E207 | Let's Talk Partnerships
Jul 18, 2019
On episode 207 of The PT Entrepreneur Podcast I address a question that came up within our PT Entrepreneur Facebook Group. This question was prompted by curiosity of a practitioner and how to approach partnerships.
The question: "Hey I'm thinking about partnering with somebody to start a practice. What are your thoughts on, you know, partnering with this individual in particular?"
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Episode Transcription:
Hey, what's going on, guys? Doc Dany here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast and I'm back again with a little nugget of information from a question that I got. this was actually through our Facebook group. The PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. So if you're not in that, go check it out. But a question, the question that I get frequently.
And, it was actually like perfect timing because it was about partnerships. So. For those of you that don't know. So I, I own, athlete's potential, which is our cash-based practice. I started that. My wife and I are partners in all. Both, we both work in the business and run the business. That's a little bit different from a partnership.
We're married, right? So we, we've been. Together for about 15 years. We've been married for nearly 12, and there's a lot more there than just a business partnership. So I can't speak to that so much. But the other business that I own in physical therapy biz is what it's called. I have two partners in that, and I can tell you, you know, from my experience, the pros and cons of partial, but here's the, basically the question.
The question was, Hey, I'm thinking about partnering with somebody to start a practice. What are your thoughts on, you know, partnering with this individual in particular? kind of talking about. Someone that was in a similar, you know, job, like basically not a cash practitioner, was a chiropractor, I believe, or maybe was a massage therapist, one of those.
But asking about, Hey, should I partner with this person or both independently, kind of do our own thing. And, so when we look at partnerships, I get this question pretty frequently. I think that you have to look at a couple of things to see if it's the right fit or not because a partnership is essential.
A marriage. It's, it's only, it's almost harder to get out of, a partnership, than a marriage. And, you know, it can get messy. So I've had a handful of business owner friends of mine go through pretty nasty business, partnership breakups, I guess the right way to put it, dissolving a company, and just didn't go into it with the right.
Things lined up. So here, here's what I mean by that. So if you are looking to partner with somebody, it should be to grow something bigger leveraging skillsets. You know, just a better service that you can't hire yourself, right? So here's what I mean by that. If you could hire a massage therapist to see people for you, why would you partner with that person?
Right? I mean, unless, unless that person has a massive following already and they want to join forces with you and build this more significant entity, I could see that. But you have to ask yourself; also, that sounds cool in isolation, but now the two individuals that you're talking about teaming up, what are their skill sets.
Are they similar or are they, are they different in a complementary way? Because of the issue that I've seen in particular with cash-based practice owners, the ones that we work with, you know, this is most of my experiences. Look, if you're performance-based cash-based practice, you know, whether that's massage, chiropractic, physical therapy, whatever like you're in my wheelhouse.
That's the people I deal with on a day to day basis. And what I've seen with partnership issues is that you get to practitioners that are very similar in terms of their skill sets. You know, both. Enjoying, kind of doing the big picture stuff, the visionary type of role where they're, they're thinking about ways to take to the company in different, different, directions, add various services, improved services that they have, partnerships, you know, affiliations, getting out, connecting with people.
All of that is kind of falls into what we consider as a visionary role. This sounds more relaxed than the other goal, which is an integrator, an integrator, or somebody who can organize things, detail things, make sure that things run correctly. Typically stop the visionary from burning the business down.
And, and really, Implement on the things that are being kind of put in place from the visionary role of like where they want to see the company go. Right. So it's, it's one sort of steering the ship, but the other one is making sure it doesn't go down. So you need both. But if you have two visionaries on the same boat, you've got two people trying to drive it, and it.
It turns out bad because they start to frustrate each other quickly. They realize there are gaps in what they're, what they want to accomplish, but they don't have the skillset to achieve it, either one of them cause they's good at the same thing. And. Eventually, they get frustrated and have to either find someone who is an integrator to hire, which is what they should've done in the first place, or dissolve the company, start over, brand new, and then, you know, learn their lesson and find somebody like that.
And, and, and you can hire roles like that depending on the person that you're, you're looking to work with. And too often, I see people partner with others. Practitioners in the hopes that that's going to resolve a problem for them, but they don't look at is what are the, what are the superpowers of that person?
What are your superpowers? And if they're the same superpowers, you're going to have a lot of trouble. With making that partnership work in particular, if you're already friends, to begin with, that makes it even more challenging. You know, because you guys have, our girls have a different relationship in place.
So I can tell you the partnership that I have with physical therapy biz works well. So it's me, Eve, GG, and Jared moon. Now. The way that we structure the partnership that we have is, you know, I'm, I'm the majority owner of the company, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm the one that is in charge of what happens with certain things.
Like, you have to know when to lead, and you have to know when to follow. And one thing that I'm not good at is, integration or implementation of things, of detailing out how things should, Sh should flow. How, how to make sure systems are repeatable and efficient, of deeds or, delegating specific tasks out effectively.
That's none of that is real. What I'm good at. And ironically, and ironically, for our planning, this was planned. You know, Jerred and Yeves are both much better at that then, then than I am so, so Jerred, is much more organized, in many ways, you know, when it comes to these things from a business standpoint and me and an incredibly good marketer.
And. That's a massive asset for us in our business because I'm a, I'm a reasonably good marketer, but I'm not necessarily as good as Jerred is. So I can take a step away from that and focus on, you know, building, building the company. So getting in front of more people, writing a book, you know, podcasts, getting on other people's podcasts, putting content out, meeting people, you know, teaching relationship development, networking, all of those things are.
What I focus on. Tara doesn't do any of that. You'll never see him do it. He would hate to do that. Do you know? That's not his thing. And then Eve is good when it comes to. Fulfilling on coaching people and helping them get the results they're looking for. Figuring out what's going on in their business, connecting them to the right people, connecting them with the right resource that we have, and fulfilling on, the, you know, the agreement that we have with them to help grow their business.
And that role has to be somebody who. It has a practice that's helped grow practices their own as well as other ones. And it's a tough one to find. And you know, us all having our businesses as well. It's been beneficial because. That's not our first rodeo. Like we understand what goes into a business.
Our eyes are wide open. We know what it looks like, and we went into this partnership with full disclosure of what we knew our roles would be and how we could kind of have checks and balances in place if we decided to step into somebody else's lane. You know, inappropriately. So we have what's called an operating agreement, which lays out exactly what we can expect from each other.
How can we hold each other accountable for, and then what happens if we don't do those things? You know, how is that? How is that appropriately addressed? And these are all written out in, you know, black and white in-text, in an operating agreement of what is going to happen. So if you are looking to partner with somebody, you have to ask yourself, number one, are you doing it because.
You don't want to go on this journey alone, which some of, I mean there's, there's some validity to that, but it's not necessarily the reason to partner with somebody. If you're scared about failure and you think it's more comfortable with other people, I mean, it's not necessarily more comfortable with other people.
Sometimes it's harder with other people, and failing sucks no matter what. But. You got to take a chance on yourself. You can't just rely on somebody else that you partner with to help string you along in, in, in business. That's not, that's not the way to go. That's the easy solution that typically never works.
So are you trying to offset your skillset with somebody who has a much a different skill set that's very complimentary? Cool. That sounds like it could be a perfect partnership. You know, and, and having different roles within the company that you guys both or girls both for Phil on, and that is a great way to look at a partnership.
And are you, are you documenting this stuff on the front end so that there's no, you know, a gray area. There's, there's probably always going to be some added grayer, but tiny gray area in terms of what you're expecting from the other person, what they're expecting from you, how you're splitting up revenue.
This is huge. This is a massive one. People get. Weird with money, especially when there's a lot of money. And if you don't have it documented out exactly how profit is distributed, salaries, equity in the company, you know, how has that's transferred all of these things like you're going to have, you're going to have a problem, so you need to sit down with an attorney and make sure that you do this stuff, correctly.
Otherwise. It could be a massive problem for you if you don't, a few years down the road as your company continues to grow. And, and as I said, the biggest mistake I see is two practitioners getting together that have the same skillset. And it. It ruins the relationship, and the business suffers because of it because they have two visionaries trying to steer the same ship versus one visionary and somebody that's keeping everything else from, from falling apart and the boat sinking.
And then you get where you're trying to go. So. Thank you for the partnership questions. I hope this helps. As I said, I have two partnerships, one as my wife, so that's a that's not going anywhere we ever, we should have a perfect working relationship, and sometimes it doesn't work out so well with your spouse, but we have, we have offsetting skillsets.
It's worked well for us with, athlete's potential. And then I have two partners in the other business that I own. And, I mean, we all have different skillsets there too, and that's worked well for us. Or just be careful with partnerships. Ask yourself if you're just doing it because maybe you're afraid of not being able to do it by yourself, not knowing what to do.
That's fine. Nobody knows what to do when they start a business. That's it. That's normal. Do you know? Like you can't expect that. You know how everything goes. I mean, shit, every year, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing or where this thing is going, and you just have this idea of what your core values are and what you know is essential.
What you want to have as far as impact and this big goal that you have, you know, to help impact other people in your community or the people that you serve. And then you make best decisions, in terms of what, what aligns the most with your core values, those deep-rooted things that mean so much to you and your, to your company.
And that reflects in the decisions that you make going forward. Cause you're not going to know everything that you need to do in business. There's just no way. I mean, you can, you can get guidance and support, like people in our mastermind group, they just, they make way fewer mistakes. They have much faster increases in their revenue, and it's because, you know, they have some guidance and alignment with people that are already there ahead of them that are dragging them along, right?
Like, we're helping you skip a lot of steps. So those are, that's an example of. Kind of how you can make it more efficient, but even still, you know what, we've, I've worked with hundreds of cash-based practices all across the country and in frankly, internationally at this point, and I still don't have all the answers, you know?
And, and not only that this year's journey, right? Like you sort of having to learn things as you go. You're learning about yourself, you're learning about what works, what doesn't work, how you respond to specific situations, what you need to improve personally, that helps improve your business. All of that stuff is.
The journey of entrepreneurship and having a company and you're your flaws and your strengths reflecting on, on, on that company in just a different setting. So that's where we're at from a partnership standpoint. I appreciate the question as always, guys, thanks so much for listening to the podcast.
As I said, this one came from the PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group. If you haven't gotten into that yet, head over there. Just search PT entrepreneurs on Facebook, and you'll see our group there. We've got about 2,500 people, I think in it right now. It's a super cool group. Okay. Yourself set up for it. And if you think about starting a practice or you begin a practice and, you know, you, you want to learn some things, and it took me five years to figure out, get a, get the book Finsurancebook.com.
You can get it for free. Just pay for shipping and send it to you. And, and it's yours. So you get everything I learned in five years, basically just for the cost of shipping to get it to you. And I'd love nothing more. Then did it help kind of share the information that I've obtained with you in this book that I wrote?
So guys, as always, thanks so much for listening and take care.
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