E536 | 3 Huge Hiring Mistakes
Sep 13, 2022Today, we are talking about hiring within our practices. I wanted to discuss some of the mistakes I made as a business owner when hiring and the mistakes I see when others are hiring. Not knowing if you're making the right decision on hiring can be a very frustrating place to be. Enjoy!
- The complexity of admin hire vs staff clinician
- Incentivizing a staff clinician's pay
- Costs associated with staff turnover
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Podcast Transcript
Danny: Hey, I've got a question for you. Do you know if you're tracking the right data, the right metrics, the right key performance indicators in your practice? This is something that's huge for us and really helps us make solid decisions within our business, but the prior software that we're using to run our practice made it really challenging.
To actually get that data out and use it in reports. Since we've switched to PPG everywhere, this has actually become way, way easier for us to be able to have the right data. We have a dashboard of all the things that we actually want to see, the metrics that we want to pull, and it makes our life a lot easier to pull the information that we need to make the right decisions within our business.
So if you're running blind and you're not tracking the right things, or you're having a. Hard time actually pulling everything together. I highly recommend you check out our friends at PT Everywhere and see what they've got going on with their software platform. It's what we use for our practice. It's been a game changer for us.
You can check 'em [email protected]. I think you really like it. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't want to work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?
This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Mate, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.
What's going on guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we are talking about hiring. We're talking about mistakes that we make, mistakes that I've made and mistakes that I see people make in the hiring process when. In particular, they're bringing on a staff clinician, so we'll dive into that real quick, if this is your first time listening to the podcast, welcome.
If you listen on a regular basis, welcome back. My goal of this podcast has always been to share what is happening in real time in the sort of cash and hybrid world. To be able to shorten the learning curve for you and hopefully help you and your practice be successful over the long run. For me, the hiring side of things, especially when you look at hiring a staff clinician, I think is actually probably the most difficult hire.
That someone makes early on maybe ever. Honestly I feel like administrative assistant office manager, whatever you want to consider, your admin. I feel like it's a very, it's a much easier hire because there's not as much complexity with compensation. Their roles are very different than your roles.
You're basically, Empowering that person to do the things that you have been doing, and then they take those things off your plate and you don't necessarily have to, really do those anymore if you get the right person. Those would be things like following up with patients, scheduling, patients reaching out, if you're checking like benefits on anything.
Management of inbox, just day-to-day stuff, answering the phone within an office space. So that, that's typically the first hire that people make. And I definitely recommend that's the first one. That people make over a staff clinician, even though on paper, when you look at it, a office manager, an admin, they are not a revenue producing person, right?
So they're not generating you any money, but what they are doing is saving you time. And that is very valuable and something that you need in the business because the mistake that I see people make is, If they hire, let's say you hire a staff clinician before you bring on an administrative person, then you become the administrative person.
And if that's what you wanna do, if you want to be the office manager and you don't want to be involved in patient care really at all. Maybe that's the right move for you, but most of you want to be involved in patient care and probably should be because it's it's more profitable early on that way.
An administrative or, assistant or an admin office manager they get your time back and they absorb the other staff clinicians as well, the work from those those people. So that's typically the first hire. It's really it's a bit daunting. I've never hired somebody, but it's.
It's less, there's less you can screw up with that one than when you bring on a a staff clinician. So when we look at hiring your first staff clinician, this is a scary step in a lot of ways because most people. Ha they've never hired anybody for their own business. You, maybe you're a clinic director or, some sort of role like that in a supervisor role where you're a part of the hiring process and maybe you are even hiring people, but you're hiring people for someone else's business and you're typically following their processes.
That they have, maybe they have head hunters that are finding people, maybe they have, an in with a school or with new grads in some way. So there's lead flow in a way in terms of new people to interview to, to bring on for these entry level positions. And it's a bit different whenever you start to do it on your own.
And the main issues that I see, there's three that I'm gonna get into but to get to this point, You have to start your business, grow your business, bring someone on already that is in an administrative role, and get to a point where, ultimately you're time poor and you're, you are making good income.
Everything you do is you, so it's not, there's not really a business there just yet, but you're getting there because as soon as you bring somebody else on, That can start to fulfill within the business with you. Now you're one step closer to having a a business that is not a lifestyle business, but it's an actual, like true business.
And the test for us for that is the hit by a bus test. So if you already get hit by a bus today, would your business still function without you, right? Like completely take you out of the equation? Would your business still function? Would it still generate revenue for your family? Would it still be, able to employ the people that you've hired?
Would it still run, is it systemized? And non-dependent on you primarily and, everybody starts their business the same way. Like it's just you. It's just that's how the vast majority of businesses are started. There's one person with an idea and they try to, see that to the point where they can then bring other people into their vision.
At this stage, you're very close to bringing somebody in that's gonna help you grow your business by being able to see more people, in most cases, in these types of businesses. So the first mistake that I see and before I get there, If you're there, congratulations. That's a big ass deal.
That's a very hard thing to do. To grow a cash-based practice in particular past yourself is not easy. So congrats if you are even listening to this and thinking, wow, okay, hiring what do I do? Or more importantly, what do I not do? So these three mistakes. The first one is you hire somebody that's just like you.
They're very similar to you and I'm gonna, I'm saying these mistakes cause I've made all these mistakes. So this isn't like I am bringing up, just what you shouldn't do because I. Of theory like this is, I've done all of these and I've seen people that we've worked with do these as well. Even though I've, we recommend certain things around hiring.
We don't hire people for the businesses that we work with. Ultimately, that's on them who they decide to bring on. But in some cases it's clear, it's. It's dude, yeah, you like this guy because he's basically just like you. It's like obviously now you wanna like the people that you work with, but you don't necessarily want them to have all of the character traits that you have.
Because if you are willing to start your own business, you have some element of entrepreneurial, instincts or desire or underlying just natural behavior that. Is going to make you more likely to wanna start your own business. And when you hire people like this, it's like raising a baby lion.
So you get this cute little lion and you're like, this is awesome. This lion's tiny. And people are, it's just amazing. No one has a baby lion and you feed it and it gets bigger and then, it's like a teenage lion. And now it's bro I'm hungrier than the food you're giving me.
And then next thing you know, it eats you. That's basically what happens when you hire somebody that is a very entrepreneurial clinician. They're awesome because you guys have things in common and they're go-getters. They're self-motivated, they typically are down to just pivot quickly to things and move different directions in a small business.
But if you do not give them the right structure and. Growth opportunities, they just are gonna leave. Take your client base with you that they've worked with and they're gonna start their own thing. That is legitimately the case in with many people that we've worked with and people that we've brought into our own practice.
And in some ways you have to decide whether you want that or not. And one of our mentors told us, you have to look at. People as rivers or ponds, some people or ponds, they don't move. They don't they're pretty stagnant. They stay still. That's like an employee that's not gonna go anywhere.
A river is more exciting, right? It's faster moving. But it's gonna move on. And if you wanna hire rivers or more entrepreneurial people, cool. Know that you're probably gonna have them for Maybe two years, and then they're gonna move on and do their own thing. But they could be very valuable to your business.
And as far as helping it grow during the time that they're there. And if that's, if that is the direction you try to, you decide to go do that knowingly. And don't hire somebody that you think is a pond, but really they're a river. And keep in mind that as you bring these people on, They can be great assets to the business if given opportunity to progress within the business.
Because just like you think about it for a second, one of the reasons you maybe got frustrated with wherever you were at is because you saw the writing on the wall. You didn't really see a lot of opportunity to progress or be creative or try to work on projects that you found interesting. And the same thing will happen with these people.
So keep in mind who you're hiring and what you're hiring them for. Are you hiring a river? Are you hiring a pond? And early on I see a lot of people hire rivers. They hire people that are entrepreneurial because they are entrepreneurial and very. Often those people end up moving on and doing their own thing, unless that business has fast growth and can sustain that type of person moving up in more into more of a leadership role.
So mistake number one. You're hiring people that are too similar to you. Mistake number two, excuse me, unrealistic marketing expectations. So if we go back to the first mistake. Those people actually might do really well in this setting, so this would be assuming. And putting complete burden on the person you're hiring to bring in the people that they're gonna work with.
I see this so often and I hear the frustration in people that bring this up. They're like, my staff clinician just won't go out in the community and get their own patients. They won't initiate setting up workshops. They won't join a networking group. On their own. No fucking shit. Of course they won't.
They're working for your business. If you wanted them to act like that, they would just go open their own business. That's the thing you gotta keep in mind, you are bringing somebody into your business that is there to be a clinician. They think they're supposed to see patients because that's typically what they're gonna do in a clinic.
And all of a sudden they come into your practice and you see the overhead you have because of their salary and you start to scramble and get frustrated. And really you get a bit worried about meeting the overhead because of the delay it can take sometimes and building somebody's schedule up. As a new provider is brought on, what, which we tend to see is about a six month timeframe.
Not to say that they're not seeing patients from that six month, but really until they're in a spot where it's pretty good for them to, to be employed by that company. And they're profitable and, you're not worried about their schedule. It's about a six month window, right?
So what I see is at about month two. Especially with that first hire, people start scrambling and they start. Just getting frustrated with the lack of growth sometimes that they have and the lack of maybe networking and local marketing that the clinician they hired is putting in and in many cases with minimal to no training, minimal to no structure from the business owner.
And this is a huge mistake because you will frustrate whoever you hire and they're gonna start looking for a job somewhere else because they came in with the expectation that they were gonna be an employee in a business where there's a lot of person in terms of being able to function as a clinician in a manner that many people want to, but.
All of a sudden, instead of them being a clinician, they've turned into a local marketing, expert or whatever they're supposed to be, to go out and get all these patients that they thought they were gonna get from just being an employee of the business. Like turn, keep that in mind for a second.
A, as someone who has worked for somebody else, which is pretty much everybody. If you're, if you go get a job at a ice cream stand, and you're like, okay, cool, I'm gonna scoop ice cream, and they tell you to go out there and spin around one of those big arrows to get more people in line to buy ice cream, you're gonna be like, what the hell?
I thought I was scooping ice cream. And now I'm out here with a sign dancing around trying to get people to come in to buy from us. Like the role is different and the expectations are not met for what the employee thinks is gonna happen. They end up with more of a eat what you kill mentality, which is not that's more of a contractor mentality.
That's more of a, somebody that wants to have, flexibility with their hours. They want to, be able to see a set number of people and be done with it. And maybe they do that in multiple places. That's more of a contractor mentality. And when you shove somebody into an eat what you kill environment.
They're gonna wonder why they're not just doing it for themself. Because aside from the legalities of setting up a business like this and finding space and some of the things that are challenging on the front end, The hardest part when you get started is understanding how to get people to come and work with you and how to sell them into working with you.
And that's basically what you're just putting on them the burden of that you're putting on your staff members. So if you're going to get them involved in local marketing, which I do recommend you do, I recommend that you do it. A fraction of what you have been doing. They can't be teaching three workshops a month.
Maybe it's one, maybe you set them up to go do, a little local networking meeting with somebody that you know, and that's one or two times a month. Maybe you have them, join a structured networking group instead of just having 'em go figure it out all on their own.
Maybe you get them a gym membership. To an area where, or a gym that you want them to be more visible in and they get to train there as well. And it's a good way to build community and networking relationships. And you're supporting them through that. Not necessarily just tell 'em to go figure it out.
And it sounds. Yeah, who would do that? A lot of people do that a lot. And it's frustrating for both the business owner and the clinician because there's a communication breakdown of expectations. That is the biggest problem that I see in regards to what drives this. And it creates a lot of people that split off and end up going and doing their own thing because they're treated like that.
They're treated like a, an entrepreneur. But they're functioning in the role of a staff clinician, and it tends to not work out really well if you do that. So number three, and this brings me to the last one, but it encompasses the rest is poor pay setup. So traditionally the PT world, the clinical world, I guess in, in general.
There's employees and there's contractors and there's a lot of gray area associated with this in terms of what stipulations have to be met for somebody to be considered an employee or a contractor. These are federal regulations, but also there's some state to state differences. I'm not gonna get into that cuz I'm not an employment attorney, but these function within our space and contractors, most people, that's the thing that they look at as the easiest place to start.
And they may say, okay, you can see, people in my clinic on the weekends and I'll give you 50 bucks per person that you see. And maybe that person sees, I don't know, four people on a weekend. They make an extra 800 to a thousand dollars a a month, and the clinic generates some revenue from that, and it sounds like a win-win.
Rarely do I see these contract positions. Work out long term, unless somebody literally just doesn't need a job. That's about the only time that I've seen this. So let's say they, their household has, a great income that's coming in from their spouse and they really don't need to work full-time.
They just want to make a little bit of extra money, use their skillset still, and not really have much to worry about like that could work out. In that situation. But more often than not, what I see is people that should be employees be treated as contractors and ultimately not getting the amount of support that they need and not the safety of a pay check versus a contractor, 10 99 distribution.
What I mean by that is a contractor goes into the month with no idea what they're gonna actually make. There's no consistency necessarily unless there's a history of that. But in most cases there isn't. So they don't really know and they show up and they're gonna make whatever they're gonna make based off of whatever volume.
They're fulfilling on. These are people that are a bit more transient and are typically not looking to just be employed by the same place for extended periods of time. If you're looking at an employee setup, you're gonna need a salary associated with that. This is what you make per month. Now, there may be bonuses in conjunction with that, which is oftentimes the model that we recommend implementing because of just incentivizing the things that we want.
To be done in the practice. So this could be based off of number of visits that you have. As a simple example, I know, hey, over a certain number of visits, then you get this much of a bonus. The better the business does, the more we can pay you. It's somewhat of a a pretty transparent, fair setup. But the base salary, what we've learned over the last, almost 10 years now of running these businesses and being involved in these businesses is.
That employees like really good employees, they want a high base salary in comparison to their bonuses versus somebody like me gimme the lowest salary you possibly can and just let me have like unlimited compensation. I'll take that all day cuz I'm fine in that environment.
That's not the normal, that's not a normal person. It's also why I'm chronically unemployable. No one can hire me because I just wouldn't, it just wouldn't work out well at this point. And I'm not the person you wanna hire. You wanna hire somebody that is looking for a job. That is.
Career driven and not just compensation driven based off of a contractor mentality. So what I mean by that is, especially if you can find people that are a couple years outta school this is actually something that I wish I would've known earlier is we used to hire just like new grads because the one practice that I did work in that wasn't a military practice, that's basically how they built their practice.
They would hire new grads, they would take 'em through residency. Build their clinical skillset and they would just flow right into the practice. So I assumed, all right, cool. This is the way you should do it. They're less expensive coming right out of school. They don't have as much experience.
You can kind of mold them into what you want them to be, and to be fair, like it can work out well. It just depends on who you find has to be the right fit. What we found though, is if you can find clinicians that are, let's call it maybe three to 10 years out of school. And they are expert clinicians, like they want to be really good at what they do.
They want to get great outcomes. They take, they have a lot of pride associated with their skillset, their outcomes, and their reputation. If you can take somebody like that, And you can take them away from, in most cases, they're at a high volume clinic, take them out of a high volume clinic, they're gonna be way more satisfied with their work because they're going to have the right situation, the right context to work with people in a manner where they're going to get the best results.
And they don't have to question whether because they had three to four people stacked up in an hour where they actually have the right amount of time, or they were able to. Engage with this person in the right way to get them to make a change. You needed to change in order to get the outcome that they wanted.
So you take this person that is trying to become a clinical expert, or is a clinical expert out of that environment, put 'em into your environment. Normally, they're not gonna make quite as much money, but it should be pretty close and. You give them stability through a paycheck and the higher the base salary is the, and the lower the bonuses are, the more likely it is that person is not gonna.
Want to leave and go somewhere else because they're looking for stability. They're looking for consistency. They don't want this big, erratic difference in what they're making because in most cases, they have responsibilities. They have a family, maybe they have kids, they have a mortgage. These are the things that they are on the hook for every single month, and they want stability in their career.
These are people that. As more of a mature business owner, I would look at hiring those folks because they're gonna be more stable within the business and they're typically, they come, batteries included. They know what they're doing already. They're really good clinicians. You may just have to adapt what they're doing to the cash model, which is.
Definitely retraining to where they know how to engage the people with that. They know how to set up their first visit to where they're actually getting people to commit to plans of care to see that through. And that just takes some retraining to do and, but they do require a higher base salary, so that sketches some people out that are newer business owners.
And it did for me too, because. You don't actually know what you can expect that person to generate. We don't have the history of that. You don't have the data to back that up. So you're assuming what's gonna happen. You don't actually know. But the ability to pay somebody a higher base salary and get a really quality clinician, it's dictated by what you charge and the poor pay setup.
Which is this last mistake, it's primarily dictated by your average visit rate. So what are you charging on an hourly basis? And the areas that I see this be more problematic. Are actually in higher cost of living areas. So let's say like a, an la a San Francisco, New York City, Boston, expensive cities.
Expensive cities mean people have to make more money to be able to pay for their living their livelihood each month. And if you are not pricing yourself accordingly. Let's say you're charging 150 bucks a visit and you're in la the, that's your, if that's your average, the problem that's gonna happen is if, let's assume if we're looking at like average numbers, okay?
If you have somebody that's full-time and they're seeing 115 visits a month and you're charging $150, That's about $17,000 a month that they're generating, or just over $200,000 a year that they're generating in total gross revenue. So that is the amount they're generating doesn't in, doesn't have anything deducted for, from an ex, from an expense standpoint.
So you have this person that is generating, let's call it $200,000. But if you're in that area, they're in one of these bigger cities, that person is probably gonna be making, let's call it $90,000. In, in that profession, which it sounds like, okay, cool. There's still a lot of room there, right?
But as you look at the profitability of your business, If you were to divide $200,000 by $90,000, it would give you about 2.2 would be the ratio there. So this is what's called a labor efficiency ratio, and this is how you can look at your business somewhat objectively in terms of what people need to make based off of what you're charging.
So for service businesses on the low end, you really don't want to be below like a 2.7. Closer to three. So to put that into easier numbers, let's say somebody was generating $300,000, they should be paid a hundred thousand dollars or slightly more, because that would put us at the ratio of route three.
So you take $300,000 is what they generate, divided by their salary, which is a hundred. And that equals three. Sorry, I'm doing public math on a podcast cuz I know this is hard to visualize sometimes. But this is important to understand because if we need you closer to a three in that ratio, And you're paying somebody $90,000, that means they should be generating $270,000 in order for that to be the case, which if somebody is generating that much, they're actually gonna be closer to an average visit rate of probably 175 to $180.
If they're seeing 115 visits, which. Yeah. Is it gonna be, is it gonna be between like 1 75 and 200? So if your average visu rate is one 50, you have to compensate somebody based on the area, otherwise they're not gonna take the job. That's the thing. Like they, they may take a small salary, decrease.
But they still gotta pay their mortgage. They still gotta buy groceries. And if it's that much more expensive to live in an area the only variable that has to change is you have to charge more for what you're doing. So in these more, high costs of cost of living areas, this is where we see big mistakes that are made by not being able to Actually pay people what you're, you need to pay them in your area for them to match whatever their compensation would be in other places, and this is where we see, have a hard time hiring because their compensation structure's just too low and they can't really raise it.
Because if they do, they can cannibalize their own business and they put themselves in a place where they don't really have much profit. And that's not a very good place to be either, cuz you don't wanna hire employees that then fulfill on what you're doing. And it sounds like. Okay, if you're paying somebody 90 and they're making 200, that's $110,000 in difference there that, that sounds like a lot.
But when you take into account all the overhead, the other staff, the taxes, you have to pay on that, all the materials and everything that goes into having an employee and having a space. It gets whittled away really fast. And to, I'll put it in perspective the consulting world, like Big Four Consulting World.
If you're looking like a Deloitte or a pwc, Mackenzie Ernst and Young, like these really big consulting companies that do all kinds of different, consult variations of consulting with big businesses. They're typically gonna be somewhere around like a seven to an eight if you're taking the same ratio, right?
If you're if they're making $800,000 for the practice, then they're probably gonna be making like 120 in salary, which is a lot of money for anybody to make. But in comparison to what they're generating, it's a small fraction. So if you're, someone is making 200 and you're paying them 90, There's very little profit there, which means the business is not very stable.
And if you have downturns, if you have slow periods, you have no cash reserves, you have no profit to be able to bolster those fluctuations that happen in just normal business. So you have to keep that in mind as you are setting your prices. And maintaining your price structures. You really need to be able to pay people a competitive wage in order to get really good people in the business and for them to stick around for an extended period of time.
Because one of the most expensive things that happens to a business is turnover. I, when somebody leaves, they're like, you firing somebody that's not the right fit, or they're doing something that is just not right. That's different. That's a, that's something that has to be done and it sucks, but it needs to be done.
When somebody is a good fit and they leave and you have clinician turnover, it's one of the slowest things. It's one of the things that slows your business down more than anything, and in particular early on, because if it's you and admin and one staff PT and that staff PT leaves, so there's three of you.
One leaves, that's 33% of your workforce. Just left. So if a company has 3000 employees, it would be like a thousand of them leaving. That would be a massive hit to that company. Huge problem. And in your case, one third of your workforce just left and. If, again, if it's not the right fit, cultural fit or whatever, that's actually still on you because you hired that person.
So your hiring process, you missed something. You didn't vet the person well enough, you didn't ask the right questions. You just misread something and that still on you. But either way, it slows you down, it slows you down a ton because then you have to rebuild caseloads. You have to explain it to everybody of what's going on, and like people don't stay forever.
But if you have continual turnover in your business, the people you work with, they're gonna start to wonder what the heck is going on. Because good businesses tend to hold onto people longer. And businesses that are, not maybe run as well or the culture isn't as good, or employees aren't as happy, they tend to move on sooner.
And it's something to keep in mind for you as you look at this, because. A sort of amateur approach is hire a contractor, make 'em go, do all the marketing for themself. It's all, eat what you kill. That person's just gonna leave and go do their own thing. That's what you're doing to yourself. I if, unless you give 'em a clear distinction of, once we get you to this point, we're gonna bring you on full-time.
It's gonna be your salaries, this is how we're gonna structure everything and explain that, then they're probably good to go, but, In most cases, that's not what actually happens. So if you could think about it, like there's three big things that will help you quite a bit if you look at what you shouldn't do, and you can do the reverse, right?
Hiring somebody just like you, very entrepreneurial person, only works if you have they have a strong idea of upward mobility within the business and what they can move towards. If that doesn't happen, then they're gonna leave. So don't just hire entrepreneurial people. Number two. Don't have unrealistic marketing expectations for the people that you hire.
Don't expect them to just go out and find a bunch of patients and bring them into your office and sell 'em into packages and. Make you a bunch of money and you don't have to do anything. That's not how it works. You have to be a part of that. You're the one that's in charge of driving people to the business more than anybody else.
And you have to really own that role and spend a lot of time on that and structure. What you do have them do from a marketing standpoint, in a manner where it sets 'em up for success. And it's not just, Hey, go figure this out. That's not fair for your employee to do that. And the last thing is make sure your pay structure is set up in a way where you're retaining people.
Pay them a salary that is competitive that is within the financial constraints of your business. There is somewhat of a financial risk bringing somebody on, and I think what most people freak out about is what I, what if I can't pay their salary? What if their, what if their schedule doesn't grow over the next six months?
You just let 'em go. That's pretty much the simplified answer is if it's. Cannibalizing the business, and let's say you're completely wrong and you just absolutely cannot grow the business past yourself, then you just learned a mistake. You let that person go, but you, your business is still solvent.
It's still in a good place. So it's not like a permanent thing. This is a temporary thing that you are That you're testing out and you can let somebody go if it's not working out. It's pretty much that simple, so as you look at this, you're not tied to this person forever. So pick somebody that you think is gonna be a good long-term fit for the business.
I prefer to look for people that are more ponds than la more ponds than rivers, so people aren't gonna run off and go do something else. People that want to be a part of a culture, people that want stability, that's more what I look for now. And those people, they're not gonna. They're not gonna go out and do quite as much, but they're gonna be great fillers, they're gonna be great employees, and there's a lot of stability that comes with folks like that.
And it's gonna be a little bit more of a burden on you. But hey, that's what you signed up for. You're a business owner and they're not. That's why you have risk. You have some of these other things that you take off their plate, and the reality is they're never gonna know how difficult it is to be on your side.
They'll have no idea. And they don't want to know cuz they don't want to own a business and they'll stick around yours for a long period of time and can be great fits in the business and a great mutual relationship between somebody that just wants to be a great clinician in an environment that allows that with a culture that is fun and for you to have somebody that's a dependable team member that allows you to then go do the things that you're uniquely good at.
So that's my hiring advice. Like I said, this is something that's been going on a lot. We've been doing a lot of this within our mastermind group. It's actually been really cool to see. We have about 200 businesses that we're working with now, actively within that community. And I have to look at the numbers again.
But I want to say in the last six months we've had, I don't know, over between 30 and 50 hires of staff, clinicians that have occurred. And so a lot of them are going through it and they're growing their businesses. And the first one I think is the hardest one. And my mentor Kelly would always say The first pancake is always shit.
And so when you hire your first person, like it's, might not work. It may not be your best moment when you look back in your hiring history. You might do great, right? So hopefully this helps you and hopefully us being able to share what's going on with that community is helping.
If you have a business that you have as a cash or hybrid practice and you're actively looking to, improve your business skills. To grow that business, to be able to really grow to a point where you have a legitimate, true business that runs without you, makes money without you being there and is a potential sellable or passive entity that you can turn that into one day.
If you decide that's what you want to do, I highly recommend going to physical therapy biz.com. Check out what we have going on. You can learn a little bit more about our process and our. Team, I think we have the best team in the industry. At this point we have about 18 people that solely focus on helping these businesses grow these businesses, support these businesses.
And it's been pretty awesome to be a part of and see as these companies Have really grown to, over 50 million in annual revenue combined between the companies that we're working with. So it's pretty awesome. If you're interested in any of that, go to physical therapy biz.com, check it out.
Maybe it's a fit. We could help you out. If so, that'd be awesome. Otherwise, guys, thanks so much for listening to the podcast. I'll catch you next week.
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Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one-way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about 4,000 clinicians in there.
That are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country.
I do live trainings in there with Yves Gege every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside of that group.So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.