E588 | The Importance of Community

Doc Danny, Jerred Moon, and Yves Gege recently had a conversation about entrepreneurial health, and this week Doc Danny has been reflecting on the topic of burnout in the business world. He spoke with a clinician and discussed the challenges of being a clinical entrepreneur - needing to be present and engaged with patients, yet also managing the multiple facets of running a business.

Balancing these two aspects can be draining, and it's important to find ways to maintain mental and physical health in order to prevent burnout.

Danny was reflecting on the complexities of owning their own practice and having to deal with tax season. The speaker recalled a weekend spent with their community, including coaching a basketball game and attending a cookout.

Danny noted that it would have been impossible to take on such commitments in the past due to the need to constantly work and the lack of mental and time bandwidth. However, Danny was ultimately able to create time and financial freedom for their family by making sacrifices.

Sacrifices often need to be made when working to build a successful business. This may mean saying no to social invitations or activities such as sports teams, hobbies, and other community events. It is important to find balance in order to maintain the relationships with those in one's community, as well as to enjoy the fruits of one's labor.

Physical health is important and can be improved through stress management, nutrition, sleep and movement. Mental health can also be improved by finding a community to get involved with, such as a church, volunteer group, or coaching a kids team. It is important to not let community be the first thing to go when running out of time.

Danny also discusses the difficult trade-offs that come with starting and running a business. He talks about the stress and strain it can put on relationships, and how it requires a full-time effort and commitment. He acknowledges the negatives of the journey. Then expresses that he was motivated to do it in order to create something that could generate generational wealth and change not only monetarily, but also in other ways. He highlights the importance of taking into account all the elements of life when making this decision.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Hey, real quick before we start the podcast episode, I want you guys to check out our new YouTube channel for PT Biz. We are putting out a weekly video on the most common questions that we get, and we are breaking those down in a way that's more engaging. Where you can learn better and really focus on one thing at a time.

So if you're interested in really learning more skills to upgrade your cash and hybrid practice, head over to YouTube. Subscribe to the PT Biz Channel and check out the weekly videos that we're coming out with to help you win in the cash-based practice game. 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 Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today I want to chat a little bit about continuing the theme of entrepreneurial health. So this is a podcast. If you haven't listened to it yet, go back and listen to it. It was, I forget the number, but it was a couple weeks ago with myself and my business partners, Jared Moon and Eve Gigi, talking about entrepreneurial health and.

Honestly, a lot of it was really taking care of and maintaining not just your physical health, but your mental health. And this weekend I actually was thinking about this quite a lot because I chatted with a guy that that is a clinician and we were talking about burnout just in the profession, but also burnout associated with.

Being in business for yourself. So just being a, clinical entrepreneur. And both of those are very difficult. Like the clinical world is challenging because we're, we're really, we're just giving so much to all of our patients, and you have to be such an active listener and engaged and present.

You can't be. Thinking about something else when you're trying to solve complex musculoskeletal problems with people, like you have to be there. You have to be with them. And that can feel very draining for a lot of people can feel like, you, you end up burning out.

If you don't have a good job, don't do a good job of balancing that. Then you layer on entrepreneurship with that. And trying to make your a business work, which is such a difficult thing to do, such, such a multifactorial problem to solve. If you think about it that way, you have to learn how to sell and market and how to systemize your business and how to hire people and retain people and your culture and all the financial side of it.

And then tax season rolls around and you have to deal with all of, the. The intricacies of that, which is, it's just so much more than what people, really think whenever they dive headfirst into starting their own practice. And, as I was thinking about it this weekend I actually had a lot of non.

Structured things. It just came together where I was, really spending time with people that are just in our community. I had our first basketball game, or our last basketball game I was coaching was on Saturday. Then we took the team out to get pizza, and then I went back to play a a coach's basketball game with the coaches in the ref.

We played a little A little pickup game. And then I spent, the evening with my family and a few other families at a cookout with with a little bonfire. And what I thought about on Sunday after that was just how, for so long, for so many years that we just basically worked all the time.

We worked constantly. And when I say we, I mean my wife and I, we were always working, we were hosting events in the evenings and the weekends, and we were tired a lot, and we said no to a lot of things that were community driven. I never, ever would've coached my kids' teams. I just, I didn't have the mental bandwidth for it.

I didn't have the time for it. And we have to make these sacrifices to do things that are important to you. And for us, it was to make sure that we grew a successful a successful business and that we could create time and financial freedom for ourself and for our family, which we have been able to do, but not at the expense, I would say, of other things.

And a lot of that being Friend re friendships, friend, relationships, and and time in our own community because of spending so much time in our own business with our own people that we are working with in that business and trying to just work really hard to grow that. And I know that many of you are doing the same thing right now.

And as I look back on it and I think to myself, hey, was were all those sacrifices that we made worth it, right? Was it worth it to say no to so many things so that we could focus really intensely on this business? I think it is, at least for me, and people might be different because.

For what we have done and what we've been able to do and the type of life that we know our family's gonna be able to have for BA basically generations I think is very much worth it. And what I'm realizing now though, is once you get to a place where you know you have some, you can create balance back in your life.

Cuz I don't think. At least, maybe this is a false belief, I'm not sure, but I don't think that if you really want to accomplish something of significance that is difficult in business which is exactly, just the, I guess the relevant experience I have with this is you can't do that with balancing your life.

You can't You can't coach all your kids' teams. You can't go to every, weekend, evening invite you get from a neighbor. You can't go and play on all these intermural teams and, the softball leagues and bowling leagues and, you can't get involved with hobbies that take up a lot of your time.

You want to be in a Tuesday evening golf league and start a business like. I just don't see how you can do that. You, in my opinion, you have to earn the right to get back to those things. And hopefully along the way you haven't lost touch with those people so much that they stopped asking you to do anything.

And that is the, I would say the challenge that could very well happen, you could say no enough that people just stop reaching out because. They just think that you're not interested. And it's not that you're not interested, it's just that you have to make sacrifices and you have to really narrow down what you're doing.

This happened with me with a guy that he, our sons were good friends in kindergarten and they he had a softball team that he'd played on, like guys that he was like, went to college with and he would ask me to fill in cuz they would have people that couldn't make it Almost every game.

So he asked me to fill in and I would, I would go occasionally. But, he would usually, he would call me up the day before and be like, Hey man, can you fill in, for softball or whatever. And I, at the time I was running the Dock and Jog podcast and I was also, I had the PT Entrepreneur podcast and we were obviously trying to run our business with athletes potential.

So I had workshops, I had podcasts scheduled all the time in the evenings in particular, and, I just end up having to turn 'em down quite a lot, especially for podcasts that we had scheduled. And that's a weird thing for somebody else. Or you have a podcast scheduled, yeah, dude I have a, an interview or, I have this conversation with a guy that's my co-host except for this time, like we already have it on the schedule, whatever.

And at a certain point, he just stopped reaching out to me about, Filling in on their team. And it's not really something that I thought much of. I was just kinda okay, cool, whatever. Not a big deal. I move on. But that's just an example of a relationship that you just have to make a sacrifice with.

That's somebody that I actually enjoyed being around. I, somebody that I liked, I like playing sports. I really do. And for years and years I didn't do anything. Nothing. Because I was solely focused on trying to just build this business. And this past weekend I would say, I think happiness is something that's very subjective, and I don't think it's something that is that you, I don't think you, you need external things to be happy.

I think you should be happy in general, just as a person, just yourself and be happy with yourself. But man I had a great, I had a great weekend and I, as I thought about it and I was just like trying to, I was like, man what was it that made. This weekend. Such a fun weekend. And it really, what it came down to was the community of people that I spent so much time around.

And when we talk about these variables of not just entrepreneurial health, but just health in general. This is, I'm dusting off my clinical brain at this point cuz this is the stuff that I used to teach and that we used to work with our clients on, day in and day out. And it's stress management.

Nutrition, sleep and movement and getting those four variables dialed in to just be a healthy overall person. But I think that the one thing that I would add on top of that, that basically is, maybe doesn't help your physical health all that much, but I think overall just your mental health wellbeing and feeling of con being content is community.

And you might find that in many different ways. Maybe it's your church, maybe it's a group that you volunteer with. Maybe it's, coaching your kids' teams. That, for me that's one thing that I've found a lot of community with is is coaching. I enjoy sports.

I like coaching. I it's something that I get involved in the community with these kids and these parents, and I get a chance to just help them develop, with through this sport as well. And I really like it. But it's, man, it's just time intensive, right?

So I feel like this, the community side is something that a lot of us leave off that we, that it's the first thing that we cut. It's the first thing that we get rid of whenever we run out of time. We have to make these decisions of do I coach my kids' team or do I teach x amount of workshops that I know are gonna build, the business that I'm trying so hard to build That I, that's a tough dis, that is a tough decision.

That's a tough trade off to make. And sometimes I wonder if maybe I made the wrong decision and I could have potentially done it differently where I had better balance along the way. But I just don't know that I could have, because it was, it's just so hard to actually start and grow a business that grows past yourself.

It can't be, Part-time effort. It can't be one foot in and one foot out. At least from what I experienced and what I see with the people that we work with, it, it really comes down to, are you committed to this without burning down? Obviously all the important relationships around you, which.

To be fair, I definitely stress tested the shit out of those too. With with my wife, with with my family even with my kids, and I just don't know if there's another way of doing it where you have more balance, especially where you can have an element of community involvement and have that.

Really sound well-rounded life as you're doing these things. So if you're listening to this, you, it might sound like there's a lot of negatives with starting and running a business. And there definitely are, there's no doubt there's trade offs that you have to make and there's things that you're gonna have to say no to that you might really enjoy, but.

What you have to look at. And I think the reason that I was okay with making these exchanges was because I knew that there was something that I was working towards that was hopefully something that was going to support not just myself and my family, but also to be able to create something that.

Is gonna create a generational change for my family not just monetarily. And I think this is important to keep this in mind. We think, okay, yeah. Gener generational wealth, can that be generated via business? Absolutely. Can that be generated other ways? Yes. But I don't really know. The path that takes.

If you're just gonna save money in your 401k for the rest of your life, I think there's a chance that you can really affect your your family for generations to come. But I don't think it is in as significant as of a way as having success in business. There's just, as far as money is concerned, let's just say that there's nothing that I've found that is as potent of an opportunity, as likely of an opportunity if done correctly, that create legitimate generational change in your family, but along the way, and this is what I think you have to keep in mind, and I think it's the thing that is so much more valuable.

And any money that you'll ever make in business. And it is the lessons that you're going to have to learn and the development you're gonna have to go through in order to earn. No one's giving this to you. Earn a successful business, earn a successful company, earn the opportunity to create generational family, financial, safety, security, wealth for.

Generations to come. You cannot be gifted that we see this all the time. People win the lottery, they lose the money right away. People inherit a bunch of money in a trust, they lose it right away. Why? Because they never ever were taught the lessons that were learned by the person that had to fight for that.

The, it wasn't passed along. So more importantly than money, it comes down to lessons development and what your. The people in your ecosystem your kids your family, see that you're doing and that you're leading by example, and that they can follow something similar if they decide that's a life that they want.

Resiliency, grit, the ability to be creative, the ability to, understand how to communicate with people and solve problems. These are all things that I spend so much time on with my kids. I will literally map out like literal business scenarios with them to do math equations.

You wanna learn how to multiply, let's do this shit in real life. What does that mean? What is, where does that go? What's the opportunity here? And let's apply it in real life. And these are things that I take And try to apply that I've learned myself that have led to success that are far more important than any dollar that we've ever made.

Cuz I know if I can share these lessons with my kids, they could have zero money, zero help. And they're gonna be just fine because they're gonna understand the rules of the game. They're gonna understand how to play, they're gonna understand how to create value for themself. And that is massive.

That's so important. And the only way for me to learn that, Was to dive in and do it myself. You can read a book about swimming, but it doesn't mean you know how to swim. You gotta dive in the pool. And it's scary as hell when you breathe in a little bit of water, you think you're drowning. Like you just don't know what you're doing.

You're inefficient and all of a sudden you start to figure it out and you get more comfortable. And then you can, you can. Do other things and that's what happens with entrepreneurship. So when you look at entrepreneurial health mean, look at the things that some of you maybe are going through.

If you've dropped your community like I did, if you dropped the people around you because you're having to say no to things and just focus only on your business, that's, that happens and it passes, it comes and goes. Just make sure that as you get yourself back to a place where you have more financial, you have more time, bandwidth.

That you say yes to those people again, that you start getting involved in community again because of the, all the variables that I mentioned. I think the one thing that has made such a big difference with myself in terms of my own mental health and my and just like my. Emotional control and happiness over the last, in particular two years as I've really sort try to dive back into these areas of just being involved in community is that, is being involved in a community of other people.

And oftentimes a lot of them are not entrepreneurs. Like it's cool to hang out around other entrepreneurs cuz we're so similar and we get on, we get each other all. Riled up about the things we can possibly do, but man, you gotta spend some time around some normal fucking people because we're not normal.

You need to talk to somebody that literally has hobbies. You need to talk to somebody that likes to play an instrument. Like you need to talk to somebody that likes to camp. Like not just wanna talk to somebody that wants to talk to you about digital marketing and selling packages or whatever else.

Like you gotta have variance in your relationships. And it's a good thing, it's a normal thing cuz that's a community. Not everybody is like us. We're somewhat outliers in a lot of ways and we gotta learn how to taper that around those folks. So if you're like me, if you've dropped your community, get back involved in it when you feel like you have the time to do and maybe you don't have it right now, and that's fine.

Everybody goes through that phase. Everybody goes through, this time poor phase that maybe you're in that's normal. So be okay with that. But you're earning it, you're. Earning a lot of lessons. Keep that in mind too. You're not doing this for no reason. You're earning a lot of lessons that you can then pass forward, that you can then pass forward opportunities to the people you care the most about and they see what you're doing.

Like they see you leading from the front and it is a powerful thing. Don't ever take that for granted what you're doing and it being hard. Other people see that and. That rubs off on them. That gives them hope that they can do something similar. You're a leader in their eyes and that is a huge lesson that you get a chance to take away that they share and see as well.

So guys, I hope this helps you if you're struggling a little bit with where you're at. I know entrepreneurship feels like sometimes somebody, as soon as you get up, somebody trips you again. If that's how you feel, I hope this helps you. I hope it helps you get back to feeling, more well-rounded finding your place within your community and focusing on your own entrepreneurial health, because that's what matters most.

You don't, can't burn yourself out. You've gotta keep going. You gotta, stay in the game as much as you can and then ultimately find the success that you're looking for if you do the right thing. So guys, hope you like this one. As always, thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next time.

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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.