E709 | Fear And How To Deal With It In Business

In this episode, Doc Danny explores the common challenge of fear that entrepreneurs face throughout their journey. He shares insights from a conversation with a performance coach who works with C-suite executives and entrepreneurs. The discussion revolves around two major stages of fear that entrepreneurs encounter: starting their practice and expanding it.

Starting a practice brings about fear due to the uncertainty of generating enough income to replace their previous salary and provide for their basic needs. Doc Danny reassures entrepreneurs that while this fear is understandable, it is often an unlikely outcome. He recommends utilizing resources like the PT Entrepreneur 5-Day Challenge to help plan out the financial aspects of starting a practice.

The fear of failure also plagues entrepreneurs during the startup stage. The fear of being perceived as a failure by colleagues, family, and others can be crippling. However, Doc Danny encourages entrepreneurs by highlighting that true failures in starting a clinical practice are rare. There are often options to return to a clinician role if needed.

The second major stage where fear arises is during the first major expansion cycle of the practice. This stage involves taking on more overhead, loans for buildouts, and hiring additional staff. Doc Danny compares this stage to the feeling of going too fast on a snowboard - uncomfortable and "sketchy." However, he emphasizes the importance of leaning into the change and committing to it in order to safely navigate this stage.

The fear at this stage stems from increased financial risk, responsibility for supporting the livelihoods of new employees, and the shift from being self-employed to a true business owner. Doc Danny shares his own experience of feeling obligated to ensure stability and growth for the families of his new hires.

Despite these fears, Doc Danny highlights the potential rewards of entrepreneurship - freedom, impact, and the ability to support others. He notes that if it were easy and guaranteed, it wouldn't be as fulfilling. Facing and overcoming fear is an integral part of the entrepreneurial journey, leading to significant personal and professional growth. 

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Not being able to succeed the fear of the financial, challenges that might happen if you have an unsuccessful business is are, do those outweigh the potential opportunities that you could have that are amazing, to be able to support other people, to be able to create a life that very few people get to live.

And just these extraordinary things that will happen to you personally and professionally. If you're successful, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skillset in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot.

My name is Danny Matta. In the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession. I've been a staff PT. I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice and today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices.

So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up because I'm here to help you.

Hey, what's going on? Dr. Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast and today we're talking about fear. How do you deal with fear and just the fact that this is going to come up for you as you start grow and, really scale your business. And this comes from a conversation I actually had yesterday with a performance coach that I work with.

And really, she's a, she's like a very specialized therapist that works with mainly C suite sort of executives and entrepreneurs. I think of her like the lady, she's like the lady from billions. If you've ever seen that show. That is like the in house psychologist. She's, and she's awesome, man.

I, so I go and I see her usually like once a month and every time that I go, she just, she's so good at forcing me to look at things at a different perspective. And yesterday we were talking about decision making. And, what leads to making decisions, how I think through decision making.

And sometimes whenever I struggle with making a decision, it's because there's some sort of fear involved in it. I actually did a presentation on this at our last live mastermind event. And the presentation was on essentially lessons learned in the first, in, in the last decade of just being an entrepreneur.

And. The second half of it was really about understanding the difference between fear and danger, and I think that's a really important distinction to make because danger is something that is actually could be harmful to you and your family and your business, and fear is a natural emotion that we have to deal with.

It doesn't necessarily mean that there's danger involved. It just means that there's typically something unknown They could also be awesome. It could also be bad. And then we have to be able to make the right decisions. And that's what makes it so hard, right? Because no one else is making those decisions for you in your business.

And when I look at fear in particular, there's two stages that I would say are the most fearful for any, clinical entrepreneur that is going through the business journey, right? And the first one of those is is when you start your practice. And there's a couple, there's a couple of things that really pop up with that stage.

Number one, you don't know if you're going to be able to make money. You don't know if you're going to be able to replace your income. And what that means is you don't know if you're going to be able to provide food, shelter, water, and security for you and your family. So this goes back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where this is a basic foundational, need that we all have.

And when you take away your income stream, you're essentially taking away security of. Food shelter water and you don't know if you're gonna be able to provide those things now That is obviously like very unlikely but in our brain like we don't know that you can tell yourself that but doesn't mean that you're Not stressed out about it because you just don't know what to expect With your clinic as you get started and I know for me whenever I got out of the army This actually wasn't the thing that was the most sort of fun Fear inducing for me, I would say I felt confident that we could replace my income.

And I was making like 78, 000 a year. So it wasn't like I was making an incredible amount of money that I needed to replace. It was like, it was not, it wasn't impossible with a cash practice. When I was charging 175 a visit, basically had to reverse engineer. How many sessions that was that I was going to see in order to replace my income with, and take out the overhead you have which is typically very low.

And, I got there pretty quick. So I felt pretty confident about that. And if you are struggling with that side of it, I really, I would recommend going to physical therapy, biz. com, go to our resources tab and sign up for our five day challenge. This will actually take you through a lot of really good exercises.

I think it's probably the best free resource that we have. Okay. It is really getting clear on your expenses. What is your burn rate? Basically, how much are you trying to replace? How what should you be charging? How much, how many visits do you need to see and really planning out what that sort of roadmap looks like to be able to, replace your income.

That's the goal. As well as what the what strategy do you want to take to get started? And there's a couple of different ones in there that people can go through, but that, that's a big reason why people have fear in that stage. The other reason, the thing that actually created more fear for me than the monetary side was the fear of failure.

Now, fear of failure for a lot of people is the strongest fear that they might have. And who knows that could come from a lot of different interactions nature, nurture, things you're exposed to growing up. And, but it's a real thing. It's something that a lot of people are scared of and it's not necessarily.

It's not even that you feel like you're going to bankrupt your family and all that stuff because unlikely you can go back and get a job as a clinician, lots of places, but it's really more about the embarrassment of not being able to succeed at something. And it's so visible because when you decide, all right, I'm leaving, I'm going to go do my own thing.

You can't hide that from anybody. Your coworkers see it, your family sees it, some of them might tell you it's a bad idea or they think it's, you're crazy for doing it or why would you ever decide to take risk like that? And if it doesn't work, then, you feel like you have to go back to beg for your job back with your tail between your legs.

And you're a failure. And Some people fail at this. Yes, there's no doubt about it. But I've never seen somebody that even actually did fail at making one of these clinics work, feel like it was, they wish they hadn't done it because you learn so much about yourself.

You learn so much about what you're capable of and maybe what you don't want in your life as well. And there's people that I've seen that, you know what? They really did not want to start a business. They felt like it was the only way for them to create the life that they wanted. And then when they realized this is actually not what I want, they go back and they have a lot more.

Respect for what they are doing and I think they feel much better about it knowing what the other side looks like versus sometimes if you don't know, it can really eat at you. The fear of failure is a big one and I see that a lot with people early on starting, I would say more than the monetary side.

The second stage where fear is really really Hard to deal with is actually when you go through the first expansion cycle that you'll have in a practice This is where you're going typically from like a subleased office to a standalone space. You're taking on more overhead You're taking on loans to do build outs and stuff like that and you just have a lot more expense Without necessarily a significant increase in income or revenue.

At that stage, I talk about this one a lot. I think it's the hardest stage because you're basically building a place for all these people to work before they start working there. So you have a lot of fixed costs that go up and those are fixed. And no matter if it's one person in the office or if you have five clinicians in the office, depending on the size of your space, right?

So it's hard because your profit, like your take home pay. goes down, you might even lose money for a few months, depending on, how, what your revenue looks like. And for most of us, you never lose money a single month in a clinic whenever you first get started, cause your overhead is so low and maybe people are going side hustle to full time.

So in this second stage, what happens is You know, it starts to get sketchy and you, it, to me, it reminds me of like, when I go snowboarding, there's like a certain speed that I'll hit where if I go any faster than that, I start to feel sketchy, but the only way to actually safely go that speed is to lean into it even more like you have to commit to it.

And. I guess you could really hurt yourself if you take a bad fall, but if you go to quickly stop, you could hurt yourself just as bad. So you, there's like this, Period in a business where it starts to feel uncomfortable. And if you go to like quickly stop, you can create more problems for yourself versus lean into it and keep, keep pressing through and get used to that new speed and now you're good to go.

So that stage is hard for people because they're less profitable. They're taking on more risks. They feel like they have a lot more on the line. Because they do have more to lose. They've built a business that was at least replacing their income, if not a lot more than that. And it was pretty simple to run.

It was just them, but they basically create a job for themselves. This is the stage you go from having a job to a business. And it is a scary step. And most people go through this and they second guess whether they should have done it in the first place. They look back at their at their subleased office with minimal overhead.

And they Oh, the good old days, right? When you didn't have a lot to deal with. And, you're taking a big step. You're going from a someone that is self employed to a business owner. And that is a very challenging step. A lot of people will not do that or get to that stage ever.

So there's fear there because it's not just fear the loans that you're taking on and the overhead and all that, but it's fear of now other people are supporting their family. Like I remember that when we hired our office manager, she had a husband and a stepson that I felt very obligated.

I was like damn, man, I have to make sure she has a a place where she can feel comfortable to work. She's going to feel like there's a steady, steady business that's going to create stability in her salary. Cause I feel like now I've inherited her husband and son, even though he had a job too.

And, but I just felt very obligated to them. To do the right thing for them and their family. And so it's it feels like all this additional pressure and stress that you have, it's almost you've just adopted these people because they're dependent on the business that you're running.

So there, there is more responsibility with that. I completely get why people feel a lot of fear with these stages, but that's what we signed up for, right? Like you signed up to start a business and to lead that business and to build this. Sort of vision you have in your head into reality and that's part of it.

You can't skip that It's actually also the greatest part of it. It's not the time and financial freedom That is so awesome about having a successful business and that's a great part of it don't get me wrong, but it's the people you get to work with and the impact you get to have on their life and the hopefully positive mentorship you get to impart on them from the things that you're learning and they get to they get to improve their life because of the culture you're creating in your company.

That's the best part. And it's not typically what people think. It's definitely not what I thought. But I can tell you for me, that's the best part. I love seeing our staff grow and improve and, be able to buy homes and, pay for their college for their kids and stuff like that.

That's awesome. Because of the vehicle we've created in the business that, that supports them and their life outside of it. So there's fear associated with these things, but you got to ask yourself if the fear of not being able to succeed, the fear of the financial, challenges that might happen if you have an unsuccessful business is are, do those outweigh the potential opportunities that you could have that are amazing.

To be able to support other people to be able to create a life that very few people get to live and just these extraordinary things that will happen to you personally and professionally If you're successful and that's the trade off right and if it was easy and guaranteed everybody would do it And if it was easy and guaranteed, it wouldn't be that much fun.

It just wouldn't what if you were playing a game? You knew you would win. What if you have a cheat code on a video game and you can't die? It's so boring it's so boring. There's no risk. You need that in order for it to be exciting and to be engaging and for you to actually want to continue to play that game.

So if you're dealing with fear, it's normal. Those are the two stages you're going to see it the most with. But guess what? Fear is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a great way for us to grow. And the other thing is, it keeps a lot of people out of playing this game. So if you can deal with fear, you already have a leg up on everybody else.

Hey, peach entrepreneurs. We have big, exciting news, a new program that we just came out with. It is our PT biz part time to full time five day challenge over the course of. Five days, we get you crystal clear on exactly how much money you need to replace by getting you ultra clear on how much you're actually spending.

We get you crystal clear on the number of people you're going to see and the average visit rate you're going to need to have in order to replace your income to be able to go full time. We go through three different strategies you can take to go from part time to full time. You can pick the one that's the best for you based on your current situation.

Then we share with you the sales and marketing systems that we use within our mastermind. That you need to have as well. If you want to go full time in your own practice. And then finally, we help you create a one page business plan. That's right. Not these 15 day business plans. You want to take the small business association, a one day business plan.

It's going to help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and when you're going to do it to take action. If you're interested in signing up for this challenge, it's totally free. Head to physicaltherapybiz.com. Forward slash challenge get signed up there. Please. Enjoy. We put a lot of energy into this.

It's totally free It's something I think is going to help you tremendously As long as you're willing to do the work if you're doing the work you're getting Information put down and getting yourself ready to take action in a very organized way. You will have success Which is what we want to head to physicaltherapybiz.com forward slash challenge and get signed up today.