E525 | What I Learned From An Old Notebook

Today, I wanted to share the importance of writing things down with pen and paper. It is a great way to organize your thoughts and then be able to look back at them and compare them to what actually took place. If you are not already doing this, start now! I want you to be able to look back on what your vision and goals are. Enjoy!

• Revisiting my notebook and what I learned
• Reminding yourself of goals and vision
• Losing track of where you are going

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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 a PT Entrepreneur podcast, and today I wanna talk about the importance of writing things down, of using pen and paper and a notebook. And I bring this up because I recently was working on a little project with my son where he is writing out this script to a little short film he's gonna make.

With some of my wife's family and some of his friends and so I had the back of this notebook that's pretty old that I that I let him use the last few pages up, but as I went back through it, I was like, oh crap, look at this. This is five years old. And I was going back through and I read through the first page and what I thought was interesting was just.

How interesting it is to read what you wrote down and see how much of that actually happened, and some of your thoughts at the time. It's like a time capsule, five years ago to now of what I was thinking and what I was trying to figure out. And for me, I write a lot of stuff down because it's how I work through trying to organize my thoughts.

I guess the best way to put it, and what I have in here is this rudimentary sort of Rainmaker program framework that I was writing out. And one of the things I wrote that I think is super relevant honestly, is, you're reimbursed the same no matter if you're the best clinician or if you're a new grad.

And. I wanna talk about that for a second and talk about what, where I see the importance of placing your attention and skills that you're learning, depending on what you wanna do. But if you think about that, if you suck, if you're a real shitty clinician, you're gonna get paid the same by insurance as somebody that's amazing, like the world's best.

And that doesn't seem fair, does it? Like it doesn't seem. It doesn't seem like it should be that way, but it is because insurances just reimburses based on the codes that are fulfilled, right? The units that are captured in billing and it doesn't really account for quality. It doesn't account for dedication to your craft, to your skill to being.

Better every single, month being better than you were the month before that improving, spending the extra time on clinical reasoning work on, con Ed courses on mentorship. You don't get paid any different for that. And what you actually probably get. Is you get a promotion to a clinic director where you see the same volume of people, then you have to try to mentor everybody else to be good, and you have administrative burden on top of that for marginally more pay because you're still not getting reimbursed anymore than any of these other people, but you're managing people so you get paid slightly more.

So when we look at this sort of continuum, if you were to think about this as like a pyramid on the bottom. We have fulfillers, that's staff PTs. No matter if you're the greatest staff PT or the worst staff PT in the world, you're going to get reimbursed roughly the same. And the reason why is that re insurance in particular, just reimburses the same no matter what your credentials are.

Now, if you're in the cash world, maybe you're gonna be able to make more because you're just amazing and you know you're able to charge more. Which is fine. That's definitely something you can do, but you're still a fulfiller. You're still at the bottom. Now you be get bumped up to a clinical director and you're a manager.

You're managing people, which is a higher level skill. And you're focused on making other people better on your team, which then drives more revenue for the business so they can pay you slightly more, but it's not really a super valuable skill. You're a manager, you're not you're not doing anything that a lot of other people can't do is manage other folks now.

Go up one more notch and you have rainmakers. And rainmakers are sales and marketing. They're people that can bring in business. They're people that can sell business. There are people that can drive revenue in a business. This is very few people. This is a very valuable skill. This is a skill that if anybody goes and decides they're gonna start a cash-based practice, they have to learn this skill.

Otherwise, it doesn't matter how great of a clinician you are because you're not gonna have anybody to work with. And if you're a great clinician and you learn how to be a rainmaker, that's who we see just explode in a short period of time. That's the people we see that go from just starting their cash-based practice to making $20,000 a month by month three or four.

And that is the unique person that can learn how to be a rainmaker fairly quickly and is a great clinician. So they, they are Light years ahead in terms of their value creation. If you're looking at stepping up cause they went from fulfiller, they skipped a manager.

They're basically managing themself and now they're, they've turned themselves into a rainmaker sales and marketing. Eventually they're gonna have to manage other people, but for now it's just themself. And then the last one that would be people that are creating things, that's, people that are entrepreneurs, are people that are Casting big visions and moving towards that, that are hiring and bringing people into that and training people and building a self-sustaining organization that is very difficult to do.

That, that is a skill that if you go into business for yourself you really have to have all of these, but focus hopefully more on the top of the, of this sort of like value pyramid where you are going to have the highest return on your time. You know you're gonna have the highest return on your time by creating things and being a rainmaker.

And the lows return on your time when it comes to managing the day-to-day of things and fulfilling. And this comes straight from the first page of a notebook I wrote five years ago, and it's still so relevant today. It's really interesting when you look back at some of this stuff because you know these concepts.

For a lot of clinicians are difficult cause they just want to focus on fulfilling. I just want to be a world-class clinician. Clinician. I get it. Cool that we need that for sure. But understand that's just the least value that you're creating for anybody else. Now, if you just get frustrated with that and you decide, oh, I'm gonna do my own thing so I can make more money, now you gotta come become a rainmaker.

And to become a rainmaker, you gotta understand how to sell and you gotta understand how to market. And if you can do that and you can have a great clinical skill set, you'll never have to work for someone else the rest of your life. And that is a profound thing if you think about it. So I challenge you start writing stuff down and if you have been doing this, if you've been writing things in notebooks and just loose, format.

No one has to be anything structured. Taking notes, writing out things you're thinking about, look back at that and see what you know, what you find. See if you've had anything where you've tried to project things out and see where you're at. Are you closing it on your goals, or. Have you completely lost your path?

Have you lost track of where you're trying to go? Cause I think it's a great way to remind us of what we were interested in and what we were focused on and what we're trying to move towards. And hopefully you look back and you're like, damn. I actually did a lot of what I set out to to do and not crap.

I haven't done shit cuz if that's you gotta get after it man. Start writing stuff down and start actually working towards whatever your vision is and your goals are and one of the best ways to do that is write it down. So anyway, hopefully you guys love notebooks as much as me. As always. Thanks for so much for listening and I will catch you next week.

What's up, PT Entrepreneurs? We have a new exciting challenge for you guys. It's our five day PT biz part-time to full-time challenge where we help you get crystal clear on how to actually go from a side hustle to a full-time clinic. Even if you haven't started yet. This is a great way to get yourself organized in preparation for eventually going full-time into your business.

So we actually help you get crystal clear on how much money you're actually gonna need to. Replace with your business to be able to make a lateral transfer. How many people you're actually gonna need to see based on what you should be charging. We're gonna tell you three different strategies you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you get to pick the one that seems like the best fit for you for your current situation.

We even show you all the sales and marketing systems that we teach within our Mastermind for people that are scaling to multiple clinicians, past themself that you need to have in your business to be able to go full-time. And the last thing is we help you create a one page business plan. This is a plan that's gonna help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and drive action.

That's what this is all about. We want you to win. We want you to take action, and in order to do you have to get really clear on what you need to do next. So go to physical therapy biz.com/challenge. Get signed up for the challenge today. It's totally free. We think this is gonna be a game changer for you and are excited to go through it.

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 connect 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.