E790 | The Mental Health Side of Practice Ownership
Feb 18, 2025
Managing Mental Health as a Business Owner: How to Navigate the Emotional Highs and Lows
Starting and running a business is hard. Anyone who has taken the leap into entrepreneurship knows the challenges—the financial insecurity, the long hours, the constant uncertainty. But what many don’t realize until they’re deep in it is the mental health toll that comes with the journey.
For many clinicians transitioning into business ownership, the focus is on clinical excellence—continuing education, refining treatment skills, and delivering the best patient care possible. But suddenly, they’re also responsible for sales, marketing, operations, and finances, all while trying to provide excellent care. The shift is overwhelming, and without the right approach, it can lead to stress, anxiety, and burnout—all of which impact not only business performance but personal relationships as well.
Why Entrepreneurship Is So Stressful
One of the biggest sources of stress for business owners is the fear of the unknown. When you’re employed, you get a steady paycheck. When you own a business, your income can be inconsistent—some months are great, others can be devastating. The uncertainty of cash flow creates massive anxiety, and if you don’t have a solid plan, it can feel like you’re failing even when you’re making progress.
Beyond finances, another challenge is balancing clinical and business responsibilities. Most clinicians go into practice because they love treating patients, not because they want to become business owners. But when you own a clinic, you have to dedicate significant time to sales, marketing, financial planning, hiring, and managing systems.
This results in task-switching fatigue—jumping from treating patients to handling business meetings, then back to clinical work. It’s mentally exhausting, and over time, it can lead to burnout.
How Business Stress Affects Personal Life
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is letting business stress spill over into their personal lives. If things aren’t going well in the clinic, it’s easy to take that frustration home.
If you’re constantly worried about money, frustrated with clients, or stressed about business decisions, your family and friends will feel it too. Many clinicians unintentionally strain their relationships because they bring work stress home—becoming irritable, short-tempered, or emotionally unavailable.
A mentor once said:
"Don’t let your bad day turn into your family’s bad evening."
It’s a simple but powerful reminder. Your business should support your life—not the other way around. If you don’t learn how to compartmentalize and manage stress, your business could cost you more than just financial hardship—it could hurt the relationships that matter most.
How to Manage Stress and Avoid Burnout
1. Get Business Mentorship
One of the fastest ways to reduce stress and uncertainty is to get guidance from someone who has already built a successful business. Many clinicians think they need to figure things out on their own, but the reality is:
💡 If you wouldn’t expect to master physical therapy without education and mentorship, why expect to master business without it?
A business mentor can help you:
✔ Avoid costly mistakes that could set you back years
✔ Provide clarity on what steps to take next
✔ Help you develop financial strategies to avoid cash flow stress
✔ Give you systems and processes that make your business more efficient
Investing in business mentorship is the single most effective way to eliminate uncertainty and increase your chances of success.
2. Have a Support System (That’s NOT Your Family)
It’s important to have people to talk to—but your spouse or family shouldn’t be the only ones carrying your business stress.
✅ Join a business community—Entrepreneurs need a group of like-minded people who understand the challenges they’re going through. A mentorship group (like the PT Biz Mastermind) provides a place to share struggles, learn from others, and get emotional support from people who have been there.
✅ Work with a mental health professional—Sometimes, talking to a therapist or counselor is the best way to manage stress. Business ownership brings unique challenges, and having a professional help you develop coping strategies can be invaluable.
3. Define Your Business Goals (Know What Race You’re Running)
Many business owners struggle because they don’t have clarity on what they actually want. They see others building multi-location clinics and feel pressured to do the same—even if that’s not what they want for their life.
There are three types of business models in the PT space:
1️⃣ Lifestyle Business—A small, intentionally limited practice that allows for flexibility and freedom. Ideal for those who want to work fewer hours, spend time with family, and avoid high stress.
2️⃣ Scalable Business—A growing practice that requires hiring staff and developing systems to operate without you treating full-time. This takes more effort but can create financial stability while still allowing for work-life balance.
3️⃣ Enterprise Business—A large clinic with multiple locations that is built with the goal of selling for millions. This requires significant capital, high-level business skills, and years of effort.
💡 Knowing which model fits your goals removes a lot of stress. Instead of constantly feeling like you need to grow bigger, you can focus on building the business that supports the life you actually want.
Final Thoughts: Managing the Roller Coaster of Business Ownership
Entrepreneurship is tough—but you don’t have to figure it out alone. There are proven strategies to reduce stress, gain clarity, and build a successful business while still maintaining a healthy personal life.
✅ Invest in business mentorship—Get help from those who have done it before.
✅ Find a support system—Join a business community or work with a therapist.
✅ Define your goals—Know what kind of business you want so you don’t waste energy chasing the wrong thing.
Running a business will always be challenging, but by taking the right approach, you can navigate it without burning out or sacrificing your personal relationships.
If you’re looking for a community that can help you build a profitable and sustainable cash-based PT practice, visit PhysicalTherapyBiz.com and learn more about our programs.
Want to chat with a business coach about your practice?
📅 Schedule a Discovery Call → Book Here
💡 Join our free PT Entrepreneur Facebook Group → Click Here
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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: Hey, real quick, if you were serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country. And it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.
Hope to see you there soon. 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. If this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, because I'm here to help you.
What's going on? Dr. Danny here with the P. T. Osborne Podcast, and today we're talking about the mental health side of running a practice or a clinic. We all know that mental health is important. We all know that focusing on our both physical and mental health is important. And should be a priority, but as we start a business and become clinical business owners, this is usually something that we do not focus on at all.
It's not something that we even consider to be a priority. But eventually it becomes a priority for basically every single person I've ever met that started a business of any sort, including a physical therapy clinic. Of starting and are running a business is a real thing. If you're listening to this and you're thinking about starting a business, this is important for you to understand and to be aware of.
Because the reality is that starting and running a business is very hard. It's very challenging. There's a lot of work, a lot of hours. But there's also a lot of unknown around the tasks that you need to do, the. Things that can happen that can positively and negatively affect your business that are honestly out of your control.
And it, it can lead a lot of people to have a lot of anxiety and stress when it comes to their business. Because this is also how you pay for your livelihood. You go from having a steady paycheck to now all of a sudden you have erratic pay. Sometimes zero pay. Sometimes you go negative. In a month and that can be a very challenging thing for people to manage Because one of the biggest stressors that we have definitely one of the biggest stressors that you know that i've experienced is really you know this insecurity around money, around Income, if we were going to have it or not, especially as we were going through different phases of our business and it was very challenging and it created a lot of stress for myself and for my family and I can't say I did a very good job of managing it.
I didn't really know what to do or not do, honestly. So what I want to do in this podcast is really share with you some things you can focus on to help improve your mental health. As you go through this journey of starting and growing a business and this is obviously by no means going to be everything, but hopefully I can share with you some things that can help you maintain a really solid mental health because here's the thing.
It's going to be hard no matter what. So would you rather it be hard and you're able to have a healthy mindset about this and not stress out so much and have so much anxiety and create a lot of problems for, your relationships and your family? Or would would you rather? Be able to understand what to do and and manage that.
Cause it's going to be hard either way, right? Like you get to choose. It can either be hard and it can ruin everything around you or stress everything around you, or it can be hard and you can manage those better. It's still tough either way. So I'm going to talk about a couple things real quick that lead to a lot of frustration, anxiety and challenging mental health when it comes to starting a business.
Number one you have anxiety around the unknown, so the unknown is scary. The, I don't know who said this, but I say this all time that the fear of pain is worse than pain itself, right? We see this with people that are scared of needles, right? Like this the fear of a needle being inserted into somebody's arm.
is worse than the actual pain associated with that needle. Like we know it's not that painful, but to that person who has a fear of needles, it is so painful. It's so scary. If you've ever seen a little kid that has to get a shot and I've seen this with my own kids, they freak out. You have to hold them down.
All of a sudden they're like, Oh, that wasn't so bad. But the fear of what the unknown was so bad that it caused them to have a, Absolute fit at the doctor's office where they had to be held down in order to get, a shot. And then all of a sudden, once they did, they were like, Oh, that wasn't so bad.
And then the fear goes away, but the unknown is scary. The anticipation of what might happen is can be very scary for people. It can cause a lot of anxiety. And the reality is when you start a business, there's a ton of unknown. There's so much unknown and it doesn't ever go away. Like it's not like it.
It just all of a sudden you're like, Oh, I got this figured out. I know exactly what's going to happen next. I know exactly, everything is planned out and it's going to all go according to plan. That ain't how it works. That ain't the truth. You could have somebody just quit on you tomorrow.
You could have somebody that is sources started to start a clinic right next to you. You could have a patient sue you, you could have economic factors that dramatically affect your business that have nothing to do with how you run your business. But they could have a real strain on your business.
I saw this firsthand whenever in 2020 with Cove it like our clinic just got shut down. You think we saw that coming? No, not at all. And that was very stressful because we had staff that we were paying salaries to and we want to make sure that they could pay their mortgages and they could buy groceries and the burden of that, the stress of that was massive.
And the unknown is just something you got to be aware of that it's there. And there's nothing you can do about it, but you have to be comfortable with the fact that you're going to have to adapt to things and you're going to have to change, but that can be a huge stressor for people. Decision fatigue is, as another one, you have to make so many decisions.
I think it's for granted now because I make decisions all the time, but decision fatigue of people coming to you. Hey. Hey. What do you think about this? What should we do in this scenario? It like, or the decisions for you, if you're just even by yourself of what you should do, what you should price, how you should market, what you shouldn't have your website look like, what the logo looks like your branding the things you want to put up on social media, the education content you have.
All kinds of stuff. Like you have so many decisions you have to make that you do not have to make when you work for somebody else. And it can be very exhausting mentally very exhausting. Decision fatigue is a real thing. And if you haven't experienced that, like you will, if you start a business.
And if you have a business, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Like these little decisions that you have to make on an ongoing basis can just really wear you down, right? Anxiety is a, is another one. And anxiety is. Is, it's the fear of what might happen and as silly as it is that we are worried about what might happen, even though it might never happen it's not like our brain works that way because it's also like a default that has helped keep us alive, right?
Like that is, you gotta keep that in mind too. That's in some ways it's like a superpower. So if you're concerned about something that might happen and it actually does happen, then your likelihood of surviving that thing goes up, right? So if you have anxiety around things, it's probably genetically.
It's been a superpower for you and your family in some capacity for a long period of time, and you do somewhat have to be paranoid as a business owner about looking at trends of things because you have to stay on top of the things you can stay on top of, right? And you're forecasting constantly.
You're constantly trying to skate where the puck is going. But that can cause a lot of anxiety for people because they have to be so aware of potential outcomes and know what to do in this in there's different scenarios to make sure that their business stays in a solid solid position.
The other thing is balancing clinical skills and business skills. Then this, I found this very hard myself because as a clinician I became a good clinician because I was very focused on continuing to learn how to be a better clinician ed courses, research doing case studies. So spending a lot of time on clinical work when I started a business, I had this massive amount of time that was necessary to allocate towards.
the business that had nothing to do with clinical work at all. And what happened was my clinical skills or my, my focus on clinical skills and clinical development. It had to back off because I needed time to be able to focus on the business. So sales, marketing, people, process, finance, systemizing things learning about new technologies that can help improve the efficiencies of the business.
Like these had nothing to do with my ability to diagnose and treat, knee pain or lower back pain or something like that. So you slowly start to become a little bit less. As a clinician, a little bit less focused as a clinician because you have to focus on the business side and it can in the task switching.
And this is where it gets really challenging mentally. The task switching of you going from learning about whatever research. Updates there are on whatever the thing is that you're trying to improve on the clinical side to then switch to having a business meeting or giving someone feedback on managing a staff member and then switching back to then being a clinician again.
And this task switching is very energy costly, very mentally challenging to switch back and forth versus if you're just. A clinician, you focus on being a clinician. That's your lane. You stay in it. And for a lot of clinicians, what happens is they move to just being a business owner because the burden of task switching and the burden of trying to keep up with these two domains that are challenging in their own right.
It becomes really hard to manage and to juggle all that. That's something that many people have to get to a point where they decide what they want to do. And maybe they can manage it. Having clinical work and business and focus on the business for extended period of time, but that the vast majority of people, they struggle to be able to do that, especially if they take a lot of pride in their clinical skill set as it starts to become a little bit less and less refined because you can't focus on it as much.
The last thing that I would say, and I'm going to try to talk about some strategies that you can do that are going to help you with this is is understanding that your, the stressors that you have, they will spill over into other parts of your life. And it's not fair, but it is the way that it's just the way that it works until you understand how to better manage your your mental health when it comes to, running a clinical practice.
And I'm sure many of you have felt this not necessarily if you're just running a business, but also maybe just at work you have a bad day, but I have a. A friend of mine, he always says, don't let your bad day turn into your family's bad evening or your family's bad night. And, if you have a bad day and you have this negative, client interaction you get by your CPA that lets you know, oh, you underpaid 10, 000 in taxes and now you have to pay this amount more.
Somebody's schedule is not going so well. They're doing a bad job of of selling plans of care or maintaining, people on their schedule and you have to train up this staff member that maybe isn't just underperforming all these things are Our irritants, like they're going to stress you and then to come home and compartmentalize all that stuff so that your family doesn't know what's going on.
That's really hard to do. So what we tend to have happen is our emotions. Are based off of how the business is going if the business is going You're fantastic to be around, you great mood, super patient Laughing whatever the business is not going. All of a sudden you suck right?
You're just like a little you're you're just quiet or you're short with people and you're yelling you know you lack emotional control Because of this thing is creating all stress in your life that does in many senses in, in many ways, you'd say it dictates what you can do outside of the business.
Like the business supports your life and the business is going poorly. The stress of that. It's hard for that not to spill over into your family and your friend relationships, but it's also not fair to them. Like there are plenty of evenings that I came home and I was a miserable person to be around.
And my family, they started to get to the point where they could tell, even just based on my body language when I would walk in to our house, they'd be like, oh, don't leave dad alone. Don't talk to dad. Don't do anything. Don't be loud. My kids would be like, be quiet.
Go to your rooms. Dad's in a bad mood. And that's not. Okay, like honestly, that's a um, that is not something I'm proud of and that's not something that I Think you know people that are going through starting a business like this Should be doing either but I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know How to manage all these stressors, and for years my, my sort of support system around me, I really strained it with being a jerk to the people that were most important to me because I just was so new. So frustrated and I felt so unsure of what I was doing that's really what it comes down to And that's really where you could start to make a lot of progress, right?
when we talk about managing this like it's going to be stressful and I always reference this as an example like imagine that I was standing next to you And, I had to punch you as hard as I could in your stomach and I had to tell you like, Hey, I'm sorry. I have to do this, but I have to punch you in your stomach.
Okay. So I'm going to tell you before I do it so you can get ready. So blow all the air out, tighten your stomach up so I don't knock the wind out of you and just take it. Okay. And then, and then I hit you versus let's say I'm standing next to you And, you're like, Oh, cool.
Danny seems like a nice guy. And all of a sudden I punch you as hard as I can in the stomach, right? Like the pain of that, the the effects of that are way worse, right? Because you don't know what's going to happen. You didn't know I was going to do that. You didn't. And now I'm unpredictable.
And that hurt a lot more so knowing what's going to happen, knowing what to expect next takes a lot of the pain away. And this took me a long time to figure this out. It took me years to figure this out because I just honestly was like, pretty stubborn about, I felt like I could figure it out on my own.
That's essentially what happened. I felt, you know what, I want to be able to have this story that I was able to start and grow this business and get it all by myself and didn't have any help from anybody else. And I, it was my ego. That just was like this. This is the way it has to go. I have to suffer in silence I have to figure this out all on my own and that's the way to do this Versus it took us going through, growing into our own standalone space going through a really terrible build out and getting our certificate of occupancy for the building so we could use it.
It took six months. We were told it was going to take six weeks when when we moved, into our space. So we're paying staff, we're paying rent all kinds of things before we could get the CO for our building. And, we had close to six figures of of a drop in our cash reserves, which is basically almost all the cash reserves that we had in order to go through this expansion and we made every mistake you could possibly make.
We didn't have any sort of mentorship along the way, and we didn't know we were doing a lot of the wrong things. And that time was so stressful. It's the most stressful time I've ever had in my life. It's the worst time that Astrid and I have ever had as far as our relationship is concerned.
It was the most, it was the most stressful. It was the most contentious. We were the most just angry during this time because we both saw what was happening and it was essentially financial, ruin that was happening. As we were growing a business that seemed on the surface to be successful and That stress was the tipping point for me to realize That I didn't know what I was doing that I didn't know what was next and that I needed to get some help And this is where I first sought out business mentorship And for me, I found a program and this at the time this program was 1500 bucks a month it was run through the e myth group, which is a book that Michael Gerber wrote fantastic business book and they had this pilot program because normally they would only work with businesses that were, I forget what it was like 5 million a year or more or something like that.
And they started this pilot program because they were thinking about working with like small businesses. They don't have it anymore. I don't think it worked well. Probably because. It's easier to work with bigger businesses than really small businesses, but it was 1500 bucks a month. And what we had was basically like a bunch of business resources that we had access to different things that we could go through.
And a lot of these were really like high level things, right? It was like. Like just defining your vision and your mission statement and your core values and I'm like what do I need this shit for this is irrelevant like I'm struggling right now why am I defining my mission and my vision and I felt like it was a waste of time but I paid the money right So I'm paying 1, 500 a month for a year.
Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, 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 would greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast. I get assigned this this mentor and she ran a marketing company and she's, she's Hey, here's why we do these things. It's especially mission vision, core values, like you need to know these things because you need to know why you're making decisions and also what you're building your business into.
And it makes a lot of sense now. And at the time I was pretty frustrated because it was, I was very time poor and I was doing these things. But as we started to go through it and I started to be able to work with somebody that was a. A seasoned business owner, everything became so much easier, mainly because it's like they could look around corners for me and they could, it's like they could go ahead and they could look around and they could be like, listen, you don't want to go down that way.
You should go this way because over there's trouble and over here it's clear. And that was. So helpful to me and it decreased my stress by such a massive amount. And honestly, it's one of the reasons why I started working with people in PT biz is because I found so much. Benefit not just for my business, but from my life because when I started to get some help the unknown Became less of a factor.
I knew that I had a mentor that I could Reach out to that was working with me that understood where I was at in business And maybe they'd run the exact same business as me Which if I could find could have found somebody that was doing that would have been even better but even still This person had, I don't know, four or 5 million marketing agency.
So she was way past me in business at a team that hired a lot of people. Just knew a lot more and the unknown of what I was going to do next in business. Became far less of a factor because she could say okay, here's where you're at. Here's where your revenue is This is at this point. You need to start looking to hire somebody and here's why this is why this makes sense This is why we want to pay this much in rent versus this much and have having some rules and parameters around things instead of just like Just trying to go off of my gut feeling It decreased my stress by so much.
It also increased our business growth, both gross and net profit tremendously. Like the ROI that I got from that year that I spent working with them was 10x what I paid. And it's, these are principles that I've now taken with me, for close to a decade now. And it's the reason why I'm so adamant about constantly being in business groups and having business mentorship along the way, even to this day, because I know how much that affects me personally in a positive way and how much it affects my ability to navigate the choppy waters of entrepreneurship with someone that can help me look around corners and someone that can help me understand what the next steps are, what to be aware of.
And that is probably one of the most important things you can think about as a entrepreneur is if you are unsure of what to do, if you are feeling anxiety and stress around the decisions you have to make in business and not knowing if you're making the right ones, like that's normal. You're a clinician.
You went to school to learn how to treat people's musculoskeletal injuries. No shit, you don't know what you're doing. That, like that, you didn't go to business school. And it took me a long time to realize that and to accept that. And once I did, everything became much easier because then I could just ask somebody that has already done what I was trying to do.
What I should do or not do and get feedback from it. And they may not give me a direct answer, but they at least will give me, some guidance and in context of where I'm at, that will help me make a better decision and more informed decision and understand where I'm trying to go.
So the number one thing that I would say. And obviously I'm quite biased because this is what PT biz does. And I honestly don't even care if it's us or if it's somebody else, it doesn't matter. You getting help as an entrepreneur on the business side is the number one thing you can do to decrease your stress, to decrease your anxiety, and also to put your business in a place that's more likely to succeed for you and your family.
Full fucking stop. Period. That's it. It doesn't make any sense why anyone would think that they can figure this stuff out on their own better than working with somebody that's already done what they're trying to do. If you're trying to become a clinician, do you just read books and listen to podcasts and then go work with patients?
No, you go to school and then you get to come out of school and you still suck. So then you go to Con Ed courses and you have clinical mentorship and people will fly across the country to take jobs in random places to find a great clinical mentor so they can become a better clinician. That's the way it works.
We have residencies and fellowships and we learn from one another through case studies and mentorship groups. And this is on the clinical side. Why would you think the business side would be any different? It is exactly the same. You just have to come to the conclusion that it's worth the investment to you because it's going to decrease your mental burden that you carry because you don't know what you're doing.
It's imagine you're driving with your eyes closed and your family's in the car. That's what you're doing. If you don't know how to run your business, it's sketchy, it's dangerous. And all of a sudden. Somebody's okay, open your eyes and oh, cool. Now, you know where you're going. That's what happens And it's such a massive advantage that it's it's just like sometimes very frustrating to me when people don't realize that and they don't even think that should be on their radar because It costs money, right?
It's yes, for sure. But you also paid probably 150, 000 to go to PT school, let alone all the content courses that you went to add all that in. And it's excessive amount. That's just that education is an investment period. So that is the number one thing you can possibly do. Number two. You have to have somebody you can talk with that is not your family.
Now, this could be a business mentorship group. And oftentimes PT biz to me feels, it feels much more like business group therapy. Just, and you can't separate the personal from the business. That's just the way that it works. And, but that's a necessary outlet. And if that's not what you're looking for, then an individual.
Mental health specialists can be a great fit because you need to be able to have conversations. You need to be able to talk out some of the things that are frustrating you. And if you want more of like the pure mental health side, then that's a great fit. And I've worked with both. And honestly this is a period of time for me where I'm not working with somebody that's a mental health specialist, but it's, I've been on and off doing that now for.
And I've learned a lot about how to understand my own sort of emotions and emotional intelligence as well as when I find myself in, in, in a place where I'm getting very frustrated. And how I'm not going to let that ruin my family's evenings, right? Because you can choose to do that.
But you have to learn how to actually understand yourself. So working with someone that's a mental health specialist can be great because you have to talk these things out. And the mistake that I made for years was I would. Express these frustrations to my wife, and she was the person that was always there.
But, if you're just dumping your stressors on your significant other, that's going to take a toll on them. And it's not fair for them. It's not the right It's not the right relationship. I'm not saying that you can't talk about negative things with your spouse, like you obviously can, but you don't want that person to be the sole person you're dumping all your business stress on.
Because they have to carry that burden too, and they may not even understand the things you're talking about to be able to give you any sort of like guidance, and it's fine to be able to listen to people, but you need somebody that can understand how to help you manage the things that you're having stress with.
And that's where someone that's a mental health specialist can really can make a huge difference. Number one would be getting business. Support and guidance and mentorship and a business a business mentorship group where you can get elements of this that is very very therapeutic and very helpful for you to be able to talk to other entrepreneurs and mentors about the business But also about some of the frustrations you're going through and I shied away from this in ptbiz for a long time By the way, I got I didn't want to talk about things that weren't business Like it's like this is business only keep your personal stuff to yourself don't bring that in here.
Like we want to make this very But it's impossible. It's impossible. And we eventually caved in and it was the best thing we've ever done because it makes such a meaningful difference in people's lives to really be able to understand that other people are going through the same shit as them. And if you want more individual work than finding somebody that's a mental health specialist.
That can really be that can be a huge help for you and your family and really help preserve the relationships you have for what they should be, which is not for you to dump your problems on your family and your spouse. The last thing I would say, and, This kind of ties back into the the first part, which is getting business mentorship.
But do you really get a clear idea of understanding what race you're running? And this sort of concept of what race you're running. This is something that I gave a presentation about a year ago and, um, it was at our mastermind event and I got such an overwhelming response that positive response from this, probably the most, most positive response I've had from any presentation I've ever given that I actually decided to write a book specifically on this.
And I just finished, the editor just finished. The final edits of the book. It's something that we should have hopefully done, in march of 2025 and be available for people to be able to read but this concept is really important and If you can nail this It, it really does help with everything else and that's understanding what race you're deciding to run.
And when I look at this, I think there's really, there's a couple that we can define in the clinical space. And that would be if you're trying to build a business that just supports your life, right? So we call these lifestyle businesses and this is basically, replacing your income, a small clinic.
You're still doing a lot. They're not complex and you're intentionally staying small, right? So you're essentially replacing your income plus, maybe 50 percent more. And you can make a good living doing this, but you're taking on the burden of running a business, but you're also deciding to not intentionally grow it.
So maybe it's because you want to be able to have flexibility with your kids. Maybe you only want to treat patients a couple days a week. That's a great fit for a lifestyle business. The second business would be a business in which you want to grow it and be able to remove yourself from the day to day.
Maybe you're still running it, but you're not necessarily treating a ton of patients. Maybe you're only treating one day a week if you decide you want to, maybe two. But you're building a business that's able to run without you being around, right? That requires a different set of skills.
That requires a different set of investment in your business knowledge. And it's harder. It's a harder race to run than a lifestyle business. That would be something that you would need to know and know what you're working towards because you're trying to build this vision out. And if you know what that vision is, then you know what the steps are to get there.
And you can reverse engineer that. And the last one would be to build something really big that has a lot of enterprise value that you can sell. And this is very different. type of a race because this is going to require way more business intelligence, way more capital investments way more time, energy focus on your part on the business side.
You can't build a business that you can sell for five to 10 million with the same effort you put into building a lifestyle business. It doesn't work that way. It would be like the difference between running a 5k and a marathon. One is much harder than the other. One requires far more training and far more focus on, Other factors, nutrition and and, strength training around that.
Like it's very different when you look at achieving this thing. It's a much more challenging physical goals. The same thing in business. So if you can get a clear idea of what you're trying to build and why you're trying to build it, then you can have a lot less. Stress around the process because you're getting self yourself into it's the same scenario as me punching the stomach Whether it's coming or not One is a lot easier to tolerate than the other because if pain is coming If you know something's gonna hurt it's better than not knowing You can brace for it.
You can mentally prepare yourself for it and you can choose what you want to do. You're choosing which race you want to, you, you want to enter because you're entering a race, whether you like it or not. If you decide to start a business, if you decide to join the world of entrepreneurship, it's a race.
Like you're in a game and that game can be a number of different things. It depends on what you're trying to achieve. But you have to know that yourself because not everybody's the same. And this is where sitting down and really understanding and focusing on your own goals, aspirations, why you're doing this, what your life you're trying to build, all these things they come together to form this decision you make of what type of business race you want to enter.
And clarity on that takes away a lot of the anxiety and the stress. Clarity is a rare thing. Clarity is so valuable. Like I don't even know how to describe the difference that you'll feel when you get very clear on what you're trying to do on the type of business you're trying to build on the type of life that you want that business to support.
And it takes time and it takes some effort and it takes really thinking through your decisions prior to starting. The business venture that you're going to start, or maybe it shifts along the way and you have to come back and think through these, but taking the time to think through that stuff will make such a massive difference in how you feel and how you're able to manage the stress and anxiety that comes along with running a business.
So in summary, you got to get. Business help, physical therapy biz if you want to learn more about it We do head to physicaltherapybiz. com You can take a look at all the case studies that we have the resources that we have all of our coaches And we've worked with to date over just within our mastermind program alone a thousand business owners That is a that's a program think of it like a business residency.
It's a year long program Over a thousand and it is something I'm very proud of because those business owners not only do they have business success but they understand how to Manage this the stressful life that they've jumped themselves into and maybe not even knowing so and they have strong relationships and they have strong, physical health mental health they're having fun in their business and they're making successful strides in their business as well if that sounds like something that You could benefit from head there and learn more about what we're doing If there's anything around you that even makes sense on the business side that is an investment in your business where you can learn how to become a better business owner Take it go for it.
Like the only time I ever find that I don't feel like I get the value back is when I don't put the effort in that's it I mean that's all there is to it Like if you're willing to put the effort in i've i've not found a bad investment in business that i've made the second thing is to find somebody to talk this out with so this could be a group like our pgbiz mastermind that i'm referencing.
This could be A mental health specialist, if it's individual, but somebody you can talk to where you can unload some of this crap that you're dealing with that's not your significant other, it's not your, your family they don't understand, they don't know what to do with you. And they but they can feel that something's off and something stressing you.
And that. So finding somebody that's like a mental health specialist individually can make a massive difference. And the last thing is to get very clear on your, the race that you're running, on what you're deciding to do and why and really tying that back into the life that you're trying to build for yourself.
This is not, this is, this should not be by accident. This shouldn't be, oh, I just ended up here because I thought, this is what I wanted. If you don't know what you want, how do you know what business you should pursue? This is intentional. You don't want to end up in the wrong place That's a huge waste and you might ruin a lot of things along the way You might work way harder than you needed to have the life that you actually wanted Maybe all you need is a lifestyle business.
Maybe that's all you care about Maybe that aligns perfectly with your vision But as other people and they're building these multi clinic locations and you feel compelled to compete with them and you compare yourself to them but yet That's not what you want from your life. You have to define what you want before you know if you're working towards it correctly.
That's the last thing. If you do these three things, then I feel very confident that, I'll tell you this, you're still going to have a lot of stress and anxiety when it comes to running a business. I'm not going to, I'm not going to sugar coat that. But you're at least going to know how to manage it.
You're at least going to know how to deal with the day to day of what that feels like and you're not going to stress and strain the most important relationships around you. You're not going to be that person that comes home and is a complete jerk to their family. You're not going to be that person that comes home and everybody has to avoid because they know that you've had a rough day.
What do they care? Why should that be their bad evening? This is what you can in many ways avoid by learning how to manage Your own mental health when it comes to running a business and it's very different than you know Generally having good mental health like there's principles that are similar, but this is a very specifically aligned way of focusing on that and I hope this helps you because I think this is actually one of The bigger catastrophes and negative side effects of starting a business is I see people that have a fantastic business success and around them, everything is crumbling.
Everything is breaking down because they don't know how to manage the. A rollercoaster of emotions that comes into play when you decide to go out on your own and do your own thing and it's going to happen. So I hope this helps you again, if you're looking to get, into a group of people that can help you grow your business and win in life along the way, head to physicaltherapybiz.
com, take a look at what we got going on. We have programs that help people get started. We also have programs that help people get their businesses scaled up and and grow them. And we'd love nothing more to be able to help you if it's the right fit for both of us. Thanks so much for listening.
Talk to you next time.
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