E751 | You Have To Be All In

Starting a physical therapy business is a challenging journey filled with uncertainty and risk. Many clinicians dream of achieving financial freedom and a better work-life balance, but fears of failure often hold them back.

In this post, we’ll explore why adopting a committed mindset is crucial for success and how you can take the first steps towards building your own practice.

The Uncertainty of Business Ownership
Imagine being signed up for a race where you don’t know the course, distance, or even the finish line. Starting a business can feel exactly like this. It's not a straightforward path, and if you begin with the mindset of “What if this doesn’t work?” you're already setting yourself up for potential failure.

The Risks Are Real
The truth is, some clinicians do fail when they start their own practice. As Doc Danny mentions, he’s seen it happen firsthand. Some decide to return to the security of a hospital job or sell their business because the stress became too much. If you enter entrepreneurship with a safety net mentality—one foot in, one foot out—you’re not giving your business the full commitment it requires.

A Lesson from Army Baylor PT Program
Danny reflects on his time at the Army Baylor PT program, where failing an intense internal exam meant a drastic career change. This experience taught him that approaching difficult challenges with an “all-in” mentality is key to overcoming them. The same mindset applies to starting a physical therapy business: there’s no room for doubt if you want to succeed.

The "Burn the Ships" Mentality
In business, you need to commit fully, burning the ships behind you so there’s no turning back. It’s not just about hoping things work out but having the conviction that they must work. This level of commitment is attractive to clients, potential hires, and even the market itself.

So, What If It Does Work?
Instead of focusing on the negatives, consider the possibility of success. Danny shares that when he meets clinicians who have reignited their passion for the profession by starting their own business, the results are remarkable. They find time freedom, financial stability, and a renewed love for helping people.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Imagine somebody, you know, you get signed up for a race, but you don't know the distance. Uh, you don't know the course and you don't know the finish line, right? Like you don't know what the end looks like. You don't know how far you're going. You don't know what a good time is and you don't even know what distance you're going.

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 today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale, their own cash practices. So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, cause I'm here to help you.

Hey, what's going on? Dr. Danny here with PT biz and the PT entrepreneur podcast. And today we're going to chat a little bit about your mindset when it comes to starting your business, as well as investing yourself and taking a chance on yourself. So I recently had a, uh, a meeting with our, with our sales team.

And this is a weekly meeting that we have. And one of the things that we talked about was some of the, um, you know, common, obviously, like questions that we're getting with people we're talking to that are interested in working with us. And one of the things we talked about today was, uh, the idea of what if, what if it doesn't work, right?

Um, what if you starting your own clinic doesn't work? What, what if you trying to, you know, scale your clinic doesn't work? And these are legitimate, you know, concerns, um, because there's a chance that it, that it doesn't. We see clinicians that, that fail, uh, on the business side, uh, every year it happens.

You know, I can think of, uh, two just this year that are in, you know, one of the programs that we have, and they just decided, you know what, this isn't for me. I want to go. One was I'm going to go work for a hospital network. Um, they just, you know, they were very new in their business and they didn't want to deal with it.

And the other one a little bit further along. And honestly, I think that the stress of it, uh, for where they're at in their life, it just didn't make sense. So, uh, they're in the process of actually even selling their business, because it's at a point where they can do that, but they're going to go get a job and not even in the healthcare, uh, space.

Right. So it, it definitely is something that is a possibility. This is not a hundred percent. And if anybody tells you that it is, they're just lying to you. Uh, they're probably just marketing to you. This is real challenging. Business in general is really challenging. And, uh, I will say like the businesses that we have, the likelihood of failure is very low.

Um, but it still exists, but the mindset you take into it, it can't be, well, what if this doesn't work? And, and, and it's, It's so challenging, I think, for someone to come in with that mindset, to put in the effort that they need to actually have the success that, that they want in their business. Because starting with this idea of what if it doesn't work is it already puts you way, way out of, out of, uh, out of the way, in terms of where your mindset needs to be to go through something that's challenging.

And I don't even know how to liken this to a race or anything, you know, like, When you get into business for yourself, and I did a presentation at our, at our mastermind event, kind of talking about this as a, as an example of, uh, the challenges it's imagine somebody, you know, you get signed up for a race, but you don't know the distance.

Uh, you don't know the course and you don't know the finish line, right? Like you don't know what the end looks like. You don't know how far you're going. You don't know what a good time is. And you, you don't even know what distance you're going psychologically. That's very, very, very hard, right? So. If you go into something like that with this mindset of, well, what if I don't make it, then you're probably not going to make it.

And if you go into the mindset of, well, what if this business doesn't work? You're probably, it's probably not going to work because you kind of have one foot in and you have one foot out. And I'll give you a really relevant example. Like when I went to PT school, My PT school was, uh, the Army Baylor program, and this is a program that you are active duty.

So we go through our, our, you know, basic training program prior to starting school. Then we start school, and this is a program where they condense down, you know, our didactic portion into, like, 12 to 14 months. This is basically around a year of like school time. The rest of the time that we're, we're in clinic, uh, we're doing rotations.

And it's because by the time that we graduate, you know, like you don't know you might be deployed quickly after, after that, and you don't have time to learn how to do your job. Like you gotta be good by the time that you graduate good enough to be serviceable in an environment where you may be the only clinician.

So what they don't tell you whenever you sign up for this program, uh, is that there, there is an attrition rate that occurs and that attrition rate happens at our internal exam in order to actually get out of the school. So the way the school works is once you do your didactic portion before you go and you do, uh, Your, uh, your rotation, your long rotation, um, you have to take, everyone takes this internal oral exam that's based off of all the information that we've learned.

So they can ask you questions on anything that they want. And there's three rooms. So you have a neuro room, you have an anatomy room and you have a physiology room and you have a, like a science kind of lead and you have a clinical lead. And when you come in, Uh, you, you're staying there and you're in your, you're in your dress uniform.

So I'm in my dress blues. Uh, you, you know, it's very formal. You walk in and they can ask you a question on anything that they want. Uh, they've taught you over the entire time that you're there. Like for instance, I went into one room. And the professor gave me a dry erase marker and a whiteboard and he said, draw the circle of Willis.

And I was like, okay, uh, draw the whole damn arterial supply to the brain. And then they put an X on it, you know, after I drew it, I thought that was the end of that. Uh, they draw an X on, on one of the areas and they say, okay, uh, explain how this person would show up in your clinic. And, you know, if this was the area where a clot occurred.

Uh, you know is is located and you have to describe all the symptoms and then how you would work with this person or whatever And like it was way more intense than the federal exam way worse than any test that i've ever taken And what they don't tell you is if you don't pass this then, you know, they give you a second chance So you have, you have one run through.

If you don't pass, you get time to prep to take it a second time. If you don't pass it the second time, then you don't move on and you don't become a physical therapist. Even though you have gone through a year of very, very intense education for that, you don't get a chance to become a physical therapist, but you still have a military contract.

So guess what happens? You become a medical service corps officer tracking, you know, patients typically at the time you got to keep in mind, like we were involved in Both, you know, uh, Iraq and Afghanistan. And we had someone in our program that didn't pass, didn't pass a second time, and they were, they were gone within a few months, they were, they were overseas, right?

They were in Baghdad, tracking injuries and driving trucks wherever, right? Like that, that mentality of, well, what if this doesn't work as an example? What if I don't pass this? Like this, it's such a terrible mindset because it's possible that it, that it could happen. It's possible in that example that you could think I'm going to have this one career end up doing something completely different and that is a That is a complete shock for most people whenever they go through that program But if you go into this with the mindset of what if I don't pass you have to keep in mind like your confidence And your conviction and what you're able to do is Is a huge part of you actually accomplishing it a huge part.

You know, if you say, Oh, what if I don't get into PT school versus I've got to get into PT school, this has to work. This has to work like that mentality versus what if I don't get in, what if this doesn't work out? What if I asked my wife to marry me and in a few years it doesn't work out. What a shitty approach to anything challenging, anything meaningful.

In your life, you cannot take that mindset of well, what if this doesn't work? What if my business doesn't work? What if it fails you may say hey danny is financially prudent to do that to completely agree Like you you obviously want to have an idea of like financially what's going to happen or whatever But you cannot think that that's even in the even in the cards for you Like it has to be, this has to work.

It's the only way this is going to happen because it's too damn hard for you to have one foot in and one foot out. You have to be fully committed to something like this. And it's not just this kind of business is any business. It's anything of meaning to you. It's anything hard. This is a challenging, challenging thing to do.

And the reality is the landscape is getting. More challenging, the best businesses are going to do better. They will take the market share of what, you know, the, the profession is sort of shifting towards. That's what happens in every business. So if you're thinking that you're going to get involved in a cash practice, because you think it's easy, it's not easy.

This is not easy. It's not been easy. You know, it wasn't easy when I started because the education component was the hardest part. People didn't know what the hell I did. Now it's getting harder because there's more options. So instead of an education component, people know what it is, but there's a lot more options for you there.

It's hard. It's always hard. It's going to get harder. So if you decide that you want to do something in this profession, In a business for yourself, you want to start your own clinic. You want to scale a clinic. You've got to realize that there has to be a level of commitment and conviction that is, you are a hundred percent in.

There's no backup plan. We talk about this in the concepts of like, we call it burn the ships. You're going to burn the ships because there's no other option. We're either going to do what we have to do or, or it's going to be a terrible end for us in the process. Right? Like the mindset of that has to be what you take.

To starting and scaling a business because if you if you think that you can just i'm kind of in out I don't know if it doesn't work i'm gonna go do this then you might as well go do the other thing Because you're already there mentally and if you can think of no other way that you can You know use your degree in our profession than this like you're basically out of the profession If this doesn't work, you're all in on it.

You're gonna have a lot more success with that mindset Then thinking, well, what if it doesn't work? The other thing to think about is what if it does, and this is one of those things where when I come back from these live events, we do, I have so much, I have so much conviction with what I get to see when I'm there, the people that I get to talk to you, the lives that are being changed, you know, the, the, the difference in what they're able to do in the world, both, you know, with time freedom and financial freedom, as well as just having, uh, this, this, uh, This reignited, you know, desire and love for the profession where they get to work with people on their own terms, on their own terms and help people that they like to help the niches that they like to work with.

Like to see somebody go from, uh, not even thinking they want to be involved in the career of being a physical therapist again, to all of a sudden they love doing it. It's just amazing to see because I've been there myself and I know what that feels like and to be able to grow a business where you get to employ other clinicians that are doing the same thing.

It's just, it's, it's so remarkable. It's such a. It's such an amazing thing to see firsthand. And when I come back from these events and I know everybody that goes to these as well, they see the same thing and they see all their peers really being able to move towards whatever future state it is for them, wherever their business looks like, whatever their life looks like, whatever their goals are.

And everybody's different when it comes to these things, but they're all making forward progress. And that is infectious. And that's amazing. And I can tell you everybody that's in there that is actually going to accomplish what they want. They're all in. They're all in mentally. There's no other options.

There's no what if it doesn't work. It's what's next. This has to work. This is my vision. I have to move forward towards it. That's attractive to other people. That's attractive to clients. It's attractive to people you want to hire, you know, so you got to get your mindset right. And if you don't have your mindset right, you might as well not even start a business.

Hey, Peach entrepreneurs, we have big, exciting news, a new program that we just came out with. It is our PT biz part time to full time five day challenge over the course of five days. We get you crystal clear on exactly how much money you need to replace by getting you ultra clear on how much you're actually spending.

We get you crystal clear on the number of people you're going to see and the average visit rate you're going to need to have in order to replace your income to be able to go full time. We go through three different strategies you can take to go from part time to full time. You can pick the one that's the best for you based on your current situation.

Then we share with you the sales and marketing systems that we use within our mastermind that you need to have as well. If you want to go full time in your own practice. And then finally, we help you create a one page business plan. That's right. Not these 15 day business plans. You want to take the small business association, a one day business plan.

It's going to help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do. And when you're going to do it to take action. If you're interested in signing up for this challenge, it's totally free. Head to physicaltherapybiz. com forward slash challenge. Get signed up there. Please enjoy. We put a lot of energy into this.

It's totally free. It's something I think is going to help you tremendously as long as you're willing to do the work. If you're doing, doing the work, you're getting. Information put down and getting yourself ready to take action in a very organized way. You will have success, which is what we want. So head to physicaltherapybiz.

com forward slash challenge and get signed up today.