’m sure there are people that are reading and thinking, “That’s not me. I’m not hair-on-fire going to work all weekend and sacrificing everything to get this done.” There are people out there who are reading like, “Maybe I’m not the best PT owner if I don’t have that drive or all-consuming desire.” Those people can be amazing physical therapy owners as well, but I’m talking about some people where it comes naturally to do some of the stuff because I see myself as that person as I’m listening to you. 

I’m like, “I didn’t lose all my hair because my hair was on fire for my clinic. I wanted to do more, be more, and expand, but as I started putting some structure into my life,” and this is going back to what you said first, the habits. As I learned more and recognized that what I was doing wasn’t getting me the results that I wanted, even though I couldn’t totally iterate what those results were, even though I couldn’t define exactly and specifically what I wanted, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t getting enough out of my clinic. I wasn’t getting enough of my personal life. 

As I started reading, gaining more knowledge, and putting some of that structure and those habits like you’re talking about into place, my business started doing better. For those people who are reading like, “I’m not a hair-on-fire type of person that’s going to kill it every weekend and sacrifice everything,” if they just not only got the knowledge but start implementing structure and be disciplined enough to take the knowledge that you gained or the information that you receive from a coach and do the work, consider you’re not done with school.  Now that you graduated from the PT program, you need to pay the tuition and do the homework as an owner and as a leader now to learn what it means to be an owner, to become a better leader, and to create something better than you. It takes a little bit of discipline and establishing some of those habits exactly you’re talking about. 

As I hear you talking about that, it helps me get one more clear on the topic. Like you said, not everybody has that natural, internal drive to make things happen. If you’re not that person, no big deal. However, in order to create that, you’re going to have to develop some external pieces in your life to force you to move in that direction. Establish some boundaries on how you behave, how you make decisions, and what you prioritize. Creating a structure and lots and lots of discipline is a way to externally create that environment for you to succeed.

There are some this-is-what-successful-people-do types of actions. I stole it from someone else. You don’t start acting like a million-dollar company once you make $1 million. You start acting like a million-dollar company now so that you can make $1 million. If you have a $200,000 annual revenue mindset, you’re going to make $200,000, and if that’s cool for you, then that’s cool for you. If you have a desire to do more, be more, make more money, provide more for your family, and have some more freedom, you need to start acting differently. You need to start doing more and being more. 

For someone who doesn’t have the innate desire, they just need to recognize that some of the things that come naturally to them need to change. They need direct decisions. They’ve got to delegate to different people where if you don’t have the energy for certain things, you need to delegate those things that take energy from you and give it to someone else because they’ll actually start pushing you and pulling you along. I noticed that with some of my team and maybe you have that in some of your leaders. As I delegated roles and started developing a leadership team, they started pulling me along like, “Come on, Nathan. We can do more.” That’s the beauty of a team. Act in a different way, even if you don’t have the innate desire.

You mentioned earlier like do the work. I wrote down before this talk like, “Show up, make the time, and do the work.” If you establish it as important, get it done. There’s no like, “I’m going to get it done if.” There’s no if. It’s just, “I’m going to get it done unless it comes before my faith and my family, but all else aside, I’m getting that sucker done. I’m going to build out that KPI dashboard. I’m going to freaking create that email campaign. I’m going to spend hours and hours trying to recruit if I need to. Whatever I say I’m going to get done, I’m getting it done.” 

That’s part of this time because, here in a couple of weeks, people are going to have New Year’s resolutions. They’re essentially making promises to themselves that they’re not going to keep. Part of what you’re talking about is saying, “I promised myself to do these things for the benefit of my clinic,” but it’s really easy to let yourself down and break a promise to yourself. That’s why I think it is having one-on-one personal coaching or even a mastermind that holds you accountable. Not all masterminds are good at accountability. They ra-ra each other kind of thing. 

Do something that provides accountability that says, “You promised yourself and me, your coach, that you were going to do these things for the benefit of your company. Are you going to get them done?” This time, it’s good to have this kind of conversation to remind people it’s more than just putting yourself out there and saying, “I want to set these goals, set those off to the side, and let them collect dust on the shelf.” Where’s that accountability piece? If you’re not good at keeping promises to yourself, I’m one of those people, then you need to put some structure in place. 

The reason I thought about that is because you said, “I’ve got to do this. I’m going to spend the time to do,” blank. For me, I have to put it on my calendar. I look at tomorrow’s calendar the night before and I’m like, “That’s right. I’ve got to do that. If it doesn’t work for me, then I’ll change the time and move it around, you name it, but I’m going to put that action item on my calendar, even if it’s on a Saturday or Sunday so that I know it’s there and I don’t 1) Forget about it, 2) I block out the time to get that thing done.” That helps out a ton. 

There are a lot of ways to develop habits. Write it down. Share your habit with an accountability partner. Maybe you have a spouse or a team member and saying like, “I’m going to commit to this and I give you permission to hold me accountable.” Those are all great things. The thing is you start small and get some wins. Stack some wins. You do it over and over and then you eventually start to prove to yourself. You start to identify like, “I am a disciplined person. I say what I’m going to do and I do what I’m going to say.” You start to develop that mindset of like, “If I say I have to do it.” That’s part of it. 

Part of being that owner is to look forward. This is an experience that I’ve had. I’m creating this course to help PT owners increase reimbursements or revenues. It’s a profits program. I need to create these videos for the training. I would say 70% done with the videos, the training, and putting it on Thinkific. I got the designer. He’s working on all the resources and stuff like that. This last module is a little bit more involved. It takes a little bit more explanation, you name it, and I’ve just been dragging my feet. I’m doing it for a month or maybe more. I’m going out of town. I’m going to be going out of town for a few weeks and I want to get it done before I leave town. 

I bring that up simply because I knew there was a deadline. This can be similar to having that coach and the upcoming one-on-one call like, “I need to get this stuff done before this.” I just told myself. “I need to do this. I need to complete all this stuff within the next week.” Having that deadline was in my head every day. It has been. I’m not completely done, but I’m probably 80% to 90% there. That helps me get things done by just looking ahead. “I want to have it done by a certain time. I’m making promises to people that I’m going to have this product out to them by a certain time. I need to hire.” 

As we’re looking forward, you don’t have time to do as a PT owner if you’re treating all the time and it gets forgotten. It is to look forward on the calendar at what’s coming up. It can be so valuable and so helpful if you take the time in the space to look forward on the calendar. We had our group call and we talked about, “What do you guys are going to do to minimize those same cancellations at the beginning of the year when the deductibles go to zero again?” 

I think one person said that they were talking to their patients now about the potential for holidays coming up and canceling or deductibles going to zero out of the 10, 12, or whatever. Looking forward, that is your job. You’re standing at the helm of the ship looking forward and no one else is doing it. You’re the owner. A habit of a really good owner is someone who looks forward on the calendar, “What needs to get done? What’s coming up? Where are the rocks showing up?” 

Christina in our group mentioned, “Medicare reimbursements are going down in 2024. How are we going to combat the declining reimbursement rates with Medicare?” It wasn’t just Christy thinking to herself, “What am I going to do about it?” No, she brought it forward to the team. This affects us all. Those are some of the rockstar leadership qualities and I’m not trying to tell myself. I put myself up as an example of what deadlines and looking forward can do to move you forward and take action. True leaders really look forward. You do the same thing. Come November every year, what do you guys do for your marketing? 

We do the Use It or Lose It campaign. 

Exactly. You do that every year. It’s going to go out every year. When you get to that level of leadership where you have programs in place, now you’re putting them on the calendar. Now you’re talking about Jim Collins’ Good To Great pushing the flywheel. The initial pushing of the flywheel is hard. It takes effort and you’re grinding and grinding, but as you keep going, it goes a little bit faster and faster and it starts spinning. All of a sudden, the momentum starts pushing itself and it just takes a little bit of push after a while to keep it going. 

Now, for most owners, as they’re reading, it’s a grind and it’s pushing through. It’s setting things up such that you can stand at the helm and look forward, taking the time away from patient care to look at the calendar, sitting down with your leadership team at the beginning of the month and saying, “What’s coming up this month? What’s coming up next month that we need to market for, plan for, birthdays that are coming up, and holidays that we need to adjust for?” you name it. I think leaders who set themselves up such that they have that kind of time to look forward make huge strides in their company. 

I’m thinking about Sam Jackson now. He’s killing it. The guy is crushing it. One of the things he’s done is he stepped out of treatment. 

How long has he been an owner? 

Not even a year. He stepped out. He’s only treating two and a half days a week now. The guy has so much time to create, to be proactive, to get out ahead of those things, to identify priorities, hold himself accountable, to learn, and actually do the things that are important that are moving the needle in the business. Systems, policy, marketing plan, everything that an owner should do. Stepping out of treatment is so critical. I have that written down. It is stepping out and being proactive about the things that you’re trying to create your business. 

A lot of times, there’s this problem or a fire in the business erupts, “Here we are in the middle of the fire. Let’s put it out real quick and then let’s just keep going.” The answer to that is, “No. Why did this fire happen? Why did that happen?” You’re trying to look back and find the point in time at which the mistake occurred so that way you can be more proactive about it in the future.  That takes a different type of mindset. It’s a different part of your brain. You can’t do that while you’re treating patients, answering emails, and answering phone calls. You need some quiet time to sit down and think. Zoom out a little bit so you can solve those problems, but once you do that over and over, the fires don’t come up anymore.

I love that you brought up that it takes a different part of your brain because it was so hard for me to come off the floor right into my desk in my office and start working on business stuff. The wheels just got all gunked up and stuck. It’s like a frozen engine for me at least. It’s a completely different mindset. It’s a shift. When I tell people, “You need at least a half day to work on your business,” you do. 

It’s really hard if that half-day is immediately related to patient care. It’s got to be after some kind of decompression like lunch or whatnot, or even starting the day in a business mindset and then going to patient care, that would probably be better. I don’t know if you recognize the same thing, but it’s taxing. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to get your mindset in a different space. It takes a lot of energy to simply make that mental transition. If people can spend a full day or start their day working on the business, I think that’s even better. 

I always recommend setting that deep work time. It’s the cognitively intense boring work that you know you need to be doing that you’re not doing. That deep work time, most people would recommend that be earlier in the day and earlier in the week because that’s when your energy levels are at their highest as opposed to Monday morning compared to Friday evening. It’s a whole different energy level at that point. We want them early in the day and early in the week. That’s the time you work on your business. 

What you’re talking about there, creating habits, you take that structure and put it in your admin time. You do need to create habits. Tell me. What do you do so that you’re not guided and dictated by your emails? 

There are a few things that you can do, but we have a section in our training called Time and Attention Mastery. That’s how important I think it is. It’s so important. It really comes back to designing your ideal workplace. Be the designer. Write down. I bet you now if I ask anybody like, “What would be the most ideal place to work?” it would be like, “It is if my emails were off and my phone was on silent in the other room, and if I was in my office alone and there were no people interrupting me.” 

Let’s do that. Let’s create that. Take your phone. Put it on silent. Put it in the other room. Design your ideal scene, create your environment, and then be disciplined enough to say no because what happens is we’re so used to giving our time away. We give our time and attention away. We just give it away to the first urgent thing that comes up. Inadvertently, we create dependent relationships. People are dependent on you because they just come to you with all their problems. When you start to say no and you start putting boundaries on things like emails, phone calls, text messages, and questions from your team, people are going to be like, “What’s going on?” 

We inadvertently create dependent relationships because we cannot say no. People become dependent on you because they just come to you with all their problems.
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You used to be available all the time. 

It starts to, number one, getting clear. Your time and your self-worth are valuable enough to where you need to have uninterrupted time. There are probably only two things in the world that would be a good reason for you to break that rule. That would be faith or family. Anything else that’s not in a dire emergency, I’ll talk to you after my deep work time. It comes down to developing those habits. 

It definitely takes some discipline, whether you have that innate ability to have all the energy in the world to work on your business or you don’t. You can’t get away from the fact that you have to stay disciplined. 

Discipline equals freedom. I feel like that’s a book. 

If it’s not, it’s going to be. It’s the guys who are just disciplined and working smart. Discipline doesn’t mean taking that admin time. The admin time in and of itself isn’t what’s important. During your admin time, if you are cutting checks, catching up on your patient paperwork, or maybe fixing a piece of equipment during your admin time, that’s not admin time. That’s not what we’re talking about. You not only need to be disciplined in setting aside your time, but you also need to be very specific and prioritize what you’re doing during that time. That’s a constant question going through my head every day, “What is the most important thing I need to be doing?” 

That’s the most important question any CEO should ask. That’s it. Every single day, week, or month, at your cadence, you define the priority, you predefine the priority, and then you create boundaries around your time and attention to put all of your energy, motivation, and resources towards whatever priority you set. You do it week after week. That’s it. I don’t know about you, but that’s how you make progress. That’s it. “What is the priority?” is the ultimate question.

If you haven’t done some pre-work, then that answer is going to change a lot, and it shouldn’t. What I mean by pre-work is if you establish some annual goals and priorities, those are the goals and priorities for the rest of the year in spite of everything else. If you’re floating and day-to-day asking that question to yourself, you could fool yourself into thinking that answering these emails is the most important thing you could be doing when it really is establishing or building out the job description for my front desk because they do whatever they want whenever they want and I don’t know how to control them.  I don’t know. It could be something like that. That’s a lot more important. Until you have a relatively solid policy and procedure manual, an employee handbook, and job descriptions, I’ve done enough annual strategy planning sessions to know that usually lands number 1 or 2 every year if it’s not already built out.

It is to beef up our policy. 

Yes, we need to build out our programs, policies, procedures, systems, job descriptions, you name it because it’s hard to give someone a position and help them feel clearly defined in their role if they don’t have something written that you can reference or hold them accountable to. If you don’t have those, that’s way up there and that’s the crap work. It’s not fun. It’s a grind. Make it piecemeal. It’s the one most important thing, but you don’t have to spend five hours every night doing it. You just commit to doing one job description a week. 

Within a few weeks, you probably covered all the job descriptions. That’s a huge part of it right there. Asking that question, you could get fooled into thinking that some things that are urgent are most important. You might think that they’re urgent but they’re not important. You want to stay in the important range and not be dictated by urgency, which is typically reactionary. You want to set up your systems and policies such that you aren’t living in the urgent realm and the reactionary realm but working on the important stuff. 

You did hit on learning about policy and procedure. You learned about some urgent versus important. There are some principles in there that you’re alluding to. You have to learn those things. It’s not when you turn eighteen and then you, all of a sudden, learn what policy and procedures are and you know what those things are. You have to learn those things. I wrote on my sheet, study. Read. You’ve got to learn. You’ve got to become a master of your craft. 

Always be studying. Find a podcast that you love. Find a book that you love. Find a mentor that you can leverage. Hire a coach. Read a book. Let’s say you want to build out a KPI dashboard. Play with it. Get involved with it. Put some numbers in there. Create some scenarios, “What if my clinic did this? If this happened, how could I improve it?” and engulf yourself in the material and know it inside, outside, upside down, and backward because the people who know their stuff are the ones who can make really good decisions and stay in that important zone a lot more often. You’ll have a leg up on your competition. You make a ton of progress.

People who know their stuff are the ones who can make good decisions and stay successful.
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You’re going back to one of the old mottos of my podcast. That was step out, reach out, and network. We talked about getting away from patient care, sending aside admin time, and stepping out of the technical aspect of PT. Reaching out is getting the knowledge. Reaching out, partially a big portion of that is getting some coaching or consulting, but it’s also, like you said, listening to podcasts and reading books. I love the quote, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Find the books. I mentioned them on the podcast every so often. The third part of that motto is network. 

If you don’t know which books to read, then you tap into your network. If you don’t know what KPIs are most important or what benchmarks are most important, tap into your network. Your network could be listening to a podcast just like a bunch of other PT owners do. That network could also be a Facebook group of PT owners like we have. If you’re not part of the Physical Therapy Owners Club Facebook group, join it. 

You could join the peer-to-peer with APTA PPS. They have a peer-to-peer network every year that starts up and you can be in a group with PT owners and share, learn, etc. That’s what you’re talking about, learning and constantly reading. There are those people who constantly read but never implement. Hopefully, you’re not one of those. I just did an episode on the podcast with Steve Edwards. He’s been a long-time friend and coaching client. I highlighted him because he sent me an email about things that he had done because of podcast episodes that I had. I was like, “I wonder how many listeners out there are making significant changes in their clinics after listening to episodes and not just gaining knowledge and doing nothing with it.” That’s not wise. 

That comes back to the discipline. 

That’s what a rockstar PT owner does. They take the knowledge and then implement it. They don’t have to take everything out of my podcast and implement it that week and do the same thing the next week when the episode comes in. For example, Steve Edwards, what really inspired him was an episode that I did with Steve and it’s called like the five-star experience or something like that. I’m sorry, Steve, if you’re reading, but I don’t remember the name of the book. He got the book and then started implementing aspects of the book in his clinic. It transformed the patient experience such as the arrival rate went up and the plan of care completion went up. 

That’s what I’m talking about. You don’t have to do everything. Take aspects of what you’re learning, especially as you’re reading Traction . If you’re going through the first hundred pages of Traction by Gino Wickman and don’t have your purpose, values, and the beginnings of an org chart in place, then you’re wasting your time reading the book. That’s fundamental business stuff. There is some of that where people can gain a lot of learning without getting anywhere. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about making sure that that learning is led to action. 

Jim Rohn is an old-school personal development guy. He said one thing that really hit me. He said, “Work on yourself more than you work on your job.” It’s like, “You got to be learning. You got to be reading. You got to be studying. You got to grow yourself. You got to grow your understanding and your perspective,” and then you can take the knowledge, awareness, and perspective and insert it into your system of discipline that you’ve created, like showing up, doing the work, making the time, keeping the promises, and embracing accountability. When you do that, the only other side is the results. It’s fulfillment. You are manifesting what you want to create. Developing those habits is huge. 

Show up, do the work, keep your promises, and embrace accountability. Do all that and you will find great results on the other side.
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Unfortunately, my default when I lay down in bed is to pull up my phone. 

Me too. That’s me. 

That’s the constant fight. Pick up the book or pick up the phone. I would be better served and I’m sure Huberman has gone over the studies and whatnot of the blue light that you shouldn’t be watching before you fall asleep and how it affects you. Whereas reading the book, you’re eventually going to fall asleep because your eyes just get tired. It would be better to read the book before you go to bed than pick up the phone and stream. There’s plenty of time. How many minutes do you spend streaming before you fall asleep and it would be better served reading?

Get an audiobook. There are all kinds of ways. Go for a walk and kick on an audiobook ten minutes a day. It’ll change your life. I’m sitting here thinking about PT owner A who’s crushing life and PT owner B who’s struggling. The only difference is PT owner A has just done more work. They’ve done more of the boring work. 

They’re willing to make more decisions. 

It’s not a talent gap typically. It’s very similar skillsets and similar IQs. This guy is dialed in with his discipline and is committed to learning, growing, and implementing anything. He’s accumulated more body of uninterrupted deep work. 

Do you find some of the owners that are “struggling” or meddling aren’t making decisions? 

Not to a fault of their own. We’re in our own way. You’ve developed a habit of the way that you approach problems and it’s no longer serving you. I’m very guilty of it. I’ll get on calls with potential clients or work with clients and I want to make no mistake. If you ever work with me, I’m not doing the work for you. You’re doing the work, not me. It’s very easy to think like, “I’ve got this coach who’s done it already. I’m just going to show it to the call and just let him do all the deep work and just pull the questions.” 

That doesn’t serve you. You only make progress whenever you make the best decision you possibly can, calculate the decision, and make the decision. If you fail, who cares? You get back up, you learn, and you keep going. The ones that struggle do procrastinate. They’re trying to find a sense of certainty in their decision that doesn’t exist. They’re recalculating and calculating again, asking the same question but in a different way. It sounds like you’re really clear like you just need to take action.

It’s almost like they want to find some reason to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.

It’s because it’s comfortable. 

Yes, they don’t want to get out of their comfort zone. 

It’s predictable. “If I just work harder and try harder, then I did that before and I created a clinic, now if I try double harder, then I’ll have two clinics.” No. It’s a whole different skillset. It takes a massive amount of discomfort and change to take risks and embrace uncertainty. One of the things that I wrote down is to be uncomfortable. You’re going to have to make decisions and you’re going to have to trust your gut. You’re going to trust your coach. You’re just going to have to pull the trigger and go. You’re going to have some sleepless nights and you’re going to come out the other night away and you’re going to learn a lot from that. Embrace discomfort, that’s where the growth happens. 

Being comfortable with uncomfortability. 

Be uncomfortable. Get in there and start swinging. Let’s go. 

This is what we talked about. Implement, take risks, and be comfortable with being uncomfortable and with making decisions without all the data. I did a disservice to one of my coaching clients because we spent three months on coaching calls talking about hiring another PT. We couldn’t go anywhere because his fear was just there like, “I don’t see how I’m going to make money with another PT on board,” and all the things that could benefit from bringing on a PT, shuffling things around, and opening up more time and space for him. I had to come back quite often like, “What do you want?” If you’re happy with treating part-time and your current financial situation and you’re comfortable there, it’s really hard to move someone off the comfortable financial situation. That’s the first line in Good to Great. Good is the enemy of great. If things are good, it’s really nice to stay fat and happy. 

It never stops. 

Taking risks and being comfortable with uncomfortability is hard for me. My wife loves change. She’d move every 2 or 3 years if it were up to her just to see amazing places in the world and experience other homes and different places and stuff like that. I’m just like, “We’re really comfortable here.” She’s the one who pushed me into PT ownership, to begin with. Otherwise, I was pretty happy with the salaried position with benefits. That’s the beauty of having that yin and yang, but it’s necessary. I wouldn’t be here without a lot of that. 

It’s an avoidable component of growth, fear and discomfort. It’s the part that everybody hates the most. It’s like a muscle, your risk muscle. The first time, it’s like, “I got to spend $200 a month for somebody to host my website. I can’t afford it.” Yes, you can, and then it’s like, “I got to hire a PT for $10,000 a month,” or whatever it is. It then is like, “I got to spend $30,000?” The numbers just keep growing and growing. Eventually, it gets to the point where you start to prove to yourself like, “I can pull this off. I’m calculated. I’m disciplined. I’m surrounding myself with some people who are smart. I got my network. I’m reading my books. I don’t have all the answers, but I feel good about this. Let’s roll.” 

I love that you made the analogy to a muscle because that’s something that I’ve learned over time. Now as I see something, I want to do this and I don’t know how to do it and I’m uncomfortable. I’m really comfortable now looking for guidance in terms of the coach. That’s been there, done that, and it’s willing to teach me. A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have paid the money for a coach or I won’t do that thing. I’ve done it enough now that I’ve exercised that muscle enough and I have enough faith where I’m like, “Someone’s been there and done that. Someone’s teaching people how to do it. I’ll join the group. I’ll join the mastermind and figure out a way to get it done.” 

It makes that decision and path much more easy for me. It is a muscle that I’ve exercised enough that I’m willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on coaching and consulting to get the results that I want because I’ve done it enough. I like that you made that analogy because, for those people who are relatively comfortable but know they want to do more, there are people out there who have been there and done that that will teach you. 

There are coaches like ours. There are other coaches out there for physical therapy owners who will teach you what it takes. It’s a fear of the unknown. It’s a fear that I’m going to lose everything or sacrifice everything just to do this one-off thing. A lot of it is fear-based. In our industry, there’s a lot of scarcity mindset because of the thin profit margins understandably, but there are people who are succeeding and flourishing in spite of those situations. 

As I heard you talk, I thought about my experience with working with coaches and whatnot. It’s almost to the point now where it almost seems irresponsible because they’ll tell me something and I’ll just do it. I won’t even think about it anymore because I trust that process so much and it helps. The quicker I can go from instruction to implementation, the faster I can grow. You got to trust it. 

We spend a lot of time on it. Were there any habits or traits that you think we missed? There’s plenty out there. 

I enjoy this topic, but we pretty much hit all the ones that I thought of. The only other one that I wrote down was to make the investment, which we hit on with the risk like spending the money. If you’re a PT owner, let’s say you’re at 30 to 40 visits a week and you’ve got a front desk, that’s probably what a lot of people are at. The mistake that we make, guilty as charged here, is that we think we’ve got something to lose at that point. Somewhere in our mind, we convinced ourselves that what we have at this point is a lot to lose, and it’s like, “No, we got to start thinking way bigger,” and helping them realize like, “We’re just getting this party started here.” We’ve got to double down on this sucker until we get to where our passive income exceeds what we’re currently making. We got to think way more. We got to think 10X. That helps me with the investment piece. 

It’s interesting when you talk about investments. I think it was Jamey Schrier who pointed this out. Physical therapists spent close probably close to $100,000 and, on average, a lot more than $150,000 to get their Physical Therapy education with no guarantee of passing the boards. No guarantee of finding a job that could justify their investment, yet they did it. It’s weird that they’ll express fear towards an investment when they’ve already done that. They already did it once by getting a Physical Therapy education that promised them nothing. No promises, no refunds.

You can’t blame the system. When you’re going to the PT school, you’re investing in the system. It’s all on you. You’re investing in yourself. You got to pull it off. It’s the fear of, “Can I really pull this off?” 

That’s true. Not to reiterate this too much, but one book that was influential for me this 2023 was 10x Is Easier Than 2X . It goes back to the thought where, “If I just keep doing a lot of the same things twice as hard, then I’ll get two times the results.” That’s not how it goes. The premise of the book is that if your actions were actions of someone who’s doing ten times what you’re currently doing, like you’re making $200,000 a year now, if you took on the actions and made the decisions of a $2 million a year revenue company, then you would easily get past $400,000 in annual revenue a lot faster than if you just focused on the $400,000 in revenue. 

It’s because $400,000 is close enough that you just do a lot of the same stuff over and over again and a little bit harder. You’ll gradually inch your way up to $400,000, but you make the investment into, “I’m going to 10X this thing.” The questions to get there and the decisions that you have to make to get the $2 million are completely different and will transform your business. I like your comments about mindset and investment because it takes a completely different mindset and a different amount of investment to make significant transformational changes. 

That hits the nail on the head. 

This is going to be one of my first shows of the new year. We’ll have to get back together and talk about some topics that are related to what owners need to think about in the new year and how they need to come to a fresh new start. If people want to get a hold of us, like I said before, get on the group page on Facebook. Reach out to Adam or me on LinkedIn and check out PTOClub.com where you can find out a little bit about us, find the episodes, and also schedule an appointment to book a call with us and get a free consultation and see where you’re at your business. If we can help, great. If not, we’ll direct you where you need to go. Anything else you want to add after that, Adam? 

That’s it, buddy. Sounds good. I enjoyed it. 

Thanks for joining. This is awesome. Have a great Christmas. 

You too. 

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