E591 | Why You Need To Do Less

This podcast discussion is based on the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It is a comedy about a musician whose girlfriend, a famous actress, breaks up with him. To get away from it all, he goes to a resort in Hawaii. Unfortunately, his ex and her new boyfriend are at the same resort.

The discussion focuses on a particular scene in the movie, where Jason Segel, the main character, takes a surf lesson from Paul Rudd, the surf instructor. In the lesson, Paul Rudd teaches Jason Segel that sometimes it is important to do less in order to achieve more. This can be applied to entrepreneurship, where having a focused approach and doing less can help you succeed.

Danny recently spoke with several entrepreneurs who were looking to expand their businesses in different ways, such as adding on a branch or an office. He encouraged them to look at what they can squeeze out of what they already have in terms of efficiency.

He used his own experience of having three offices in different markets of Atlanta to explain that often, the market share we think exists in our current area is a lot more than we are actually capitalizing on. Danny advises entrepreneurs to look at how much growth potential is left and it may be more than they think.

When it comes to growing a business, it is important to consider if you have reached saturation in your current market. It is possible that there are many more people out there who could benefit from your services, but they are unaware of your business.

To make sure you are reaching those people, marketing and content creation can be helpful. However, it is important to make sure that your existing systems are tight and efficient so that you are not stretched too thin. Additionally, when trying to measure the success of your efforts, it is important to not give up too early and keep track of the data for a longer period of time.

Danny recommends that businesses should focus on one space and make it as efficient as possible. This is because it will help to create a good culture and retain employees, which is essential for the success of the business.

Danny suggests that companies should focus on a more narrow scope of business and keep things centralized. They should do less and focus on the boring stuff, as this will make the business more successful. Danny also emphasizes the importance of employee experience and customer experience, as this will help to create a positive culture that will retain employees and make the business successful.

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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? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we're talking about why. You need to do less. And it makes me think of the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which is hilarious. If you haven't seen it yet, it's a really funny movie about a guy that is a musician and his girlfriend breaks up with him and she's like a famous actress and he goes to this resort in Hawaii to get away and take a break from everything and.

She ends up being there with her boyfriend, her new boyfriend at the same resort as him. And it's just it's a funny, it's a funny interaction movie. And anyway, there's a scene in there where Paul Rudd is the surf instructor. That Jason Siegel the main actor is taken a lesson with, and if you haven't seen it, go to YouTube and just look up forgetting Sarah Marshall Surf Lesson and Paul Rudd giving guidance to Jason Siegel is how I feel sometimes with some of the entrepreneurs that, that that we work with.

It's all about doing less, but enough of what what you need to do to make it work. Here's what I mean by that. Recently I've had, I don't know, half dozen conversations with different entrepreneurs that are looking to expand different things in different ways within their business.

And it could be, adding on like a different I guess branch to the business. It could be adding an additional office somewhere. Really just lots of different sort of additions to the business that You know they require time. And one of the things that I always wanna look at is what do you have left to squeeze out of what you already have?

So if I look at efficiency of somebody, and let's say somebody is, wants to start a satellite office somewhere, and they say, all right I'm gonna start a satellite office at this other part of town, and then I'm gonna capitalize on the the demographic over there, which, hey, I've been there like at one point in time we had three offices in different markets of Atlanta and one, one main office, two satellite offices.

And I get it. I thought the exact same thing and I. It's not to say that doesn't work. Cause it does, but it's, what's funny about it is the amount of market share that we think maybe exists in our current area is probably a lot more than we actually are capitalizing on. Very small percentage of the population probably actually knows who you are and a very small percentage of that population actually has probably worked with you.

So when we look at like, how much do you have left in terms of ability to grow it's probably a lot more than you think. And if you can increase, the the volume that you have in an office that already exists in a space where you already have a great reputation, where you can manage everybody in one place.

That's what I would recommend somebody do if somebody thinks, oh, I've hit sort of saturation in this market and now I'm gonna start this secondary company that does some sort of like consulting service or something like that. I would tell that person like, Hey, that might be a, the right thing to do, but I think you should really take a hard look at your market and see if you've saturated it or not, because a lot of us think, oh, there's just no more room to grow.

But it's just not true. If you think about the people around you that are your competitors how much revenue are they doing, how much revenue are those people doing? Rolled up into one, right? That's the current. I guess market cap of the cash-based services in your area.

Now take all the physical therapy clinics as well, chiropractic clinics, massage therapy clinics, take all of those, add that up. That's truly the current market market cap of the people that are actually getting help. Now, take that and multiply it by a hundred because. That's the market cap of all the people that don't even know you exist.

They don't know that you can help them. And they're just unaware, but yet you could actually help them. So that's where marketing comes into play. That's where content comes into play. That's where, local networking and marketing, getting out in front of people and just beating the drum of your business constantly.

This is why big brands spends so much money on advertising cuz they wanna be top of mind. They want people to know who they are and not forget about them. As you look at your market, I think what you need to really keep in mind is you are just working with a fraction of the people that you could really possibly work with, and if you can narrow down your efforts to the things that are producing the gains in the business that you want, then that is where you really need to spend your time.

And this is where it gets tricky because I think everybody wants like the silver bullet, right? They're like, Hey, just tell me the one thing I need to do to get twice as many new patients like next month. Okay. That could be a dozen different things and probably a number of things layered together as well as.

What are you doing on the back end of your business? So are there things that you're just dropping the ball on? Do you not nurture clients very well? What, what happens to the let's say you have 10 people that reach out to you, five of them actually come in. What happens to the other five people that you actually don't work with that have reached out about wanting to work with you?

What happens to those people? Are you following up with them on a regular cadence? Do you have a system in place to make sure that. Let's say half of those people eventually do come in and that you're continually, reaching out to them and wearing them down in a good way to get them in to co become a client.

What about people that, you're trying to develop some sort of new relationship with? How are you doing that? How are you establishing that initial contact point? Are you exchanging something of value? Some sort of content, some sort of, potential opt-in format. You can have, some way in which you can share knowledge and help them get a win before they become a client.

All these things can be done in a number of different ways. Both dig both digitally in person and then on the back end of the business with your team to make sure that you're basically building a bucket that doesn't have a bunch of holes in it. So there's just so many things that you actually have to do right, in order to see a business double in a short period of time, let alone triple or quadruple, and.

The other I would say big challenge for entrepreneurs that I see aside from a just wanting things to happen faster is that they're unwilling to track things for long enough, and I've been very guilty of this. I've had marketing initiatives that we've had, and I've turned them off early cuz I didn't think that they were actually working.

And then I look back at 'em like three, six months later and it was like, oh crap. That actually was a really good marketing campaign. It just took longer for people to become a client than I thought. And then we go back and we try to recreate those things. We made the mistake of turning things off when if we would've just.

Let things go and track things better, we would've had a lot more clarity over whether we were spending the right money, time, energy, on the, on, on the things that were actually producing results for the business. But you don't know unless you're actually tracking those. A as I'm going through this and giving you a better idea of why you should do less it's that you can't expand laterally very well.

Meaning just open up like additional sort of branches of the business. If you don't have ultra tight systems, In the main thing that you're actually working with. And if you really do, why wouldn't you just try to load that thing up even more unless you just completely run outta space? Which is one thing, right?

You might have run outta space in your facility and now you gotta expand out. But I see this as a mistake that a lot of the business owners that we work with they make this too early. They open a satellite office somewhere else. They drop a student in there, a new or new grad, and then they just expect that person's gonna figure it out and it's not gonna take much of their time when it actually takes just as much of their time to run that little office as it does to run their main office that has more people in it.

As you're looking at these things, my advice to you, just based on the experience that I have and the, what we've seen with the businesses we've worked with is I would. Build one space. I would try to get that as efficient as you possibly could. Max it out. If you can't expand, then maybe look to, move laterally from there, but do less by focusing on, a more narrow scope in terms of the business that you actually are working on.

Keep it centralized, keep the culture really good. That's one of the nice things about a A standalone space is like you can develop a really cool culture, and we know that culture is one of the main reasons why people leave. If they feel like they're not part of a healthy business culture, they're gonna go somewhere else, or they're just gonna do their own thing if they feel isolated.

So you being able to maintain a really good culture actually is gonna help with your retention significantly, which is one of the bigger problems that we see senior businesses have, where they have turnover, where people just. Moving on, and it's a pain in the ass. Reschedule those people and get somebody else in fulfillment and all that.

So the better you can retain people, the better your business is gonna be overall. So customer is not just customer experience, but it's employee experience and that comes down to your culture. So do less focus on less. Tighten your sort of like parameters of what you're focusing on and do the boring stuff.

Just keep being boring and doing the boring stuff and tracking it and see what's working and then double down on those things. Cuz not everything is gonna be the right fit for everybody. For some of you, maybe it's Google ads, for some of you, maybe it's content marketing. For some of you, maybe it's, more workshops or local networking or maybe it's referral marketing to physicians or concierge based physicians.

Whatever. There's lots of different options that people have. You gotta just pick something, track it, make sure it's working, and optimize the heck out of it. And it's not as cool as the excitement of maybe like branching off to something else, but man, it's going to gain you a lot more traction and and help the business.

Faster over over the long run than if you're just constantly trying to like, piece together things that are just lateral elements of building the business versus just focusing on your core elements. So do less and yeah, go watch the surf lesson from forgetting Sarah Marshall.

It'll give you a little laugh.

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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.