You Can't Budget Your Way to Success

Are you trying to 'save' your way to success?  We dive into the entrepreneur mindset on money in this 'sode.

We've now worked with 500+ business owners.  ALL OF US have money mindset issues with our business.  Being a good business owner doesn't mean checking your bank account every day.  It doesn't mean counting pennies on your supplies.  Going without an EMR to save costs.  Asking your clients to pay with cash or Zelle to avoid transaction fees.

What we don't see is the opportunity cost of taking all this time on cost-cutting rather than focusing on growth.

As business owners, we realize increasing revenue is always more powerful than trying to decrease costs.   Now, that doesn't mean we should be frivolous with our money.  But that's not usually our problem.

Can't wait for you to dive into this episode on money mindset and how to focus more on growth instead of cost!

Business Accelerator

If you're a business owner interested in going to the next level, make sure to get on the wait list for our next cohort of the Business Accelerator Program!  We've now taken 200 business owners through this six-month coaching intensive and seen how transformative it can be in your business.  On average, participants added $53,000 to their business in the first year!

Check it out and get on the wait list (www.pelvicptrising.com/accelerator)

About Us

Nicole and Jesse Cozean founded Pelvic PT Rising to provide clinical and business resources to physical therapists to change the way we treat pelvic health.   PelvicSanity Physical Therapy (www.pelvicsanity.com) together in 2016.  It grew quickly into one of the largest cash-based physical therapy practices in the country.

Through Pelvic PT Rising, Nicole has created clinical courses (www.pelvicptrising.com/clinical) to help pelvic health providers gain confidence in their skills and provide frameworks to get better patient outcomes.  Together, Jesse and Nicole have helped 500+ pelvic practices start and grow through the Pelvic PT Rising Business Programs (www.pelvicptrising.com/business) to build a practice that works for them!

Get in Touch!

Learn more at www.pelvicptrising.com, follow Nicole @nicolecozeandpt (www.instagram.com/nicolecozeandpt) or reach out via email (nicole@pelvicsanity.com).

Check out our Clinical Courses, Business Resources and learn more about us at Pelvic PT Rising...Let's Continue to Rise!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

In the last 10 years, our field has gone from an unknown specialty to a household name. This brings unprecedented opportunities, but we need to rise up to meet them and give our patients the care that they deserve. In order to help others get better, we need to be better. This podcast will help you to become more confident with your patients, more successful in your practice or business and a leader in pelvic health, and we're going to have some fun along the way. Join us as we rise together. We're Jesse and Nicole Cozine, founders of Pelvic Sanity Physical Therapy and the creators of the Pelvic PT Huddle, and this is Pelvic PT Rising.

Speaker 2: 0:54

Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Pelvic PT Rising podcast with Jesse and Nicole Cozine. Hey, nicole, hello, I'm really excited about this topic on for you guys who are business owners or potential future business owners, that you can't budget your way to success. This is something that we see a ton as we talk about money, mindset issues and especially as people are transitioning and growing in our programs, going from the accelerator program to mentorship or graduating from mentorship into CEO. We see this with the new group of people every time they come through and it's an attitude we really have to examine, see if it's working for us and often rewire in order to have true business success.

Speaker 1: 1:33

Yeah, I think for everybody we need to move through this. No one has been exempt from this. I don't feel like we've met anybody that hasn't had this tendency. We're going to talk about why we feel like that is and where it maybe comes from in this podcast above.

Speaker 2: 1:49

first, yeah, we need to talk about, nicole, your IC course. The cohort number two of that is going to be coming out on Monday. If you're interested in that, make sure you head over to PelvicPTRISINGcom, get on the wait list there. You'll get all of the information. You'll get $50 off. You'll get access to a live Q&A, all of the material, newly updated stuff, new research, new AUA guidelines. Basically, you want to be the best at treating IC and doing the best for your patients. This is the course for you.

Speaker 1: 2:19

Yes, I will say one more thing about it it is the most comprehensive treatment, from start to finish. We go through the history of ICs. You really understand it so you can speak with confidence to your patients and to other practitioners who may not be as well-versed in the condition. We talk about medical management, nutrition, obviously, all of the pelvic rehab evaluation and treatment techniques that we need to be doing. You basically can have any patient with interstitial cystitis walk into your clinic and you will know how to comprehensively treat them if you take this course.

Speaker 2: 2:55

Yes, hands-on treatment stuff with real patients, with models, with all of the things Super practical for that diagnosis. If you're feeling that you're not providing the best quality care for those with IC, you can rectify that coming up on Monday. That'll be coming out soon. Nicole, let's get back to this idea that you can't budget your way to success. I think one of the best ways to think about this is to ask yourself, when you're in a time of financial stress, when you're feeling stressed in the business, where does your mind go? I want to tell you a story that illustrates this.

Speaker 2: 3:28

We had a physical therapist who ended up moving back east or was going to leave the practice. We're going on business as usual and our office manager came up to me and she said some of us on the admin side are a little bit worried with this decrease in revenue, with this PT leaving, and we didn't have somebody to replace that person right away. Are we going to have our hours cut? Are we going to? Is anybody, should anybody, be worried? And it was so funny when we see like this mindset shift that had literally never crossed my mind, right, nicole? And I had never talked about that. We didn't even think that it would cross the minds of our staff Like we actually had to have a meeting with the front and just said, hey, this doesn't change anything at all, it's totally fine.

Speaker 2: 4:09

Because my focus then is on the other side of the coin, on generating more revenue, not trying to tighten up because we lost an area of that. It's like cool, we need you on here to manage the patients who are transitioning, to make sure our fill rate is fantastic, to make sure we're converting and make sure we're ready when we bring in. And now in February, we're bringing in two new clinicians. We got to be ready for that. I'm not cutting off my nose despite my face here, like that's the attitude that I want everybody to kind of question. So where does your mind go when you're feeling financially stressed? And for a lot of people and we'll talk about why it goes to, oh, I need to cut costs, I need to feel like I've got control of my business. So I'm going to eliminate this thing or I'm going to try to save money here, as opposed to what we're going to suggest is thinking about increasing your revenue and increasing growing the business instead.

Speaker 1: 5:01

And you know I feel like it's worth to take a pause for a second and hypothesize or project where we feel like this comes from. And you know I feel like if you are trying to be responsible with your personal finances, then there's a lot of personal finance gurus out there and the overwhelming majority of personal finance information you will hear has a lot to do with this cutting expenses situation and tracking what you're spending money on and that kind of stuff. And if you think about it, it makes sense. Most people don't own their own business and therefore are in a job where their income or their personal revenue is relatively capped and even if there's still growth within their position or opportunities to get more money from their current job, that's not from the financial gurus perspective. That's not always a road they want to go down right, actually many of them.

Speaker 1: 6:03

If you really pay attention and listen around the edges a little bit with them, they will say one of the first things to do is ask your boss for a raise, go interview at other places, make a lateral move.

Speaker 1: 6:14

A lot of times that's where you can increase your income or your personal revenue. But the majority of personal finance people will start talking about expenses, because somebody's income the underlying assumption is it's relatively capped. So if we can't change the equation on that side, we have to change the equation on the other side, and that's really where it comes from, and I think that that infiltrates our psyche and our brains more than we realize. And so when we move from our personal finance management to our business, you will find that those two things the personal part of your finances and your business part of your finances are actually really enter way more intertwined. But there is a huge mindset shift that we need to have, that now we're running a business and we do have control over both sides of that equation. And so then the real question is where can you make the biggest difference? And that's where we should be focusing on.

Speaker 2: 7:15

And you know we see this, and this is a natural thing as you're first starting off. But I think a lot of people can get stuck in this mindset of just trying to keep costs low for everything you possibly can, and so I've seen this with people who are out there and trying to have their patients. And if you've done this, no judgment. We've all had to walk through this. This is an evolution of our money mindset as we become business owners. It's something we've had coaching ourselves on and something I obviously think a ton about and do a lot of independent research on. So no judgment if this has been you.

Speaker 2: 7:48

But oh, I'm going to get my clients or patients to pay with Zell or cash so I could avoid those credit card fees. Or I'm going to charge those credit card fees to the patient. I'm going to put that onto their bill or that like oh, can I encourage people to pay with this method? Or I don't even want to use my EMRs credit card processor because I can get a different credit card processor for my local bank. That's going to save me 0.2%.

Speaker 1: 8:13

Or I'm going to use free Google voice, which objectively fucking sucks and you're missing calls ever left and right and it doesn't work at the time. But you're doing, you want to do the free version before you really quote, upgrade and pay more money for like a real phone system. And this is I mean to Jessie's point. It's understandable, especially when you're first starting out, because the revenue side of their equation is still unclear, Like you're not super confident that you can actually have the power to change that side, and it might actually be not where you want it to be. Right when you're building your clientele, if you want to be seeing 20 patients and you're really only seeing 10, then that can feel really scary and in that situation, right in the time of stress or uncertainty, you go towards things that you can control, which is the expenses. However, we need to make that a very short term solution.

Speaker 2: 9:09

Yeah, some other examples that we see with this are, you know, trying to rent a room by the day or the hour and not having a room that you can just be in whenever you want to see patients checking eight different sites. Every time you have to buy gloves, guys, like that's, how much are we really saving with that kind of stuff? But you're right, nicole, sometimes we just get stuck in that initial feeling of the business, that initial scarcity, and I think it does. It gives us some sort of like short term relief or a dopamine hit, like oh great, I was able to save $6.99 on this thing by shopping around on it, or I was able to get the deal from OPTP and do that.

Speaker 2: 9:47

And this isn't to say that we are just wanting to throw away money, but most of you guys who are starting businesses are not in the oh, I'm just going to be like extravagant, we really haven't seen that a ton as we do business mentorship of the person who's like oh yeah, I got into it and I got an eight room place and I got six high low tables and we're like well, how many clinicians do you have?

Speaker 2: 10:08

Oh, it's just me, like I haven't really seen that yet right. So usually we're biasing toward focusing on these, you know, cutting costs and budgeting, and being really cautious on that. So if we think about all of that, I want you guys to think about it on the other side. So that's a lot of time and mental energy that we spend focusing on saving money, on using that Google voice thing, on not getting an EMR and being able to piecemeal it together with a paper calendar and Google notes, or not getting the Superbill feature on an EMR because it costs an extra $20 a month or whatever it is right, that's a lot of time and effort and mental energy that goes into this budgeting, this cutting costs.

Speaker 2: 10:51

And if we took all of that same mental energy and put it toward growing the business, what would the ROI be? And now we can kind of compare those two things right. What do you get when you are checking eight different sites for your glove prices versus what do you get if you grow your practice by one extra patient a week?

Speaker 1: 11:08

Yeah, and I wanna just push pause here for a second, because even when Jesse said like grow the business, and the mindset of the person that's in this situation might be thinking like why in the world would I wanna grow the business when it's not, when it feels like it's not working at its max capacity right now? And I wanna shift a little bit, or change that language a little bit to not, you are growing the business but you're focusing on increasing revenue. How can I increase revenue equals growing the business, but I don't want you to have that like visceral reaction to like, well, I'm not really wanna grow more, right? I feel like we have like a different. Do you know what I'm trying to say, jess? Yeah, just language-wise, right? Yeah, language-wise.

Speaker 2: 11:49

Growing in revenue. That's a great clarification there. It doesn't mean that you're adding staff. It doesn't mean that you're adding an extra room. It doesn't mean that you're adding a service. It just means that you're getting, in this case, more revenue, more patience in the door. So if you think about that, if you're charging about $200 an hour, just as a ballpark, and you get in one extra patient a week, well that's $10,000 of extra revenue a year. If you're seeing about 20 patients a week and you raise your prices by $10 a visit, that's also an extra $10,000 a year. If you rent a room to someone for $400 a month because maybe you got a space that was bigger than you needed to right, that can be an extra $5,000 a year. Are you saving five or $10 or $20,000 a year by shopping around for gloves?

Speaker 1: 12:38

Yeah, I want you guys to be thinking about those sides of the equation, because you should really only be living on the saving side if the choices for growing your revenue side aren't possible or you're simply just not going to do them, which we don't recommend, quite frankly.

Speaker 2: 12:57

You know and this is one of the bunny mindsets that actually one of the reasons I'm so proud of the people who are able to jump into the accelerator and one of the reasons we wanted to create a lower cost and lower entry thing into business coaching that's a lot of the attitude that holds people back from doing this is focusing on the cutting costs thing. Oh wow, that's $350 a month. Where am I to come up with that, as opposed to saying, hey, if that $350 a month can help me make an extra $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 a year, that's a no-brainer once you embrace this business owner mindset, but it's hard when you're starting and we totally get that. That's why we literally track those numbers in the accelerator program. Just as a total aside, on average, our people added $53,000 per year to their business. Right, let that sink in for just a minute.

Speaker 2: 13:50

That's more than you're going to make by making sure that you get the cheapest EMR out there or that you keep on Google voice even though it's missing calls for you. So that's really where I want you guys to be thinking and I want to realize and you might be saying, well, can't I just do both? Right, sometimes that's another thing, like, can't I just keep my mind on all of these cost-cutting things and budgeting and being really conscientious about where all the money's going and still try to grow the business? And I would just say, theoretically, yes, that's possible, but in practice there is a major opportunity cost to playing small and focusing on that cost-cutting rather than focusing on growing revenue and growth in the business. And if you get stuck there, you're always going to be stuck there and playing small with all of it.

Speaker 1: 14:38

Yeah, you know what? I kind of equate that to a little bit for just a clinical analogy. It's like it would be somebody's wanting to strengthen their glutes with just doing bridges all day. It's like that's not going to happen. At some point you have to switch and start to load that tissue, and so I feel like in that case you can't just always cut expenses. That's just doing bridges, that's like maintaining where you're at and making sure you're halfway responsible. But, like Jesse said, that's not usually the major problem. The major problem is is we're not flexing the other side of the equation. We're not growing, we're not physically loading the glutes right. So we have to change what we're doing, we have to change our position, we have to change essentially the load on that clinical thing and so that you need to flux on the other side of that equation a little bit.

Speaker 2: 15:28

Absolutely so. That's when we had that physical therapist, that clinician who left Right, our initial thought wasn't oh my gosh, how do we turn off lights in some of the rooms so we can save on our electric bill? It was like how do we go out and make sure that we get a new clinician in, or multiple new clinicians in? How do we go out and market? How do we make sure that the clinic is as full as it can possibly be? Because if we've lost a clinician, that means that everybody else should be 120% full. We should never have a hole in the schedule. Right, all of those things are going to be so much more valuable than cutting the hours of a loyal employee who did nothing wrong, because we're feeling some kind of way about money. Totally.

Speaker 1: 16:09

I also want to just point out, too, that this is where your personal habits really start to infiltrate your business habits and vice versa if you're not careful.

Speaker 1: 16:19

So what we really are having you do is stop the that stuff, also on your personal side, because when personal and business finances are so intertwined, then that means that the better the business does, the better your personal finances do.

Speaker 1: 16:36

And this becomes really challenging if you're in a partnership, like with your partner or spouse, where they're still stuck in the cut expenses situation You're talking about hey, I really need to still invest or work to grow revenue, and they're being like, well, wait a second, we need to either do some cutting expenses on the personal side or they're having judgment on what you're doing in the business because they're still stuck in that mindset.

Speaker 1: 17:04

It just becomes really messy and intertwined, and that I just want to point out that your personal ways that you deal with stuff also translates into the business. So if you're the kind of person who's sitting at a table out to dinner and you have a six friends and you're sitting there and you've had dinner and drinks, you guys all had a great time and at the end of the time the person comes in with the bill and you're either asking for a separate check or you are wanting to see the receipt so that you can be the one to divvy out how much everybody owes and Venmo-ing. Honestly, that is a mindset of the. That's just like a what's that word?

Speaker 2: 17:47

It's a canary in the coal mine.

Speaker 2: 17:48

for this mindset, yeah, a canary in the coal mine of that mindset might be you, if that's how you are, and that goes back to just as a thing that goes back to how you were raised about money, that goes back to how your spouse I mean. There's some deep stuff in here and that's one of the reasons I love talking about this so much in mentorship and CEO program. All of that because this isn't a one-time thing. It's not like, oh cool, I heard this podcast and Jesse said I should focus more on revenue. Cool, done, check Right. This is going to be an ongoing thing. So if this is you right now, don't blame yourself, but it is something that's going to have to change if you want kind of financial peace in your business and you want to be able to grow.

Speaker 1: 18:26

And you might have to change personally in order to make that mindset shift as well in your business. And that's hard and that we're not saying it's easy, but it's certainly necessary if you're going to have this business for years and years and years. Otherwise you're just going to be a neurotic mess for a long time.

Speaker 2: 18:40

Yeah, 100%, and that's a place we don't want you guys living and we certainly don't want you staying there if that was where you were when you started your practice. So I hope this has been helpful. We love talking about this. We need to do a couple more episodes, nicole. I realize we haven't talked a ton about this on the podcast, even though we talk a ton about it in the mentorship group, so it's like, ah, we need to hit some more of these things. So, if this has been helpful, or you guys want some more stuff on money mindset, finances, that connection between business and personal finance, that's all stuff that we talk about a ton and have all sorts of frameworks for. So that's something you guys want more of. Please DM Nicole, let her know and we'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 1: 19:19

Keep this conversation going and let's continue to rise.