What the business was costing my family, and the pivot that actually fixed it.
My wife Colleen got the call while we were driving home from a weekend at the beach.
Her dad said our building was on the news. It was on fire.
I didn’t miss a beat. I said, “Good, I hope it burns down.”
Because I knew I’d have tomorrow off.
The fire that forced the question
I wasn’t joking, not entirely.
I’d opened my own clinic with cheap equipment and a lot of hope. Colleen worked the front desk before we had kids, and we figured out marketing by making it up as we went.
Once we started hiring, everything got harder. I didn’t trust anyone the way I trusted her.
The fire wiped out the building. My lease kept me locked into the business anyway.
Colleen told me it was my chance to walk away and try something else entirely. I couldn’t.
So I finally asked myself the real question: how do you actually run the business of physical therapy, not just practice it.
If you run a physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech, or mental health practice, you already know the gap between treating patients and running the operation behind them.
What the business was costing at home
The stress didn’t stay at the clinic.
Colleen had just had our first baby when our front desk person started stealing from us. There was nothing she could do about it. She wasn’t leaving a newborn to go fix my staffing problem, and I couldn’t blame her.
I brought the business home with me constantly. I’d work at the kitchen table because it was the only space we had, and I’d follow Colleen around the house talking business at her, not to her, while she tried to get dinner made or the kids to bed.
One night I told her I’d only be at the office for an hour. I missed Jack’s first soccer game entirely.
Colleen kept the house calm, kept the kids in what she called their “pink bunny fun creative world,” and absorbed most of the cost of my stress herself. There wasn’t another option yet.
Getting past the price tag
The turning point was agreeing to get help, plain and simple.
My first real coach quoted me thirty-three thousand five hundred dollars for six months of work. I almost threw up.
I’d never charged a client more than a hundred and twenty dollars in my life. That reaction wasn’t really about the number.
Beliefs about money often form in childhood and operate completely outside conscious awareness, shaping financial decisions well into adulthood, as a financial psychologist told CNBC.
I kept circling the decision until Colleen finally said, “Just do it already. You keep talking about it and talking about it.”
I asked her what happens if it doesn’t work. She said, “So what, we’ll figure it out.”
I wrote a check I didn’t have. That year I broke even. The next year I tripled it.
What changed for Colleen
Once I had a coach, something shifted for Colleen specifically, not just for the business.
She’d been the only person I processed every idea and every worry with, for years. Once I had somewhere else to put all of that, she got some of herself back.
People assume the value of a coach comes from knowing your exact industry inside and out.
CEOs looking to keep growing often turn deliberately to seasoned outside voices with no stake in their industry’s conventional wisdom, Harvard Business Review has reported.
My coach was a trial lawyer, not a physical therapist. What he knew was how to help me see what I couldn’t see myself.
That gave Colleen room to just be my wife again instead of my only sounding board.
Building the structure that protected our family time
This turned into specific habits Colleen and I still use, years after that first coaching call.
Block your time off in advance
We decided where we wanted to go on vacation before the year even started, and put it directly on the calendar.
One year we counted it up. We’d blocked out a hundred and thirty-seven days off, in one year, all planned in advance.
Actually disconnect when you step away
The first time I left without checking in, I told myself I’d just peek at my email once.
People who use eleven or more of their vacation days are significantly more likely to get a raise than people who use ten or fewer, a large study covered by Harvard Business Review found.
Stepping back completely also gave my team room to solve problems without me, and gave me something real to debrief once I was back.
Give your reactive decisions twenty-four hours
I used to answer an email that made me angry the second I read it, and it caused problems every time, at home and at work.
Now I sit on anything emotional for a full day before responding.
Get a coach who isn’t your spouse
For years, Colleen was the only person hearing every business thought I had, whether she wanted to be or not.
A coach takes that weight off the person you’re married to, so your relationship isn’t the only place your stress has anywhere to go.
One thing to start with
Pick the one thing your business is costing at home that you haven’t said out loud yet.
Ask what happens if you finally get help with it. Then ask what happens if you don’t, for another year.
If you want the full recording of the fireside chat where Colleen and I talked through all of this, comment “FIRESIDE” below and we’ll send it your way.
Hiring 101 with Practice Promotions
Practice Promotions is hosting a workshop on October 8 at 12:30pm Eastern called “Hiring 101 for PTs.” Neil will show PT owners how to use Google Jobs to get their job postings ranking above Indeed & Ziprecruiter! Register here.
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Freedom By Design, Season Two
Season two of Freedom By Design is out now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. New conversations with practice owners and independent thinkers who are building businesses, and lives, on their own terms.
If something in this piece resonated, the show goes even deeper into the mindset shifts behind it.
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