Aaron LeBauer explains why physical therapists and coaches get stuck trading hours for money, and how to escape: sell one-to-many products like evergreen online courses, or hire staff to deliver services while you focus on scaling. His evergreen webinars now enroll more students than live ones.
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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. I'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, you know, degree because I paid so much and 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 gonna 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? That's not, 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, 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, okay? And if you're just getting into physical therapy and you're like, I'm just going to get a great job, you're going to 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, 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 training, 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's. 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 going to sell online, it needs to be evergreen. And then we need to hire other people and leverage software to do the technical work and the service delivery. Right. You getting this?
