E480 | The Safest Investment You Can Make

I think the overall goal with investments is to build wealth outside of whatever your income is. I don't really agree with the traditional approach of saving up this huge chunk of cash that you then retire and live off of one day. If you find something you truly enjoy doing, then why retire from it? 

I wanted to share some of my thoughts today on the safest time and financial investments that I think you can make. Enjoy!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So I was having a conversation with one of our staff members about documentation and he had come over from a in-network practice that he was working at and he was talking about just how long it would take him to document and click through and the workflow and how, just how time consuming it was and how much easier it's been with the software that we use, which is PT everywhere.

And I know for us, we're very aware. Sort of time leaks within our staff and our own schedules. And it's just one of the worst things you can do is just waste time on things when you could be doing them more efficiently. One thing for us is we have to document. It's something we need to do and you need to do it as efficiently as you possibly can because that's where you're gonna save a lot of your time.

We were seeing our staff members save upwards of an hour a day as far as cleaning up his documentation, making it more efficient. What if you got an hour of your day back just from documentation? What if all of your staff did the same thing? Highly recommend you take a look at PT everywhere.

It's been a huge time saver for us and really has made a big difference in our efficiency of our practice. You can check 'em [email protected]. I think you're gonna really like what they have. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna 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 Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on, guys? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we're talking about what I think is the safest investment that you can possibly make. And what I want to dig into honestly, just is just a few different areas where you can look to invest. This is both time investment, financial investment.

It's gonna really be all of those and. The areas that most people look at for investments and really investments are a way for you to build wealth outside of whatever your income is, right? That's the goal. Like the goal really is for you to build an investment that is generating cash flow in particular, hopefully that offsets or replaces your income Then you can work because you wanna work, not because you have to work.

Versus I think the tr traditionally the thought processes that you save up just this big bolus of money and then you live off of it one day in a, fabricated sort of end of life scenario known as retirement. Which I honestly, I just don't particularly agree with because I think if you find something that you really enjoy doing, why would you wanna retire from it?

Like you get a lot of enjoyment out of it. You get a lot of energy out of it. And just personal satisfaction like that is the key to be honest with you. Like it's not about where, what's the end? It's about finding enjoyment in the process along the way. I think that's really the most important thing to keep in mind.

Which brings me really to these different investment options. And I'm gonna tell you which one I think is the safest one. The best one and I'm gonna give you a couple reasons why. So traditionally, people look at a few different areas where they can invest, right? They can invest. Stocks and bonds, right?

It's a 60 40 portfolio is what many people have pushed for a long time. And probably has worked well for a lot of people. Historically at least you have real estate. There's probably no other area that more wealth is held and generated than real estate. In particular over the last 20 years we've really seen a massive increase in in real estate.

And then there's also cryptocurrency. I think it's an interesting space. It's very new, it's very volatile. But definitely an area where a lot of people have made a lot of money and can can potentially grow, wealth in that area. So of those three really, all those. The thing that you don't necessarily have that you have in the fourth investment, which I think is the safest one is control.

And what I mean by that this fourth investment is business, is a business. A business that you own, a business that you run. And a and initially, obviously, you're gonna work in it and do everything. Having a business, I think is the safest investment that you can have. And I'm gonna give you some examples here of why that.

And I'm just gonna use what's going on right now. So this is, this is February 22nd, 2022. So when I'm recording this is, it'll come out probably in a week or two a week or two later from now. But as of right, There's a lot of shit going on that is causing people a lot of uncertainty in what's gonna happen in the world.

One of the big things is Russia and Ukraine. There's a lot of tension about what Russia is gonna do from a. From a macro standpoint, huge, worldwide ramifications could be very problematic. If Russia decides to, invade Ukraine, what does the US do? What does the EU do?

What, what does NATO do? What are the. Sanctions, even if they matter. How does that affect everybody else? What does China do with that? There's a lot of things that have to do with just this one scenario, right? Of a country that perceives that another country is essentially their territory and was not it was taken from them.

Wrongfully during the period when the Soviet Union was broken up, that's what's going on. Just one example. And you have covid still, it rears its head and spikes, from time to time. We have supply chain issues associated with that, associated with workforce issues that people are having with finding people to work.

Employing people. I saw, I was on a trip last week and I think it was Taco Bell was paying like 18 bucks an hour for people just to. Work at the front desk or at the cashier position or in the in the kitchen. That's pretty good.

But that has also has to do with inflation and the fact that our dollar doesn't go quite as far anymore as it did even two years ago. When we dump another trillion dollars of money into the economy. We dilute the buying power of every dollar that everybody already had.

And then you have, the impending interest rate increases potentially by the the Fed, which is a reaction to inflation. This is a, it's a counterbalance of that, and that's what happens when you know you have a bunch of money to. Put in to the economy.

And again, and this is like a, unprecedented times with people having to stay home and all the things that happened in particular 20 20, 20 21 with Covid. It's a, I it's an interesting time. It is a very challenging time for a lot of people and. One of the challenges is how do you put yourself in a place where you can create financial independence for you and your family?

Like the stress of that, I think for a lot of people is is very hard. It's a real problem. Not and, A real problem for people in any sort of employment. Not necessarily, just saying our, clinical field is directly related to this, but that's the field that I know the most about and that I work with, so that's what I'm going to address.

I wish I could solve all problems for everybody, but I can't. So what I do want to address is the way that I see an investment in your own business. As an opportunity to take back some control over these events that we cannot control. I can't control what Vladimir Putin decides to do, or president Biden or any other world leader.

I can't control that. I, and I don't know what their. Re reasons are for things that they do or not do. It's so far away from my sphere of control that there's nothing I can do. I can't control covid, I can't control supply chain issues. I can't control inflation and what's happening with that, or interest rate changes.

I can't control any of that stuff. And if you try to fixate. Things, especially things that involve money that you've saved and you've earned and you're trying to do the right thing with, to create long-term stability financially for yourself and your family, which I think everybody should be able to do and hopefully can do.

I see a lot of frustration and. Associated with these traditional investments, and I invested all the things that I mentioned I have investments in. It's, I see it as well. But the thing is I also have two businesses, right? And. One of those being a, a essentially a education consulting company.

And the other one is our physical therapy practice. And I can speak directly to that in particular with going through 2020 and worst case scenario. Before 2020, I remember I had an entrepreneur friend of mine ask me if I'd ever had a business in a bad economic time, and I hadn't, I thought about it and I was like, you know what?

I haven't, I started our practice in 2014. We, the financial and housing collapse happened a couple years before that. We were well on our way out of that. And honestly up until 2020 we had a pretty solid economic environment for the most part and. Honestly, all of that changed in a period of a very short period of time in March of 2020.

And not only did it create a economic environment where. People were fearful, lost their jobs just put us in a kind of bad economic position as a country really in the world. But ultimately, basically shut our practice down for a decent amount of time and, That's not something I ever expected to happen.

I never expected for my business to just be shut down, to go from, the revenue that we were making to zero with staff, with employees. And that being said, the, I think the scarier thing for a lot of people is, and this did happen to a lot of people, was for them to just get let.

This actually happened to a lot of people in our profession. They worked at a clinic hospital and there wasn't anybody coming in. They just got dropped, right? They just let, they let 'em go. The you have no control over that, and it's not fair either, right? Like you, especially if if you're doing the right thing for your employer, you feel.

You, there's safety there, especially in a clinical position, like whoever thought that there would be clinicians and physicians and dentists just completely not working for a period of time. But that's exactly what happened. And there's no control in that. There's no control, there's no safety necessarily in employment from somebody else, in my opinion.

Because if you just take a look at what happened in 2020, the last person to go is gonna be the person that owns that, that business and the first person to go is actually gonna be the most qualified, highly paid person. That's what we saw more than anything. If you were a fellowship trained lead clinician, you were gone before a new student because you cost more.

And insurance doesn't reimburse any differently for you than it does for a new grad who's getting paid, 60% of what you're making. And that's just economics. That's just the way that. Businesses run for-profit, businesses run. So when we look at investments and a lot of people don't necessarily look at their business as an investment, they just look at it as creating a job for themself.

Which, if that's all you do, it's honestly probably still gonna be an advantage if. It's the direction that you want to go, and it's not the right thing for everybody by any means. I think that only a small percentage of people should actually start and run their own business. I think everybody can do it.

Like mentally, they have the skillset to do it. They can put the work in if they decide that they want to do it. But for some people, the lifestyle is just not what they're looking for. But if you have entrepreneurial tendencies or entrepreneurial tendencies and you're constantly trying, be creative and come up with solutions to problems and and make things better within a business that you're working within, then you could be successful on your own.

You may just choose not to. But if you do, I think you have to look at your business as an investment. And if we look at a practice, for instance, it costs me $3,000 to start our practice. Okay. It was, and a lot of that honestly was a computer. I had to buy a computer. This is about a thousand bucks. So a third of my budget was for a computer.

Cuz I had to give my, I had to give my army computer back, which was a piece of crap. Anyway, it was happy to give that thing back. But $3,000, not too bad to start to start a business. And if I look at the ROI on that business, it's, God, I don't even, this is thousands x it's a huge roi.

In comparison. It, I don't know of anything that you could have put $3,000 into that would be worth, what my business is worth eight years later in as far an inve as an investment goes. Now it required a lot of work and it required a lot of time and energy. But it still is an investment.

It's still something. Qualifies as that. And the way I look at investment is it's something that creates cash flow. Is it something that appreciates and is it something that you have control over that's also tax advantaged? Those are the big things that I want to see with any sort of investment that I highly recommend you think about as well, which is one of the reasons why people like real estate so much is because they checks all the box on that.

The only thing you can't control is some of. The other factors as far as interest rates go, the economy whether thing things open and close as far as like employers go in your area. You can be fairly accurate with predicting those things. But even still, you don't have quite the same level of control that you do in a business.

But even in 2020, in the worst kind of time period of our business, we still had control. To some degree, we could make a decision about what we were gonna do. I think a lot of people they just decided they were gonna chill and wait it out, and I think a lot of people just took a pause. And hopefully that was a beneficial thing for them. For us. We decided that it was an opportunity to work on things that were going to make our business better. As things came back, which inevitably they, they would, and they did but we decided, In particular to work on how do we improve our recurring business our business of people that are coming back for not just PT services, but other services that we could provide both in person and remotely.

And, looking at that, like that decision was our decision. We could have decided, you know what, we're just gonna chill and hope this goes away. But we decided, all right, we're going to, we're gonna work on the things we can work on. Within the constraints that we have because we have control over that.

And there's a level of comfort associated with having control because it's up to you really, whether one way or another. It's up to you. What happens with that investment, that business that you have invested in, both with your money and time. You can't look at Google stock and say, I have control.

What happens with this company, you have no control over it at all. All you can do is just speculate and hope. But with the business, with your own business, you can make adjustments. You can make things better. You can hire the right people, you can get rid of the wrong people. You can improve efficiency.

You can do all these things that allow you to create an investment that cash flows, which is e essentially your salary. And the salaries of all the people that you hire, as well as profit, which you are able to take on top of. If you run a business correctly, effectively and make the right decisions, put the right work in and do the right things.

And that's the thing that is the biggest differentiator between traditional investments and what people look at and a business and, You can't necessarily lump them in together. Stocks in particular, any of these, not necessarily real estate but any stocks, crypto hard assets whatever physical, precious metals, something like that, whatever.

These are all. Passive things, you buy them and hope that they go up in value. With a business you put money in and then you work towards something going up in value and being worth more because of the effort that you put into it. So it's a completely different type of investment, but if you're willing to put the work in, you're willing to learn, you're willing to grow it, in my opinion, is the safest investment that you could possibly make.

I especially feel. If, when you look at these sort of cash and hybrid practices there, So much positive momentum that's going for these businesses. And for us, within our mastermind group in particular, we have about 150 businesses that we work with very closely. We track data very closely and we see trends at least on a fairly decent size scale with these businesses.

And I've never, ever seen more of these businesses grow at the speed at which they're grow. Grow into standalone locations at the speed at which it's happening. Many people within 12 months of starting have a standalone location. It's gonna me three years to get to that point, and I was terrified to sign the lease on it at that point as well.

Cuz I just didn't know if it was gonna work. It was a huge risk and it was very stressful. And now we see it happen in a third of the time with people that are, have these massive trajectories, and legitimate ability to grow seven figure practices in, in these different areas.

And it's just like, All, I don't say it's all positive. There's so much positive momentum and change that's occurring. And some of it has to do with negative things like insurance sucks, it's getting worse. COVID I think scared a lot of people. It forced a lot of people to take a hard look at themself, which in the long term, it's gonna be a very positive thing, I think.

Are you taking care of yourself? Are you taking care of your vehicle in life, your body? And for a lot of people, they weren't. And they were looking for people like you and me and our businesses to help them understand how to take care of themself for the long term and view their body as an investment, not as a cost.

And that's a very interesting paradigm shift that, that we're seeing that's leading to these types of businesses grow. And scaling and becoming more sustainable in many different environments, both small towns, big cities, anywhere in between, as small as 15,000 people in a sea, we've seen successful, practices.

It's not just. Big cities where this works. It's really, it's interesting to see and in particular these mid-size cities where there's just not as much competition or I think it's just such a huge opportunity where people have not necessarily started building these businesses.

And I think over the next five to 10 years we're gonna see just a massive. Number of businesses open of practices, open of insurance-based practices that shift over to, at a minimum, a hybrid model because of, decreased reimbursement, they're gonna have to. So when you look at the viability of these businesses now in comparison to eight years ago, and that's the.

The most perspective that I have. I know these have been around longer, and there's people that I can speak to where these were at 20 years ago. But for me, I only know, what's happened over the last eight and what I see with the people that we work with and the changes that they make, and it's, it is an interesting, exciting time to be a part of this.

Movement of clinicians that are really driving towards businesses like this. And I think for a lot of people, they look at a business as just a escape from the job that they don't like. And that's exactly what it was for me. It was just the thing that was gonna get me to not have to. You work in a clinic that I just didn't wanna work in with a population I just didn't get satisfaction from working with.

And that was all that was all I expected. But it turned into unknowingly as, as far as, for me it's, I intentionally did this. It turned into a great investment. It turned into something that I was able to scale with my wife who is, absolute ninja, badass. Develops and runs all the operations of the practice.

Together we're able to grow a business that now is an investment, is now, makes money when we're not there that provides jobs for other people. That is an entity that has a value that we could sell if we decided that we wanted to. That's an investment that checks all the boxes for that.

So what I want you to think about is if you're on the. About this, whether you should do it or not. I think you have to look at, if you're willing to put the time and energy in to create this investment that you're building, it's much different when you really, view this as something bigger than necessarily just replacing your income and take that lens to it.

When you take the leap, when you dive in you're gonna treat it much differently. You're gonna see just. Impactful this can be and how much it can grow past yourself. And it's, I think it's very hard to see that when you first get started because there's a lot of, honestly, you're just, you're drinking from a fire hose basically.

You're just trying to figure it out. There's a lot to learn. There's a lot going on. And you're scared. You're scared that it's not gonna work and you're gonna have to go back and, try to find a job and all your family and friends are gonna see that you weren't successful. And it's embarrassing and, financial, you'll be fine.

I think it's the fear of failure and potential embarrassment of not being able. Make something work that stops a lot of people from actually trying. And if you have a, if you have a practice you have to take the lens of. This as an investment in order to really put this business in a place that is gonna safeguard it and insulate it the way it deserves.

Where you're making decisions based off, a business that you want to have for decades. A business that you want to be able to run without you, that is frankly a safer place for your people to work. You can't do everything yourself. You have to bring other people in. You have to employ smart people.

You have to give them great opportunities and you have to give them support. That's how you grow something that is there, whether you're there or not, that generates revenue, whether you're there or not. And it's not just for the purpose of making money when you know you're not directly doing something.

I think a lot of people, they think that and they're like, oh yeah, it's, that's the dream. Make money while I'm sleeping. I hear that all the time. It's it's not that cold. It's not that fulfilling like it's just money. Who cares? It's about building something that is bulletproof, about building something that employs great people, that develops a culture that you're proud of that helps people make true long-term changes in their health.

It's about much more than money. Money's a byproduct of building something the right. Passive income is a byproduct of building something the right way, but it's not the goal. That's just the byproduct. The goal is to build something you're proud of and to be a part of something. That you enjoy so much that you don't want to, try to build up this huge retirement nest egg and then never have to work again the rest of your life.

You would question why you would do that. It's the thing that you enjoy the most as far as, work goes it's the thing that, that you want to do, the thing you get energy from. Why would you ever wanna stop that? That's the goal. And that's, you have to look at it as an in. An investment in how you're building something in the people.

The people are an investment, not a cost. Keep that in mind. Your admin your staff members anybody that you bring onto your team. These are not costs. These are investments in people that are gonna be the infrastructure of your business. That represent the thing that you've taken a risk on and worked so hard on, cuz you can't just do it all yourself.

Those are investments and they all work together to create this entity that supports everybody as well as yourself. And allows you to have control over the decisions that are made in that. So that it is a safe investment, whether it's good economic times or bad economic times. I can tell you if Russia invades Ukraine, it's, there's a lot of negative things that could potentially come from that.

I'm not worried about our practice or other business one bit because we provide value to people. We have solid business infrastructure and relationships and great people that work with us in those businesses, and we're gonna continue to be fine. Now, Google stock might take a. Because of that, and that might freak you out if a lot of your net worth is in that, or, interest rates spike and all of a sudden the value of, your investment property tanks because people can't afford the same mortgages they can when interest rates are low.

All those things you can't control. But all these things have nothing to do. With how we're gonna run our business or the decisions we make. And even if never negative things happen, nothing. I can't imagine anything being worse than what we dealt with in 2020. And we came out of that just fine, in fact, in a better position because we had a control over what we were doing, the decisions we were making, and how we ran that business through that time.

So to leave you with a summary of this, I think businesses are the safest investment that you can make for four reason. Number one, there's control, which is the biggest reason, control over what happens with it at least a significant amount of control. You may ha have ultimate control, but you have a lot of control in comparison to other investments.

It appreciates if you put the right amount of work in it, cash flows, and it will generate income for you month in and month out, and pay the payroll of all your staff members if you run the business the right way and it's tax advantage and helps you really keep more. Of what you make as an investment, which is very important.

So hopefully that's helpful. Hopefully if you have a business, you start looking at it more as an investment and take it very seriously as you're growing that because you have a massive really cool opportunity if you're on the fence about it. If you look at it as an investment, as something that you wanna put work into actively, I think it's the best investment you could possibly make.

So as always, guys, thank you so much for listening and 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 Eve Gigi 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/pt entrepreneur or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur, and we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that name.