He’s opening his eleventh clinic.
Six months ago, he was putting two hundred hours a month into his business. Not exaggerated. Two hundred. He was the answer to every question, the fix for every fire, the one holding ten partnerships together by sheer will.
He’s down to forty four hours now. Focused hours. The kind where he’s actually working on the business instead of getting buried inside it.
That’s the part most people would stop the story there and call it a win. And it is. But it’s not actually where the story gets interesting.
Because once he had his time back, he looked at growth differently. And what he saw almost made him stop.
The False Choice
He started connecting the dots backward. Everything it took to build ten clinics, every partnership, every owner he’d supported, every fire he’d personally put out along the way. And then he looked at doubling that. In his mind, doubling the clinics meant doubling the grind. More hours. More weight. Back to two hundred a month, maybe worse.
So some part of him quietly decided not to go there. Stay at ten. Protect the forty four hours. Protect the peace he’d just fought for.
That’s the choice a lot of owners feel right now, even if they couldn’t put words to it. Stay small and stay yourself, or grow and become something else. Private equity has made that choice feel even more real lately, rolling up practices left and right, and a lot of owners are watching that happen and quietly deciding growth means turning into something they don’t recognize. A bigger, colder version of what they built. Less healer, more operator.
But that’s not actually the choice. It just feels like the only one because nobody’s shown the third option.
What Actually Shifted
He stopped looking at the eleven clinics and started looking at why he built any of it in the first place.
It was never about the money for him. He’s said that for years, and financially he’s done well for over a decade, so he can say it and mean it. But somewhere in working through this, he realized that wasn’t true for everyone he was serving. The owners he’d helped, the ones now running their own clinics, some of them multiple locations, money mattered to them. Deeply. It meant security for their families, freedom from the stress he himself didn’t have to carry anymore. He’d been so disconnected from needing it that he almost missed how much it mattered to the people standing right next to him.
That hit him hard. Because the thing he didn’t care about for himself was exactly what made growth meaningful for everyone else in the room.
He lit up talking about that part. Watching someone else build wealth and ownership because he gave them the support to do it.
That’s the thing that was actually fulfilling him this whole time. Not the eleven clinics. The serving. And serving more people, fully, meant their financial growth too, even if his own had stopped being the point a long time ago.
And once he saw that clearly, growth stopped looking like more weight on his shoulders. It started looking like more of the thing that actually lit him up, just with the systems now in place to support it without it landing back on him.
The clinics grow. The valuation grows. But none of that was ever the real engine. The real engine was always serving people well enough that they grow too.
He didn’t need to choose between staying himself and scaling something impersonal. He needed to build the version of growth that was actually his the whole time.
Your Turn
Stop here for a second and actually think this through.
Do you find yourself intentionally or unintentionally avoiding growth because some part of you believes growth just means more weight on your shoulders? Not more freedom. More to carry.
Have you ever looked at everything it took to get where you are now, and used that as the reason to stop, instead of the proof that you know how to build?
If money stopped being your personal motivator a long time ago, have you considered that it might still be the thing standing between someone on your team and the life they’re trying to build for their family?
Two Things To Do This Week
- Make a list of everything currently on your plate that doesn’t light you up. For each item, decide: delegate, automate, or eliminate. This isn’t a someday project. Pick one item off that list and move on it before the week is over.
- Get honest about what’s actually fulfilling you in this business. Not what you think should fulfill you. What actually does. Then ask whether your current plan for growth is built around that, or built around what you think growth is supposed to look like.
The eleventh clinic was never really about the eleventh clinic. Neither is whatever your next move is.
Titans of Private Practice in Nashville, September 24–26
I’ll be speaking at Titans of Private Practice LIVE this September in Nashville. Three days with hundreds of practice owners, focused on building a stronger business and getting more freedom out of the one you have.
Use code freedom20 at checkout to save 20% on your registration.
Learn more and grab your spot here.
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