Do You Know What Stage Of Business You Are In? – FB Live With Adam Robin And Will Humphreys Of Multiplexit

Today’s conversation brings so many insights for PTs to delve into. Will Humphreys of Multiplexit and In The Black Financial Therapy sits down on an FB Live Event with Adam Robin to discuss the various stages of business ownership. Every business owner can relate to Will’s hierarchy of business as he lays it out, and each level creates new opportunities and growth, leading to the next stage in their progression. Getting to the pinnacle of that hierarchy is laborious but worth it, eventually leading to freedom and fulfillment at higher and higher levels. Find out more about the Leadership Hierarchy when you join Will Humphreys and Adam Robin in this episode.

https://intheblackbilling.com/

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I was looking through my list of people that I thought were cool. I came across your name. I was like, “Let me think about Will.” I’ve been in this coaching space for some time and reaching out to people who are either practice owners or used to be practice owners or have been networking with people like D Bill, who’s a practice owner and also has the guru thing on the side. You’ve been a practice owner. You’ve also been a part of a big merger and then a sale. You were a partner and you’ve got a billing company.

You’re doing all kinds of cool stuff. I thought it would be cool to talk a little bit about that journey and specifically some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way. I was curious to hear if you can see some of the same types of patterns in the PP space or the Private Practice owner space. Do you see some of the same types of things on the billing side and the Healthcare Business Academy ? Let’s start there. Tell me a little bit about your journey and some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way.

You said a lot of cool things that I want to highlight. There are different stages. Our common coach and great friend, Scott Fritz, says that it’s not the age of the individual but the stage of the business. It doesn’t matter our age. What matters is the stage of business. The PT journey is very easy can look like if we’re not aware of becoming a new grad, a tenured PT who knows what they’re doing, a director, an owner, or an owner exiting and starting businesses that are industry-facing but usually starting in the consultation space or coaching space.

That’s one potential journey. I have friends and you probably do too who have stayed in that PT owner space. We have common people in our network like Blaine Steinbeck, who’s on his 60th location. They stay in that space, expand, and become eventually this multi-state business. It’s interesting you mentioned that because there are unique lessons to each stage from my experience and some commonalities that you see into seeing it again as someone who goes more business-to-business or B2B, where I work with PT owners. I was seeing some of these lessons manifest, not just for them but for me in a different light.

The stage of business is interesting. As we progress through, it’s a journey that I don’t even think we’re aware of is there. We do have more than that as an option but most PT owners may not even realize that that’s an option to go that route, learn, earn, and return. I love that phrase. We learn, earn, and return. That’s the same thing as mentioning those stages of the business. I’m happy to talk about that journey in any way you’d like.

I like the idea that you mentioned stages of business. We built our coaching program specifically around helping owners get clear on what stage of business they’re on. We’ve built a little mini window of that to help people understand that. I’m curious. Can you talk a little bit about those stages? How do you define those stages? What type of information do you use to define those stages of business?

What we’ve created in my world is something called the leadership hierarchy and there are five key stages. That first stage on the entrepreneurial leadership hierarchy is the physical therapist who comes in and starts to hustle. They’re in that world of learning their skillset at age one. I’ve got a graph and everything if you want me to pull it up. I don’t know if it’s relative to what we’re doing but that graph was adapted from other graphs outside of PT that are similar in nature.

The physical therapy stage there is trying to get over themselves. They don’t think that they have the skills that they have. They’re trying to overcome the feeling that they’re not as good as the degree says they are but they learn their skills and think that’s all they’re ever going to want to be. The next level comes in, which is the director stage. That director stage is where they start taking on actual leadership concepts.

Given every step in this hierarchy is leadership, what’s the number one job of any leader? It is to create more leaders. This is the first step into that domain. When you’re a director, we start looking at it from a place of building other people. In our industry, because there’s such little support, oftentimes what happens is the directors become a default dump. All the stuff that the owner’s doing that they can’t keep up with they end up giving to their director.

The number one job of any leader is to create more leaders.
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There’s such a difference between, “Take this from me,” versus what you were talking about with Nathan, which is giving plenty of space for people to grow, scale, and figure out their problems. From that second stage of directorship, then we get into the first stage of the higher pyramid, which is the ownership level. The first stage is self-employment. We go open to practice and own our job. We think that’s all we want.

Here’s the commonality in all these stages, Adam. We think that’s all we want. I’m a PT and I’m treating. All I want to do is treat my patients. You then become a director and it’s like, “No, I want to help my clinic go right but that’s all I want. I want to treat my patients and be a part of a great team.” We become entrepreneurs. “All I want is to own my job. I want to make more than $80,000 a year. My dream is to make $150,000, see the same number of patients, and have a small team work with me.”

The problem is that there are gaps between all these things. It’s in solving those gaps that we rise to the next level. Once we get to that next level above that self-employment stage, then we become a manager. I don’t like the word manager but that describes that stage because we stop begging for new patients. We’re starting to get some flow in on their own. We’re not chasing profits. We’re starting to get them a little bit more consistently.

Instead of being self-employed, we start looking at hiring directors underneath us and learning that stage. We then get to that stage of true leadership where we are effortless. It’s not that we don’t have problems but we have a real team underneath us. We have leaders upon leaders who are growing things for us. The gap between those top two stages often exists simply because people are pretty comfortable when they have a director and a couple of locations.

It becomes that comment from the book Good to Great . Good is the enemy of great. We’re comfortable at that stage but true greatness comes from building systems and people at a level where the owner can leave for a month every year and nothing goes wrong. If anything, it keeps getting better. As you are coaching people up that hierarchy of leadership, we do things similarly in my world in different ways. It’s something that I wish PT owners were aware of. My journey was painful because I didn’t have as much support as for example, you and Nathan are able to offer.

I learned a lot from hearing you talk about that. The thing that hit me was one lesson that you learned. We think that’s all we want. It also ties in a little bit to good as the enemy of great because they’re both the same thing. You think this is what you want and then when you get there, it’s like, “I’m done.” It takes this new mindset push or ceiling for you to break through to realize there’s a bigger vision for yourself. You haven’t quite explored it yet. That’s amazing.

I like the stages of business too. I experienced a lot of that as a business owner. We talk about stage one a lot. Stage one is that hustle phase where you’re hustling up new patients and getting referrals in the door. We call it the get busy stage. Stage two is like, “Congratulations. You’re busy. Get organized with policy, procedure, and systems.” You might have a team of 3 to 4 at that point. Stage three is like, “Now that you’re organized, you get to build your team.” It’s leadership, recruiting, and clinical director. Stage four is like, “We get to scale, open up a billing company, start a coaching company, or open up another location.” That’s how we define it.

It’s cool having gone through those stages. I still am learning a ton on the clinic ownership side but I’m starting all over on the business coaching side. I get to relive all of that. It’s cool going through that experience again and not feeling that sense of overwhelm and understanding, “I’m in stage 1 or 2.” Did you feel that had that same experience when you started In the Black ?

Absolutely. Every single time I started something new, I went in there with a false sense of confidence. In the end, it wasn’t false but I’m one of those where I was like, “If I could figure out how to run four locations and have them be almost autonomous, I can start a billing company with the right partner like Katie Archibald.” When we started it, I had all sorts of very restful evenings because I was like, “No, this is great.” I’m pouring in hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it started with my money.

You start growing up in those hierarchies again. What I love about the hierarchies, Adam, is that nothing’s more humbling than starting over in a new hierarchy vein. The difference is that when you’ve gone through one to a point where you’ve been able to experience leadership, it must be clear. People who get to that level five leadership are not better. Level five is a term from Jim Collins from Good to Great about that special type of leader.

That person is always more of a reflection of the coaching that they’ve received and the team that they were able to build, which is mostly due to them but not exclusively by any means. When we start over, we don’t have the team and we need a different coach. That’s the thing I’ve always had. I always have a coach. They’re always in the industry. I want to work with them when I’m building in the industry but later on, I diversify outside the industry.

A person is always more of a reflection of the coaching they've received and the team they built.
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It was so humbling starting In the Black. I remember Katie and I had been in business for a year. I was like, “What should our first quarter theme for next year be?” She’s like, “How about we turn a profit?” I’m like, “How about our company’s name is In the Black, which is a financial term for being profitable. How about our theme is In the Black Is In the Black?” Our team laughed when they said that.

We were on track for what we wanted to hit numerically but there is nothing more humbling than watching your bank account drop. Also, having people you’re hiring and mishiring and be like, “I brought that person on and they were not a good fit.” You have to fire them and all the head trash that goes with that. The sleepless nights start kicking back in. I’d still rather do that than get stuck. I love the idea that our potential is unlimited. I don’t think we realize as leaders our potential and power. The older I get, that’s probably one thing I am learning. It’s unlimited.

One of the things that I’m committed to is seeing and hearing you so that you can learn to see and hear yourself and realize the potential that you do have. In our industry, people are starving for new patients and they’re looking to outsource like, “I need more referrals. I need this amazing billing company or this amazing solution to automate my practice.” It’s like, “No. You are the answer to everything you want.” I’m helping people realize that. Once they start to see that and develop that vision, that’s when it becomes fun.

I agree. It’s that traction of them believing. One thing that’s interesting to note about you though is I never felt like you needed help with that particular area. I’ve always wanted to ask you, “Who was it?” Was it organic for you to already have that knowledge? Not that you were anything other than humble but there was this awareness of like, “I can do these things.” That’s part of the reason I thought you were so advanced when we met. Was there someone in your previous world who showed that to you or is that something that you developed by learning? If so, how did you do it?

I’m not a super-talented person. I’m a normal guy. The thing that drives me is mostly internal. I have this fear of regret. The thing that I don’t want is to be on my deathbed, have to look at my son, and be like, “I didn’t take the shot or go for it.” For whatever reason, I can’t live with that. I put myself in uncomfortable situations. I’d see them sink or swim. I’m a fighter. I may give the impression that I’ve got it figured out or something but I don’t. I’m swinging for the fences like everybody else is.

You said the thing I was looking for, which is you have this inherent clarity of potential negative outcomes that you don’t want to have. That’s the only healthy type of fear there is. It’s the fear of not banking enough on ourselves or taking our shot. Oftentimes in physical therapy, we’re so afraid to hire the coach or do the thing that’s going to put us in deep water because we’re already drowning. Oftentimes, that’s the only way through. It’s only in swimming forward in that way and taking those risks. I’ve never hired a coach and I regret it. Every one of us taught me something.

Even the bad ones. I feel the same way. I get on these calls with people who call and these practice owners who are amazing and super smart. They’re like, “We talk a little bit about what it’s like to work together and we get to the end. We talk about the price. To be transparent, we are not the most expensive place. We’re right there in the middle.” If I ask the question, “Money aside, is this something you want?” They always say, “Yes, I would love to do this.” It’s not a decision if you want this. It’s a decision like, “Do you feel like you can pull it off?” That’s what we have to help people overcome. You’re betting on yourself.

The first time Nathan and I spent money on a coach, it was $30,000. It was a full program that incorporated a year. It wasn’t a six-month gig. t was a full series of programs and stuff that we were committed to. We had social proof. We knew people and talked to people who’d been through that program. They were who we wanted to be and we were still like, “Are we going to do this?”

I remember Nathan sitting across from me going, “What else are we going to do? You got to get there.” We’re afraid of spending that money. That was a lot of money. It’s not like we were going to go bankrupt by spending that money. I’ve known people who’ve gotten loans to pay for coaches because they understand what I didn’t back then. That investment we make in ourselves is the single quintessential expression of self-belief.

It’s risky. “What if I have a bad coach?” Do more research. Once you talk to people who are having great results, your choice is simple. Do you want to be stuck? We’re leaving the millions of dollars of what could be made, all the freedom we could have, all the trips and the months off, and all the things I’ve been fortunate enough to experience. I didn’t realize at the time that was the decision that I could be screwing up by not doing it. That to me has always been the biggest challenge. You might think, “He’s always had it down.”

If I can share a quick story, Adam, because you talk about my early stages, the first coach I ever hired was before Nathan and I’s $30,000 thing. This was 3 or 4 years into us being together. At one point, I purchased my location from Nathan’s. I was a sole proprietor. I had two locations. I was drowning and was about to walk away from the business. This was in 2007. My wife, beautifully, was like, “I got your back.” She’s my ride-or-die. Heather says, “I’ll support you in any way. I won’t give you any resistance but before you give up, why don’t you go join this networking group called Entrepreneurs’ Organization?” I was like, “Sure.”

I looked at it and it was $2,500 for a monthly coaching call in a group, which I was like, “That’s insane.”. It wasn’t one-on-one coaching. They have these quarterly events that they kick-off. You’re there for eight hours. I’m like, “How am I going to take eight hours of a work week, go sit in a room, and learn about business while all those patient visits aren’t getting seen and all those employees are hanging by a thread because I’m keeping them together. What’s going to happen?”

I didn’t go for the year. I coped. In the second year, I was like, “That’s it. I’m walking away.” She goes, “Show up this time and then quit. At the end of 2008, after you’ve done a year of this Accelerator Group and Entrepreneurs’ Organization, you can leave. Know that you’ve tried everything you can.” I showed up for the first day. This guy, Scott Fritz, was hosting the event. He said, “Who are you?”

He was talking to me and I was like, “My name’s Will. I was signed up last year but I didn’t come.” He goes, “Everybody, look at this guy. He was so busy that he didn’t have time to get help.” Everyone started laughing but it didn’t make me feel bad. It was like a “You’re in the club and I’m arousing” kind of experience. That changed everything, Adam. The day that I paid and showed up was when everything shifted for me.

Scott Fritz, that guy who was the facilitator, who had sold his business in 2007 for an unbelievable amount of money, and a non-physical therapist, he and I are partners in one of my four companies. He’s a minority partner and I get to see him every week. He’s an Angel investor in 50 other companies. Who was that physical therapist who was going to walk away from his practice? I am a living testament that if I can do it, anyone can. It takes paying the money, showing up, and realizing, “You said that if we start over, be patient.” What’s the worst option? Is it to give up?

I want to shout out to Heather for being such an amazing leader. We talked about developing other leaders. I will go a step further. The biggest expression of leadership is helping people commit to what they want. Heather helped you realize more about what you wanted and enrolled you to take action toward what you wanted. You didn’t take action because you were focused on what you didn’t want. Patients aren’t getting seen. This isn’t happening. All these negatives.

We get all this fear junk. It’s being brave enough to say that’s all a lie, being bold enough to go after what you want, believing in yourself, and taking action. When you can get alignment like that, I have the same story. I worked with Nathan. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I was young and dumb. I was working my fingers to the bone. Nathan pulled me out of the gutter and got me out of patient care. I started making more money and spending more time with my family. We’re partners. It’s the same story. That’s amazing.

Those people like Heather in my world, and your wife, or the ride-or-dies, that’s where I feel the most blast. Without her, it’s a different direction and outcome. That’s why I love the phrase, “It’s a stage, not the age.” Not everyone has maybe some of those elements in place or has maybe an organic, natural ability to fear the thing that we should be fearing, which is untapped potential, or a Heather but we all have something.

Anyone reading this show is in that realm of powerful leaders looking to tap into what they can sense inside. It may be motivated by, “I’m drowning and I want help.” I’ve had the privilege of working with 93 different companies. One commonality I’ve realized is that you can see people in their late 70s who never listened to a podcast and never made any steps. If you’re reading and you’re like, “This isn’t me,” you are exactly us. We are you no matter what stage you’re in. We might be out of that stage in one setting but we’re back in it in another. Each time, it’s another reflection of humility and realizing we’re nothing without our teams and all that. I love it.

I have a few things that I’m thinking about in the stages of business. They come with avatars. Each stage has this ownership avatar that lives inside of it. They have the overwhelmed guy who’s in stage two and can’t figure out his systems. The woman who opened their practice is full of fear in stage one, trying to drum up some referrals.

There’s the frustrated owner in stage three who’s trying to develop their leadership team and can’t learn to let go. Every stage comes with its discomfort. Our ability to learn a little bit more about ourselves and overcome that to experience a new possibility is what helps us grow. We talked about a lot but I want to hear more bullet point. What are 1 or 3 biggest lessons that you’ve had to learn over your entrepreneur career?

Technically, it’s stage three but level one of self-employment. The biggest lesson is that there are plenty of problems that new patients don’t solve. The erroneous thought I had was if I’m busier and I see more patients, I’ll be successful. That is hands down the biggest lesson I learned at that stage. That mindset is what kept me thinking that I’m self-employed and not a business owner.

You know the distinction for the clarity of the audience. Self-employment is when we exchange our time for money. According to Rich Dad Poor Dad , a true business owner exchanges people and processes for money. That mindset, “I am a PT. The more new patients I see, the better it is,” was limiting. Being an owner who has a director, the next stage that was clear to me was no one could ever do it better than me.

Self-employment is when we exchange our time for money.
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Don’t let it go apart.

All those cookies and pies at the self-employment stage were validated. I hired people. My biggest seeming frustration was, why can’t I find people who are as good as I am?

These people won’t listen.

They don’t care enough, they’re selfish, and all these judgments that aren’t true, which aren’t necessarily false but they’re not the whole truth at least.

That’s why leadership is the key to that stage. You’ve got to learn leadership and recruiting. I feel like recruiting at that stage is hard too because recruiting is leadership.

You’ve heard me say it. Recruiting is, in my mind, the quintessential expression of leadership. If a leader’s number one job is to create more leaders, recruiting is that. It’s a matter of finding, developing, and retaining talent. It’s that second level of being like, “No one is as good as me.” I remember that shift in my mind of being like, “I’m not the practice but I’m still pretty much the best one here. No one knows how to treat other directors.” It was that self-involvement that was not healthy.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned at the top of that leadership hierarchy was when Nathan was in Alaska and he’s expanding a new concept for us for locations. We have a leadership team running it. I’m not treating patients or even managing directors. All I’m doing is 10 to 15 hours a week of recruiting, which is my energy bucket filler, and overseeing the leadership team. I would be with them and their executive council.

The thing that I learned at that level and the number one lesson is how profitability unlocks possibility and how opposite we’re taught in school. You should never want profits. You should be humble. I say this all the time. I want every physical therapist to say that they want to make as much money as possible. I want physical therapists to say, “I want to be rich.”

It’s like the guy who owns Facebook, Zuckerberg. I don’t love him personally but he has a couple of cool quotes. One of them is, “We don’t do Facebook to make money. We make money to do Facebook.” When we get to that level of leadership, we understand the relationship between quality care, changing the industry, impacting patients, and being profitable. It’s not one in lieu of the other. It’s one causes the other.

When we can facilitate an expansion of those points through developing better people and recruiting and providing better quality care, the money starts to pour in, which allows us to find better people, incentivize them, and write even better quality care, which pours in more money. The freedom that I was able to experience was unreal so much so that the worried person that I was like, “I’ve got to be busy,” that’s when it was like, “Maybe we should sell our company.”

I feel like I’ve won the game so let’s go start a new game. There were plenty of times I regretted it but I’m so grateful I did. Those are the main lessons or bullet points. I gave you one per stage but there are many. There are operational lessons and leadership lessons. It’s powerful to see how profitability does unlock our ability to even imagine what’s possible professionally and personally in every domain of life.

I want to quickly touch on those. We talked about how new patients don’t solve problems. All problems can’t be solved. How do you get over that? How do you do that? I haven’t quite figured this out yet. Nathan and I were talking about this same thing. We’re leaning so heavily on our ability to hustle. We know how to hustle, build units, get that patient in, and get that plan of care going. That skillset equals success.

Part of that is getting new patients in the door. We have leaned on that for years. We stay on that roller coaster and oftentimes get owners who are stuck in that stage of business. We have to ask them, “Stop with everything you think you know. Do this other thing, where it seems like a super big waste of time and super boring. You’re going to hate it.” The only way to get there is through pain. I don’t know how else to get through that.

It’s beautiful how you articulated that, Adam. It’s that concept we’ve heard over and over again. “Change doesn’t happen until the pain of change is lesser than not changing.” I said that backwards but it’s the same message. We have to feel so much pain by not changing the way we think that we eventually are forced to change how we think. To answer your question, it’s different for everybody but it all boils down to the same concept, which is education.

When people can understand what problems aren’t solved by having an endless amount of new patients, it does start to shift things. The obvious answer is staffing. Every PT I’ve ever met is looking for a PT. That’s why my recruiting company does well because people are desperate. They’ll even talk to someone they’ve never met. That’s the tip of the iceberg of what’s wrong in thinking about new patients. The biggest thing I’ve grown is true marketing and understanding that world. We don’t do marketing in physical therapy. We think we do.

We have a website and do SEO. That’s about it.

When we own companies and go to doctor’s offices, that’s sales but we don’t use the word sales because of all the connotations. Marketing truly is putting a message out to inform and educate. Therapists who understand the concept that new patients don’t solve all problems are the ones who are dropping UnitedHealthcare and have the courage to look at their patient mix and say, “I’m not going to work with this insurance.”

The uneducated bleeding heart, which all of us, says, “I want to help as many people as we can.” Here’s what we have to see. When we treat someone who has insurance that undermines the value of our profession, we are hurting future patients with that insurance on a large level. When we take a stand for the reimbursement that qualifies us to be able to be in business, we are able to help and expand that.

That doesn’t mean we’d close our doors. We see two options. I take you and I in healthcare or I don’t. I have to worry about my doctors not sending it to me and patients or my employees thinking we’re all about the money. No. We educate people in a third option and say, “For every referral, we’ll tell the doctors we don’t take them but we’ll tell them why. We’ll have another option for them to go to Joe Schmo down the street, who’s not able to learn these lessons and willing to sacrifice his family time and his soul to help someone for $30 an hour.”

We’ll have other options for them. There’ll always be those other options. Remember, we can help everybody but we can only serve so many people. The savvy business owner who gets over that idea understands that they’re going to serve their avatar and ideal market, and that includes reimbursement. That’s one factor in addition to needing to hire more PTs because I’m too busy treating at a loss, all these UnitedHealthcare patients. It all boils down to education. How we see it depends on how willing to be coachable and learn and how good the coaches are. At the end of the day, all of us need that to get there. Once we get there, we never go back.

Be coachable and learn to get there. Once we get there, we never go back.
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The pain in that stage is you’re physically and mentally exhausted, burned out, overwhelmed, and stressed. You’re losing your hair. That’s what the pain feels like. We’re in stage two where we’re having a hard time letting go. The pain’s different there. For me, the pain was when people started quitting because I was a micromanager. I was a jerk and a poor leader. There’s only so many times people can quit. You got to look at yourself and be like, “There’s no way seven people are all jerks. You’re the only cool guy.” Eventually, you’re going to have to look in the mirror and be like, “They’re quitting because of you.” Has that been your experience?

A hundred percent. I remember telling my wife that it was a good day because everyone showed up. That was my standard. To me, this next stage is the most personally invalidating. When we’re getting out of that level where we are director owners, we’re still pretty much self-employed but director owners. We have a team and maybe another director underneath us.

I remember having a team meeting. I came back into the office for something and saw that they were having a staff meeting behind the team meeting to talk about how stupid my information was in the team meeting. I remember crying all the way home from work that day because it was like being told by the cool kids, “You’re an idiot.” I didn’t think of my employees as the cool kids necessarily but that was the feeling of complete isolation. No one gets me. I’m the biggest loser. I’m a horrible business owner.

It comes from releasing that pride. That was the pain threshold for me. I didn’t care at all how much I thought I was good as a therapist. All I cared about was being somewhere at work that was safe and how I built that safe environment. That began my journey into learning how to recruit. You’re a powerful recruiter. I remember when we were working together.

You took some concepts and within weeks, you did what other people took months to figure out because you were already there. The pain is I want to build a team that might become a family. How do I build leaders underneath them? I no longer did a comparison of me versus them. It was, what are their strengths and weaknesses? How can I serve them? That’s how we eventually got to a place that I’ll never forget.

About a year before I exited, I came in to do a town hall. We had 50 employees. I walked in. They were hugging each other and talking, “It’s so good to see you.” I walk in and someone goes, “Will, how’s it going?” They saw Michelle Bambenek, who at the time was functioning as a CEO. They’re like, “Michelle,” and they hug. I was like this welcoming team member. They weren’t rude to me but I went from being hated to being seen as an amazing leader to being seen as, “He’s a great guy. He’s a part of the company. We’re not sure what he does because he’s not here.”

That was hard. That was so weird to have all this need for me and attention, negative or positive, to then go to being in the background. From that place, that’s where I was able to do some things I never dreamed were possible. It was no longer about me or the cookies back when I was at PT. It’s an interesting journey for sure. It was painful but very worth it.

We’re getting into the mid-part of Q1. We’ve been talking to our clients. At the beginning of January 2024, we talked about annual strategic planning and setting goals. Our clients are killing it. They’re hitting records and smoking it. They’re hiring people into their team. Many of them are at this stage of business where they’ve never been.

They’ve got the most amount of visits or people on their team that they’ve ever been. They’re starting to get pushback from their team and try to figure out how to support and challenge. If you don’t mind real quick, what’s your spill on that? How do you be that leader who empowers and gives people space but also has a standard? How do you know when to move and not?

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s very little original content that I create. I am big on reflection of everything I’ve ever learned. I love it.

I steal all that stuff.

I’m going to butcher this quote a little bit. “What a team helps create, a team will support.” Talking about that yearly strategic planning piece, it took a few years. The first time we implemented things was without our team being present. It was very much like, “We support you. We believe that’s a good thing and so on.” This is when things took off. We started doing quarterly events.

Our system, for the last 2 or 3 years of being in business, was that there was an executive council comprising me, Michelle Bambenek, and two others. It was over-marketing and some ops. We would get together on a Thursday and spend all day Thursday off-site at a hotel in a conference room. We were taking Verne Harnish’s book, Scaling Up . We had read that book. They have a literal checklist of what a business needs to have to be elite.

Research it. It’s a very proven stuff. We looked through the checklist and identified where we were the weakest in that checklist. We would spend all day talking about the biggest. We looked at our stats for the previous quarter and everything that was there. We’d come up with some general ideas of what we were missing. That’s Thursday.

On Thursday night, all the directors from the different locations would come in. It was about ten people. We’d have this big kickoff dinner every single time at the same Italian restaurant. All day Friday, we were all together with a facilitator who would help us take what we had taken from Thursday. With all the directors, they would piece out the next quarter’s strategy, which was a direct reflection of the annual thing we did in January 2024.

This was so great because they were the ones creating it. That whole buy-in thing went away because they were solving their problems. I learned that my greatest skill was being authentic as a leader and saying, “I don’t know how but do keep vacation coverage. I don’t. I’m offering four weeks, which we did. None of you can take it because we don’t have coverage in the middle of nowhere Arizona. What do we do? How do we solve that? I have to be honest. I need your help.”

We put them in a space where they could collaborate and create it. I was engaged. It’s not like I had my hands off but I learned that when you have the right people, they create the right solutions. If people are having a hard time buying in, it boils down to each employee 1 of 3 things. Do they know their product? Can they name their product? Knowing and naming is the same thing. Do they know how to get it? Do they want it? There’s a willingness factor.

If all your employees and leaders are matching those things and that’s a check mark yes on those three elements, then it’s a matter of creating space for them We had a facilitator and the book. We had space for them to collaborate and address the big rocks that needed to be moved. When they moved them, the buy-in was immediate.

When you have 50 employees and you have not just the executive council but your director saying, “This is why we’re doing this,” and they’re talking from a place of complete buy-in, no one ever questions it. We’d make a fun theme. After that Friday, we would make a theme. I remember once it was in the jungle. We played the Guns N’ Roses song. Everything was decorated. All the leaders were face-painted with animals.

We’re talking about we’re in the jungle and coming out of it. We’re animals. We can do this. We had a quarterly goal. That goal was attached numerically to a reward if we hit yellow and a super reward if we hit green. At the end of that quarterly event, every employee down to the tech, one thing that they were going to focus on for that quarter, is to help move that initiative forward. That was the golden years of my experience professionally in owning a PT practice.

I was part of that. I watched the culture shift and how people would eliminate C players on their own. A C player couldn’t find a home in our place because they loved the company so much. That was a long answer to say, given a shared common goal and the ability to get the right people on the bus pointing toward that goal, eliminates all of that other stuff.

It’s super powerful. Here are the biggest lessons. 1) New patients don’t solve all the problems. There are some problems that new patients can’t solve. 2) Learn to let go and empower others on your team to make decisions. 3) Profitability unlocks possibility. That’s awesome.

Can I add one more? This is the lesson of all lessons and I want everyone reading to dial in on this. After going through this journey, realized, “Work is a ball made out of rubber and my family is this glass ball I can’t drop.” I dropped that rubber ball so many times. I’ve worn the floor thin. I did that not just as a PT practice owner but as a medical billing owner.

With other companies I have, I’ve come down to this one realization. It goes back to what you said, Adam. I matter. My life matters. It’s not that I’m better or worse but I am enough, worthy, and capable. There are days that I know it. There are days that I hope it’s true. There are even some days I believe it but no matter what day it is, after all this failure, leaning, and learning how to collaborate with great people like you, at the end of the day, my life is important. That is something I hope everyone reading will start to resonate with. At the end of the day, that’s the only lesson that matters.

Amen to that. Will, you’ve got a podcast that you started, In the Black, and Healthcare Business Academy. People want to know how to find you. How can you help them? Tell us a little bit more about that.

I appreciate that. I am launching a podcast. I’m super excited about it. It will be in April 2024 at the latest. It’s called The Willpower Podcast. That’s my way of introducing powerful people like Mr. Adam Robin, who’s one of my first guests. They’re short podcasts. They’re 30 minutes. They’re meant to be every week. I’m also going to be doing a Dial-In Call-In Up episode where people can call in anonymously and ask me anything. I’ll coach them there on the call, whether it’s a 15-minute, 30-minute, or even 1 hour.

That’s the main thing I want people to know about in this episode. I’m going to that podcast. From there, they can learn about the four other companies that I’m associated with. At the end of the day, that might be a great way to stay in and start to hear a little bit more about what we’re doing to help PT owners. We’re huge supporters of you and Nathan. I love what you guys have meant to me. I’m so grateful for the universe putting both of you guys in my path. I’m so excited to see what you guys are building.

Thank you. Let’s do this again. I love it. Tell Heather I said hi.

Will do.

Peace out.

Adam has been committed and driven to make a positive impact in the world of physical rehabilitation. Adam, with the help and guidance of mentors, founded Southern Physical Therapy Clinic, Inc. in 2019 and has since developed a passion for leadership.

He continues to work closely with business consultants to continue to grow Southern to be everything that it can. During his spare time, Adam enjoys spending time with his family and friends.

He enjoys challenging himself with an eager desire to continuously learn and grow both personally and professionally. Adam enjoys a commitment to recreational exercise, and nutrition, as well as his hobbies of playing golf and guitar.

Adam is inspired by people who set out to accomplish great things and then develop the discipline and lifestyle to achieve them. Adam focuses on empowering and coaching his team with the primary aim of developing “The Dream Team” that provides the absolute best patient experience possible.

He believes that when you can establish a strong culture of trust you can create an experience for your patients that will truly impact their lives in a positive way.

Teaching entrepreneurs how to maximize their income, profits, and net margin is what I do, but helping them change how they think, reclaim their freedom, and discover what is possible is who I am.

I teach the value of this key phrase: Profitability unlocks possibility.

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