Gain Leverage for your Physical Therapy Practice

Hey, welcome back to the Aaron LeBauer Show. I'm your host, Aaron LeBauer the big tall red headed dude with a beard. Today we're going to be talking about leverage. And I mentioned the word leverage on one of our platinum mastermind calls a few weeks ago and one of our members posted in the group was like, Aaron, what is your definition of leverage for a PT practice? I was like, I need to make a podcast this. So this is the podcast episode about leverage, the short answer. And this is what I might. That's when I wrote back to her. I was like, the short answer is having leverage in air quotes means I'm able to use my time to magnify my income and results for myself as well as for other people, others income and results. Let's see. I gained leverage when I stopped treating patients one on one. There's one thing to say, like you should treat patients. Look, I treat treated patients one on one for 20 years. I'm not going to say that was long enough, but that was long enough for me to realize I can help even more people if I change my business model. If I update the Aaron LeBauer you know what my time is like. So I'm treating one person at a time, which is great. And for years that's what, and that's what patients need. Honestly, not all patients, I'll agree to that. Not everyone needs it. Some people just need to get off the couch. But a lot of people who've been around the block, they've done everything in their own power, they've tried everything and they're, they're just kind of like they've been let down. They come to us and we run them through a total body diagnostic. I look through their body, I touch them, I can tell like where they're kind of like where they're not moving. Well, we use sfma. So I can see, is it a mobility issue, is a stability issue. I can use my hands and find out like, where's their body holding tension? What does their body need? And I'm able to get them results that they couldn't get anywhere for years. I mean I've had people come in be like for 20 years I've been trying to figure this out and I was the first person to touch them where they hurt. Great. But I don't, but that doesn't have, I don't have leverage with that. I didn't have enough money to create leverage. I didn't have enough time to create leverage. So what I've done is I've bought back my time to magnify my income and results not just for me, but for the people I serve. So by hiring multiple other pts now we can see more people through our practice. By helping coach other pts, see more patients. Now I even it's even 10x or even 100x greater magnification of my time. So creating this episode, it's going to be heard by thousands of people, which is dope. Not all thousand people are going to do something about it. But maybe a hundred of you, maybe Even only just 50 of you will find value in this. But if it's more than me, if it's more than one person, if it's two people that find value in this, I've magnified my time. For the 25 minutes I'm going to sit here and talk. My guarantee at this point in my career, it's going to be more than two people. So, so what does it do? What does it mean now in my time, I can spend an hour on Tuesdays with our Platinum Mastermind members. Somewhere between, anywhere between, you know, 30 to 50 people will be on the call. We'll answer a handful of questions and I can answer one question that helps 10 people. And those 10 people can go back and add another 10 people per week to their schedule or another $100,000 a year to, to their business. Has that changed their life? So now I've now by building that group and building a coaching program, you know, even people coming into my course, the Cash PD blueprint, I've helped thousands of people launch physical therapy businesses, which is kind of crazy. So I created a course. Was it in 2014? Almost 10 years ago. It's like the 10 year anniversary is coming up like this August and run over a thousand people. I mean it was a thousand people like three or four years ago before the pandemic. I don't know how many people have gone through it. I stopped counting. I could go and count. It's probably 1500 to 2000 people. Plus there are people who've told me that the book and other things I've shared the podcast has helped them launch a business. Now had I not shared that information, had I not created the course, had I not started talking about what I was doing and sharing it freely and even charging money, maybe someone else would have come along a couple years later and done the same thing. I mean, other people have, the other people are doing it now, but most of the people who are doing it since have been through one of my programs, which is kind of cool. They've been through something of mine at some point. Read about it, et cetera. Read about what I was talking about, etc. Like, before I got into PT and started really, you know, putting stuff out, there was like one, maybe two people talking about cash practice. Not very many. And maybe if that, you know, it was really like, I think Jared Carter and I. I'm a shout out to Jared. He's done some great work for a long time. Like, we kind of found each other through a. Like, like his bunion video and my foot massage video. I was like, who's this other guy teaching this? And we chatted and, you know, just reached out about clinical stuff and he was starting to talk. He had a cash practice. But prior to that part of, you know, that was 12 years ago, maybe there weren't many people. There was no one else really talking about this freely. So had we not, like opened that door, people might still have been stuck for a while. Right? So that's leverage. It's like I took some of my time and helped people. But here's the other thing that creates leverage is I can take something and teach it once and I can share it multiple times, not just multiple platforms, but I can take something I taught 10 years ago and I can share it again today. And it's gonna help new people because if people didn't see it, then that's also the other power of, like, social media and YouTube. YouTube has a ton of leverage because I can put something up there once I've got videos. That video, that foot massage video has 250, maybe 300,000 views. That's leverage because I made a video for my patients and 250,000 other people have watched it and benefited from it. Yes, a foot fetish community did catch it early on and get me 20,000 views overnight, which is kind of funny. But people, you know, people are watching it. And so I can magnify my income because the bigger the problems I solve and for a larger number of people, the more money I can make. Same with you. The more people you can help and the bigger the problems you can solve, the more money you make. Okay, I'm not telling you stop treating patients. What I'm saying is, if you are a business owner, it's probably not in your best interest to continue treating patients yourself for the rest of your career. You do it because you love it, but you don't have to always have a hand in the door or a hand in the cookie jar to know what the cookies taste like and to know how to bake the cookies. You don't have to be the one serving the cookies, making the food to be a successful restaurant owner. Okay? If you want to open multiple locations, you can't be stuck trading time for money. And that's the next point I want to make. Most people are stuck trading time for money, even in successful businesses or what we might think is successful, because time is the most valuable resource. We've talked about this a lot. Most people are stuck here, especially physical therapists, because you paid $200,000 a year to get your degree. You worked, you took the gre, you went to grad school, you worked insanely hard. Maybe you took Adderall like I did and read all night long. You're like, ah, you know, like. And now you're committed to this degree because I paid so much, I spent so much time on this. Right? Like, I get that. But the degree gives you leverage if you choose to use it. If you choose to just treat patients one on one for the rest of your career, you don't have leverage. Not in this definition. Right. You might be better than the stretchologist at Stretch Lab, which we both agree you might be. Sometimes they're going to get better results for your patients because if insurance has constrained you to seeing people for 15 minutes, like, maybe that person, that person didn't need to just get off the couch. They ain't getting results. But most people are stuck there because that's kind of what school teaches and trains you to go out and get a job and be a good employee. That's really a lot of what society does. Insurance is trapping us there because we think that we have to abide by the insurance rules. Even people that have treated as a PT for few years and they get out into cash practice, they're like, do I do 45 minutes or an hour? And how do I, how do I mark down what units? I'm just like, it's just arbitrary. Because if you're not billing for insurance, you know it's arbitrary. Like you just put some, whatever, whatever your best guess is down. It doesn't matter because insurance is either going to pay it or not. We're not documenting for insurance. We're not treating patients. So the insurance pays anymore. And it's a different paradigm. And so you get stuck there. Even society wants us to do that. Like, wants us, like is training us to be good, good employees, you know, but if you don't want that, if you don't want that life of being a good employee, there's no longer a work for General Motors for 30 years and retire and on a fat pension that doesn't work anymore. So we got to get out of that trading time for money trap. If you want to have leverage, it doesn't mean you have to get at it, you know, to have money. You can get a good job, you know, but some of the best, highest paying jobs, you're not necessarily trading time for money. Some of them you still are. But treating patients one to one, well, as good as it is for patients, as the owner, you get, you can get stuck there. So here's how we get out of that trading time for money trap. There's two big ways for physical therapists to do that. Number one, sell something online. Okay? It's not really just sell something online, okay? It's not that simple. But it's really sell something. You could sell it in person. Here you just need someone else selling it for you. And when you sell online, it's not a person, it's a software. And it has to be evergreen. You have to be able to make sales while you sleep, okay? So you're still trading time and creating content and creating the product and working on, you know, the initial webinar has to be live, but you can set up the webinar evergreen, and it sells for you while you sleep, okay? That's how you escape trading time for money. If you've ever been on any of my webinars, you've either been on a live one or an evergreen one. And more people have purchased my course at this point through the evergreen webinar than the live webinar. I can tell you what, in 2023, more people enrolled on the live webinars than the evergreen ones. So I've done more live webinars, okay? But guess what? I'm selling one to many on a live webinar, not one to one. And so that's leverage. That's still leverage. It's a product that I can sell one to many. I can do this with PT as well at workshops, events, CrossFit, 5Ks, you know, the Qantas Club, et cetera. I'm selling one to many, okay? That's the leverage, okay? In the practice, I'm not really collecting the money one to many, but I'm still selling them on our business. And they come in and then number two is hire other people to do the technical work. So the people doing the technical work for me are then doing the selling. Because, believe it or not, physical therapy is a highly paid very, you know, Very expensive technical job to learn. You know, it's expensive in time and money. And if you're just getting into physical therapy and you're like, I'm just gonna get a great job, you're gonna have a hard time paying back your student loans, especially if you have, you know, 150,000 or more in student loans. So as a business owner, as a cash practice owner, we need to hire the other people to do the technical work for you, and they need to do this and to do the service delivery. So in my PT practice, for example, in my PT practice, I have physical therapists delivering the service. In my coaching business, I'm still delivering a majority of the service. Okay. It's a little bit more nuanced than that. I've got a couple great guys helping run some of the coaching calls. Like they're running launch calls, Owen and Nick right now. I've had other people come in and do some of the trainings, but it's still mostly Aaron. Okay. But I'm doing it one to many, not one to one. There's a lot of coaches. Majority of coaches are doing one to one. But the leverage comes when you can do one to many. And most people think that it won't be as valuable, but it's actually even more valuable. We can do a podcast about that. Just shoot me a message. Hey, I got a coaching business I want to learn more about. About that, like going from one to one to one to many. I see a lot of PT coaches out there. They're just doing chat, they're just doing one to one, which is great. But the leverage comes in one to many. So that that's where it is. It's sell online, sell one to many. You know, maybe selling online is really the selling one to many, but it needs to be. But if you're gonna sell online, needs to be evergreen. And then we need to hire other people, leverage software to do the technical work and the service delivery. Right. You getting this? There's benefits in owning a business. There's actually more benefits in owning a business with employees than owning a business where you're the sole proprietor. Okay, so let's talk about this. So when you own a business, you go on trips and not vacations. So I'm going to Australia this spring, and guess what? The last four days, I'm going to be there. It's going to be my coaching program, Taki Moore's boardroom meeting. But the five days leading up to it, I get to explore Sydney and Brisbane and the Gold Coast. And all the places in between. Right? It's an expense on the business to go there, to eat, to fly, to get the hotels. Those are all business expenses because I'm there with the purpose of doing business. And on the way, there's other things that happen and look like I'm not a tax professional. So make sure you go over this with your tax professional and you're expensing the right things. But this is an overview, right? You don't take vacation. I can tell you one thing. One of my tax advisors at some point has told me, like a cruise is very difficult to make as a business expense because it's a cruise. Everyone knows cruise is vacation. You can expect. When you own a business, you can expense things in your life like a car, like a company car. If you can justify that you're using this car for your work. And there's different definitions of this, but you can buy a car through your business. And the insurance and the monthly payments, they all run through your business. And it runs through your business as pre tax dollars because it's a business expense. If you get a big enough car or truck, I think it's, I think it's, I think it not just weighs over 6,000 pounds. I think it's a towing capacity over 6,000 pounds. Because there's a Porsche. I think it's the Porsche. Cayman qualifies. You can write it all off in the first year. So if you have a big income year, you can buy a car and expense the 50 to 75,000. But you let your tax guy do that. Otherwise you can get a car, you can get like a Honda Fit, and you can just write off the monthly payments every year for five years, something like that. But you can put your car through your business, which is dope. You know, you get a little bit higher rate as a business loan, however, you just roll out the door, least amount down and everything like runs through the business. Okay. There's other things you can do. Some people can write off like space in your home. I don't know that that would be advisable unless you're treating patients in your home as a majority of your time and income. When you have other employees besides just you and your spouse, you can run your. You can get group health insurance, which saved me a thousand bucks a month when we started doing that. You can build in retirement savings so you can max out an IRA before you get paid. So versus getting paying yourself and going, okay, where's the money to put into retirement? You can get disability insurance for the group. There's other things you can do as a group. Like when you have a group, when you have you plus another full time employee, okay. Family members can be board members. So when you and your spouse, you know, travel together on trips, you're there for, you know, your annual board meeting, or you're there to do business. You can make your kids, employees and give them some work to do, and you can pay them up to a certain amount, I think, per year. I don't know if it's like $6,000. I can't remember. Like I said, I'm not a tax professional. But you can put your kids in your business. They can do some work for you. You can assign them roles and you can pay them a salary. And then you can take that salary and put it right into, like a retirement savings account. Like, I've got them a Roth account. You could put it into a 529. But I think the way that I got it set up is pay them, and then I'll make contributions to a Roth ira, which over time is a little bit more flexible than the 529. And also the age they're at. But it can. It'll grow and it's future money for them, not now money for them. Okay, so those are some, like, tax and money benefits, which took me a long time to learn. Okay, there's another one here. It's like the networking and fun event. Let's see. This year, you know, I was like, all right, how did it working with Caitlin? How do we. What else do we need to do to grow the business and get more referrals? And, you know, I've got some Platinum Mastermind members who have had success with BNI this year. And, you know, six years ago, I mean, I think it was Amanda Zariello, like 2018 or 2019, had a lot of success with it, which is great. And I had tried networking and done that like 10 years ago. I was like, so this year I chatted with Kate and I was like, hey, let's try. Let's go check out a couple of the BNI groups. I think there are three BNI groups that were close to us here in Greensboro. There was one that fit my schedule, which I could do, one I couldn't, and another one, which I think it didn't fit Kate's. So she went to one without me. Then we went to one together. And I was like, okay, like, I get this and, you know, I'm not gonna. I don't wanna shit on bni. If you have good success with it. Because every group is different and it's different, different cities. It's not just about who's in the other groups, but the, but it kind of works like this is, it's, I think it's a $500 membership a year, which isn't that big of a business expense. But what kind of got me was they want you there every week. Like it's, I think it's kind of like a commitment or requirement to be there every week. And if the meeting is an hour and a half, it's going to take at least two hours out of my day. The meeting starts at 8:30. Well, I got to leave at 8 or 8:15 at the latest. And you're going to be there for the hour and a half and you're going to stay a little after to chat. And that, that's really a two and a half hour chunk of my day once a week. Okay, so then my next question is who are the other business owners coming to BNI and do they have my customers? And is this, and ultimately is this a place where I want to spend three hours of my week? And my answer was no for a couple reasons. They weren't the level of entrepreneur that I wanted to surround myself with. You know, I think the meeting I went to there was this whole. If you've listened to this podcast for a while or my social media, you know, I, I detest it when people complain about merchant processing fees. Well, there was this whole 10 minute discussion about merchant processing fees and how they're getting so expensive and blah, blah. Because one of the guys there was a sold merchant processing and I was just like, this is like low level business. It's like, just raise your rates, five bucks and it covers it and just get on with life. Because you can't save your way to success. So saving a few percentages or a few points or a few fractions of a percentage on merchant processing is not going to make you rich. Those aren't. That's not the conversation I want to have. Okay, so we're doing that at the same time. My buddy Greg Pennington, not Greg Todd, who you guys might know, but Greg Pennington, he owns a motorcycle shop here. And I've known him for almost as long as I lived in Greensboro, maybe 18, 19 years. We've been hanging out more this year. And he's one of those people that showed up as like one of Aaron's really good friends. And I know Greg's got my back, right. And we were Hanging out. And Greg belongs to Havana Phil's, which is a cigar lounge here in Greensboro. It's one of the, like, largest, nicest cigar lounges in the southeast. Like, people come here from all over. And he's invited me up there to hang with him, you know, because he'll go there after work, smoke a cigar, have a drink. Every time I go up there, I see someone I know. I see someone in Greensboro who owns a massive business. The guy who, you know, owns like, big construction company, the car dealership owner, people that are executives at, like, Volvo trucks, etc. I'm like, these are the people I want to be around. And so we were up there one night and enrolled like eight people. And I knew one of them was family. Close family friend's, you know, son, you know, my parents, my dad's close friend, their son who was one of my older cousins, age Tony. I saw a couple other people who are former clients of mine in this and a couple of people I just knew from the community. And this was like the week or the week after I went to bni and I was just like, yeah, I need to come up here more. And then two weeks later, there was a holiday party, and Greg invited me. He's like, but it's only for members. He's like, do you want to join? I was like, sure, sign me up. Well, here's the thing. And, you know, we go to the holiday party. I see a bunch of people like, I've made great connections here in Greensboro in a very short time with the people I want to be around and have the conversations I want to have. And BNI was $500 a year, and the cigar lounge is $500 a year. I get so much more out of it. And yes, you might be like, oh, smoking cigar. Aaron's healthy lifestyle. Like, it's not like, it's not that I need to go up there to smoke a cigar, smoke cigarettes. I'm definitely not doing that, But I don't mind smoking a cigar. But I don't mind having a drink. And there were 10 years where I didn't drink alcohol at all. There was more than that, that I didn't drink any caffeine. Like, I can do with or without those things. But it's about putting myself in the environment around people that I want to be around, that I want to learn from, that I want to connect with. Because while I have a clinic here in Greensboro, I also have a coaching business that serves the United States. Like, my future isn't just in the clinic. And there's other business opportunities here in town where I can leverage my experience and knowledge. Or maybe I just meet people. I mean, I've met someone up there in the last six weeks who's become a client in the clinic. Plus, like I said, the former clients that have been up there. So, you know, to me, so the leverage is this place where I can go and socialize is also a business expense because it's a networking, it's networking. I belong up there. And every time I go, I meet someone and talk about business or I go up there with Greg and we're talking about business and it's a business expense. Just like going out to dinner with a prospect, it's a business expense. So just that's leverage of having a business. And that's how you leverage your business and say, hey, I'm going to do this thing and because I love my work. If you don't love your work, you're in the wrong line of work. But I love my work. I want to talk about it. Okay? The last part of leverage about business that I'm going to talk about. And I don't have as many notes about this, but I'm going to. But it's, it's simple, but it's the next and a little bit harder step. The number one way you're going to leverage your success in your current business is by preparing for the next thing. You're making 30k months, 33k months, you hire another PT. Now you're doing 50, 60k months. Okay? You've got extra money coming in. Great. All right, make sure you got your six month emergency fund, you got your estimated taxes paid, you know, you're running expenses through your business. I mean, shit, as a pt, like I said, like you can buy a whole gym for your clinic and now that's your personal gym. I mean, that's a business expense when you use it with your clients. But yet you, you can work out there too, right? You can buy all the nice rogue stuff or whoever else is making the dope. The dope stuff, right? But now you got your business rolling, you got money coming in and you don't know what to do with it. Okay, There's a couple of things you can invest it. So make sure you're maxing out your ira. Or if you don't believe in that, you don't have to believe in that. But I like diversity. And maxing out my IRA is, I think it's like 24,000 a year. That's not a lot of money. So yes, I could put that money in other places, but I can put that money in the stock market, I can put other money in crypto and I can save up other money in cash to buy real estate or invest in other businesses. Okay, so when you've got extra cash coming through, don't let it all just sit in your bank account. You want to have some in long term investments, you want to have some in short term. Like I don't, I don't know because this isn't my thing either. I'm not a, I'm not a financial advisor. But there's some bonds that produce a decent return. But you can get the money out within 30 days or even 60 days if you know something's coming up. Like you can pull that money out another way to have leverages in your home. Right. So you know, but let's not talk about that. Just as I'll talk about that in a second, I'll just have to add that on. You take your income now and we can start looking and going. Okay, business is running. Okay, what's the next thing? Really it's use the cash from this business to fund the investments that are going to pay you dividends for longer than you're going to ever want to treat as a physical therapist. There's a lot, I mean there's. And then there's beyond like next level podcast. How do we leverage the investments and some of the other things and other pieces I just want you starting to think about how do we do this? Because some of the wealthiest people in America are invested in real estate and even. And I'm starting, I'm only starting to learn about this. I've heard about it for a long time, but only really starting to like learn about it. It's the, it's not term life insurance, but it's the paid up whole life insurance. Whole life insurance policies, you can borrow against those, you know and you can create your own, you can become your own bank and you can become your own bank with whole life and you can, this is also the home ownership with a home equity line of credit like you can go become your own bank. You own a home and after 15 of the 30 years now instead of just that 70k or 100k down payment, now you've got 250k of, of equity. But if the value of your home grows, it doesn't matter how much equity you have in it, you're still going to make a certain amount extra profit. So the amount of equity you have in Your home doesn't really matter. When you go to sell your house, you're still going to make the same amount of property as. Unless you. And even if you own your own home outright now, you've just parked a bunch of cash in this property that's kind of going to grow the same whether it's all in there or not. And so leverage is getting a home equity line of credit and saying, okay, I've got this home equity line of credit. It's maybe at 7% right now. Can I take that money and put it into something that's getting and get me a 10% return? Yeah, okay. You know, how risky is that return? Right? How risky is that investment? Some of the wealthiest people are doing this kind of like, it's not really like an arbitrage. It's like, I'm going to take out this loan for 7%, but I'm going to put the money in this other investment that's 10%. And I'm not saying take out a home equity line of credit and go dump the money in the stock market or crypto. Like, I'm not saying do that. That would be like, invest in your friend's third or fourth restaurant or car wash, okay? That can get you those returns. There's other things to do in that. Like, that's not the advice I'm giving you. But, hey, you got a lot of equity in your home. Maybe you get a home equity line of credit just to sit there until the opportunity comes to buy the building that your clinic's in. And now your clinic's been open for, you know, five to seven years, maybe even 10. And you know it's going to stay open another 10 years. You buy that, the building that it's in, and now you're your own tenant and you've got a tax write off on both sides. And you know that you as a tenant isn't going to leave because, you know, as a landlord, one of the hardest things is figuring out, okay, when's this person going to leave and what happens if it sits empty for two years. But if your clinic's successful and you buy the building that it's in. So one of my clients, Mike and Christy Bleffert, own the building their clinics in. You know, and some days we're chatting through our coaching calls and strategy. It's like, well, you know what we'll do? Because they're out and doing Jackson Hole, Wyoming, they're like, well, if we can't hire another person to really work in our practice, and run it long term. Then maybe when we're decide to retire, you know, like they sell the building because their business is funding. Their business is basically funding their purchase of this building. And the real estate there has gone way up and that's. And they said, Christy said to me the other day on our Project Yellowstone call was that was one of the best decisions they ever made was buying the building they were in. So that's how we create leverage. So they've got leverage. They've got leverage is having choice. Leverage is being able to help multiple people. Leverage is power. It puts you in a powerful position to say I have leverage because it allows you to say no. And when you can say no without fear, you have leverage. That's it. We'll see you on the next show. Have a great day. I'd love to hear from you. Shout me out on the stories, even just shoot me a message, let me know it was helpful. Over on Instagram, Aaron LeBauer If you'd like to hop on a call, brainstorm some ideas about business, see if we can create leverage for you and your career and your business. Hop over to callwithaaron.com book in a time and let's chat. Talk soon. Peace.