E607 | A Great Time Freedom Reminder

Today, Danny emphasizes the significance of time freedom and how entrepreneurship can lead to achieving it. He shares an amusing anecdote about his daughter's school performance, where she performed a trap version of "The Wheels on the Bus," to highlight this point.

Dr. Danny also talks about how challenging it can be to take vacations while working for someone else, which is not the case for entrepreneurs who have the freedom to manage their time. 

Dr. Danny stresses that financial freedom precedes time freedom and that it is worth the exchange. He values being present for his daughter's school activities, coaching her teams, and traveling with her, which he can only achieve due to his freedom of time as an entrepreneur. He draws on his experience in the military to compare the culture's lack of support for taking time off with entrepreneurship's advantages. 

Dr. Danny encourages entrepreneurs to become better business owners, hire talented people, develop systems and processes that can run without them, and reinvest in themselves as business owners.

He concludes by stating that time freedom is the pinnacle of success, and revenue is what follows it. Tune in to this episode to strengthen your knowledge of how entrepreneurship can lead to time freedom.

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Podcast Transcript

 Danny: Hey, real quick, before we get started, head over to Facebook and join the PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. If you haven't done so yet, we have monthly live trainings going on there. There's an opportunity for you to join in the conversation instead of just listening to what I have to say on this podcast, as well as the people that I bring on.

And it's a really cool place to join about 6, 000 other clinicians that are. Honestly, trying to change the landscape of our profession through these cash and hybrid practices. One other thing that's really cool is we have a guide in there. That's a quick start guide. When you join, you can go and check this out.

There's about seven videos that we've curated that are the most common questions we get in the best case studies that we've found to really help you start, grow, and scale your practice up to seven figures. So if you haven't done so yet, head to Facebook request to join the PT entrepreneurs Facebook group.

You have to be a clinician. We're going to check you out. We don't just let anybody in. But if you are, Hey there, go ahead, get signed up. We'd love to have the conversation with you in that group.

So here's the question out of physical therapists, like us, who don't want to 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 Matei and welcome to the PT entrepreneur podcast.

Hey, what's going on? Doc. Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast. And I'm excited to share this lesson learned with you today. Something I picked up from a in person school event that my kids did. And it was a good reminder of the importance of time freedom. My kids go to a school here in Atlanta that is a it's a Atlanta public school.

It's a charter school, so they do a slightly different curriculum, but they do a morning meeting every every day and sometimes they'll have classes perform like a song or something like that. So my daughter's class is doing the wheels on the bus as their song, but not the old boring version, the trap version, the Atlanta version PJ pandas versions.

Check it out if you want to see what they're what they're doing. So check out PJ Panda. He's got some cool songs, but. They did that and I showed up for it and I was standing there talking to one of these other parents. And she's a physician and her husband works for Delta and I was talking to them about the perks of him being a Delta.

So they get to basically fly standby wherever they want, whenever they want. The challenge is they rarely get to do it because the two of them have such demanding jobs that they can't. Take their family anywhere, even though it's free for them to do so they might be able to do that once or twice a year, which is pretty similar to most people, even for this could be a quick weekend trip or get it, get out for a longer period of time.

And I asked her where her husband was. And she said that, they just both couldn't make this little performance cause he had to go to work and they're, saving time off for the other things that I want to do. And I talked to Ashley. Whenever we left and I was like, man, do you remember what it feels like to request time off to ask for vacation time?

and I know I did, and I remember the process when I was in the military. It's tedious. But I just can't really relate to that so much anymore because I haven't for time off or requested vacation days in almost a decade. And not to say that the path that we chose right in with entrepreneurship and doing something on our own, in some cases, you couldn't take vacation if you wanted to.

So early stages in business is just, you're just so busy. You're working so much. You just, You can't really take time off because it's such a grind to get started, especially if you're going side hustle to full time and you have your full time job. You've got this part time job that you're doing evenings and weekends and you're not quite at the stage where you can go full time into your business yet.

You're just really time poor. And then you go full time with your business, you get some time back, but. You quickly fill that with things that need to be done. People that, you're seeing patient volume that you're growing and then you're hiring and you're finding a standalone space and you're hiring again.

And it's almost like it's hard to come up for air until you're around this sort of a four to 500, 000 gross revenue business where all of a sudden you can honestly just like. Pump the brakes and chill there if you want to do that for a while, and it's a really great business that's fairly easy to run if systemized.

If you have the right hires and you can start to create better time for you and for yourself, but getting to that point You know it can take years But I thought about the exchange of the years in which Ashley and I put into the business that we started and if the exchange was worth it like just like the Extreme amount of work the intensity that's the stress associated with that versus just working for somebody else And then you know not having the time freedom that we eventually were able to build and I think it's very worth the exchange looking back.

Would I do it again? Absolutely and part of it has to do with the fact that I when I think about these little things right like I get to go You know, watch my daughter and her class perform a song and that may sound somewhat insignificant to, to people, especially those of you that don't have kids, right?

And it's just hard to explain if you don't, because it's, it's just such a important person in my life, both my kids, obviously, but this example, I would watch my daughter do pretty much anything. And I would want to go watch it because I can do that. So I have the time freedom to be able to go to her.

Little class performance or to volunteer at their school for field day or to coach their teams, or to help them, with their homework when I pick them up from school or to walk them to school and drop them off or to go on a trip with them when they have a three day weekend or over the summer to be able to travel with them or spend time with them and teach them things that I want to teach them that they're not going to learn in school.

And take them through different educational topics that I think are important that requires time, and the time comes after financial freedom because financial freedom in most entrepreneurs that I work with me included the money side of it is not the most important thing.

It's really not, but you can't have time freedom without financial freedom or. You could but it would be very difficult. It's not as safe in a lot of ways because you need the ability for a business to be able to generate revenue without you being there to actually have time freedom.

Now you can have. Say over your time when and where you're doing things. And if you say no to things, you're basically just saying, okay, cool I'm gonna say no to patients this day Which means you're gonna give up, you know a thousand dollars in revenue so that you can go do this other thing and that's okay You can make that exchange It's actually a far better place to be than somebody that is I think on a really tight schedule that they can't get time off to spend with their family At least you have say over that the stage in which that we're in like we could say Hey, we're going to do this today, but our businesses still generate revenue, whether we do or not.

And that is ultimate time freedom. That's time freedom to be able to do what we want when we want now, not to say that we don't work really hard. Still, we obviously do. And we do it because we like it and we're mission driven and we're helping a lot of people. But we've built it to a point where we can pretty much do what we want, especially with our family when we want to, when we want to do it.

And that is a very unique place to be. It's a place in which. I hope everyone that listens to this podcast gets to where you get to be those parents at your kids Performance at their school when everybody else just has one parent there even in a time like now where there's a lot of flexibility with work schedules we're like one of the few people that were there where both parents were at this little you know this little performance and I can't say that You know why everyone else, you know wasn't there but many of them spouses had to work they had something going on and for us, you know We're able to make that decision that we want to go to that and as insignificant as that might sound it means It's literally Exactly why, we've decided to do what we do and the time freedom side of things, I've been on the other side of it.

I remember being an intern whenever I was in the army, I was doing a rotation in Augusta, Georgia. I had an eight week rotation and Ashley ended up in the emergency room and I had I basically had to beg my boss to let me cancel schedules so that I could go. Wait in the emergency room with her for something that we were really scared about that was going on.

That she had to have a dress that was causing these really unexplained symptoms. And I still remember that. And I'm like, this is, this sucked. The fact that I had to, and I felt bad about it. I was like, shit, man, I'm like. I had to basically move patients over to somebody else and they had to cancel some people And it was only like three people at the end of the day But I felt bad.

I felt bad that I was like not doing the work. I was supposed to do but yet You know my wife's sitting here in an emergency room scared. What the what's the choice to make? Of course i'm going to try you know, and i'm going to go and i'm going to be with her like i'm not going to put some other people over Someone that is the most important person in the world to me.

But I just remembered the culture was not aligned with that at all. Like it was almost something that, I remember my instructor was like, look, we don't normally do this. Like you can't miss time. You can fail your rotation by doing this. Like these things that just weren't, they just, they weren't positives.

Versus, Hey man, this is unfortunate. Yeah, we got to go. Go be with your wife that didn't happen. And the culture of these things, these, this work culture that we have it has to be, there has to be some balance there but in a corporate setting or a big, group setting like the military is a huge corporation.

It is government entity, but it's a huge corporation. It's no different than a big consulting firm or working for IBM or or whatever, as far as like logistically, how things are run with big systems. And obviously the job is quite different, but it's still huge systems follow a lot of red tape and it's a heavy work culture.

And it's like that in most, big clinics that I see as well. Versus if you end up being able to successfully do your own thing, like you can decide what you do, when you do it and who you do it with. And the time freedom comes off the back of financial success. That's how it works. You have to have one with the other.

And the way you have financial success is by effectively running. A business learning how to do that. And clinically you might be a baller. You might be able to get everybody better and you're just a stud and you don't know shit about business and you're still going to struggle. That's the reality.

That was me for years. Whenever I started my practice, and I got to a point where I was. Schedule saturated time poor still didn't know what the hell I was doing. I still really had no time freedom whatsoever and then Understanding and learning and growing and reinvesting in myself as a business owner and not just as a clinician Is what made all the difference in the world?

It's what made the difference between me, you know Seeing patients starting at six o'clock in the morning until four or five o'clock at night and then headed home, and making really good money doing so to making quite a bit more money than that now. And being able to go to my, see my daughter seeing wheels on the bus trap version by PJ Panda any day of the week that I would choose to do that's the difference. The difference is I became a better business owner and built a system and a business around me. It's repeatable. Be able to hire really talented people, be able to. Develop, systems and processes that are going to happen whether I'm there or not and be able to create time freedom So the time freedom is the that's the goal.

It's the pinnacle in my opinion and the revenue is it's it precedes that in terms of the step to get to time freedom, but the time freedom That is so much more important. It's not the money it's, you need a certain amount of it to get there. But then after that, it's just about being able to live your life with the people that you want to and to be able to work on the business the way that you want to help the most people that you can.

That's where it's at. But I had a great reminder of this recently, this week, and I want to share that with you. Cause I know for many of you, you're on the journey, you're maybe you're just starting in this kind of maybe doesn't resonate with you as much. Some of you, maybe you're a clinician that is super time poor now, but you're making great money much better than you have in the past.

And this probably you're at a stage now where it gets, it feels like it's real hard because how do you give that up? How do you hire and grow your team? And you probably know you have to, I know you have to, if you really want to get to a stage where you have actual time freedom, but it's hard because you got to learn these skills of hiring and systemizing and really getting better at finance and understanding how to.

Teach the skill sets that you need versus just do it yourself. And then if you're at a stage where you've got your business to a place where you have a team, it's about refining that it's about developing leaders within that and being able to grow the business without it just going centrally.

Or directly through you and all these are unique challenges right along the way. And even where I'm at, I face plenty of challenges now that that I'm working through and business is always freaking hard. It's always hard if there's a stress component there that never goes away, but I would take that all day, to have the time freedom that we experience now versus, roles that I've been in.

Where. You just can't, you can't even enjoy the world with the people that you want to be with. On the terms that you would want to dictate, that's what it comes down to. So if you're chasing time freedom, which I think is, it's like the Holy Grail, it's the thing that's the most impactful thing on your life that I've experienced, at least most impactful thing on my life that I should say that I've experienced.

You got to have a vehicle that is efficient and is a solid business for you to get there. Otherwise you're always stuck in the rat race and you're going to be missing a lot of performances that your kids put on

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