Client Of The Month With Tonya Fuller Of Dynamic Mobility And Balance Center

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Client Of The Month With Tonya Fuller Of Dynamic Mobility And Balance Center

It’s our Client of the Month episode, ex-client of the month. Miss Tonya is here. Tonya is in Colorado. She’s a practice owner. She’s been a practice owner for a few years. In February will be her anniversary. She is the owner of Dynamic Mobility and Balance Center. We’re going to learn about Tonya and what her story is. She’s done some incredible things over the past year and we’re going to try to get inside her brain and put it on a PowerPoint for everybody to steal. How about that? Tonya, how are you?

I’m good. Thanks for having me on.

Have you read the shows?

I have.

Isn’t it crazy, like reading the show for so long and then now you’re on the show?

That seems a little crazy to me for sure.

Tanya's Journey Into Physical Therapy And Neuro

I had these conversations with people. I get on the phone with them like practice owners and a lot of them tell me like, “It’s like I’m having a conversation with the show. It’s like the show is talking back to me,” because they listened to the show so much. It’s cool because many people that we’ve worked with have come from that show. They’ve been reading the show for over a year. They knew they had to do something and kept reading and reading. Finally, they got on a call. I’d love to hear your story. If you don’t mind, just introduce yourself. Tell people who you are and where you’re from. Tell me a little bit about what got you into PT and then into business?

I graduated from PT school back in 2001. I’ve been PT for a long time now. I got into PT school because when I was in undergrad, I was dating a guy. I was lost on what I wanted to do with my life and asked him one day, “How did you know what you want to do?” He said, “I’ve always loved airplanes.” He knew wanted to go into aerospace engineering. He said, “What do you like to do?” I said, “I love to run. I love to go to the gym and play softball.” He said, “You should be a PT.”

I started looking into PT and my grades at the time weren’t great enough to get in. It was super competitive. I got my degree and decided I didn’t want to go to PT school right then. I became a school teacher and it took one year of teaching school for me to realize that was not the career for me. That’s when I decided to start applying to PT schools and luckily, I got in.

I graduated in 2001, worked for three years in skilled nursing and did a little home health. I went into a hospital based outpatient neuro practice primarily because I wanted to do ortho. I thought that would be a good way to get my foot in the door at this hospital system that had an amazing ortho group. My first day at a contract job in the neuro outpatient, I fell in love with neuro. That’s been my world ever since. I was there for almost a decade. They were a non-profit and partnered with a for-profit company, which changed everything.

A lot of people left and I got offered a job in Colorado. That hospital system was in Dallas. I lived there for most of my life and decided to take a chance at this job in Colorado. I moved out here and started working for them. They closed most of their practices two years later. I bounced around to a couple of other places and finally decided that after many years of saying, “I will never open my own practice,” I decided that I would give it a try after talking to a friend of mine who owned a practice. I opened my business in February of 2020.

Great timing.

Weeks before COVID shut the world down.

Isn’t that crazy? We can do a whole show episode on that. I’d like to ask you one clarifying question just because I’m curious. Tell me what was it about neuro that caused you to fall in love with it?

There are no protocols. You have to be creative in your thinking. You are looking at truly function. It’s rewarding when you get somebody who can’t walk after a severe neurological injury and you get them walking again or you get them moving again. I specialize in treating vestibular therapy and having patients who are dizzy for months on end and come in then they’re dizziness is gone. I found it very rewarding for me. I still love doing a lot of athlete work, but ortho is just not my background anymore.

No protocols is like another way of saying there’s no rules. You strike me as a rule breaker. Not a rule follower. You love adventure. You moved all the way from Texas to Colorado. You’re not scared to go on an adventure and we know each other well enough. You’re a go-getter. You’d like to jump in the deep end and start swimming. It seems like that aligns with you well just like the idea of going on a journey with patience, let me put on my creative brain and we’re going to figure this out.

You could have two people with a stroke in the exact same area of the brain and they’ll present completely differently. That’s what was so interesting to me. It’s having to think, what am I going to do with this person? How do I get them better? Diving into those skills and doing everything in your power to get this person the best life they can have.

Overcoming The Fear Of Opening A Practice

You said you had this idea, “I will never own my own company or my own practice.” Why?

Honestly, I didn’t want to deal with insurance and still don’t. I thought it was a lot of work and in all honesty, it is a lot of work but I was scared that probably a failure of that inability to make a living of it. I thought I would be a general therapist my whole life and never specialized, too. Things change as you get this many years into practice.

I can resonate with that fear of failure. Sometimes, it’s just more comfortable but you did not display that during our time working together. I would say that it might be perhaps one of the biggest reasons why and I don’t know if it’s fear of failure but one of the finding characteristics between the owners and our program that do well, that make progress and knows that stagnate is they fear, like are you willing to lean into the fear or not?

All of it is scary. Opening the clinic is scary. Having a look at your numbers are scary, having a hope that the money is there at the end of the month, having a higher people, having to invest, having a whole people accountable, and having a delegate and let people go without micromanaging them. It’s all scary. It’s like all these little wins that add up because that’s the game like, how can I lean into that fear and be like, I’m going to try something different.

I’ll say this, I have a friend who owns a PT practice. I remember going to him and saying, “I think I’m going to do this. What do I do?” He helped me through and I said, “What if it doesn’t work?” He goes well, “What if it doesn’t? What are you going to do?” I was like, “I’ll have to go back to work,” and he’s like, “You’re going to be doing the same thing that you’re doing, so what if it fails? You’re just going to go back to where you are now but what if it doesn’t?”

I think that was the other thing to go to the coaching piece. When I got into coaching, it was that pushed that it’s okay to do this and do that. You’re going to be okay if you hire another therapist. The first time I hired my first PT was just terrifying. I’m not going to have money to pay this poor person salary. What am I going to do? I had a couple of front desk people that I couldn’t afford prior to that, but looking at the difference between a revenue generator and one that’s not, once I took that leap, it was the best thing I did.

Fear of failure is a big one. There is an exercise. The one thing that came to mind is, for me, the mindset shift is always been stopped focusing on like, what if I don’t achieve the outcome. What’s scarier is like, what if you never truly live the life that you want to live? What if you just stay in Cal your whole life? Screw that. I feel like that’s way worse.

At the end of the day, if you had the map it out and if you’re like entering the world and God’s like, “You can choose this life of adventure and you might fail, but you’re going to go all in for what you want or you can choose this life and you’re just going to play it safe and pretend like you don’t want it until we maybe you don’t want it because you want to preserve your comfort. Which one you want to do?” Everybody would choose that one.

We know what we should. That’s why I love the idea of coaching because you know what you should do most of the time but it’s just having that one person who’s on the outside looking in saying like, “No, wait a minute. Remember you chose this. This aligns with your vision.” You should go for it. It’s that. You sell some tools and some clarity around some things and it’s like, “Okay,” and then you take action.

Going into the business side of things. I remember thinking, “I don’t like the way this person does this.” “I don’t like the way this boss is.” “I don’t like the way they do this.” Can I do it better? That pushed me in that realm, too. I don’t know that I could ever go back to working for somebody. It would be hard.

How would you know now when you know too much.

I’ve got that tunnel vision to retirement at this point.

I’m so glad you did it because I feel like the world’s a better place. You’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing and helping these PTs find an amazing career. There’s so many upsides to it. I do want to get back to the business stuff. We mentioned that you’ve been in business. February will be your anniversary. When we met, with our first phone call and I’m remembering back then. I remember you had like a part-time front desk person and you were basically working. You were doing treating full-time. You were working 40 hours a week and there were no other people on your team.

I was treating full-time. I was doing the desk part-time. I was pretty much doing everything.

Tell us about you then. What was the story around the way you view things like what your day-to-day was like? What was your strategy was then or like?

My strategy was just treat, treat, and treat. I knew I needed help and I needed another therapist. I had in my brain that I needed to get a part-time therapist because when you look at your bank account, which is how I spent a lot of my first few years. I was basing all my decisions on the balance in my bank account. When you look at that and you’re like, “I don’t have the money to pay a salary of somebody full-time.” Your brain goes to a totally different place. I was looking for a part-time therapist at that time.

I can remember even trying to find somebody who was PRN, but full-time was never something that I would have considered at that point until we started talking. You said, “Do it.” More or less. You’re not going to regret it and I haven’t. As a matter of fact, I’m doing this one-year annual review and I’ve hired a second PT now and the same situation. I look at my bank account and I think, “Am I going to have enough money to pay this person?” “I know too that another PT is going to bring in more patients. I’m going to have more people that can get on the schedule and their revenue generators, so why wouldn’t you?”

The Mindset Shift: Focusing On Value Creation

This is an important topic. I would say the majority of our audience is smaller practice owners and here’s the mistake we make. It’s the same one you made and it’s the same one I made. It’s the same one Nathan made. It’s that, we think that when it’s just us and a front desk person, we think our job is to make money then we can decide what decisions we make. That’s not the goal. That’s not the goal for a long time.

You’re not supposed to make money when you’re by yourself and you have one front desk person. I don’t want you to make money. I want the business to have the money because you’re not ready to pull the money from the business yet. The job for you in the beginning is to learn. It’s, how do I create way more value? Way more value for my patients, for my team, and my business? How do I turn my business into this operationally sound machine? Work on the thing to bring the value of it up then I make money. That’s the thing, and I very much recommend depending on what your vision is. If your vision is to open ten clinics, you’re not going to make money for the first five.

If your vision is to hire five therapists, you’re not going to make money for the first 2 or 3. It all goes back into the business. You’re going to have a small salary. You’re going to live very comfortably, but you’re not going to Disney World three times a year. I’m hoping that maybe the readers can take that. It’s like, that’s not your money yet. It’s the business.

I think when you’re by yourself, like I was the first two years because it was the middle of COVID. I had money because it was just me. There wasn’t that much expense. There wasn’t very much at all but also, I need that if I took a vacation, I don’t make money. The business doesn’t make money. I know that for every time I needed to take three hours to work on the business, there was no revenue coming into the business. That’s where you start thinking about, “If I had a therapist working here, I could work on the business. They can work in the business and then the business starts to see something.” You’re right, I’m five years coming in and my profits are still very low but it’s changing. My mindset has changed.

The first therapist pays the bills and the second therapist, you start to make some money. You need at least two, to be honest, to be comfortable. You can work 2 or 3 days a week and have a very comfortable lifestyle at that point. It’s just a good point. Being able to create something that makes money for you while you’re not there. You got into coaching.

I did.

You knew you needed some help and then you might hinder on some. What were the top reasons why you feel like you needed, “I know I need some help?”

I’m trained as a clinician. Not as a somebody that knows anything about business. My biggest thing was I need a direction. I needed to understand money and to know how to build it. That was the thing. I didn’t feel like in my own brain, I had any direction on how a business is supposed to work. I was like, “Sure, I’ll do this.” Opened it up and went with it. as I said, I used to live by what my bank account balance was. You can’t make business decisions that way.

That’s why I always think that education is such a big component of any type of coaching program, whether it’s books or online webinars or whatever. It’s an investment back in yourself. You’re deciding that like, “I have to step away and block out some time to dedicate to boring into myself.” That’s the thing that gives you perspective, like, “I can see the lights are turning on. I can see the business a little cleaner. I’m starting to think a little differently about what might be possible for me.”

Education is so important. Once you became oriented, then you can start creating a vision then you can start seeing like, “I can see where I’m going a little bit.” You start having some more clarity and then it’s about like, how do I overcome all the fears and all the insecurities that I have on the way? That’s what the coach helps you with.

There was a lot that coaching helped me with in terms of taking time out of my schedule and spending time doing business work. That was hard sometimes for the staff to understand that, “On Tuesdays, I don’t see patients. You don’t put anybody on my schedule. I’m working on Tuesdays.” That was a hard concept for me to accept in the beginning but then when I started doing it now because I have a new PT starting. Up until this point, my schedule’s been getting more and more full because we’re so busy. I’m upset that I don’t have that time now to get the work done.

That’s when you should start getting nervous. That’s when you should get nervous when you’re running out of time because if you have time, you can make money. You need some time.

I’m tired of like 5:00 AM wake up, on the computer and done at 7:00 at night. I get an hour and a half with my spouse and then I’m too tired to stay awake after 8:39. I’m ready to go to bed. It’s very hard to live that life and I can see where that’s an easy burnout. That’s the road to burn out no doubt.

We lie to ourselves and we think, “If I just keep on working, I’m going to save up some money and I’m going to be ready.” It never happens. I wrote down time versus money. Have you read Dan Martell’s book, Buy Back Your Time?

I have started that book. I have not finished it.

I’m going to give a plug for Dan Martell. It’s transformed the way about time. It’s a fantastic book but it just goes back to there’s never going to be a shortage of problems you have to solve in your business. You’re always going to have a problem. If you didn’t have problems, you wouldn’t be in business because your business is there to solve problems. It’s like, “Yay. We have problems.” You have to decide. What problem do you want to solve?

Do you want to solve the problem of, I have no time, no life, no relationships, no health, no purpose, and no fulfillment? Do you want to solve that problem so that you can just decide, I’m going to solve the problem of, how do I get this freaking clinic busier so I can make some more money? I’d much rather solve that problem and live a life that I love than stick to this thing and like, “I’m going to try to make some money.” It’s the wrong game to play.

You make yourself crazy.

That’s right. It’s this game of like, how do I get more time? How do I create more structure and power more people, create more organization, put the right people in the right place with the right culture so that I free myself up so I can focus on growth?

Delegation.

Building A Strong Team And Delegating Effectively

What happened like, once you started getting some time, your grew. Everybody got their schedule full.

It’s amazing that even when you have time during the day, your time is still being used. You have things to do all the time. It’s just that you’re not having to do them first thing in the morning and at the end of the day. You can get business done during business hours, even though we all work a little bit later and a little bit early.

You can utilize your time better through marketing, networking, and doing those things which is how my business exploded. It was just because of my networking with someone who retired. I got all those referrals sources. I got all of that business and in a month’s time, we gained like 50 visits in a month after she retired and that was awesome. I’m not complaining ever. That’s been very overwhelming to go from being steady and then suddenly now I’ve got 50 new visits and no PT to cover them except me.

Back to solving that problem again. We’ve already solved this problem, though. We already know what we got to do to solve this problem. We’ve already done it once. It’s like, how do I solve it but never have to come back to this again? Now, we solve it just a little better this time and you start creating some layers. Maybe you have a PR and list or a PTA on the side that works part-time that can float because eventually the little bit of extra payroll expense is worth the stability of your time because you could focus on driving revenue which is what you want to be. You’re the revenue doer.

I’ll go back to the coaching and then at the Private Practice Owners Conference and talking about hiring. The one thing that you guys had taught me that I had never thought about was, you should continually higher. Instead of hiring somebody and then that’s it. The job description goes out the door. I’m not going to worry about it until suddenly now I need a new PT or a new therapist. You folks were talking about you should constantly build that network of therapists out there that want to work for you.

When you do need something, then you have this list that you can start going into and trying to find somebody that’s interested in coming in before it gets to the point where we were. Suddenly, now we have 50 visits and no PT. My mind is completely different in looking at hiring in that. I keep this list of people that potentially could be employees at some point.

It’s just relationships. We get stuck in like it’s a transactional thing with employees like, you work for me and I pay you check and you go home but it shouldn’t be that. It should be like we’re colleagues and we support each other. Your interview process doesn’t have to be like, “Tell me what your biggest weakness is.” I’m like that’s old and outdated. It could just be like, “Tonya, what’s up? How are you? Tell me more about you. Let’s just get to know each other.” “What are your goals?” “Do you have kids?” “It’s nice to meet you.” “We should collaborate on some things.” “Let’s be friends.”

If you can get like 30 of those and when it’s time to hire people, you have a network to dive into to be like, “I don’t have to generate a bunch of leads from just a cold audience anymore. I’ve got these warmed up people who already know, like, and trust me, and who know me. I know their goals and what they’re into. There’s a lot of trust built already. So they’re ready to go.” That’s fantastic.

The other thing is, just to give you another thing to think about is, they’re different levels of aggression with recruiting. I need a PT now then I have the I need a PT protocol. If I don’t need a PT now but I do need a few more people on the bench, then maybe the protocol is a little different. Maybe we don’t do as many interviews but we do some phone screens and some Zoom calls, but we don’t do the full onboarding process.

You keep that running on a low level that takes a little bit of time to keep things primed. You hired your PT. Now, we had some issues with Andrew. Not with Andrew specifically, but that was your first time hiring a PT. You had to delegate some patience and you had to teach him some stuff. You had to let go some things. Talk to us about that. What were some of the challenges you had there?

One of the biggest challenges whenever you are cutting back on your schedule is that all the patients are like, “I only want to see you.” I had to I had to literally start going out to doctors who were referring to Tonya Fuller and tell them like, “I need you to refer to my clinic and not refer to me as a person because then everybody’s always asking for me.” That was a challenge in the beginning and getting people. He was a new grad. He’d only been out of school for about six months.

I put that on the website, which if you’re a business owner and you have your team on the website with their graduation dates, a lot of people get bothered by that, too. Its’ like, “I want the one with the most experience.” I took everything about the team off of the website. That was probably the biggest challenge, is people being willing to let go of me as their therapist?

He didn’t know as much as. He still doesn’t know as much as I do in terms of experience and things like that. Ongoing training, being open for questions and sitting down and having these sessions where we talk about a particular diagnosis or particular type of treatment and how would we take care of this? It’s still a lot of work, but it’s worth it in the end. Those were the primary problems in the beginning.

As you grow your company and as you elevate yourself on the org board, it’s fun to experience that transition to, your patients are no longer your primary focus. They’re not your patients anymore. Your patients are your team. Now, you’re like, “What’s Andrew’s plan of care? How do I help him? How do I help him create more value in his life?”

The same energy if you will that you had towards those neuro patients, how you want to transform in our life. You just take that, copy it and you paste it into Andrew then you create a new purpose for people. That’s when you become more of a coach of your team and that’s fun. I feel like more of your time will be spent doing that. Eventually, you’ll have leaders who will do that for you but that’s when you can start seeing that change in Andrew.

He’s been great, I’m telling you. There’s been a big transition in here. It’s been good.

You have filled up your clinic. You’re full and you’re ready to hire another PT. 2025 is coming up. What is your vision for 2025 now? What do you see coming down the pipe for you?

One thing that we are doing is we’re moving to a bigger space. That’s happening probably in February. It’s the same landlord, so we’re just moving into a different space with the same group about 1,000, square feet more. I have this new therapist starting, so that would have two therapists then. I’m hoping that after the first of the year, I’ll have a third therapist come on so that will open more time for me to mark it and build.

In 2025, I’m bringing in cash base options for additional revenue because you can’t build a business on insurance quite frankly. You’re certainly not going to make any revenue. We’re bringing in some different cash-based options into the practice so that we can build that way. It won’t be in 2025, but somewhere down the line, I’d like to get one more practice open. Personally, I don’t want to build bigger than two. Maybe there will be three in my future but I see myself ten years moving out. I got a like a ten-year plan.

You have a vision now and it’s just rewarding to hear where you’ve come and it’s like being by yourself with a part-time to you’re going to have three PTs and a new building. It’s just so awesome all because of you. You just committed to yourself.

It’s still surreal for me to realize where I was and where I am now. There’s so much more growth that can be.

For sure. I also thank you. I know your margins are thin and you’re going to be in a much better financial position once you have that third PT start with you and you get that person full. You’ll be there, especially now that you know how to run a profitable model. The thing is, when you when you scale your business, your cost per visit will scale down because you don’t have to pay two rents. You don’t have to pay two. You’ll have a good base to build off your cash pace stuff.

I did Nathan’s PT process program and I think that also is something that was beneficial for me in terms of looking at the finances and understanding what’s affordable, what’s not, and deciding like where’s the area that I can grow that revenue and things like that. By doing that and getting everybody on board, which is a challenge in and of itself sometimes. You could see some big change.

Advice For Other Practice Owners

I’ve got two more questions. My first question is, I have probably like ten conversations going on my phone of small practice owners who just needs some advice, who want to grow their clinic but not quite ready for coaching or anything, but they need some advice. What is 1 or 2 pieces of advice that you’d give them to get the most out of their practice over the next year?

My number one piece of advice would be, don’t be afraid to take the chance. If it’s something that you’re thinking about, do it. Especially when it comes to hiring. As I said, I was that person that was like, “I can’t afford somebody full-time. I only want parts time and PRN.” It was the best thing I could have done to hire somebody full-time. That would be the one thing I would say and dream big. I’m a visionary. I have in front of me on a whiteboard like what my goals are. I’m the person that doesn’t do so well at doing all the details to get there but be a visionary. Dream big and go for it.



It’s hard to see what’s possible. It’s hard to see it because0020you’ve never been there before. I had a mentor of mine that said, “If you want to start seeing what’s possible, you have to start hanging out with people who have been there,” then you could start to see it. Once they can see it for you and they can speak it and show you like, “It’s right there. Do you see it?” You could start to see it and then you can be ready to go. You’re going to have to take a leap, You can’t see it.

I’m a former long-distance triathlete and I had a coach. I remember him when I did my first IronMan. He asked me what my expected time was and I was like, “I just want to finish.” He’s like, “No, you have a time in mind.” I was like, “No, I just want to finish.” He goes, “No, everybody has a time in mind.” I told him, “I would like to finish in this time,” but him saying that to me pulled over into what I’m doing now in that it is hard to see the future but you have in your head when you start that business an idea of what you want that business to look like. If you take that desire of, “Here’s what I want my business to look like and you put that on the board up in front of you,” like I do my whiteboard.

Write it down even if it’s scary.

It’s right in front of mt desk and you say to yourself, “This is what I’m going to do.” You change that mindset from, “This is what I want to do but,” to, “This is what I’m going to do.”

“This is who I am.”

“This is my goal and I’m going to go for it.”

That’s great advice, by the way. I’m assuming you read a few books. Have you had time?

I’ve at least started a few books.

Tell me one book recommendation even if you haven’t started it. What would be the one book or the one thing that you’ve read in a book that made the biggest impact for you?

Probably Traction. It does break down the running of the business like from the start to finish and how everything should work. I felt that was a good direction book. It helped me start like, “Here’s where the start is. Here’s where your vision is. Here’s the next step from there.”

That sounds great, Adam. I love it.

Have a good one.

Alright, thank you.



Important Links

• Dynamic Mobility and Balance Center
• Buy Back Your Time
• Traction
• Tonya@DynamicMobilityPT.com

About Tonya Fuller