When More Effort Isn't the Answer
Business resilience operates by different rules than most owners expect. Paul Martin breaks down what it actually takes to push through the hardest stretches of growth.
Full transcript
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.
Hey everybody, I'm Paul Martin, founder and president of Martin Healthcare Advisors. Today I want to talk about something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and it's resilience. Specifically what resilience looks like for a physical therapy business owner who is trying to grow. And I do want to give credit where credit is due. This is a topic that came out of a message that I heard last Sunday at Journey Church from Pastor Scott Ball. He was talking about resilience in a way that really stuck with me.
And on the drive home, I kept thinking about how much of what he said applied to the practice owners I work with every single day. So there I am at church listening to Pastor Scott B and I'm thinking about you guys and the angle that I could use for this because look, the angle is going to be very different from his angle, but the seed definitely came from that message. And here's what I keep coming back to. When most people talk about resilience, it's typically really in three places.
First, sports a lot in sports. Second, as I heard on Sunday, faith. And a third area I hear pretty commonly is family. Now, in sports, resilience, it's the ability to bounce back from a loss or come back from an injury or a terrible season. There's a very clear scoreboard record and there's an off season to recover. In faith, resilience is holding on to belief where life does not make sense. It's private and it's internal. And that was a lot of the conversations that I heard last Sunday.
And in family, resilience is showing up for the people you love. When things get really difficult, it's steady and it's daily. Business resilience has overlap with all three of those, but it also has elements that are very different. And if you don't understand those differences, you can be a person of tremendous personal resilience and still struggle as a business owner. So, let me walk through what makes business resilience essentially its own animal. All right. Number one, the grind is daily with no off season. Right? In sports, you lose on a Saturday or a Sunday.
You have till the next Saturday or Sunday to fix the problems. In business, you could lose a key employee on Monday. You are going to have to make payroll on Friday. You are worried about your marketing plan that is started three weeks ago. There's no break in the schedule. The next problem is already on its way before you have closed out the last one. And I'm sure you have all experienced that. Number two, you are not just resilient for yourself. Think about it. You're resilient for everyone whose livelihood depends on you running the business or leading running the business.
Your employees go home, they have mortgages, they have tuition payments, they have grocery bills, they have debt they're paying off. That weight is a part of business resilience. And it's a kind of pressure that does not exist in most other parts of life, but I know you feel it every single day. Number three, you usually don't get to show the stress that you have in business, right? In sports, you have a bad game or a tough loss, you can just collapse on that field after the game.
People understand. But in a clinic or in a business office, if the owner walks in looking exhausted and worried, literally everyone feels it. The front desk feel it, the clinicians feel it, your partners feel it, and most importantly, patients feel it, too. So resilience in business often looks like being calm on the outside while you are problemolving on the inside. I'm going to say that again. You're calm on the outside but inside you are solving problems. That is a master of being a business owner. Number four, the win keeps moving.
Right? You hit a revenue goal and the goal moves higher. You open a new location and now you have new problems and you're supposed to be opening the new clinic within a few months. Resilience in business is not about pushing through to the finish line because there really is not a finish line until you end up partnering with a larger company or you sell the business outright. It's about pacing for a marathon that does not have that clearly marked mile 26 marker. So, let's now talk about the specific situation that I feel like I see all the time with business owners.
You have a very established practice. You have grown that practice. You've proven you can run it well operationally. And somewhere along the way, things start to feel harder, not easier. But everybody told me once I got to that four to six clinics, things would get easier. The roadblocks I hear about most are these. The team that got you here to maybe those four to six clinics, they can't get you to that next level, that 10 plus clinic level. And you have to make some hard people decisions.
Or it could be you're 30 clinics and you want to get to 50 or 100. You're going to have to make some hard people decisions. The systems that worked when you were potentially even in every clinic every week that does not scale when you cannot be everywhere. The cash flow tightens because you are reinvesting in growth. So your role changes from being the best on-site leader or even the best clinician to being the best global meaning for your whole company leader. And that is where a real identity shift happens.
And on top of all that, the market is constantly putting pressure on margins, on labor issues, on obviously on reimbursement, and those things just don't seem to let up. Trust me, this is the hardest stretch of being a business owner. And it can happen going from 1 to three, 3 to six, 6 to 10 to 15, 20, and on. And these stretches are difficult. And this is where B business resilience really gets tested because the answer is not just to work harder. You are already working hard.
The answer is to work differently. And if I could, I'm going to go to sports just really quickly here. My summer before my senior year playing football at Gettysburg. I just thought when I went to the field every day, the harder I ran and the more I ran, the better I was going to get. And I can remember someone pulling me aside. It was a coach who happened to be out on this high school field. I'm in college, but it was a coach happened to be out on this high school field asking me what I was preparing for.
And what he told me is as opposed to just running around and around and up and back and back and forth, run your plays over and over all the way up and down the field. The six best plays, run them over and over and over. And I did that. I did that. And by again, I got smart, I got strategic, and I got back. I was ready. So, what does resilience then really look like in this stretch? And here's what I see in the owners who actually break through.
Okay, like I had a breakthrough in sports there, right? I had a breakthrough. They treat setbacks as data, not verdicts. A clinic underperforms. A hire doesn't work out. A referral source goes quiet. The resilient owners look at it the way a clinician looks at an evaluation. What does this tell me? What do I need to adjust? They do not personalize it. They they seem to come from an outside in perspective. They study it and they build a counselor. What do I mean by that? They build a group of people that surround themselves and they surround themselves with people who can push back on them.
Sometimes this is a peer group of other owners. Sometimes it's an advisor, a consultant or a board. Sometimes it's one trusted colleague. But it's somebody who is not in the business on the payroll because they are going to be willing to tell you the absolute truth and the hard truth. They plan for the comeback before the setback. That's what resilient owners tend to do. They plan for the comeback before the setback even comes. So resilient owners are not waiting until cash gets really tight to figure out their cash plan.
They're not waiting until they lose a clinician to figure out what the recruiting plan is going to be to replace. They are working on these things while everything is seemingly going on. Okay? So that when something breaks, they already know what to do. And here's one more thing. Resilience without strategy, as I described above, that's just stammer. You could be the toughest person in the room and still be running in the wrong direction. Right? I was out on that field running back and forth, back and forth.
I just needed to bring some strategy to that. And the owners who break through pair the resilience with a clear view of where they are going and why. The why is so important. And I know you've all heard that. They are not just enduring, they're aiming. So if you are in that stretch right now where things feel more difficult than they should, where you are working as hard as ever and the needle is just not moving the way you want it to. I want you to know that what you are feeling is normal.
And the answer is not just to push harder. As I have made abundantly clear, the answer is to step back, get the right people around you, and look at the business with fresh, qualified eyes. And as you know, that is the work we do every day at Martin Healthcare Advisors. As I told someone this morning, if I'm driving from the east coast of Florida to the west coast and I know where I'm going, but I don't have a road map, I will probably get there. But it's going to take me much longer if I have those ways directions right up.
We're going to be right there. It comes crystal clear. And so we help owners see the way the way a buyer would see it. And we help them build the kind of foundation that supports the next stage of growth, whether that is more clinics or a potential sale or partnership of the company. Look, I really appreciate all of you joining us today. I really appreciate your support over the many episodes. This is well over our we're getting over our 300 episodes now. So, I appreciate all of your support.
And if you have any questions or want to talk about anything that I've discussed today or in the past, just click below. Let's talk. Thanks for joining me and I look forward to seeing you all in the very near future.
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