E421 | The Key To Transitioning From Self Employed To Business Owner

If you are wanting to take that next step from creating a job for yourself to becoming a true business owner, this episode is for you!  Everyone that starts a business should build it in a way that they can one day exit that business, even if they don't want to.  I discuss why that it in this episode.  Enjoy!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: All right, so you're just getting started and you're thinking to yourself, man, I'm just gonna use Google Suite to manage my cash-based practice as I get going, look, I did the same thing, and here's what I can tell you. When I finally had to switch over, it was a huge pain in my butt to try to move all the notes and all of the documentation that I had over to another platform so I could stay compliant.

Do yourself a favor. Start with a platform that you can scale with that makes you look more credible. When you're trying to book people on Google calendars, come on guys. That's not what a real business does. A real business has something that actually helps support it on the backend and it is branded to you.

It looks like your company. Check out PT everywhere. If you're just getting started, they're doing something really cool. For cash-based practices, and I really love this. We're one of the features that they're doing. If you're new, they actually will charge you less. As you're getting started and as you grow your membership, your actual dues each month for the platform, it goes up with your practice growing so you can actually save money upfront if you're just getting started, but yet have a platform that you can grow into.

I think it's amazing. It's the only company I know of that's doing that and go figure. It's owned by a cash-based practice owner, which we love as well. So guys, head over to pt everywhere.com, check out what they're doing. If you're just getting started, I highly recommend you check. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna 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 up guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we're talking about the shift you're gonna have to make if you want to go from being, self-employed, from creating a job for yourself to being a business owner and actually running a business and building an entity that you can grow past yourself as well as potentially, put on autopilot to have a passive revenue stream or sell one day, which frankly, every.

That starts a business should at least try to build that business to a place where they can exit it even if they don't want to. And. I, the two businesses that I have, I don't want to exit, but I could, if I wanted to sell them, I could sell them. But I don't wanna do it because I really like 'em, right?

I really enjoy the work that I get to do, and I think that's very rare. I have a lot of business owner friends that would love to sell their businesses. They don't really like 'em that much. They got into something that they thought would be a good business that they could make money off of.

Then they could potentially, grow and sell. And they're just, pure entrepreneurs and they're just, it's a value play for them. It's a revenue play. Not for me. This is meaningful. To me, this is my community. I own a cash-based practice. I like the people we get to help. I think we're really creating massive change in their life as far as.

Health and wellness goes and getting back to an active life. I like the ability to help create jobs, really cool jobs for, staff, clinicians or office manager to be able to get them outta these high volume clinics to where they can use their skillset the right way. And I love. With PT Biz, being able to help, all these other businesses around the country do the same thing.

I don't wanna sell these because I really enjoy them and I love the work which is, I don't even know what the value of that is, but it's a lot more than what the business is worth, so not to digress from that, but what I'm getting to is you need to build it as if you would sell it one day because you might want to, and also it's gonna run better if you build it to be able to potentially sell it or autopilot one.

Now the stage that most people are at when they're just getting started is they're doing sales and marketing primarily. They have to get really good at sales and marketing. So you gotta go out in the community, build your reputation, find people, be able to actually convince them and not a weird way to come in the office to work with you to solve a problem that they have.

So you're marketing, you're selling, you're communicating with people, you're getting better at, lead generation and getting people in the door, getting them to commit to you and solving problems and paying cash for that, right? And building revenue to the point where you're replacing your income and more.

Ideally. Now, after that, that stage is as hard as that is. I think the harder stage is the transition from that, from where you're doing everything from where you're just the guy out hustling and doing everything to now you have to build a team. You cannot have a business that's an actual business by yourself.

Like you are just self-employed, which is maybe that's all you want. And there's nothing wrong with that. As long as you're doing that intentionally. But if you're just stuck being self-employed, cuz you don't know how to actually grow a business, that's a problem. Because the transition you have to make.

From just starting to getting yourself busy and maxing out your schedule where you're just a sales and marketing, expert and you're getting really good at that, is you have to transition to being an amazing person that does talent acquisition as, as well as an amazing leader. So you have to be world class at finding and acquiring and retaining talent smart people.

A like human assets in the business that are going to help make the business better as well as leading those people. And it's been funny for me because. At this point with our practice now, we've, we brought one of our clinicians in as a role, as like the president of our company. And he's taken over a lot of these roles for me, talent acquisition, leadership I do very little with the practice now, aside from higher level things, when we're looking at annual quarterly planning, offsite team things and keeping up with our staff members, just as far as like curation of relationship goes.

But for him, he's, we had a conversation. It's dude, Other human beings to run your play, to follow the things that you know, you put in place is not that easy. It's not that easy. Finding really smart people, hiring really smart people, working with really smart people is it's amazing, but it's not the easiest thing to do either because human beings are messy, right?

They've got all these other things going on. They have their own life, they have their own stresses. They have their own burdens. And they have their own intentions of what they want to. And what you have to realize is you have to be able to lead those people as best as possible towards the future vision that you have and get them to, want to be a part of that.

And if they don't wanna be a part of that, then you have to find the right people to do that. And you have turnover. And that's something that happens in every single business. People leave, new people come in and it is very, Time intensive process and it slows you down whenever you have a lot of turnover.

So it really helps to be able to hire effectively to be able to have systems. You can plug people in quickly so they can be successful and really be able to work on leading those people and understanding what they really value, what they want their life to look like, and seeing how you can best support that through the vehicle of the business with different roles you can have within that, and opportunities for them to really make a good living for themself and their family.

So when you look at, where you're at now, I think you have to ask yourself, which of these two things are you focusing? Are you focusing more on sales and marketing or are you just and not like those go away By the way, you always are gonna have to work on sales and marketing and you're gonna have to train people on your team on sales and marketing.

It's the lifeblood of the business. But if you're just doing that primarily you're not gonna have any time to work on talent acquisition, talent retention, and leadership. So which of these two are you really focused on? Cause it'll tell you which stage of the business you're at, if you're working.

Primarily sales and market. You're self-employed, right? You have a job you have a job. You probably like a lot better than the job that maybe you left, but you currently still have a job. Until you have a dollar of non-active income that's generated in the business you've created a job for yourself.

Once you have non-active income, and it's so cool to hear people in our mastermind. They're like, man, I went on vacation, for a week. This much money was generated in the business, right? And or I went on maternity leave and while I was gone, this much money was generated by our staff, while I was on maternity leave, taking care of my newborn.

Like what an amazing thing to do to be able to build a business to that point to where you can come back in the business as much or as little as you. And it might be that you love seeing patients and you wanna do that's awesome. I think seeing patients is amazing. I miss it. I actually really love the people we get to work with.

I I like the challenge, I like the interactions and I learn so much from my patients. I think it's one of the most valuable things that you can do on a personal level. Keeps you very ground and keeps you, looped in with other people. When you're actively helping them.

And I think there's a lot to be said for that from a value standpoint. It's personal, value, personal relationships that you're cultivating and developing. And so don't discount that. Like you're gonna, if you want to do that, do as much of that as you want, as long as you're not hindering your ability to grow to whatever your vision is.

Cuz it might be that you want to have, three locations and however many employees that's gonna take. So who's gonna do that? If you're seeing all the. Like you, you you can't you, there's a saying you can have anything you want in life, but you can't have everything you.

This is one of the reasons that I stopped seeing patients in December. I just didn't have the time. It didn't make sense anymore for the things that we needed to work on with the businesses that we have. For me to, selfishly I really enjoyed, seeing patients and I got to the point where it just didn't make sense for me anymore.

But for many people, they wanna see people. At some capacity, maybe it's 10, 15 hours of work with patients a week for the rest of their life, for their career, and they can still work on their business and they can grow that and really work on talent acquisition.

And leadership. Just depends what you want your life to look like, but growing to the stage where you're acquiring people, you're training people, and you're leading people is where you have to go. And if you haven't gotten there yet, that means that you're still working. Your job, right? And you really have to be able to build to a place where you have consistency, repeatable processes and systems that are in place that, that, that have predictability month and month out, so that you can, with the best.

I guess assumption hire someone that you're going to be able to continue to, pay for and employ. And if you don't have much predictability in your business, it's hard to say, if you're like, I guess I'm gonna be able to have enough business for this person. That's a very stressful I think that's a really challenging thing to do.

So just ask yourself, where are you at? Sales marketing. All right, cool. You're focusing that right now. Make sure you're working towards predictability, and then after that you gotta really be good. Talent, a acquirer. You have to be amazing at talent acquisition and leadership and really learning how to, talk to manage lead people.

It's really much more psychology than it is the hard skills of seeing patients and just getting a better idea of like how to build that team to pull everybody towards your vision, get them on board with your vision, and really lead that company. So once you get to that stage, now you're building a true business.

The transition that everybody has to make, it's hard because, You just spend all this time grinding and hustling and sales, all sales and marketing and fulfilling to now you really have to put a different hat on and use a skillset that you know you have to develop that's slightly different, right?

If you're in the stage right now, I highly recommend head to physical therapy biz.com/apply. Fill out a short survey, jump on a call with one of our team members. This is a transition stage that we work a lot of business owners on. It's a tough stage starting. For sure. I think it's a scarier stage, but this stage I think is more challenging than anything because whoever taught you how to, hire the right people, how to com compensate those people, how to, like what space you should be in how to do reviews, how to actually work on developing people and leading people.

I got that in the army, luckily, but a lot of people, they didn't get that. And we work a ton with business owners on how to actually effectively make this transition correctly. Because what we tend to see is the people that try to do it on their own, they just try to figure it out and they end up with a bad hire or two.

They leave, they have all this turnover and it totally slows 'em down. They get defeated and then they decide, you know what? I'm just gonna be a single man shop forever. That's not what we want for you. So as always, guys, thanks so much for listening and we'll catch you next week.

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.

Profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country. I do live trainings in there with Eve Gigi every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside 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 name.