E725 | The Best Way To Ruin Your Practice

Are you a member of our free PT Entrepreneur Facebook Group? Join today!

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.

Danny: This is what gets us into trouble. You may be someone that is very direct with people, but Your staff, they may not appreciate the directness of how you communicate with them. And the funny thing is, people can be direct with others, but not respond well to directness to themselves. So you may even have somebody that is a staff member, and they're very direct.

And, but they don't respond well when someone is very direct to them. 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's Danny Matta and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff, ut I've been an active duty military officer. Physical, the. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing 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? Dr. Danny here with the PGI door podcast. And today we're going to talk about the surefire way. Or the best way to kill your business, the best way to stifle growth and to completely stop yourself dead in your tracks. And that comes down to you and your leadership. And man, it's hard sometimes to take complete ownership over what we do or don't do.

on a daily basis, both in our personal life and in business. But when you really drill it down, your business is either going to grow or it's going to flatline because of you. And this has to do with it. Yes. Your hard skills, understanding how to run a business, sales, marketing, people, processes, all that, right.

Finance, all that. But. The soft skills, the ability to communicate with people, to lead people, to understand what motivates people and to effectively, have conversations say the right thing, say the right things in the right tonality and to effectively lead people. Is the number one determining factor from what I've seen of whether a practice is going to be able to scale past himself, or if they're going to, it's going to feel like you're just like running into a wall over and over again, where you bring on a staff member, let's say it's an administrative assistant, you bring on a staff clinician and you have this continual turnover of, your admin makes it a couple of months, your staff clinician.

They're six to twelve months and then they're gone. And when we have this continual turnover, and I've had this in my own clinic as well. I'm not saying that I have, had all that figured out. A lot of this stuff you're going to have to learn the hard way. Hopefully you can hear what I'm saying and eliminate some of that.

That's the whole point of why I'm sharing any of this. But you're probably going to still have to learn some of this stuff the hard way. The way you talk to people, the way you manage your temper. And emotional control when somebody does something that irritates you. That is a huge reason of whether you're going to have turnover in your business or not.

And if you can imagine getting yourself to a place where you could hire is a hard enough thing to do anyway, you've got to, Get real scrappy, get patients in the door, learn how to sell, learn how to do local marketing, how to do content marketing, maybe some digital marketing. You've got to systemize your business.

You have to negotiate leases and you have to learn how to be a business owner as well as deliver a great service as a clinician. It's a combination that's hard to do. And a lot of people will get stuck from what we've seen. At a side hustle. So maybe they can make an additional thousand bucks a month or something as a side hustle, but it's taken up a lot of their time.

They're probably better off just getting a PRN job at a hospital, which would be far easier to manage. But you don't, they, they get stuck there and they just, they, cause they can't learn the business owner side. They can't get past that. And now let's say you do, and you go past that. Now, all of a sudden, this is your full time job and you.

Grow and get yourself busy enough where your schedule is a full time schedule and you're ready to bring on help. This is a challenge. You're time poor because you're doing everything yourself, but then you have to hire somebody, which takes time to train somebody, which takes time. And then you have to continue to follow up with those people and make sure they're doing the right things.

And that they also feel like you are. Mentoring them and that they're a part of your team and they're doing the right things. They know what the score is and if they're working towards being good at their job they want to know all those things. All of these things take time. So what do we do? We rush it and we limit our time that we're willing to give.

Our staff that we're willing to actually pour into them. So we go through all this trouble to get busy. And then we rush the hiring process. We rushed the training process. We rushed the feedback process with somebody that we bring in and then they leave, this is a big reason that we see people turn over is that you just do not do a good job of managing them.

And this is the hard, this frankly, the hard part for a lot of us because you are so time poor at that stage, the other issue that I see, and this is something that I just picked up recently. We did our our virtual event and I could tell the way that people phrase things, the tonality, they use certain words that they use when they describe employees and sometimes it is a very demeaning way. If you tell somebody that they work for you, that is a really bad way of phrasing what somebody does in your company. That is incredibly demeaning. I would never ever tell somebody you work for me, do you think that makes that person feel good? Do you think that makes that person want to really try hard for your company?

Do you think that makes that person feel like they're a part of a supportive culture that's trying to do something incredible with this business and really help people and work together to do or does that feel subservient? Does that feel like, you are just working for somebody versus working with somebody.

And in many cases, the way that we talk to people. This is what gets us into trouble. You may be someone that is very direct with people, but your staff, they may not appreciate the directness of how you communicate with them. And the funny thing is, people can be direct with others, but not with you.

Respond well to directness to themself. So you may even have somebody that is a staff member and they're very direct. And, but they don't respond well when someone is very direct to them. So understanding communication styles for people, what motivates them. This is the puzzle that is leadership. This is the challenge that screws everybody up as they try to scale past themselves, especially if they don't have any experience with managing people before they go into this, or especially managing people within your own business, who has experience with that until they start their own business.

Almost nobody. And what we find is very often people will make the mistake of not training people enough. Not following up with them enough, not being patient enough with people, not being clear with people. And I know sometimes you say the same things over and over again, but you've got to reiterate what you want, how you want it done and make sure that you're checking in and following up with people, giving them feedback.

They want to know if they're doing a good job. They want to know what they could do better. They want to know what, what they're doing well. And as simple as like for every one negative thing you want to say to somebody, you got to give them like eight to 10 positive things. It's a huge ratio difference.

And most people respond very well to positive reinforcement, not negative reinforcement, but when you're sleep deprived and you're time poor, and you're just frustrated and you're not sure it's going to work. And now listen, you bring somebody on and their revenue negative. For a couple of months, or maybe they're an admin and the business isn't growing the way that you think it will.

And maybe you look at them more as a liability than an asset to the business, and you start to be a little short with them and you start to say things maybe different than what you would if you were in the clearest mindset, all of a sudden you're going to get some churn in your business because you're running those people away.

So if this sounds like you. And this is where you have to be brutally honest with yourself. You really got to look at yourself and you got to say, man, am I the kind of person that I would want to work for? Am I the kind of leader that I would want to follow? Am I the person that I need to be to lead the people that I want to hire?

Because if the answer is no, I'm not there yet, then you have to work on becoming a better leader. Some of this is putting yourself in positions where, you get a chance to flex that muscle as you hire people, making sure that you are doing ongoing followups with them. You're doing quarterly feedback.

You're doing, we're supposed to be bringing somebody on. You're doing weekly check ins and giving them feedback about the things you're doing well, about the things you want to make sure that they improve on. And. Also carrying yourself in a way that other people will respect being punctual, making sure that you are polite to everybody, making sure that you're doing the work you're asking everybody else to do, and you're not cutting corners yourself and leading from from the front and leading by example is really important.

Really important because if your staff feels like you're going to do the right thing for them and you really care about them as a person and their life outside of just your work environment, they're going to, they're going to be amazing employees. They're going to be great team members. They're going to be there for a long time.

You're going to have a lot less of a problem with churn. One book that I would say was very impactful for me as a leader. It was a book that I was given whenever I was in the military and it's called leaders eat last by Simon Sinek. If you feel like you're struggling a bit on the leadership side, this is a great book for you to read.

And, reading a book about leadership is like reading a book about basketball. Yeah, you eventually, you got to get out there and play. To get better, you can't just read a book about dribbling and shooting. Like you got to get out and play a game. You got to get out and you got to put the work in.

And that's where you do that with people. You do that. Also, you can do that with friends and family. You're not just a leader in your business, but you could be a leader in your community. You could be a leader in your family, a better leader in your family, a better leader, in your area in whatever.

Communities you're involved in, and that could be you volunteering to be put in a leadership position where people are dependent on you. And that's a great way to learn how to be a leader as well, because for many of you that start a practice, you have no leadership experience. You have no you don't have any management experience, especially not management of people that you employ.

And that's normal. Where are you supposed to get that for a lot of folks, unless they have a longstanding career in the profession and some of them do, and then they move over and they start their own practice. They don't really have any other place to get it, but I'll tell you this. I've seen now time and time again, younger clinicians that start practices, struggle with scale more than clinicians that have been in the profession for.

Five to 10 plus years and have been put in leadership positions, mentorship positions, development positions that they might get to where their schedule is busy at the same time. But I see way more turnover in young clinicians that have no leadership experience, no management experience versus clinicians that have that they.

They keep people around better. They make better hiring decisions. They're better at managing and leading people. And they don't have to learn the mistakes the hard way. Quite that quite as much as someone that is that is younger. So if that's you better to start to work on that skillset now. So take a look at leaders last, give it a read.

Start to implement some of the basic principles of that within your life, within your community that you're a part of and within your business and look at that as a skill that you're constantly trying to improve and hone. And even to this day, like I've had a lot of leadership positions, have a lot of people that have been in our company, a lot of team members, and I still find myself needing to improve in this area.

I don't know if it ever stops. And it's constantly. Testing you to make the right decision to say the right thing at the right moment with the right person to make the right hire, to do the right development task. And people are a fricking Rubik's cube to try to figure out. They bring their shit into your company that is stressing them out.

They sometimes do the job. Don't do the job the way that you want. You have to help continue to develop them and remind them of what your culture stands for and what the vision is of your company and the mission and why it's so important to do the mundane things correctly. But if you can figure that stuff out, you're going to build an amazing culture, an amazing team, and you're going to help a hell of a lot more people.

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 the 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 that 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 And sign 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 a Information put down and getting yourself ready to take action in a very organized way, you will have success, which is what we want to head to physicaltherapybiz.com forward slash challenge and get signed up today.