E509 | The Skills That Will Get You To A 7 Figure Business

One of the goals of many of the businesses that we work with is to reach a million dollars in gross revenue. I revisited a book that I read a few years ago, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat, and today I wanted to go over some of these principles and how you need to apply them in order to reach your goals within your practice. Enjoy!

• Finding someone that resonates with you
• Engaging with people verbally on a level that helps them commit to solving problems long-term

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So I was having a conversation with one of our staff members about documentation and he had come over from a in-network practice that he was working at and he was talking about just how long it would take him to document and click through and the workflow and how, just how time consuming it was and how much easier it's been with the software that we use, which is PT everywhere.

And I know for us, we're very aware. Sort of time leaks within our staff and our own schedules. And it's just one of the worst things you can do is just waste time on things when you could be doing them more efficiently. One thing for us is we have to document. It's something we need to do and you need to do it as efficiently as you possibly can because that's where you're gonna save a lot of your time.

We were seeing our staff members save upwards of an hour a day as far as cleaning up his documentation, making it more efficient. What if you got an hour of your day back just from documentation? What if all of your staff did the same thing? Highly recommend you take a look at PT everywhere.

It's been a huge time saver for us and really has made a big difference in our efficiency of our practice. You can check 'em [email protected]. I think you're gonna really like what they have. 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 Mate, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on, guys? Dr. Annie here, the PT Entrepreneur podcast, and today we're talking about simplifying your path from zero to a million dollars a year in gross revenue with your business. That's not a million dollars of take home money, by the way that's a million dollars in gross revenue generated by the business, so that would be what's considered your top line.

Or the money you make before you take out all your expenses and costs and taxes and all the rest of that. So this is the goal of. Everybody we work with within our PT Biz Mastermind group. The, I don't know, 180 or so businesses that we have within that group. Some of them are there, some of them have have hit the seven figure mark.

The vast majority of them have not, but are well on their way to doing that. And I was rereading a book that I read probably five or six years ago. It's called Ready Fire. And I had a, had a friend mention it and I was like, oh, I think I have that book. And it was in my stack of books that I have down in my office and I was going through it and I thought this was a really interesting little section that the author had written, which basically he talks about the stages from zero to a hundred million dollars in a business and really in a very, Bullet point, simplified way, breaks down the skills that you need and what you need to focus on in these different stages.

And as, as I was rereading it, I thought, man, this is spot on. So I wanted to share it with you guys, cuz I do think this is very it's very good, but also I can relate this a little bit more to what I'm seeing with folks within these specific cash and hybrid practice.

And and really make it more specific to that. So he calls us the INF infancy stage. It's zero to a million in revenue annual revenue. He says, your main problem is you don't know what you're doing. That's correct. You don't know how to run a business. And unless you had a business previously.

And what's funny is the people I know that. Previous business experience that started a practice like this, they crush it quickly because they've already learned a lot of these mistakes. They've already learned a lot of skills that they need. Like honestly, you went to school to become a clinician.

More about dealing with back pain and, shoulder impingement and getting somebody back to being able to throw or something like that. Then you do about how to sell or how to look at a p and l or how to do any number of things that you're going to need to know as a business owner.

But that's not because. You don't know those things. You just haven't learned them. No one's taught them to you. So it'd be silly to think that you just would naturally know those things, right? It would be like thinking that you would just know how to treat somebody's injuries if you never went to school for that.

You never had a, you never had a instructor, you never, took courses. You never had mentorship. What do you how do you think that you would figure those things out? Like you just, you wouldn't, and you would never think that, you just would figure those things all out on your own. You would go to school for those things, right?

But there's not a school necessarily for starting a practice like this. So when you go into business for yourself, you just don't know what you're doing. And there's two ways to figure it out. One is, read a bunch of books is, listen to a bunch of podcasts, watch a bunch of YouTube videos, trial and error.

Like test things. If it doesn't work, move on to something else. Is it, if it does, do more of that. This is how I started my business. It's, it is the slow, incredibly painful way to learn how to run a business. Like you will learn some of this information better. I'll give you that, but, It also dramatically it takes so much longer and the likelihood of you failing goes up exponentially.

In fact, I was talking to one of our partners about software and the drop rate. Off the software platform they have. And the number one reason why they have churn and people using their software is that they cannot is it their business fails? Is it their practice fails? That's the number one reason why people drop.

And it's not for lack of Probably want, it's not like they went into it wanting it to fail, it just fails because they don't know what they're doing. So this stage is you don't know what you're doing. The second way to improve that quickly is to get a mentor, hire a mentor to, join programs like we have.

And if it's not us, I don't really care like it. You need to find somebody that resonates with you that you feel has done something similar to what you're trying to do that you feel like you can trust. Probably the most important thing. There's a lot of charlatans out there, so somebody you feel like you can trust that resonates with you, that has done what you're trying to do.

And they'll fast track that. And I'll give you a really clear example of this. We have people now that are doing our clinical rainmaker program. That by month two and three, we've had quite a few people hit the $20,000 gross revenue mark per month by month three in that program. And this is not like there's many people that are nowhere near that but this is a benchmark that we have that used to be what we wanted people to be able to hit within 12 months.

It took 24 months for me to. Number whenever I started my business. So instead of me figuring, I figured it all by myself it took me 24 months. When we first started working with people, it was taking them 12 months. So we cut the time in half. Now people are doing it in three months, so we cut it, down by it's a quarter of the time that it used to take when we were working with people, and it's an eighth at of time that it took me like, that's crazy.

And that's because. We're just showing people what to do. They do it and they're great clinicians and one plus one equals two. So stage one main problem is you don't know what you're doing. The main challenge. Is making your first profitable sale. And I laughed out loud when I read this cause I was like, damn, that's the truth.

This shit is the hardest. Like the first person that you get as a client in most cases is the hardest one you're gonna get. You don't know what you're doing, you're nervous. You don't know how to sell to that person. If you didn't have an established reputation or a bunch of connections, then you had to work really hard to build.

The trust enough for somebody to come in and see you for whatever injury that they have, so making that first profitable sale is hard. You may have people that you work with for free but you gotta get over your money. Mindset issues. You gotta learn how to sell. You gotta be able to like, just, be confident in your ability to treat people and for them to pay you in for that to be normal.

Not for it to be weird, but for a lot of people, that's a hard thing for them because they, they have a, they have real issues with money. They don't like to talk about it, especially not. Helping with injuries, what they probably would do for free, and that money mindset causes them, if anything, to just charge far less than what they.

To not have plans of care that people can sign up for that are gonna be, paid in full, which would really help the business out quite a bit. So the main challenge for you in this stage, which is basically probably almost everybody listening to this podcast is making that first sale, but really like it continues on into the main opportunity, which is continuing to sell until you've achieved your minimal critical mass of customers.

So the skills that you need in this stage are really understanding what to do, getting through things like understanding how to set up your business, how to run your business, what to track how to underst. Like reading a business as if you were reading like, a clinical note.

If somebody that was a CPA read your clinical note, they wouldn't know what in the hell you were talking about. They wouldn't understand your jargon. They wouldn't understand, the things that we're using to describe right side, left side, numbness and tingling. They wouldn't know any of those things.

Versus If you looked at a profit loss sheet, you wouldn't know what any of that stuff meant. Is this business profitable? What are these areas that money is going to? How much should go to those areas? Is the business healthy? Is it not healthy? How much money do you need in preparation for certain things you're gonna do?

These are very different skills, right? So like you have to learn how to actually run a business. You have to learn that side of it. And more importantly, you have to learn how to sell that. Huge. That is the most important skillset in this stage, in my opinion. Not only do you have to learn how to sell what you're doing, you have to learn how to teach.

The other people that you bring on to sell in this model, you cannot get to a million dollar business by yourself. You are going to need a small team to do that. And that small team is going to have administrative people, it's going to have clinicians and all of them are going to need. To be proficient with selling in a very non-salesy way, having conversations about visits that people are going to need to have with you, how much that's going to cost, how to actually like, talk to people about the problems that they're coming in for.

Not necessarily just the injury specifics of what's going on, how to have your office staff be able to do the same thing. How to actually like really, engage with people verbally on a level that helps them really commit to solving a problem. And putting the work in, which is something that a lot of people don't do.

Or they start and then they drop off because things get hard. And they're not necessarily willing to put all the work in. And if you can really understand how to sell effectively, you're gonna get a lot more people the outcomes that they want, and your business is gonna thrive.

Because of it. So in my opinion, the number one thing you can work on is learning how to sell and just knowing how to sell, you can probably get yourself to somewhere in the range of a hundred to $300,000 a year in gross revenue because if you don't learn any of the other things you're never gonna be able to scale past yourself.

But if you just learn how to sell, then you know, and you're a decent clinician, then you pretty much never have to work for someone else the rest of your life. That's how valuable I think that skillset is. And then from there, if you wanna scale up past that, now you have to learn how to then, teach other people how to do the same things.

How to create systems in the business, how to run those systems, how to track those things, how to be a. This is an area that we see a lot of people struggle with, wi with the clients that we're working with, they've never really had to lead a team, even a very small team. There's many situations where you don't really know what to do.

Like how do you effectively give feedback to somebody? A and in many cases, it depends on the scenario, depends on the person and how they receive information. Who you can challenge, who you really have to like, support how do you follow up with those things? What cadence do you use to make sure that people are effectively doing what you want them to do?

What do you do if they don't, how do you enforce what you want to do? Feeling like a tyrant or them feeling like you're a tyrant, right? How do you get buy-in from your own people to want to, move towards the vision of the company that you have? And if they're not the right fit, how do you let them go and find the right people?

How do you hire and all these things. There's a lot, there's a lot to get past yourself to get to that point where you're a seven figure. Business. There's a lot that you have to learn and the main things again are you don't really know what you're doing. You don't know how to sell. So understanding how to sell is number one.

I actually think that's paramount. Learning how to sell. When we do our clinical rainmaker program, that's the vast majority we're doing. We're teaching people how to sell. We're teaching people how to. Structure, their price points, their packages, how to get people in the door and build to the point where they can go all in on their business.

And the funny thing is, in the Mastermind, we teach 'em what the hell to do with that business, right? We teach 'em how to actually structure it, run it, what systems they need, how to, IM implement those systems at the right time and we teach 'em how to be leaders. We teach 'em how to actually like, lead their business, lead their team, and get very clear on their vision.

And that's where you need to be, to get to that. Figure mark. If you're listening to this and you've gotten started you really gotta get good at selling. And if you feel like you're really good at selling, then you gotta really get good at learning how to build a business, how to build systems operations, how to hire, how to lead those people, train those people and get them com really bought in to want to be a part of your culture to be a part of the vision you're trying to move the business towards.

That's your key role. You have to be a facilitator of other. Not necessarily just treating everybody, which is ironic cuz that's what we probably like to do the most. But at this stage you probably really aren't treating more than two days a week. It's hard to do everything else and be able to do that unless you have a really good coo or ops person that really takes some of that and allows you to stay in the clinical role if that's really what you want to do.

Yeah, hope that helps guys. If you like this, I would love it if you would take a screenshot on your phone and share it on social media if that's. Instagram or Facebook, whatever share it with a friend, tag friend in it you think would benefit from this podcast. And as well as leaving us a review on iTunes.

It's something we really haven't asked for in a long time. But we cracked 200 reviews. I think we're like 207, something like that. There's one bad one in there about, me cursing too much. That is what it is. It's the truth that guy's right. Sorry. Just don't listen to do it with your kids.

But the rest. They're positive and we actually read all those. And if you have anything that you would like us to talk about, a topic you'd like me to go over leave it in a comment on the on, on iTunes or Spotify or whatever you listen to this on. We'll read 'em and we will try to create, a podcast specific to answer to that questions that you have.

So thanks for everything guys. I really appreciate it and we will catch you next week.

What's up, PT Entrepreneurs? We have a new exciting challenge for you guys. It's our five day PT biz part-time to full-time challenge where we help you get crystal clear on how to actually go from a side hustle to a full-time clinic. Even if you haven't started yet. This is a great way to get yourself organized in preparation for eventually going full-time into your business.

So we actually help you. Crystal clear on how much money you're actually gonna need to replace with your business to be able to make a lateral transfer. How many people you're actually gonna need to see based on what you should be charging. We're gonna tell you three different strategies you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you get to pick the one that seems like the best fit for you for your current situation.

We even show you all the sales and marketing systems that we teach within our Mastermind for people that are scaling to multiple clinicians, past themself that you need to have in your business to be able to go full-time. And the last thing is we help you create a one page business. This is a plan that's gonna help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and drive action.

That's what this is all about. We want you to win. We want you to take action, and in order to do you have to get really clear on what you need to do next. So go to physical therapy biz.com/challenge. 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.

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.