E631 | How To Deal With Failure

In this episode, Doc Danny dives into the topic of dealing with failure in business. He sheds light on the various forms that failure can take, whether it be a referral partner canceling on a deal, a patient failing to show up, or a staff member venturing out to start their own practice.

Danny emphasizes the personal impact that these failures can have, often leading to a negative snowball effect where one setback leads to another. However, he offers a refreshing perspective, encouraging listeners to view these failures as valuable lessons to learn from and to embrace the idea of failing forward.

Doc Danny highlights the importance of self-reflection when faced with setbacks. Instead of blaming external factors, he advises taking a step back and assessing one's own decisions and actions. By understanding the reasons behind a failed hire or a missed opportunity, individuals can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Developing a short memory and being receptive to advice, just as they give to their own patients, proves crucial in growth and success.  Danny firmly believes that a positive mindset plays a significant role in achieving one's goals, emphasizing the importance of finding happiness along the journey.

Tune in to this enlightening episode as Doc Danny shares valuable insights on how to navigate the challenges of failure in the world of business. Gain a fresh perspective on setbacks, learn from them, and adopt a mindset that will propel you toward success.

If you are starting a physical therapy clinic and run into failure check out this blog post!

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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 head there, go ahead, get signed up. We'd love to have the conversation with you in that group.

So here's the question. How do 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 is Danny Matei and welcome to the PT entrepreneur podcast.

What's going on guys. Zach Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast. And today. We're talking about how do you deal with failure? Now, this doesn't just apply to business, but I'm going to mainly keep this around business. But the reason I bring this up and a lot of the things that I talk about, they just come from direct conversations that I have with clinical business owners, right?

Clinical entrepreneurs that are starting growing and scaling mainly cash and hybrid practices. And the way in which you do that is really through space and people. These are service based businesses. For the most part, you can have a digital element, but for the most part, they're going to be seen in person in a physical space by another human being.

So you need to scale through a space and through people. And a few conversations I had this week were around regrets with space, like potentially signing bad leases, signing for spaces. They wish they hadn't signed. Signed for or maybe a better spot came available after they had signed a lease and being feeling very frustrated about that as well as people and having turnover.

So staff members leaving staff members, going and doing and starting their own practice staff members going to work in other locations. And I think as a business owner, these are things that you can take very personally. You view them as like failures or mistakes that you made and a few that happened all the time that we end up having to deal with on a smaller level really are things like somebody.

That's a referral partner, you I don't know, somehow you mess that relationship up. It doesn't work out so well. They stop referring people your way that the relationship goes south. You reach out to new referral relationships or to maybe teach a workshop or to just connect with somebody you think would be a complementary person to know within the business area that you're in and they turn you down, right?

They don't respond to your email. They don't respond to your message. They don't get back to you. They don't show up for something. That you have on the schedule and we take those very seriously. That's rejection. It's getting turned down In a lot of ways, it's failure, right? So these are this is failure on a small scale not necessarily a huge scale, right?

It's like you're your business is going south and it's you're gonna be bankrupt or something like that But it's funny how these little ones can really ruin our day they can really Make us think about nothing but the negative things that can happen. And it's like this negative snowball that starts to develop where it's, one bad thing happens, a patient no shows, and the next thing you know, a referral source cancels on you last minute.

You're supposed to meet for some follow up meeting. You get stuck in traffic on the way home. Takes you longer. You're late to pick up your kid. And then next thing you know everything seems to be spiraling the wrong direction. And sometimes we just have days like this. It's like it just... It just happens.

Sometimes your day sucks. It is what it is, but. My wife sent me something this morning. There was a, basically a Mad Men quote. So it was a picture of one of the guys from Mad Men and a quote that he says in the show. And the quote goes like this. He basically says, I didn't get where I am by dwelling on the past, right?

I didn't get where I am by dwelling on the past. I love the, the show Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso says, be a goldfish. Goldfish have shortest memories be a goldfish and when you really think about how do you deal with these? compounding failures that can happen sometimes and It can really feel like everything is you know Conspiring against you and I promise you it's not It just depends on how you view what's happening, right?

If you view it as okay That was a shitty day and I'm gonna make today a much better day and you have a short memory and you don't dwell on it But all of a sudden you wake up and it's fresh and you got a fresh start to do the things that you need to Progress yourself your business the towards the goals that you have or you can wake up and you can say man That was a bad day.

I hope I don't have a day like that again and be very aware of it and avoidant of things and not maybe do some of the things that you need to do. And people take this to an extreme, right? So let's say, okay, referral partner. Cancels on your last minute, completely ghost you, whatever. You might take this in and think, wow, I just don't need to try to have any referral partners.

I don't need to reach out to anybody locally because that hurt and I don't want to experience that again. But I think rationally, you probably know that's not a. Good thing for your business. You have a local service business. You need to be a part of the local community and you need to have, communication and connections with other local business owners and or local people that are influential in some way that can help grow the business and you can help them in return, right?

You have to do those things. So if you have one bad encounter. Are you going to let that ruin a channel that could grow your business substantially grow your business past yourself, be able to hire really great people. Let's say you have somebody that leaves, we had our practice.

We had two staff members that that left and started their own practices, not far from where our practice was at, and it is what it is. It's, it is the cost of doing business. You're going to have that, especially, and I would say a good. portion of the reason why it was based on lack of being able to be good leaders and really give clear direction for these people who I think are great people.

And I know I've done well for themselves and I'm proud of them. I really am that they have been able to make their own practices work and and be successful. I think that's great. And I think that they learned a lot of great stuff with us that they've been able to carry on. And then they probably continue to do the same thing.

And I really think that there's a couple of different ways to look at that, right? Okay, if you have staff members that leave and they go open a practice and, or they leave and it causes a lot of problems for you to have to like, try to. Pick up the patients that they were seeing and all of a sudden you're like even more busy and time poor.

I've talked to clinicians that are decades into their own practice that have swore that they would never, ever hire again. And they're never hire again because he had one bad encounter, one bad example of a clinician that they brought on. And then that person left and took clients with them left and left them in a really bad spot.

And they then retract and they say I'm never going to hire again. I'm never going to do that again. And they think about it and it festers and they don't drop it. They don't let that failure just become what it is in your past as a lesson of something you can learn from. It's painful and it stays with them and it stops them from taking actions that they knew initially they were supposed to take.

Otherwise, they never would have hired anybody. If they wanted to have a small lifestyle business, they would have just done it when they go to hire and then somebody leaves or doesn't work out the way that they want or they realize, dang, maybe I'm a bad leader. Then they don't think about anything but just I don't want that pain anymore and they don't ever take any chances in that same arena.

All right. And that same sort of type of addition to whatever is they're doing versus looking at themselves like, man, what did I mess up? I do a good job betting that person. Did I do a good job onboarding that person? Did I do a good job mentoring that person along the way? Do I have the leadership skills necessary to be able to lead other people?

I drive and you have leadership skills to lead myself because if you look at your yourself first, if you look at these failures, you can learn from those if you're willing to look at them and learn from them, and it's not like you're going to completely avoid everything forever. That's silly, but you've got to learn how to fail forward.

You have to learn how to take those failures and then And this idea of retracting and shutting down because of a failure, all that, all you're doing is basically keeping that failure top of mind. And it's a pain stimulus that you stop yourself from being able to progress in any other way.

And I talked to a lot of our clients about this interactions between thoughts and feelings and actions. And this is something that for a lot of us, we can see this with chronic pain all the time, right? So if somebody has, pain and they feel bad. Then they stop moving as much, right? So let's say your knee hurts.

You stop moving and when you stop moving, you start to think worst case scenarios of man, what if I'm never able to run again? What if this gets so bad that I can't walk? You know what? What things am I not going to be able to do that? I wish I could do. And then you start to feel even worse. And it's this negative feedback loop.

That we see patients get into and we have to help them break that. Now take that and apply that to yourself within the context of your own business. You get turned by a down, by a referral, relationship you're trying to reach out to, right? So you're like, oh, hey, I wanna meet for coffee. And they're like, no, I'm not interested.

Damn. Now what? You feel bad about yourself. You feel bad about yourself. And then you start to think, man, did I do something wrong? Is it me? Is it the way that I am communicating with people? Your thoughts start to be. Negative. And then you start to avoid the action that you know you should be taking in the first place, which is local marketing and reaching out to other people in your area to develop networks and connections.

So this is again, a negative feedback loop, that feedback loop that we see people fall into and yet we help our same patients get out of it because their knee hurts. And yet you're unwilling to push past something because you had one failure, you had somebody turn you down or something didn't work out the way you want or a staff member left.

And now all of a sudden you pull back and you play small because you're. Avoiding that same interaction, that same situation, because all you're doing is thinking about it versus having a short memory and then working towards it versus saying, okay what actions do I need to take so that I am better at this?

Now, all of a sudden you start developing the skill set of learning how to network with people. You learn persuasion and influence techniques. You learn how to be more engaging and ask better questions. Now, all of a sudden you're taking actions. And now your thoughts are going to change where you're like feeling more confident about your ability to do that.

And as you start to feel more confident, you set up more meetings with people or go out back into the community that maybe you're scared of doing that because you got turned down. As you're going through your business journey at different stages, this is going to happen at some, in some degree where you're going to have something that is a failure, something that's painful, that's going to stop you from wanting to do any of these other things again.

And if it's important to you to hit the goals that you have in your business, you're going to have to really take a step back, almost pull yourself out and look at yourself top down from an elevated view. And you say, man. What's this person doing? Are they being courageous and actually working on the things that just got exposed?

Or are they just playing small, playing scared because they're scared of whatever that prior issue was that, that created pain for you? That, that, that failure that you had and what I want you to make sure you keep in mind is the advice you give yourself. You need to take the same damn advice that you're giving your patients, but just apply it to yourself in a different way.

When you tell your patients that they have to stop thinking about picking something up as something dangerous and they have to start to expose themselves to picking up weight again because life dictates it. They have to do it and they've been avoiding it and they've been never ever bending their back because somebody told him, for God's sakes, if you bend your back, your disc is going to explode and shoot out of your back.

And hit the wall and we don't want that. So never bend your back. It's terrible information and we have to help people relearn how to use their body sometimes and expose them to things that they think are threats. And painful and are going to cause a setback in order to help them take a step forward.

So as you're doing that, think about if you're doing that to yourself in the context of business and things that maybe you're avoiding because of failures that you had, because you got to learn from them and you got to fail forward. So hope this helps something that I feel like is such a big difference maker, the mindset side for the entrepreneurs that we work with.

And the ones that dial it in, they have far more success. And honestly, they're a hell of a lot happier along the way. So I hope this helps and we'll see you next week.

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