EP73: You Can't Become What You've Never Been Around

Ask yourself a few questions. Who's the healthiest person you know? Who's the best with money? Who's the best parent? Answer with an actual name, not a concept.

If you came up empty, that's the episode.

I talk to practice owners all the time who want to double their revenue, or take home three hundred thousand a year, and when I ask who the highest earner in their circle is, there's this long pause. They've got the destination. They have zero footage of the road. And you can't strategy your way out of that, because it isn't information you're missing. It's exposure.

In this one I break down what I call the invisible ceiling: the limit your circle puts on you before you ever write a goal down. Why it shows up in your marriage and your health and your parenting just as much as your P&L. The three things that actually change when you get in proximity to someone a level above you. And why the person who freezes at a number that pays for itself four patients in isn't really having a money problem.

You can outwork your circle for a season. You can't outwork it forever. Eventually you hit the edge of what you've seen and you stop, and you spend twenty years calling it bad luck.

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Transcript

0:00

This is the Austin Cohen Podcast where we talk real strategies for chiropractors ready to grow beyond the adjustment. If you're building a business, developing your leadership, and trying to build wealth without burning out, you are in the right place. Let's get to work What's up, everybody? Welcome back, Austin Cohen podcast. And man, what a night last night. Man, that was awesome. I did the webinar last night on retention pieces. And man, I just know for us, like, it's been so transformational just listening to so many clinics. Every time I talk to a clinic, what do they always say the lever that they need to pull for the quarter is? They say new patients. That is being disguised as something else, 'cause there's usually underlying issues that are going on with a leaky bucket in the practice, and there are ways to build strategies in order to change that. But it's all about just not winging it, building systems. And I just love, my cohort one right now, you're 14 weeks in, and in only a short amount of time, you have developed some serious systems for your business. We are now going into the next 13 weeks, we're gonna be finishing up our team, uh, retention experience. And then in the fall, for those that are joining me in cohort two with cohort one, we are gonna be diving deep into, uh, patient experience, which will make this group who joins me in cohort two and one a lot of money. But also, I think it'll enhance clinical results too as well, because you get to focus on the people who are already coming into you, which is great. So you can focus your resources into patient experience rather than, uh, new patient acquisition. Um, so anyways, fun night last night. Just a fun night last night, and I'm so excited for so many of you guys who are gonna get to watch the replay, uh, probably today or tomorrow. Uh, for all, for all of you in Australia who signed up for it, for you guys, uh, it was like nine in the morning or something like that. And then for us, it's seven o'clock at night. Uh, but it's weird because there's people from Alaska who registered, Australia, uh, London, people from all over. So I guess there's just no perfect time to do it, but that's what replays are for. So I have a couple questions I wanna start with today's topic, and I really think today's topic is gonna be one that is gonna make a lot of you think and really start questioning your goals, start questioning the actions maybe you've taken. Uh, I actually think today's podcast could be in the 20 to 30 minutes we're gonna spend together today, I think this is one that you will look back on. And I've probably said that before with multiple ones, uh, but uh, God, I just believe it so much here today. So I wanna ask you a couple questions. What I'm not looking for you to do is answer with any concepts. All I'm looking for is the name of a person, like a real person who you know, who you actually spend time with. Not somebody who you see on social media, not somebody who you wish you got to hang out with, uh, not a concept that you've learned from, some guru or mentor, but like, who is this person you're actually spending time with and learning from? First thing I wanna know is who's the healthiest person you know? Who's, uh, the person that's the best with money that you know and makes the most amount of money? Who's a person you know that's an amazing parent? Who's got a mar- who, who's a friend of yours that has a marriage that you'd actually want it? Not saying yours is bad. I'm just telling you, like, you look at this person, you're like, "They're a great husband," or, "They're a great wife." Now, when I ask those questions, some of you guys have probably names that are gonna come up really fast. Some of you may still be searching, and if you're still searching, that is gonna be the whole point of this episode. Because why? You're trying to become something you've never watched anybody be. And especially with that money question. Like, I could say, think about how much money you make right now. Let's say you make $150,000 a year. The person you said that makes the most amount of money or is the best with money may be somebody who only makes 100. So we've got a disconnect there, and you've never watched anybody get to where you're trying to get to. And I have this conversation all the time. Now, usually it starts with money, because what's if somebody tell me, they say their clinic does, let's say, $30,000 a month, and they wanna get to 60. And then I say to them, "Cool. Who's your richest friend?" Or, "Who, all- out of all your chiropractic friends, who here, who of your friends is doing $60,000 a month or more in revenue?" Or, "What businesses, like, what business owners are you friends with that does $60,000 or more a month in revenue?" And there's a pause every single time, because usually there's nobody in their circle who's earning anywhere close to what they said they wanna earn. And when you think about what that means, right, like they've got a goal, they've got a number. They've probably got it written on some whiteboard somewhere where all their goals get written. But the problem is they've never actually seen it before, and they don't know what a $60,000 a month looks like on a Tuesday. They don't know what those hiring conversations sound like. They don't know what that person says no to. They don't know what it feels like in your body to make a decision at that level. Yeah, they've got a destination, but what, what don't they have, right? They don't have any footage of what the road to get to that level is gonna look like. So it's not just the business number. This shows up in what people wanna take home too as well, by the way. So if somebody says to me that, "Oh, I wanna make $200,000 a year or $300,000 a year," okay, that's a great goal, and I would ask the same question: "Who's the highest earner friend you have?" And the answer is usually somebody around 150. And if you think about what they're actually asking for is, like, they wanna double the highest number they've ever watched a real human being live on. They've never seen how that person handles taxes, how they think about what to keep versus what to reinvest, which is a huge concept. Or have they ever watched somebody make a high-level purchase that's maybe, like, a $10,000 purchase or a $20,000 purchase, or even turn 'em down? What does a lot of money do to a marriage, whether it's good or bad? Like they're not just missing the strategy, but there's an entire lived experience of the thing they're chasing. And when you get there without ever having seen it, what tends to happen? You either blow it or you panic and you shrink back to what feels familiar. And I know in chiropractic school, we always talk about the fear of success. And like you get to this level, but then you shrink back down. Like that's something you're not gonna be able to build strategies around or read your way out of that because it's not the information that's missing, it is exposure that is missing. And you can go on ChatGPT, Claude all day and build whatever you wanna say and ask any questions you wanna ask. And I have people try to do this all the time. They have the information, but what they don't have is the exposure because information is everywhere in today's world, by the way. I mean, like AI, yeah, you could be having a $30,000 a month clinic and ask ChatGPT, how do I get to $60,000 a month? Tell me, uh, what, what your... tell me what your practice looks like in three months after that. So you go back to those questions I opened with And if you think about them, I think some of the other ones should hurt more than the money one. That would be my belief system. To me, money, like, that's something that, yeah, okay, you don't hit it, fine, you can dodge it. Somebody asks who your richest friend is, you may be like, "Oh, I don't really care that much about money." I mean, I know you do, but that's fine you wanna say that. But what can nobody dodge are the other ones. Does anybody say... Like when I say, "Who's your healthiest friend?" No one says, "I don't really care that much about my health," or, "I don't really care that much about my marriage," or, "I don't really care about being a good parent." So if no one came up when I asked those questions earlier, you gotta sit with that. You wanna be great at the thing, and you have no working model of it in your actual life. To, to... Then you're just guessing. Like, you're essentially reverse engineering it from what you didn't get either growing up, from what you see online, or from a book you may have read one time. And if a name did come up for you, then hell yeah, because then the follow-up will be who... when's the last time you spent real time around that person? Not I saw them, I waved at them at church, or, uh, we did a quick workout together. Like, when did you last watch them doing the thing or ask them a question about it? Because I think there's a difference between knowing the person exists, which isn't really gonna do a whole lot for you, rather than putting yourself in proximity to that person. And if you're coming up empty across the board, dude, you gotta be honest with yourself. You've got a circle problem. You definitely most likely don't have a discem- discipline problem. I don't even think a motivation problem. Like I said earlier, it's like you have the information, but it's an exposure problem, and no amount of trying harder is gonna fix it. No amount of ChatGPT, Claude searches or whatever else platform you use you gotta expose yourself. And here's what I've come to believe over my years is your circle is what sets your ceiling before you ever put a single goal down. At... For those that were at Growth Summit, you may remember this. I called it the invisible ceiling, and it's invisible because nobody put it there on purpose, and you didn't choose it. It's formed around you from the people who happen to be nearby. Now, can you outwork it for a while? Yeah, you can, and there's a season where you may be able to like grind or hustle past it, that goals you've put on... uh, that ceiling you've put on yourself. But what happens? You hit the edge of what you've seen, and then you stop. Not because you ran out of effort, not because you ran out of hustle. You ran out of reference You cannot become what you've never been around. And it's as simple as that. Like, that is the principle. I remember, uh, between 2009 and 2015, I thought I was hot stuff, man. Like, my practice was doing really well, uh, more than most chiropractors do. And then I signed up for a business group of other people very similar to me. And what I realized was that my cute, you know, 70,000, $80,000 a month practice was... I mean, first off, it was very dependent on me, where if I took a week or two off, the whole thing went to zero 'cause there weren't any systems developed in there. Uh, but what I also realized that I was working with people who were doing 70 to $80,000 a day in sales. I mean, I had friends who had a recurring business practice where what they did is they did, You essentially would be ordering, like, you would take a picture of your grass, and they would then send you products that would clear that up. Or what they would do is you would take a picture of, like, let's say an ant problem or a carpenter bee problem, then they would send you home kits in order to solve those problems, and they would put you on a recurring revenue. Now, this business sold for, it was like 60, 70, $80 million. Um, but that was a friend that I was able to associate with and put myself around. We met every single month for four hours. Then we did two retreats every single year, which was a three-day experience. A- and that was just one of them. But it was somebody I was able to put myself around. Business is just where it's the easiest to measure, so, like, people notice it first, rather than, like, the father stuff or mother stuff, wife stuff, husband stuff, right? But it's all about running your life at every single moment and just keeping everything in sync with each other. And I'll make this concrete with this group, right? Like, get around better people is, to me, some of the most useless advice if you don't know what actually changes. When... You know, I think when you get in proximity to someone operating a level above you, there's three things that are gonna happen. All right? These are the notes I took. So there's three things that happen that I wrote down. First thing is speed This is a big one. You watch how fast they make decisions. I feel that most people sit on decision for weeks at a time that somebody at a higher level will make in a day. Now, you don't learn that from a framework or a ChatGPT search. You learn that from watching somebody do it in front of you and realizing the world didn't end on this quick, decisive decision. The second thing is this, standards. What's aspirational to you is normal to them, and that's kind of what I said earlier about how I thought about my practice compared to what I was seeing in other real businesses. It's not a stretch goal, it's just a Tuesday for them, and the moment you see it as a normal instead of exceptional, the whole calibration will shift. So what ended up I start, stopped doing is like, I'm stopped congratulating myself for things that should really just become baseline and holding myself to a higher standard. The third thing, I think this is the biggest one. This this is something I teach all my clients. If you've ever worked with me before, I've talked to you about this before You see what they tolerate and what they don't, and that is the biggest difference. Not what they do, what do they refuse to put up with or who they refuse to put up with. I've built a company across 13 locations that are all cash. They have high recurring revenue, they have high retention on staff side, and they also have high retention on the patient side. And I'll tell you, the biggest gaps I see when I sit with someone stuck at $30,000 a month are not strategy gaps. It is what is being tolerated. The team member that everybody knows should not be there. The number nobody's looked at in months. Uh, there's a conversation that's probably been being avoided for a year, and you don't see that until you're around someone who wouldn't tolerate it for a week. Yet maybe you've tolerated it for like a year, so 52 weeks. This is how we expand our ceiling, and this is how we grow our capacity. And here's where this, I think, gets uncomfortable, and I wanna be careful because I just wanna sh- full transparency, I am not trying to sell you something in the mid- middle of this point I'm trying to make right here, okay? So please don't take it as that. When I talk to people about coaching, some of them get scared because it costs money, and I get it 'cause it does. But watch what happens when you run the actual math. Three months of coaching with me in my Ascent program is 3,600 bucks. It's one average case value in most practices. So essentially, four patients over the course of a year covers my program several times over and over and over. You get 52 calls for n- 90 minutes and our circle community of people doing big things. So if the math is that clear and people still freeze is the number the problem or something else? And usually it's this: when you've never been around people who invest in themselves, spending money on yourself feels reckless or selfish. It feels like something other people do, and that feeling has nothing to do with the price tag, but that's the invisible ceiling showing up as a budget conversation. And I watched this with our fi- first cohort. Some of the people in that room had been sitting at the same revenue for years, not because they were lazy people at all. They were working extremely hard, but they didn't have what footage looks like on the other side. And once they got in the room and saw what it actually looked like and they saw the behaviors and what other people were tolerating and not tolerating, and the numbers started moving I didn't give them some magic system, but they finally had something to calibrate it against when they saw what we were doing at Corrective Chiropractic and what I've built over the last 17 years. You get to see what's possible. So here's what I want to leave you with. The rooms you are in are the ceiling of every version of you. Not just the earner, the parent, the spouse, the friend, the person people are going to describe, uh, to someone someday. Nobody's gonna build those rooms for you, by the way. You have got to pick them, and if that means calling whoever's name came up first and asking them to get breakfast, do it. I mean, it's free. Do it this week. If that's a coaching room, great, and it doesn't even have to be mine. Work with anybody. Get around anybody who's further down the road than you are, and if you're not willing to take a risk on yourself, what happens? The ceiling stays, and the hardest part about that ceiling is you're never going to see it. You'll spend t- I, I see chiropractors all the time post on social media that are trying to sell their practices, and they spent 20 years bumping into that ceiling, and what are they saying? What's the justification? Bad luck. Cohort two of Ascent starts on September 8th. There will be 30 clinics in there. That is the cap. Pick the rooms you're in. Hopefully, I can be the right room for you. Go kick butt and really hopefully this resonates with you, and if it does, once again, I love it when y'all share it with me or even you share it on social media, and don't forget to give me a five-star rating if you can, if you've been enjoying this podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you've been enjoying it. Have an awesome day don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode to learn more about building your business, leadership, and life on purpose, visit chiro one eighty.com or follow Austin on Instagram at Dr. Austin Cohen.