Latest / Build Your PT Clinic with Bryan Wright, DPT / $50M Founder EXPOSES the Truth About Why PT Clinics Stop Growing

Transcript

$50M Founder EXPOSES the Truth About Why PT Clinics Stop Growing · Build Your PT Clinic with Bryan Wright, DPT

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Your clinic grew and then it slowed or even stopped.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Same team and effort, maybe even more effort than before.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: You still have the same town you're serving in and referral sources and progress just feels stuck.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Likely you went looking for what broke, like I did.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was the market or a new competitor, you think.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Reimbursement isn't what you want it to be.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps even somebody on the team is sabotaging what's winning in your team.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'd bet it's none of those.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: In my experience, there's one thing lurking underneath almost every stalled practice, and it's usually the last thing an owner looks at because it's not broken.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: It worked, and that's just the problem.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'll show you what it is, why doing more of it makes the plateau worse and how to find the single piece, your business, that's capping everything else.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's some context on why I can say that.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I took one physical therapy clinic and grew it to$50 million as a company and greater than 21 locations.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't get there in a straight line.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, success is not linear.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I plateaued at every one of the places I'm about to describe.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the first three times I had no idea what was happening to me.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I just worked harder and harder and got less and less.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, like I mentioned earlier, businesses don't grow in a linear fashion.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, success often is not linear.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And there's different breakpoints in business.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: So zero to one million is one breakpoint, one to three million, three to eight million, eight to fifteen million, and so on and so forth.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And each breakpoint has different requirements to actually move you from one breakpoint to the next.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And what got you there will get you here.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, one way to put it is whatever made you successful in the beginning isn't the same thing that will get you success through the stages.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, right now, in certain breakpoints in my own business, I'm learning from mentors who have taken themselves past the breakpoints that I'm at to help me understand how to get to the next level.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is the importance of mentorship within business.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you really want to achieve something that serves you as a business instead of the other way around, and you want to create margins in your life, you've got to build it right from the start.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Structure has a lot to do with this.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And structure alone will do a lot of the heavy lifting, but it's not the only thing that's going to make a difference here.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, one of the things that I really have loved as a metaphor and has been used many times in business coaching, probably because it's so principle-centered, is this idea of not skating to where the puck is, but skating to where the puck is going.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's a Wayne Gretzky off-quoted ideal that is used inside of business.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: You don't skate to where the puck is, you skate to where the puck is going, and that's what makes all the difference.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so this was something that Wayne Gretzky was known for and was great for.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it applies inside of business just as much.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you skate to where the puck is going instead of where it's at?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, like I mentioned, I have my own version of this.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I started out right out of school, opening a practice with a partnership, and there was a lot of new things thrown at me that I had to learn very fast.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: I became a regional director, clinic director all at once, as well as a business owner.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I truly did not know what I was doing, although I wanted to believe that I did.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: What I learned really fast is that the absence of true structure to hold the weight of success is one of the biggest problems that inhibits success.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in 2005 is when I graduated with my doctorate in physical therapy, and that's when I started to go to work inside of this new business model.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'd learned the first 15, 16 weeks was not the same thing as what I needed to learn from 16 on.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is why I invested millions of dollars in my personal education from the greatest people known to business.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And this was so that I could learn how to move from one structure to the next, because I really desired to have freedom inside of my career and I wanted to replicate the good that we were doing for other people.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, much like this metaphor of building a house, when you build a house, if you lay the foundation out in advance for a house that is as you want it right now, just one simple house, but you don't think ahead to maybe the fact that you're gonna have new family come in, perhaps new children, or uh maybe you might want that home to expand to accommodate other people as you get older.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever the case may be, if you build the foundation right here, right now, and you don't think ahead, it can create problems down the road for remodel.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Not saying you can't remodel, but it is definitely harder.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So what we want to do is we want to build the structure and the foundation right from the start so that it can scale to any size that you want it to.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, one clinic that I built in Meridian, Idaho has that same kind of thought process.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: We knew that maybe we'd want to scale into a bigger space.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we built it as a multi-tenant property with the ability to have different types of meters, with the ability to have different types of doorways.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when we found out that we actually wanted to use the full space, we still had the adaptability to be able to take down certain walls without messing with the foundation.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're here to talk about today is how do we structure your business in such a way that it actually becomes fun?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't stall in areas where you don't understand where it's broken and it doesn't move backward and cause you more strain and stress.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Quick thing before I move on, I do one of these videos a week.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want more of these, subscribe.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: How do we build this business that I'm talking to you about?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I use something called the business vault, and the business vault has been powerful for my own progress in the businesses that I build as well as the people that I train to build business.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Think of it this way: a business vault has different categories, kind of like file cabinets of old school nature, but it's now we can move these files to digital places.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: The way I like to see it is there's seven different pillars within the business vault, and they can go seven or more layers deep.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you basically have seven by seven on this business vault.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of these pillars is extremely important in how you develop the strength of your business, the strength of your life, even.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to give you an example of the first pillar of the business fault, we talk about lifestyle congruence.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't talked about enough in business.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes, people do not understand to build the foundations of your business around what your lifestyle is meant to be.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Is your lifestyle meant to be something that is 12, 14, 16 hours a week at work?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or is there more to your life with your family and other people that you want to experience?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Based on that, we want to build the foundations of the business to go deep into lifestyle congruence.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there's two common factors when we look at the business fault.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Again, imagine it like seven across the top and seven deep.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you have 49 squares.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And when you think of it that way, if you have just the top, top layer of all seven divisions, we have just a little bit in lifestyle congruence, just a little bit in executive, just a little in team building, so on and so forth with marketing and finance and operations and leadership.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: All of those things can get really frail at the top.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Think of it like a thin, thin, thin, frail piece of board.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And with a little bit of weight, it just snaps.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: It snaps because it's wide and thin.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have the depth to carry what is really going to weigh it down.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And more success can oftentimes weigh down a structure and snap it.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So what I oftentimes like to teach and actually like to practice is to get systematically deeper in each of the categories.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some people are really good at going deep and thin.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they might pick one pillar that they're really good at.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: They're really, really good at executive, or they're really, really good at lifestyle congruence, but they don't develop the rest of them.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's also a problem.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: That is called deep and thin.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it can, with pressure, it can actually topple over.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: On one hand, it snaps, on the other hand, it topples over.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we really want to do is understand where in the chain of this business vault is the weak link.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Once we find that weak link, that's where we actually want to develop, because that's where we'll develop structure where there's holes.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so systematically, it is really good to take iterations and improve throughout the entire set of pillars.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a weak link, for example, in marketing, but your operations is five layers deep inside of that business fault.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think will happen?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, of course, you're gonna have a failure to launch because people don't know how to get to you, even though your operations are way up there in terms of the type of class of operations that you have.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Marketing will not bring the people in.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not complex.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: We just need to understand which areas are gapping and then find ways to understand systematically how to fill those voids.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a couple of things that will really help you when it comes to looking at your business like a business vault with each of the very important pillars that you have.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: The first is to diagnose where you are lacking, understand where in this entire set of areas that you have in a business you might be lacking.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then the second is to determine where you're going to head with that particular pillar.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say that you're level one in marketing, but you want to be functioning at level three along with the rest of your business, you're gonna start laying the foundations for level three now.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a structure where we like to talk about hiring for professional versus amateur.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we have different domains that we look at when we talk about hiring for a professional versus amateur.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: One quick example is the puck example that we've been talking about.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Where's the puck going?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So if you know that you're gonna be going to level three, but you're at level one right now, you really want to hire for where you're going, not for where you're at.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that means that you think about what kind of individual could fill the role that you want to be at.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: We call it acting if then is now.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's we're slowing down on because what does it mean to act if then is now?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: It means that you are almost pretending that your business is where it's going to go.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that has made a big difference in how we hire what we say no to, and what we say yes to.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: One other quick little thought for you is that when you hire one person to fill a spot, you can often get this feeling of like one step forward, one step back.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's important to consider that when you hire for a new position to hire two people.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean two people for the same job.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean you're hiring for two people so that you can actually have redundancy in an area where you otherwise might feel like you hire and then it doesn't work out, or you hire, you get momentum, and then somebody leaves, or you have to fire somebody.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Quick example of what I mean is we wanted our business to grow past one clinic, and we knew that we needed to go pretty rapidly up to about five clinics.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: So we actually hired a marketing director as well as an administrative director at the same time.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that really helped to take certain things off my plate so that it would give us the freedom to expand into three clinics quicker.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: In this way, when something went a little bit south for us, which it does, then we were two steps forward and one step back instead of one step forward, one step back.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: This rule helps in so many cases and it's applicable in layers.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: For this video, we're not going to talk about it, but I wanted to give you that little nugget that you can actually advance faster and with less trouble when you're actually hiring for where the business is going, acting if then is now.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: If that was useful, hit subscribe.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's a new one every week.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Then watch this next because depth beats width and thinness out in your market the same way it does inside your business.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: The clinics that go deep and thin on one thing get known, and the ones that stay wide and thin stay invisible.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: I made a whole video on exactly how deep to go and how to tell when you've gone too far.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's a link to watch that one next.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, your clinic didn't stop growing because you ran out of ability.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: It stopped because it outgrew what it was built on.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Go build the next thing, and I'll see you in the next one.