The 5 Stages Of Private Practice Growth (And How To Know If You’re Stuck) with Adam Robin

Adam Robin • July 7, 2026
Private Practice Owners Club | Adam Robin | Private Practice Growth

 

Many physical therapy clinic owners start with a passion for helping patients but end up trapped under a massive clinical caseload. Host Nathan Shields and guest Adam Robin break down the critical path of Private Practice Growth to help you escape the treating therapist trap. If you're working sixty hours a week and missing family milestones, you're likely stuck in the messy middle of operational chaos. They map out the five distinct stages of clinic ownership so you know exactly where to focus your energy next. You'll discover how to organize your front desk, build a strong leadership team, and step into true executive ownership. It's time to stop trading your clinical hours for dollars and start running a business that thrives without you.

 

Book a Free Discovery Call at ptoclub.com/coaching to schedule an audit of your current clinic operations.


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Listen to the Podcast here

 

The 5 Stages Of Private Practice Growth (And How To Know If You’re Stuck) with Adam Robin

 

 

We're talking about the stages of ownership, which I'm excited about. I talked about this with Blaine, I remember, on an episode, and he had it dialed in. It's good to review it again and help people understand where they are and then have some certainty about where to go next. They can say, “Now I see where I am in the stages,” if you look at it from a bigger perspective, from a 30,000-foot view. It gives some certainty and assurance as to what to do next.

 

If you have the ability to zoom out and see the big picture, it's always helpful to have perspective. Having a general framework of the stages of business ownership or practice ownership can help you do three main things. Number one, debrief and look back at where you came from. What did you do to get here? What are the lessons that you learned? What can you continue to reproduce?

 

Number two, understanding where you are and where you need to focus. What position are you in? Number three, understand where you're going. What's the next stage? It is so you can anticipate or prepare for the next challenge. How do you organize your resources, your efforts, and your energy such that you can move things in that direction? Understanding that can help you stay grounded in where to place your energy more than anything.

 

One of the things that helps owners do this is networking with other owners and recognizing that a lot of them are in the same boat. It's also one of the reasons why we're doing our conference in October 2026. It is to give you those networking opportunities and also talk to you at the stages where you're at to show you what to do next.

 

One of the reasons why we're doing these Facebook lives on a routine basis is to not only share this information, but also share with you the conference that is coming up, the High Performance Practice Conference, to help you build purpose, profit, and freedom. It's in San Antonio, October 15th or 17th, 2026. You can see all the details at PPOClubEvents.com, or you can go to PPOClub.com and go to the Events tab. You can register there.

 

You're going to see the High Performance Practice: Building Purpose, Profit, and Freedom. San Antonio, Texas. Limiting it to 200 attendees. For those people who were at the previous conference and the one before, our inaugural one, a ton of value from the speakers that came together, and a ton of value from the networking and also meeting with the sponsors and vendors that were there on site.

 

It is a great opportunity to get away and focus on your business. That's what I notice as I go to these conferences. It is an opportunity to reset, refocus, and look at bigger pictures, like, “Here's where I am. Here are my weak spots. This is where I need to move forward.” I thought I'd share The High Performance Practice Conference coming up October 15th through 17th, 2026.

 

When we had our conference in Destin, it was hard to understand the tangible value that you get from a conference. It's hard to objectify it. What I've noticed, even from our conference, and not just that one, but from other ones that I've gone to, you're only one, two, or maybe three high-level ideas away from your next level of growth.

 

A lot of times, one of the pillars of moving your business in that direction is to surround yourself with people who have either been there, who are on the way, who can show you that vision, or who can inspire you to pivot your thinking subtly. It opens up a lot of clarity and direction. It, quite frankly, can give you a lot of excitement on how to move things forward for you over the next 6 to 12 months.

 

I experienced that personally from our conference when Blaine got up on the stage and started talking about finance. He talked about some concepts around moving your money around. It opened up this a-ha moment to help me be like, “You only need to be doing these 1 or 2 things and follow these principles.” That allowed me to tighten up my finances and build a team that can help me with it. The answers are within, but you have to tap in if you want to pull them out.


Private Practice Owners Club | Adam Robin | Private Practice Growth

 

There's going to be a ton of value there, I have to admit. You have a framework for where you think about phases. Share with us what your framework is around the different phases of growth in your clinics, and we'll build off of that and move forward.

 

It’s very simple. I like to keep things simple, high-level. I think of it in five primary stages, the practice growth or business growth. Stage one is to get started. It's like, “How do I get something off the ground? I have to do some due diligence work. I have to have an accountant or an EMR. I have to get a lease signed,” if you're going to do something brick-and-mortar. You’re like, “I have to get started.”

 

Establish an LLC.

 

All that stuff. Get started. Plant your flag. Stage two is going to get busy. It's like, “Now I've got a building, but it's empty. How do I get people to recognize that I'm here and give me money?”

 

We keep referencing Blaine Stimac.

 

He's very smart.

 

The Core Cycle For Early Stage Clinics

He owns Health & Rehab Solutions. He's got 40 clinics across the country. A simple cycle in those early stages after you open the doors is get patients, see patients, and collect the money. That's all you've got to think about when you open your doors. It's quality over quantity. When I say quality, not quality of care, but quantity over the quality of the subsidiary services that you're doing. You're going to provide great care, and patients are going to come back, but you're not going to have your systems perfected yet. That's okay.

 

It's going to be messy. You're going to look silly.

 

There are going to be some hiccups along the way. This is not the perfectionist's dream when you first get started. Figure out the cycle of how to get patients, see the patients, and collect the money.

 

Transitioning From Solvency To Organization

It’s important because, in the beginning, on day one, your business is slowly dying because you have no income. Your primary goal is like, “How do I get to solvency? How do I get to break even as quickly as possible?” A little bit of a different energy, motivation, and focus that’s required compared to stage three, which is going to be, “Now I’m busy. How do I get organized?”

 

This might be a stage where you hire some admin, or you bring in another clinician. You start having people in the company. Things get more chaotic. It becomes more than you can independently manage because you have the limitations of your own human brain and time. You have to start building systems and efficiencies to start building some leverage and structure in the organization. Once you do that, your business will start becoming self-growing in some capacity, and it won't only rely on you to grow and maintain the business.


If you're still answering phones, treating patients, and doing laundry, you aren't running a business. You've just built a stressful job.
Private Practice Owners Club | Adam Robin | Private Practice Growth

 

You can do whatever you want to do. If you want to open up more locations, you can. If you want to maybe buy the building, start knocking down walls, and build out a bigger practice, you can do that. You can get into non-traditional revenue. Maybe you wanted to write a book. Maybe you wanted to get into teaching or whatever other fun thing you wanted to do with your life, which is stage five.

 

Do you know what we're seeing? We've noticed this. To bring it to light from the conversations you and I have had. At this stage, people who have built and scaled sometimes find niches within the business ownership that they enjoy outside of the patient care and start pursuing other purposes/passions. You talked to someone who started her own billing company. You don't start your own billing company unless you fall in love with doing the billing, or you feel like you're an expert at it.

 

The owner that you talked to has found a secret to reclaiming money through denial analysis. It's not until you get to this stage that you can find those other things that you might be doing while still being a business owner. It's interesting how we've seen that play out. It's not until you get to stage five that you can get to that point.

 

Even myself. You've been wearing so many hats for so long. This has been my experience. You get to look back and say, “Did I get here? What were the 1 or 2 things that I excelled at that drove these outcomes that allowed me to build this team or whatever?” Sometimes, there are a lot of people in the industry who did well because they figured out marketing. They figured out Facebook ads or how to build a great website or something like that, so they started a marketing agency. They’re like, “I was good at marketing.” My experience is that I was good at recruiting. I knew how to recruit, so I built my company on recruiting. I see a similar pattern as well.

 

You laid out the framework. There are those five stages, which are to get started, get busy, get organized, build your team, and scale. Most of the people who are reading are going to be somewhere in stages two, three, and four. Maybe we can talk to those stages a little bit more in-depth. Is that cool?

 

Let's do it.

 

In stage two, which is getting busy. That's when I brought up the cycle of getting patients, seeing patients, and getting paid. It's important to let people know that you exist. Start to learn how to market. Start to learn how you want things done in your business. Figure out the systems, like, “How do I properly intake somebody? How do I properly bill for these patients? How do I properly interact with these insurances? How do I properly interact with my billing company?” That's all part of it.

 

Within that stage two of getting busy, I would highlight that's where your first hire comes along. For me, that first hire is the front desk person. I have talked to a few owners who are getting busy, and they don't feel like they’re getting anywhere, but it's just them. They're busy because they're manning the phones. They might even be verifying insurance, and they're treating the patients. I'm like, “From a patient's perspective, I don't want to walk into a clinic and see you answer the phone, treat me, go clean the toilets, and fill the laundry basket. It's not professional. I don't want to see it.”

 

Not only is it not professional, but it's going to limit your growth. If you're focused on answering the phone calls, doing the verifications, and all the other things. You can't focus on the things that are most important, which are getting patients, seeing patients, and collecting the money. Anything outside of that cycle, you should be handing off to someone else. That lands with the first hire being the front desk.

 

I agree. I like the way that you painted that. I pretty much align with everything you said. If I had to boil it down to what I feel is most critical in that stage, there are two things on my mind. This is coming from a place of pure business. It’s like, “I want my business to be better.” It’s almost a dangerous suggestion because we typically get stuck here. The first thing that you need to get right is that you have to become obsessed with patient satisfaction, especially if this is your first practice. Even if it's a secondary practice, it's like, “How do I get obsessed with the product and the value that I'm delivering to every single patient at a world-class level?”


Hiring more staff to solve a chaotic front desk without clear systems only multiplies the chaos. Organize the desk before you recruit.

 

Can I rephrase it and say the patient experience? It talks a little bit about what I was talking about. The patient experience when it's you doing all the things is not a professional patient experience. That's not what they're expecting. Focusing on the patient experience is huge.

 

You're fine-tuning it. You have an idea of what that should look like, but you don't know how to apply it in a business setting yet when there are more moving parts. It's not just the clinical side. It's like, how do we take that intake call? How fast do we get them scheduled? How do we make sure that we're available during the times that they want to be there? How do we keep them compliant? How do we get buy-in?

 

What does the waiting area look like? Is it welcoming? Does it smell good? Does it look good? Is it nicely designed, or is it dirty and messy?

 

If you could put yourself in the shoes of a patient. Try to take your clinical hat off for a second and be like, “If I were a patient, what would I want to see to feel like I would become a huge promoter of this place?” If you could obsess over that, the thing that it will unlock for you is the second important thing, which is that you have to tell the whole world about it.

 

Knock on doors. You should have no chill. You're broke. Go freaking tell somebody about this. Call, text, or DM. Call your friends, call your mama, or call your grandma. Get them in the clinic and tell the entire world about how hard you're working on providing this type of experience. If you obsess over those two things, I feel like with enough hustle, grit, and commitment, you'll probably naturally move into stage three.

 

That's when it goes to get organized. You've got this influx of patients. It's chaotic. You've hired somebody, and you're training them at the same time while you have these patients flowing in. There's still chaos involved, but the only antidote for chaos is organization. If someone were to come to you and say, “I'm feeling I'm in the midst of chaos.” Where would you focus them first?

 

We've had this conversation with practice owners many times. I can't speak to everyone, but I almost feel like you start again with the patient experience. You have to start over. If you did stage 1 or 2 right, this stage is less about rebuilding it all. It's more about documenting what you're already doing. That way, you can get it out of your head on some type of resource that can be shared with your people and process-driven instead of what's in your head. I would start with what we do when a referral comes in, and what the process is from referral or lead coming in to when they show up for the initial evaluation. Let's start there.

 

Perfect that.

 

How do we do it? Fast, quick, and efficient. How do we get them scheduled? How do we schedule out the plan of care? How do we do the follow-ups? I would start there.

 

Why The Front Desk Is Your First Operational Priority

How do we respond faster and better in line with our values? You're going down the exact line that I was thinking. I was thinking that if I were to give an area of the business to focus on, it would be the front desk.


Private Practice Owners Club | Adam Robin | Private Practice Growth

 

Front desk all day.

 

Start organizing there. If you're in chaos and you're busy, organize the front desk. It will make you so much money and will clean up so many things if you start there and focus on it. To your point, you can think of it as a front desk, but when you think of it from the patient experience timeline, what do they see if they look at your website? Is it inviting? Does it highlight it well? Did you spend a decent amount of money to make it look good, efficient, and welcoming? Sometimes, that's the first point of contact for people.

 

If someone says, “I recommend going to XYZ physical therapy, pediatric clinic, or whatever, they're going to Google you. You want that to look good. If they call you, what does that voice sound like? Is it warm and inviting? Are they asking the right things, or are they going straight to, "What's your date of birth?” Don't start with that as your first question. Why don't you get to know the people who are calling first? Focusing on that patient experience timeline falls right in line with focusing on the front desk. All that interaction that happens there at the front desk can be super beneficial in controlling the chaos.

 

I agree. A common mistake is that whenever the front desk gets chaotic at that stage, you're going to feel it as the owner. Your team is going to feel it. Your patients are going to feel it. Our typical move is to hire another person. We’re like, “Let's hire another front desk person.” We start bringing on these bodies without clear job descriptions, clear roles, and clear ownership, so the chaos starts to multiply. It's like, “Now I've got three front desk people, and nobody knows what the heck is going on.” It's not unsolvable, but it's a lot harder of a problem to solve at that stage whenever you have no systems built.

 

You're jumping stages, though.

 

Correct.

 

You're going from stage 3 to stage 4 without the organization. You're starting to build your team without the organization. That's going to magnify your weaknesses.

 

This is a cool topic. You're solving multiple problems at one time because you're trying to build your systems and learn leadership without a system or a playbook. You're not good at leadership. It's the best. It's a heavy lift, which is probably the worst place to be as an owner, honestly, in that situation.

 

When you've got a bunch of people looking to you for leadership, and you're not organized enough, you can see the disappointment in their eyes as they're watching you flounder.

 

Correct.

 

We're going to talk about the front desk. For people who are considering, “We're getting pretty busy. I'm worried that my front desk might be overwhelmed, or at least they're telling me that they're overwhelmed.” Does it still hold true that the metric of about 125 visits a week is about the capacity of a full-time front desk person? Is that what you're still seeing?


Your business slowly dies on day one without income. Your immediate goal is solvency. Don't worry about perfect systems until you're busy.

 

Yes, if they're going to still hold onto the authorizations and verifications. If they're still holding onto that as part of their job description, that's probably right. It's probably useful to find ways to offload that first because you could bump that capacity up to 180 or so. If they're focusing on scheduling, collecting over the counter, and organizing patient experience, you can unlock more capacity in that front desk. You also keep your admin costs lower by offloading a fraction of that role.

 

Even if you were going to bring on another person, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Clarity is King. We always begin with the end in mind. It’s like, “If I'm going to bring somebody on, what are they going to do? What is their job description? What are the KPIs?” It can't be whatever the other person can't do. It needs to be defined, like, “This person does this. You own this. You report this.” There might be some overlap, but there should be no confusion about who owns what. As long as you can start building your team with that expectation on the onboarding process, you could probably skip a lot of the chaos that you might experience in the long run.

 

I like to see the growth on the therapist’s side. The easiest way was laid out to me by Blaine, the man of knowledge. The goal is to get patients and see patients. You, as the initial owner-operator, are going to fill up your schedule first and get full-time. Once you do that, once you get yourself to about an 85% to 90% utilization rate according to your schedule. That's your green light, assuming that you're getting profitable, the billing systems are going through well, and money is coming in. You should be making some money at this point.

 

Assuming that's all true and correct, and you haven't bought a lease or bought too much in tenant improvements and equipment to drag you down, then you can bring on that other provider and move them into a full-time role while you take a part-time treatment role. The rest of your time is in admin, marketing, generating more Standard Operating Procedures or SOPs, and getting things organized. You learn how to start offloading patients.

 

We've seen this many times. I was talking to a provider who's pretty stuck because she hasn't learned how to offload her patients to other providers. These patients keep coming to her, and they only want to see her. She hasn't either coached that provider well enough or infused enough confidence in those patients. They can not only see her, but they can also see the other provider that she has on the team. She's finding it hard to fill up that provider's schedule. That is part of getting organized. Part of getting organized is learning to hand off processes to other providers so you can continue to grow and expand. Have you seen some of that yourself, some difficulties there?

 

Yes. It's not just in PT either.

 

We all go through it.

 

Any company. It could be a plumber or the sales driver of the company.

 

That's the whole thing behind The E-Myth Revisited. That's the whole thing behind the book. The owner-operator gets stuck because they haven't figured out how to get organized and offload their responsibilities.

 

We have five stages, but this could even probably be its own stage. There could be these little sub-stages in between. The transformation must occur at some point where you are no longer the therapist, but you are the therapist’s teacher. You're the therapist’s coach. It's a very common experience that you have in sales organizations. You can no longer be the only person who does sales. You have to learn how to teach sales, build a sales team, and be the sales manager.


Private Practice Owners Club | Adam Robin | Private Practice Growth

 

That transformation has to come. That has to happen. In your brain, you have to decide, “What I do is valuable. I'm committed to teaching other clinicians about it, spending time and energy, and building something that I can give them to help elevate their skills and help them perform at least close to my capacity.” That's a big project. That might take a year to build.

 

The Real Meaning Of Proper Clinical Onboarding

Some people think onboarding a provider is quick and easy. They’re like, “I start filling them up with patients, and they do their thing.” That's a good way to get in trouble. That's not being organized. A proper onboarding process says, “This is how we do things at our therapy clinic. Here are your tools. Here are some trainings on our EMR, and here are some trainings on how we bill for our services.”

 

“Here are some of the expectations that we have for our providers in terms of production, but also in getting results with our patients. Here are some of the continued education courses we plan on sending you to. Here's our mentorship schedule, so you can ask questions about how we do things here at our clinic when it comes to different diagnoses.”

 

“Here’s some of the equipment that you'll want to learn about. This is how we bill and code appropriately to maximize reimbursement for services ethically. Here are some of the cash pay services and the benefits to the patients and to you if you are to sell some of these cash pay services.” Those are all trainings that are all about being organized. Those should all be part of the training, the onboarding, and the handoff process as you're bringing on other providers.

 

That's beautiful. If anybody is reading this and thinking to themselves, “If I don't treat patients, what would I do with my time?” There's a lot of stuff to do. Not only are you trying to get out of this stage, but you're trying to prepare yourself for the next stage. In order to do that, you have to have some foundation. You don't have to write a novel and do five peer review studies. You've got to start with something. Start with a checklist, and start building it over time. Start documenting what you do. That way, it can become reproducible.

 

An important one is, “This is how we sell a plan of care. This is how we get patients to stay engaged. This is how we maintain a higher arrival rate. This is how we get patients to come at the frequency we want them to come. This is how and why we don't treat one time a week for musculoskeletal injuries. We're going to see them a minimum of these times a week.” All that is coaching. Getting organized like that and putting that together, number one, has changed dramatically in the ability to do this because of AI. Leveraging AI accelerates this process. I can't tell you how many times over.

 

I know. It's almost dangerous.

 

I had to organize back in the day with pencil, paper, Word documents, and stuff like that, with binders and whatnot. It doesn't have to happen anymore. Thank you for AI. Once we get organized like this and we've at least gotten it down, where it is saved somewhere in some resource. We can confidently move into stage four, which is building the team out. It's easy to start building a team if they have clearly defined responsibilities, job descriptions, they know the KPIs that they're responsible for, and they know how to report to their supervisors. You can do a little bit more copy and paste. Run the cycle a little.

 

Copy and paste, change the words, change the title, change the outcome, and change the avatar of the person who needs to be in that role. Run your system of the Building People playbook. I would love to hear your perspective. We're in stage four, building a team. The previous stage, stage three, I believe, that that stage can get you to over $1 million a year. You should be profitable. It could be one of the most profitable stages in the company towards the end of that.

 

Once you have a team of 3 or 4 providers that all have job descriptions, you're the clinic director, you're still treating maybe 15 to 20 hours a week, and you've got 2 or 3 front desk people. It should be about 1.2 million and run 20% margins. You should be profitable. As you enter into the following stage, stage four, you've got time and money, which is a great problem. You've got a team of people. You can start allocating, but you're still holding onto some stuff.


You can't be the only person who drives production in your clinic. Learn how to hand off your caseload and become your team's chief coach.

 

You are your leader, still.

 

You're still doing the heavy lifting. The heavy lifting is still yours. You're not out of the weeds. You're probably still working a lot. You're probably still stressed in a lot of capacities. You get to take some of that money and reinvest it into that middle management layer, which is maybe the clinic director or director of marketing. Maybe you put somebody in charge of marketing and recruiting, and you start building that leadership team.

 

Maybe a front office supervisor role.

 

A supervisor trainer role. They hire and train people at the front desk. You're going to have to call them up in the organization. That comes with a little bit of a salary, which is going to eat into your profits a little bit. What it ultimately allows you to do is get to that next true freedom, where you can maybe go to $3 million or something like that.

 

It's not all about scale. What else could you do when you have a team of leaders and a team itself? They're running according to the organization that you created, and they're doing so successfully. They're able to replicate successful actions. Do you need to exist every day at that clinic?

 

Hopefully not.

 

Hopefully, you're checking in every so often. I've got friends who live in different states from where their clinics are. They check in on their meetings a couple of times a week. I've asked them, “Why don't you sell? Have you considered selling?” They're like, “Why? I am on a few hours a week of management calls. Am I going to sell so I can work five hours less per week?” That's a great opportunity to be like, “Do I want to have this kind of freedom and lifestyle business now, or do I want to scale?” If you have plans on scaling, that's a different ball of wax.

 

This is the stage where you start building your people. It's no longer about building the business. It's about building your people, and your people build the business.

 

Your Single Greatest Responsibility As A Clinic Owner

I was reminded that the one responsibility that you have as a leader is to build other leaders. Your sole job when you get to this point of building out a team is to start building leaders. Look for leaders in the recruiting stages. Call people up. Invite them up to do more, be more, and take on more responsibilities. Have conversations with them, like, “Where do you want to go in this organization?” The true role of you, as a leader, is to build and find those leaders within your organization.

 

You put together a leadership training at this stage. You're going to have a leadership training program that you're going to require people to come in and go through. It could be some books that you've read or some valuable resources that have influenced the way that you think.


Private Practice Owners Club | Adam Robin | Private Practice Growth

 

Let them bleed out in some of the meetings. Train them on how to hold people accountable. Hold them accountable to the Standard Operating Procedures that you've created. If we need to change them occasionally, then these people do that. You're not the one diving into the SOPs all the time to make sure they're appropriate and that people are getting adequately trained.

 

To summarize that whole thing, building leaders, in my opinion, comes down to three things. Number one, give them something to consume, whether it be a book, a YouTube channel, or a podcast. Give them something to read. Give them some people to hang out with who are going in that direction. Meet with them. Call them to meet with you, the leader. Call them up personally, challenge their beliefs, and coach them up. Number three is to make them do hard things. If you do those three things and keep that dynamic for each of your people, they'll call up and grow with you. You can build great people.

 

Great opportunities. From there, scaling, I can't say, is the easy part. At that point, when it comes to scaling, you're looking for who? You're looking for more people and more leaders. It's a constant battle to find the right people that fit your organization, that are value aligned, and that you see a vision for them in your organization.

 

As you move forward with proper policies and procedures that are well-trained, and you've got nice leadership teams and leadership opportunities for the people within your team, scaling can be easy. I hate saying that because it's hard and a different ball of wax altogether, but it's not the chaos when you started the company and had to get through those first three stages. It's different.

 

If you're trying to grow the company and you want to scale it out to 5 locations or 40 locations, as Blaine did. I've never done that, but I would assume you have to be profitable. You have to have strong financial systems in place. You have to be able to understand how money moves through the organization and the cycles of money, like, “What does this mean for next month? What does this mean for next quarter?” You have to be able to project those things out a little bit cleaner and become good at managing your money.

 

I talked to an owner who's looking to open his third clinic. He was like, “I've got some money. I could cashflow these Tenant Improvements at this new place.” I said, “Maybe. I'm not a huge fan of cash flowing your TIs if you can avoid it because you never know. You always want to keep a nice chunk of money in case of some billing hiccup, insurance change, or something like that.”

 

I recommended that he go talk to the banker about what is available to him. I don't think he has a line of credit. He hasn't gotten a business loan from the bank before. I said, “You need to go through the experience. You might never get the line of credit. You might never get the business loan for what you're talking about. You can decide not to do that, and that's fine with me.”

 

I think, as a business owner, you need to have a relationship with a banker. You need to know what that looks like when it means turning in your T12 financials, your profit and loss statements, your taxes, and your personal financial statements. You should learn as a business owner what that sequence looks like and go through the experience. Especially if you're considering scaling in the future, you need to go through some of these steps. You need to go through the process and go through that experience.

 

If you got a good pulse on the money, you know what a good high-performing leader looks like, and you know how to train them up, motivate them, and create an alignment around incentives and motivation. The last thing for you, as the owner, is one of the things that I've seen is about finding ways to stay motivated. If you're not on fire and excited about something, then you lose motivation. You get boring, and the company can feel that. If you're going to stay in the company, make sure you have something exciting that you're working on and that you don't lose the culture that you built.

 

We didn't bring up culture along the way, but that should be getting set up somewhere between stage 2 and stage 3. As you're getting organized and as you're building your team, you need to start buckling down and hammering out what your values, your purpose, and your vision are. That's how you're going to build an aligned team that wants to fulfill all the goals that you have and help you achieve them.


The true role of a strategic leader is to build other leaders. Challenge their beliefs, give them hard tasks, and let them grow with you.

 

I agree.

 

You need to stay on top of that. We went through the five stages. It was good stuff. There's so much more. We could do an entire episode on each stage, I'm sure.

 

There's so much to learn. It's a big topic. In running the business, there's so much to learn. The main thing that I've learned along the way is that hard work isn't the answer. It isn't going to help you be good at any of these things. You say, “I built a policy and procedure,” but there's a whole other level to it. Is it a good policy and procedure? Is it drivable? Is it clear? Is it data-driven? Are people following the process? Is it efficient? Does it align with your overall product?

 

Does it even get you the results you want?

 

There are layers to that. Hard work is not going to get you there, but becoming a student of the game of business will. For those who are reading, come to freaking San Antonio.

 

Go to the conference. I'm one of those people who was stuck in stages 2 and 3 for probably a decade. During that decade, I never experienced much freedom. That's why I'm so passionate about sharing a lot of these resources on the show, the coaching, the conferences, and whatnot. It's because there is a better way.

 

You don't have to go through the school of hard knocks the way I did to get to that stage of freedom in stages 4 and 5. It's possible. Hopefully, there aren’t too many people tuning in who are stuck in those stages. If they focus on what we were talking about to move to the next stage, they’ll get much further in their practices and experience what they want to experience.

 

Tune out all the stuff, get clear on what stage you're in, and lock in. Take daily action towards that every day and block away all those other things. If you can do that with some discipline and consistency for long enough and don't quit, you'll probably grow.

 

That's right. Good conversation.

 

Thanks.

 

We'll see you in San Antonio in October 2026.

 

Later.

 

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