From Army PT to PT Biz: How Doc Danny Built a Multi-Million Dollar Business

Many physical therapists dream of having more autonomy, better income, and greater impact, but few take the leap to build something truly scalable. Doc Danny Maté, founder of PT Biz, did just that—transitioning from a military physical therapist to a cash-based clinic owner and ultimately growing a coaching business that has helped over 1,000 clinicians achieve financial freedom.

In this post, we’ll break down his journey, the key lessons that shaped his success, and why business skills—not clinical skills—are the real game-changer for private practice owners.

---

The Military Mindset & Early PT Experience

Doc Danny’s story starts in 2007, when he was accepted into the U.S. Army Baylor Doctor of Physical Therapy Program in San Antonio, Texas. This program, one of the best in the country for sports and orthopedic physical therapy, set the foundation for his future.

His first exposure to high-volume physical therapy came during his clinical rotations, but it wasn’t until he was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii that he truly discovered the power of autonomy and performance-based training.

Unlike traditional PT clinics, where productivity is king, Danny’s role in the Army gave him the ability to:

✅ Set his own schedule
✅ Focus on injury prevention rather than just treatment
✅ Teach strength & conditioning for soldiers
✅ Have full control over his clinical decisions

This freedom and responsibility gave him an early taste of entrepreneurship—long before he knew he’d run his own business.

---

The Pivot: From Military to Cash-Based Practice

After several years in the Army, Danny made a major career pivot. In 2014, he left active duty and moved to Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and two young kids. The goal? Teach for The Ready State while launching a small cash-based clinic on the side.

At the time, cash-based physical therapy wasn’t nearly as common as it is today. But Danny saw an opportunity:

• People wanted 1-on-1, performance-focused care
• High-volume insurance clinics weren’t delivering great patient outcomes
• He could offer something different and actually enjoy his work

The clinic was meant to be a side hustle—but something unexpected happened.

🚀 It grew. A lot.

Without advertising, without a big marketing budget, and without taking insurance, his clinic started thriving simply by delivering great results and prioritizing patient experience.

Within a few years, it was clear: this wasn’t just a side hustle. This was the opportunity that could change his family’s life.

---

Helping Other PTs Escape the Insurance Grind

As Danny’s clinic grew, something interesting started happening.

📩 Clinicians who had attended his performance-based training courses started reaching out, asking:

"How are you running a cash-based practice? I don’t want to work in a high-volume clinic anymore, but I don’t know how to make this work."

At first, Danny didn’t think he was doing anything special. But after seeing the demand, he and his wife decided to take seven clinicians through a one-year mentorship program to see if they could replicate their success.

The result?

💰 Clinicians started building thriving cash practices—just like he had.

At the end of the year, every single one of them asked to continue working with him. That’s when he realized:

Helping PTs grow their businesses was a bigger opportunity than just treating patients.

---

The Birth of PT Biz

From that small mentorship group, PT Biz was born.

Danny and his team have now worked with over 1,000 clinicians, helping them:

✅ Launch successful cash-based practices
✅ Build recurring revenue through performance & wellness services
✅ Scale from solo clinicians to multi-provider clinics
✅ Create financial stability without chasing insurance reimbursements

Today, PT Biz has helped add hundreds of millions of dollars in recurring revenue to the physical therapy profession. Their Mastermind program alone works with over 250 clinics across the U.S., impacting 65,000+ new patients per year.

---

Why Business Skills Matter More Than Clinical Skills

One of the biggest lessons Danny shares is this:

"Your ability to grow your clinic and create financial stability isn’t about being a better clinician—it’s about being a better business owner."

Many PTs believe that if they just hone their clinical skills, their business will grow. But the truth is:

❌ Being the best clinician in town won’t matter if no one knows you exist.
❌ Working harder won’t automatically bring in more revenue.
❌ Without strong sales, marketing, and leadership skills, your business will plateau.

The clinics that thrive are the ones that:

✅ Learn sales & marketing – Not just treating patients, but getting patients in the door
✅ Build recurring revenue – Not just one-off sessions, but long-term programs
✅ Hire & train a team – Not doing it all alone, but scaling strategically

These are the exact strategies PT Biz teaches, helping clinicians go from overworked to financially free.

---

What’s Next? The Future of Cash-Based PT

Cash-based physical therapy is growing exponentially every year. If you think your area is "saturated," think again. Most people:

❌ Don’t even know what physical therapy is.
❌ Aren’t aware that cash-based clinics exist.
❌ Are stuck in a broken insurance system that doesn’t prioritize patient outcomes.

The real competition isn’t other cash PTs—it’s big hospital systems, low-quality clinics, and AI-driven health solutions.

That’s why marketing, branding, and sales are more important than ever. The clinics that grow in 2025 and beyond will be the ones that own their local market, become the go-to authority, and keep innovating.

---

Want to Grow Your Practice Faster? Here’s How

If you’re a PT looking to:

✅ Break free from the insurance grind
✅ Grow a cash-based practice with predictable revenue
✅ Create more financial freedom while working fewer hours

👉 PT Biz can help.

💡 Try Clare AI for free → MeetClaire.ai

📞 Book a free strategy call with our team at physicaltherapybiz.com and find out how to scale your clinic!

🚀 Enjoyed this post? Share it with a fellow PT!

Do you enjoy the podcast?  If so, leave us a 5-star review on iTunes and tell a friend to do the same!

Ready to elevate your practice? Book a call at the link below with one of our expert consultants today and start your journey to delivering unparalleled physical therapy.

Podcast Transcript

Danny:  Four to eight hours a week. That's what we have found that we can help clinicians save just by using our AI documentation tool, Clare. Head to meetclare. ai, get signed up for 10 free notes that you can use to test this out and see how it can help save you time. Not only does it listen to your note and document the soap note effectively, but also creates a visit summary that you can send your patients after the fact.

To help with compliance and help them have clarity with what the plan is going forward so that you can help them get the result that they want. Now, if you're tired of having to write notes and you want your virtual assistance tool, Claire, to help do that on your behalf and save four to eight hours a week, head to meet Claire.

ai, get signed up for 10 free notes and test it for yourself. Hey, 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 and over 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 to date, my company, Physical Therapy Biz, has helped over a thousand clinicians start, grow and scale their own cash practices. So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, cause I'm here to help you.

What's going on? Danny Matei here, founder of Physical Therapy Biz, and I wanted to take A couple minutes to reintroduce myself. Many of you, if you've been listening to my podcast for quite a while, you probably already know my backstory. You probably already know a bit about me and how I got where I am today.

But as we move towards putting more of this on YouTube and sharing more in other formats and other platforms, I want to take a few minutes to just reintroduce myself and give you an idea of my philosophy on these businesses, but also how I got here and what shaped my views on what we teach today and what really changed my life, to be honest with you.

If we go back to 2007, which I'm dating myself is when I started PT school. So I went into the U S army's program, which is through Baylor university. So it's a U S army Baylor. doctorate of physical therapy program. It's in San Antonio, Texas. Shout out to, to to all my colleagues that are still military physical therapists and have, graduated out of that program still active duty and, or that are civilians like myself right now.

I think it's one of the greatest. Educational programs for physical therapists in the country. If not number one, in my opinion, if you want to be involved in sports, medicine, and orthopedics, which is what I wanted to do. So I was fortunate enough to get accepted into this program. I spent three years there learning how to.

Become a physical therapist and and did all kinds of rotations around there, which was awesome, right? Because half our program is is in clinic and the other half is didactic. So we're learning, everything we need to pass tests, but half of it we're spending in clinics. And I spent an entire year in a high volume insurance based clinic in the San Antonio area.

And that's actually where I got my first exposure to what I consider high volume physical therapy. Now, as I graduated and I moved on to other roles, I was fortunate enough to be assigned to the 25th Infantry Division out at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, which is a infantry division. They were a striker division at the time, which means they were they had like small tanks.

Think of it that way, right? But they were transitioning. To to light infantry with the brigade that I was assigned to. And and it was a cool time to be there, right? It was an opportunity for me to move into an infantry division environment as a medical provider, which is really cool. I got a chance to get, do a lot of cool military stuff that I thought was enjoyable and physically challenging, but also I got to treat people that were hurt and I got to teach strength conditioning classes and I had a lot as a brigade physical therapist in charge of.

Thousands of soldiers. And what I got there was my first taste of what I would consider entrepreneurship because The reality was nobody knew what I did They didn't really know what I was supposed to do or what my deliverables were all they really cared was soldiers were being treated if they're hurt and fewer soldiers being hurt was like Better right and great.

That's what my focus was on So I got to a point where I really was focusing heavily on Performance and injury prevention and less so on on injuries, which was the goal, right? I wanted to stop people from getting hurt not wait till they got hurt And I had a ton of freedom, so I set my own schedule I did the things that I wanted to do from an education standpoint and it really spoiled me to be honest with you to go back to any other general clinic job that, that I would be assigned to.

And in the the summer of 2013 I was reassigned to Fort Benning, which is in Columbus, Georgia, which is the home of the Airborne School, which was a cool opportunity for me to move to a clinic that was attached to the Airborne School. So we saw all kinds of strange injuries, jump injuries, lots of trauma.

But What happened to me was I was put back into what's considered a troop medical clinic, which is basically a high volume clinic a traditional clinic setting. And I was taken out of this interesting environment where I could be involved in lots of different training and injury prevention.

And have say over my schedule and get to do cool military shit with with an infantry division that I was assigned to it, all that kind of went away. But what I did have was an opportunity to. move into some other things. And the Staret's Kelly and Juliet Staret, who own a company called the Ready State had approached me about potentially teaching for them at the time.

I had known them for a few years. I had learned from him and his staff and and it was an opportunity to take a job teaching. Both for their company, but also to fulfill tactical contracts that they had a lot of with different military groups all around the world, which was a really unique opportunity for me and something that I didn't feel like I could that I could turn down.

So in 2014 in the summer of 2014, By we, my wife and I, and and by that point, two young kids decided, Hey military been cool. It's been very, impactful part of our life, but we feel like this is the direction that we need to go. So we got out, we moved to Atlanta and where there's a huge airport where I can fly to all these obscure places that I was going to.

And We started a clinic in on the side of cash based clinic, because I needed something to do when I wasn't teaching and in order to test the stuff that I was teaching anyway, it gave me an interesting opportunity to just test these concepts that we were teaching to strength coaches and clinicians and operators, all, all around the world.

And what we didn't realize was that clinic. Would turn into the thing that really what had was the biggest opportunity for us was the thing that changed our life frankly and After a few years of teaching and having this clinic on the side What happened was the clinic started to grow and grow organically?

As we started to just get people great outcomes really care about people spend time with people and we were doing something different than what people could find in the city of atlanta at the time And we realized after a couple years that this is really what we need to focus on. So I stopped teaching We focus just on, on our clinic and Ashley and I were able to quickly grow that clinic to multiple providers.

And it turned into, something that legitimately just changed our life. It financially changed our life from an impact standpoint and the people that we were able to work with and made us just better business owners. We had to learn to be better. better business owners. And a few years after starting our clinic I started to get people reaching out to me primarily from courses that I had taught.

So clinicians that had come to courses that I taught were reaching out to me about, Hey, what are you doing with your clinic? Because I don't want to work in an in network clinic. I don't want to work in a high volume clinic. I don't want to work in a hospital. I don't want to do home health anymore. Like I want to work with, active adults.

I want to work with athletes like what you're doing. And I don't want to have to take insurance. And we didn't think we were doing anything special, to be honest. We just had no idea. We decided that we would take a group of clinicians, seven clinicians, for a year, and we would work with them to get their businesses in a better spot.

And to try to take what we learned and apply it to their businesses. And see how that, and see how that actually went. And Over the course of that year, Ashton, I learned a lot. We were able to help a lot of people and we were just shocked, honestly, at the results people were able to get the changes in their business, but more, more importantly, how cool it was when we got everybody together at the end of that year, we have brought everybody to our clinic and how good of a time they all had with each other.

And how, just like, how awesome the energy was, just how positive everything was, and how rare it felt. And at the end of that, my goal was like, okay, cool that was great, go ahead and take what you learn and run with it, right? And every single one of them asked me if they could continue to work for another year, right?

And that's when we realized that, we knew some stuff that was really helpful to clinics that we were very much underestimating. And we decided to, really start to help more clinics because, honestly, I enjoyed it so much. I just If I felt that it was more of what we call in the military force multipliers, right?

So like myself going into a brigade, I'm a force multiplier. I can help people Not get hurt. I can help them be able to do their job better. I can help them perform better. I can help them improve the fighting capacity of this group, right and For us, when we look at the profession, there's a phrase that says, it's better to be a pirate than join the Navy, right?

And that means it's better for you to do your own thing and, and stick to that and chart your own course than it is to, to join a big group. And that's how I felt. I felt like we had this group of people that are just doing things differently.

And we want to really see that grow. We want to see that develop because I feel it's very important for the profession for clinics like ours. To grow and be able to help more and more people and to help people live these like high performance pain free lives That so many people are after but very few people have an advocate have somebody quarterbacking their ability to do that that we can do so well and there's people that need it There's businesses that can thrive off of it and it's a perfect match So we felt we had a better opportunity to help change the profession by doing so I basically started to remove myself from patient care and focus on educating, focus on learning, focus on sharing the ideas that that we had formulated within our clinic, athletes potential, which was the name of it.

In the first. Five years or so of running it. Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast. I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a long time listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast and please leave a rating and review.

This is actually very helpful for us to get this podcast in front of more clinicians and really help them develop time and financial freedom. So if you would do that, I'll greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast. And off the back of that, I wrote my first book, it's called, go figure, fuck insurance.

And it it's a book that I'm very proud of. I'm very proud of the title. I'm very proud of the way it looks. It looks like a 1990 CD, parental advisory, the shit you weren't supposed to buy at the store. That's what we want it to look like because the information in this book is dangerous to the profession.

It's dangerous to the status quo of physical therapy, of you, seeing. 20 people a day of People burning our providers out at a young age and wondering if they made the right choice going to PT school That's there. That's a dangerous topic in there that shows people how to take ownership of their own career and increase what they make, but also increase their impact and increase their enjoyment using their skill set the way that it's deserved.

And that book was something that, had, helped a lot of people and reached a lot of people. Some of you may have read that book right now. We revised it and updated it. It's now called the Cash Based Field Manual, which isn't as cool of a title, but to be honest with you. Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, you throw the mother of all curse words on the front of a book and it's impossible to run any sort of ads to it.

So as we revised the book and updated it based on information that we had learned that was just better concepts we changed the name of the book, which that's readily available on our site as well. You can actually still buy fuck insurance if you want to do that, but you got to go to Amazon and look for it.

But either way. That's a book that we're very proud of. We've had thousands and thousands of people buy it, use it. And many people grow, multiple six, even seven figure practices just off the information in that book. For us, that was the next logical step.

And from there, we just put our head down and started getting after it. Like we did with our first business. And to date, we've helped over a thousand clinicians directly helped over a thousand clinicians. I'm not saying I have a thousand clinicians that have listened to a podcast. I'm saying we've helped over a thousand clinicians face to face.

person to person, start, grow, and scale their clinics. We have more alumni that have successful clinics than most coaching programs, in our space. And we're very proud of them. To date, we've added hundreds of millions of dollars of recurring revenue to the profession of physical therapy in these small one to one or low volume clinics that are either fully cash or hybrid clinics.

They're incorporating things like training, wellness training obviously injury treatment, semi private training, digital program work, all kinds of different profit centers that happen in these businesses that allow us to have a lot of flexibility. And even currently with our our mastermind program, we have 250 businesses.

We work with all across the country. And what's so cool about that is the effect that we have. On the population now, just with the businesses that we're currently working with in the last 12 months is 65, 000 new patients. That's an arena full of people. That's something that we're really proud of.

And and we look forward to helping, even more people. But I will say, for me, the transition has not been. The easiest thing to do because when you go to school to learn how to do something as valuable and important as helping people get out of pain and back to, activities and resolving injuries and being better after surgeries than they were before, things like that.

And you enjoy doing it when you make a pivot and some of you are going to have to do this with your business. When you make a pivot from. Expert clinician trying to be world class is something to now of a sudden you have to run a business that transition can be Really hard that has a very difficult thing for me I identify as a clinician if somebody asked me at a dinner party what I do for a living I tell them a physical therapist then it gets weird when they ask me where I treat and I tell them I don't Anymore, I sold a practice now.

I help clinicians on the business side, but I still identify that way And people in my neighborhood friends, family, I have a free garage gym, PT clinic where, you know, they can get checked out by someone that's a mediocre physical therapist. But free at the same time anytime they want and that transition and many of you will have to make the same transition to go from clinician and being obsessed with being great as a clinician to being a business owner that can be hard.

That can be hard because you have to shift your attention and your focus and you may really love what you do over here as a clinician. But when you look at your impact, if your goal is to have a bigger impact. You have a bigger impact by training your staff to do what you love to do and helping them, be as great of a clinician as you are.

Now all of a sudden, instead of it just being you, there's three, four, five of you. That's a lot more people that you can help. And then to make that transition for me, even from the business owner side. To really an education platform where we're helping more clinicians again a very hard thing to do You know, we sold our practice and it's a fantastic accomplishment.

We're very proud of it and that business is still doing very well, but to even sell a business like that you're so tied to it personally It's a difficult transition. It's a sad thing in some ways to remove yourself from a community, from a culture that you've built that is that's special, that you enjoy being around, and that's such a positive place to be.

These pivotal points, everybody's going to go through them, and where we're at now, where we solely focus on helping businesses, that's why we put this information out. That's why, we have 700 plus podcast episodes, who knows how many. videos. That's why we travel around.

If you haven't seen them yet, clinic tours, we're showing off what these clinics look like, what's possible to do and what, to give you some ideas so you can be creative within the profession with your own clinic. Because this is the path that we see this going. Cash based physical therapy in particular is growing exponentially every single year.

Some of you might see this in your area and you might say, okay, Is it saturated? It's not. It's not at all. There's so many people that don't even know what the hell physical therapy is. They don't even know that you exist. Let alone know that your competitors exist. There's so many people and we fight over this small piece of the population that is aware they have a problem and they're looking for a solution.

That's a sliver of the population. It's tiny. You got to get out there and let people know who you are, who you help, be involved in your community, and do a fantastic job. We're not competing against each other. We're competing against not knowing who we are. We're competing against large hospital organizations.

They're going to give them watered down care, and they're going to have them, be seen with two other people at the same time. That's what we're competing against. I'm pretty sure you're going to be competing against Digital options that are AI based algorithms for treating different injuries, and this has already happened.

So are you competing against each other? No, you're gonna be competing against a lot of other people, a lot of other things, and the best thing you can do is just focus on having the best clinic you possibly can grow, being the best business owner that you can possibly be, and reinvesting yourself as a business owner.

And understand that your limitation is not gonna be as a clinician. I promise you it's not. Unless you suck as a clinician. And if that's the case, stop listening to what I'm saying, and go learn how to be a good clinician. Tons of resources out there. But if you're a good clinician, your ability to grow your clinic, your ability to provide financial stability for you and your family it is on how good of a business owner are you?

How good are you at sales, marketing, people, processes, finance, leadership? That's the variable that's going to change things for you and allow you to create time and financial freedom. And as soon as you realize that, and this was a hard pill for me to swallow too. I just thought I'm just going to be the best clinician I possibly can.

Then my wife and I realized we don't know shit about running a business, especially when we hired people and then we moved into a standalone space. We took on a bunch of debt in order to be able to grow and scale. We didn't deserve it. We didn't know what we were doing. And, luckily for us, we didn't ruin it along the way.

And we did dive into learning more about business and reinvesting in ourself. And that's the paradigm shift that you have to get to. If you want to run a business. You've got to understand you've got to be a good business owner, and that's where we help people today So in my whole, pivot and transition from you know going to school Wanting nothing more than to be you know a fantastic Military clinician to then wanting to be a fantastic civilian clinician educator to then wanting to be a fantastic business owner to now wanting to be a fantastic educator in our profession to help our population grow and scale.

It's all comes through this evolution of the things that you're learning, the things that you're applying and the things that you want to focus your attention on. So if you're listening to this and you have a business, I promise you, you need to focus your attention on becoming a better business owner, period.

And if you're looking to improve that's what we do. I hope that my story has helped give you a better idea of who you're listening to why you might want to listen to me, and if you look behind me, there's two Inc 5, 000 awards behind me. This is not like. We're not making this shit up.

This isn't business information that I just read in a book and I'm sharing with you now. This is in the trenches, legit business advice from someone that's been there, done that, and trying to help a lot of people do the same thing. So you can listen to what we have here on YouTube, you can listen to this on a podcast, you can pick up my book, you can pick up the resources we have, you can head to our website.

Go through the free resource we have the five day challenge you know you can get on a team a call with our team go through our business audit where we'll actually take you through and Benchmark you based on portions of the business that we see as being the biggest bottlenecks and let you know how you're doing compared To the hundreds of clinics that we actively work with we're here to help.

Okay, and we are clinicians. That's my background. That's your background. You can't fake that. You know what I'm saying? Like you can't fake being involved in the profession. And there's a lot of people that probably see this as a business opportunity within the profession as this is growing.

And that sure, no problem with that, whatever. But when you come at it from the angle that I do, that my team does, From being there knowing what that feels like knowing what it feels like to see 20 people a day You know knowing what it feels like to be scared out of your mind starting a clinic Knowing what it feels like to take on debt to be able to scale and being terrified That you're going to go bankrupt and having personal guarantees on leases and things like that it's a different place for to come from, for us to be able to help people because we intimately understand what that feels like and how we can help you navigate those very choppy waters and in some cases, dangerous business situations that can ultimately bankrupt you.

And that's not a, that's, I'm not like saying that to scare anybody. That's legit. Thing that happens, like you can go out of business, you can lose at this game. That, it's not like you just, everybody wins. It doesn't work that way. And we want people to not actually go out of business, to not lose, to be able to play this game for a very long time at the highest level that they want.

And that's why we put this information out. And I am very honored to do I've been doing this non stop now and sharing information for Literally years and years I find a lot of value in being able to educate other people and I've loved seeing the growth of the people that we work with because I know how much it affects their lives.

I know how much it affects their finances. I know how much it affects their time freedom, their mental bandwidth to be able to be present with their family and their communities and their ability to help people around them. Get back to things that they love doing. And that's fantastic.

That's why we do what we do. So that's me, Danny Mattei, founder of PT Biz. If you're interested in learning more, just stick around. We have a lot of information to share. We have a lot of resources that we want to, share with you to help you along your journey. And and if it makes sense and you want to get, you're trying to go a little faster, we'd love to have the opportunity to maybe even work with you in person.

So thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. And I'll catch you in the next one.

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. And 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. So head to physicaltherapybiz.

com forward slash challenge and get signed up today.