Turn Business Success Into Personal Wealth - FB Live With Eric Miller Of Econologics

Turn Business Success Into Personal Wealth - FB Live With Eric Miller Of Econologics

Quick heads-up for all the private practice owners tuning in. If you've been tuning in to the show for a while, you know that it took me at least ten years of grinding in my own clinics before I finally figured out how to scale and sell my 4 practices for 7 figures and about 3 times the national average. The biggest shift wasn't some secret marketing hack. It was how I thought about profit, systems, and my role as the owner.

That's exactly what we're going to be working on together with you at the High-Performance Practice Conference in San Antonio, Texas. From October 15th through 17th, 2026, Adam, Robin, and I are hosting a 3-day hands-on event for PT, OT, speech, mental health, peds, pelvic floor, and medical practice owners who want to build clinics that are profitable, scalable, and, best of all, don't depend on them 24/7.

We'll dig into simple profit and KPI frameworks, real leadership, culture work, and practical systems you can take home and plug in with your team. If you're doing roughly 6 to 7 low figures a year, and you want your clinic to feel more like a real business and less like a job slash cage, I'd love to see you there. Frankly, I'd love to see you bring your leadership teams as well because we will have breakout sessions for them, too. Let's get into this episode.

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Introduction And Upcoming Conference Events 

It has been a while, Eric Miller, E-Money.

It seems like the days go by faster. Once you hit 50, it seems like time moves faster for whatever reason. I don’t know if it should be that way, but it seems like it does. Happy 4th of July, too. Do you have any big plans?

No big plans here. I don't know. I'm old, and my kids are older. They're never excited to do anything. How about you?

We're renting a boat. We're going to watch fireworks. I’ll probably take a leisure day off tomorrow and lie by the pool. That's what people do in Florida.

That sounds awesome. We're doing our bi-weekly Facebook live with the Private Practice Owners Club. I've got longtime guest Miller with us on the Facebook live. This will also double as an episode. Before we get into things, this is part of our series leading up to our conference in October 2026 in San Antonio, the High-Performance Practice Conference hosted by the Private Practice Owners Club. That’s in San Antonio, from October 15 through 17. Registrations are going on.

Go to PPOClubEvents.com to register. Bring your team members. Bring your spouses. We'll have things for everyone to do. It was a great event in 2025. We have great speakers and sponsors like Eric Miller of Econologics there. It should be a super valuable event for all owners and even their team members. We're going to have some breakout sessions for your team leaders and organizations. We'll even have some special breakout sessions for our peds owners that we didn’t have in 2025. We're doing more and wanting to expand it. There'll be more speakers, more value. Check it out at PPOClubEvents.com for the High-Performance Practice Conference.

Eric, thanks for joining us. You're the first person I thought of bringing on because the topic for this episode is financial management or wealth management in our private practices. It's always important and something that I like talking about. It's easy to have you on the show. People are always worried about their financials when it comes to owning a business. It's an emotional conversation. It can make or break a practice. A lot of things to talk about here. As we get into it, what do you find yourself talking about most often when you're talking with private practice owners and what they're having to navigate in the circumstances?

Shifting Focus From Tactics To Strategy

It's tough to try to direct people's attention to a big picture or what the real goal is because there's always pressure on day-to-day stuff. There are always decisions that you have to make on day-to-day stuff. People get lost a little bit in some of the tactics, and they forget the strategy. Let's come up with a strategy first, and a tactic second.

Tell me a little bit about that. Go deeper. They're not looking at the big picture.

I'll look at someone's personal balance sheet or their business balance sheet, business financials. Also, what I'll see is that they have twenty accounts. They're always trying to be like, “This money market account is earning 3%. The one that I'm in right now is at 2.5%. If I move my $1,500 from that one to that one, I may make an extra $50.”

It could be things like that, or they got a $7,000 IRA, and they're worried about whether or not it's performed at 8%. They’re like, “My friend got 15%.” It's like, “$7,000 is not going to meaningfully change your life at all.” You shouldn't pay attention to those things. People get lost in some of those little minutiae. There's an order of importance on financial matters that people need to concentrate on.

The big goal for everybody is to be able to sell when you want to. You want to have a bunker full of money and resources. You want to have enough money to support your family, your churches, and whatever else. You don't want to have to rely on one income stream for the rest of your life, being your practice. That's the big goal. Setting up the system to allow that and the alignment for that to happen is what's important.

The Importance Of Business And Household Alignment

I can go off on one other thing, too, when it comes to alignment on that, if you don't mind. I've been big on alignment here. You'll know if your business and your household are aligned. Meaning, like, “I want to make sure my household financially progresses while my practice is going up.” You guys have continued to help people get more profitable, be more autonomous, grow their practices, and do all the things that you do in the PPO Club. The benefit for them should be to also recognize, “My household is improving at the same time.” That doesn't happen. That's the misalignment. It’s like, “My practice is growing, but my household gets leftovers,” so to speak.

If your financial plan doesn't get you financially free in 7 to 10 years, there's misalignment. That's the indicator. What does everyone tell you? They’re like, “At 65 or 70, let's retire at that point in time.” I'm like, “That's fine. You can retire whatever you want to, but you should have the game of money.” All those things that we talked about, you should be able to accomplish them if you have a fairly good, profitable, and growing practice in about 7 to 10 years. You can only do that if the two are aligned with one another.

What I took from your first part is that people focus on tactics instead of the strategies. Maybe some people can get too caught up in certain investments, accounts, and moving money to get the most out of it. You would wish that they had the same energy and intensity around some of the specifics in their practice that could net them significantly more money. Is that what you're thinking as well? We're thinking about some of these smaller things, like moving around tens of thousands of dollars, but if you put a little bit more energy into the business to benefit the household. You don't need a lot of special accounts.

The extravagant investing or new stuff that isn't provable or workable, or having to take ultra high-risk in certain areas that you don't necessarily have to. People seem like they're forced to do that, and I get it. They don't feel prepared. They don't feel like they have enough money. They look at their time horizon, like, “I'm 45 years old. I want to be done with this when I'm 55. I have $100,000 in my retirement account now. I'd better go buy some Triple Q, leverage it, and throw the dice.” Not a lot of people do that, but we'll see that every once in a while.

Back to alignment, I love the timeframe that you're giving them. What do you need to do in 7 to 10 years to make your business financially free? I'm using the words financially free, but profitable, and generating consistent income. How would you describe that?

Measuring Success Beyond Revenue

The goal for the practice, which most people have, is, “I want to get 4 or 5 locations. I want to have multiple providers. I want to be whatever it is.” What do you want your household specifically to look like? That is missing from a lot of people. A lot of people who run a business know how to run a business. What does that mean? They know, “We have meetings. We have an organizational chart. We have statistics. We have measurements. We do all these things, and we look at them. We look at our cashflows. We look at all these things on a regular basis.”

I asked the same question. I was like, “Are you applying that same methodology to your household?” Most people say, “Not. I’m paying myself leftovers or whatever's left. I don't have a system where I'm marrying the two.” They need to be connected. Accountants and CPAs are the first people to tell you, “You've got to keep your business finances separate from your personal finances.” That's true from an accounting and bookkeeping standpoint, but there has to be an intentional use of the business to build a household that you can be financially proud of, and that is measurable. Those are the things that we've talked about.

 

I've always appreciated your perspective because it goes a little bit counter to what we naturally think. A lot of business owners will say, “I want to have X number of clinics. I want to have these many employees. I want to generate this much revenue.” That's secondary. Based on my conversations with you, it should go primarily to, “What do I want for my household? What do I want to bring home? What kind of lifestyle do I want to live? How much money does the business need to generate in order for me to achieve that household income and those revenue streams?” We can then work backwards. We could be like, “What would the business have to do in order to generate that amount of household income?”

If I could get every owner to think that way, my life would be so much easier. Your life would be easy, too, because everyone would be super motivated to get there. That is the sequence in which people should operate. They should look at the household and the achievement of financial success in the household as the priority. How do we do that? What does the business need to do in order for us to fulfill that particular whatever that is, specifically?

If I want to be financially free in ten years, have my house paid off, have 3 or 4 income streams that can at least pay for my basic lifestyle, and have autonomy and do some other interests that I have in life, because people do have other interests. It's okay to have other interests, and you should have other interests, the reality is my business is going to feed that. How well does it have to do? That does force discipline in the business. It forces financial discipline in the business. It forces business discipline in the business. It forces you to be a better CEO and a better manager and hire better people. It creates that necessity when you do it that way.

If we're focused on the business, then we'll take whatever scraps come off the table in the end. We'll keep running. If we can get some more money, better, and if our profit margins are better, great, but to what end? How do we know when we've achieved what we want to achieve instead of saying, “I want to make as much money as I can. If it makes more, it makes more. If it makes less, it makes less.” That's a hard way to live because as your income increases, you don't tend to buy less. You take on more debt in a bigger house and more expensive cars. Your business needs to accommodate that.

The unfortunate thing is that there are rarely leftovers in a business. There's always going to be something that comes on your plate, like, “Boss, we need this. We need to hire this person. I know we don't have a job description or any clients for them, but we need this position filled right now. We need to move to this facility. It’s important that we do that. We need this.” It doesn't matter whether you have a $10 million practice or a $250,000 practice. That's always going to be the case. You have to make sure that there are some priorities set. If you do it, it works out great. It's amazing.

For people who are reading, we're talking about how to set up your business so it feeds your personal household.” The mindset you have to take is, “What do I want to do in my household? What kind of lifestyle do I want to live?” Then, create the business around that to meet those goals.

Practical Steps for Debt Payoff and Wealth Building

I'll give you a simple example.

I was going to ask what some steps are, but if you have an example, that's great.

It depends on the type of mortgage that you have, but most people would like to have their home paid off before they're done with selling their practice, unless you got one of those 1.9% mortgage rates that seem like most people got. By and large, that would be like, “I would like to have my home paid off.” How could you then utilize the business to be able to do that?

The first thing would be, “I know I want to sell my business in twelve years. I have a $960,000 mortgage on my house. How much would I need to apply to my current mortgage, where I could have that paid off in that timeframe?” Let's say it's an extra $2,000 a month. It’s like, “I'm going to make that as part of an owner draw or something like that that I'm going to take. I'm going to use that and have my house paid off in that timeframe.” That's one thing. That's the point of using the business to further the progress of your household.

Can I ask a specific thing about that?

Yes.

If anyone has read our episodes in the past, we have always recommended setting aside 10% of revenue every week, or month, or at some frequency for your retirement. Could the $2,000 come from that, or is this above and beyond that?

It could. This is where we have a little bit of art and science, too. Scientifically, I want to make sure that people are taking the 10% and utilizing that for other wealth-building vehicles. I can get specific on that because there are some things that people could be doing that will allow them to help minimize their capital gain taxes when they go to sell. I'll talk a little bit about that.

By and large, I would probably try to take from somewhere else to do that, but you could if you wanted to. I probably wouldn't have too much of a problem with that if it were a real priority, and that's something that you wanted to have done. When people sell, I like them to have a position where they get to keep most of their proceeds. I enjoy that.

Those proceeds don't have to go to taxes.

They don't have to go to taxes or debt, which is what happens for a lot of people. They’re like, “I sold for $5 million, but after taxes and paying off all my loans and whatever it is, I got $750,000 left over.”

You want to avoid that stuff.

I'd like to avoid that a little bit.

For the people tuning in, if you have specific questions about some of these financial things, go ahead and post your comments. We'll try to answer them as we go. The mindset of someone working on their household or knowing the financial needs of the household, making the business supply those needs, SNF doing so such that you are financially free or significantly profitable within the first 7 to 10 years, where do you start people on building that out? Do you start with what that household income needs to be? Where do you start?

We do start in a lot of those different places. The first thing is, let's have a target of ideally where we'd like to be, then we can assess where you're currently at.

In terms of overall net wealth?

Yes. Most people can articulate to me that they would like their household to look like without even a number attached to it. They’re like, “This is what I would like to have.” A lot of people do have numbers in mind, like, “If I had $10 million, $7 million, or something like that.” That's fine, whatever it is. There are things that we want to make sure are in place that will allow that. Let's see what that number looks like.

Calculating Your Path To Financial Freedom 

There's an income amount that people have an idea of what they would like to have coming in for every single month, whether that's $20,000 a month or $30,000 a month. I saw some guy on X. He wasn't wrong on his math calculation, but he was a little absurd. He was like, “If you want to have a $500,000 a month to burn,” which I'm like, “Who wouldn't?” He said, “You're going to need $120 million in investments.” I’m like, “Can we dial it down a little bit?” I'd be good on $30,000 or $40,000.

The equation is that if I want $300,000 a year of income for my household, then I'm going to need around $6 million. We'll multiply that number. $300,000 by 20. That's usually the formula. That gives us a number of about $6 million. $6 million earning around a 5% rate of return would produce around $300,000 a year. That's a quick calculation. That's a real number. Could you do it on $500,000 or $450,000? You could if the investments were producing ample returns for that.

The first thing is what the amount of income that you need is, and then we can work backwards to get a range of what your net worth needs to be at that particular time. Let’s say it's $6 million. You look at your personal balance sheet, and it's $2 million. You're like, “This is going to take forever. I'll never make up $4 million in ten years. Are you kidding me?” I'm like, “You don't understand the financial system at all because it is an inflationary system where assets of value go up in value, typically.”

“You're in control of the biggest one on your balance sheet, which is the practice. You can make a practice that's doing $1 million in revenue a year at a 20 % profit margin in ten years. Are you telling me you couldn't be at $3 million a year or $2.5 million? The value of that practice has gone from maybe $1 million to $3 million to $3.5 million. Are you telling me you can't do that in that timeframe?” They’re like, “We could.”

I’m like, “You wiped out your gap right there on that. Forget any of the money that you saved from the practice or in your retirement accounts. Forget all that. You did it right there.” That's where we start. We try to give them something like, “This is the ideal, this is where you're at, and here's the gap. Every year now, let's try to minimize that wealth gap through proactive activities.”

I appreciate you setting that up because I frequently talk with owners about building out proformas at the beginning of each year and building out the expected growth in their clinics for a given year. Without some framework like this, they're throwing a dart, like, “I want to increase 10% this year because 10% sounds good. It's a good round number.”

If you have a 10-year, 15-year timeframe, or 7-year timeframe, it doesn't matter. If you have a timeframe at all, and you know where you're at, and you know the gap, and you know where you want to get to, you can work backwards and regressively find out, “This is how much my clinic needs to grow this year in order to meet my goal.” You can apply that to the proformas that you're requesting from your accountant on an annual basis. You know you're building towards something and not just shooting for 10%, like, “If we hit it, great. If we don't, we'll go for it next year.”

How much would you love someone to come to you and say, “Nate, here's my ten-year plan. This is where I want to be in ten years. This is what my practice is doing now, and I need it to be right here. This is my financial goal to meet all these things. Can you work this out for me so that we can hit this?”

That would be easy to help you out at that point.

I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that I hit this goal as well.

At that point, it's either marketing or operations. You tighten up your operations or get more patients in the door. You can make it easy. I'm glad you brought that up. As I'm talking to people about, “It's that time of year when you should talk to your accountant about building out a proforma, what you're going to do this year, knowing your costs and expenses coming up, and maybe bringing on a provider and how that's going to affect your financials,” that's all well and good, and you should do that, but if it's not tied to an end goal, then you're doing it for the sake of doing it to make sure your practice is doing well. It'd be better if you had a real target to aim for.

I could even go down a rabbit hole on this and say this is why having your providers, your people, and the biggest producers in your practice have the same thing for them and their households, because they had personal financial targets that they needed to meet. We say to them, “If you want to make X amount, save X amount, save for a house, and save for retirement, your production needs to be blank for you to do that. Is that part of your compensation package?” They’re like, “I think so.” We’re like, “Good. This is what you would need to do in order to hit that for yourselves.”

You mentioned it. There's something tied to it. It's not just, “I need you to do more production because it's good for me.” If they see that making an extra $5,000 a year can help accelerate their debt payoff by seven years and save them $50,000 of interest, it may not seem like a lot to an owner, but that's a heck of a lot to an associate. It is tying the production to an incentive that is a win for everybody. You can do it on any scale. It's a great point that you make that you have to do that.

Strategies For Minimizing Capital Gains Taxes

To go down a little bit of a rabbit hole, you said there are things you can do to minimize the capital gains for a sale. Do you want to talk about that? I don't know if I've dug into that deeply with you. There might be people who are getting closer to that potential sale. Especially for those people who are looking to potentially sell in the next 5 to 10 years, is that enough runway to start creating a buffer for that capital gains hit?

It's not going to be one particular strategy to help minimize the capital gain. It could be a number of things. I'll talk about one. Number one, you would need a bit of a timeframe. You've probably heard the term tax loss harvesting before.

I haven’t heard of it before.

Someone has a brokerage account where they own stocks. There's a strategy where I'm going to sell some winners and sell some losers to help minimize a tax liability that I may have. It's a method that investment people will do. This is non-qualified money. This is not money in IRAs.

These are stocks.

I probably butchered how that works, but anyway. If you have 10 years, 7 years, or somewhere along the way, you can start accumulating capital losses in your brokerage account. Especially if we have some volatility in the markets, where I may sell a position to take the loss. I can buy back the position if I want to, so I don't miss the gains. This doesn't have to affect the overall performance of your portfolio, but take advantage of the ups and downs and the volatility of what the markets provide, which they do. This may be a way to start accumulating capital losses.

You can't do this on a $10,000 portfolio. This is why we have to start pouring some money into these things. If you have a $500,000 or a $1 million portfolio, which is not unheard of, you could build over that over a ten-year period. Let’s say we've created $400,000 worth of capital losses. What did I do right there? I'm going to apply that capital loss to whatever my gain is on my business.

I minimized my tax liability by a $100,000 by doing that, investing as I was going to invest along the way, and accumulating these losses. That's a proactive strategy. You have to do that intentionally. You have to have a bit of a timeframe to do that. It can work great. These are all little things that people can do. You've been there. It’s like, “Here's the amount of tax that you owe.” You're like, “Crap.”

That was disappointing. I can't trust my CPA to give me tax savings advice. When we sold, he said, “You guys are set up like this. This is the type of sale that you're doing. It’s a stock versus asset sale. If we had set this up differently, we could have saved you some taxes.” I'm like, “Why didn't we have some conversation like this a while ago? Maybe it was something we could have done over the course of the past year if I knew that.”

Even if you do sell, there are some of these strategies that you can implement in the year of the sale. There are some things you can do in the year of the sale, applying some leveraged options. That is an ability to create greater gains and losses in a portfolio to help offset some of the capital gains taxes. I've seen it.

We have access to some family office private wealth managers who are like, “Eric, if you got a guy that sold for $3 million or $4 million and has big capital gains, we have some strategies here.” It's not going to minimize the whole gain that they have, but if you can save $100,000 or $150,000 that you'd normally pay, it's worth looking at. Here's my point. When someone says, “There's nothing you can do about it. Bite the bullet and pay the tax,” come on.

Get a real financial advisor to help you out.

There are things that you can do along the way. To your point, the more time that you have to prepare for the sale, the better. For some of the strategies, I mentioned 7 to 10 years would give you some time to be able to accumulate some of those losses and some other things that you could probably do in a 2 to 3-year ramp-up. The people are, “I'm selling next week. Is there anything you can do?”

That's something that I would highly recommend people who are tuning in to do. Start talking to your CPA about when you're looking to sell. I'm upset with my CPA because he didn't tell me what I could have done to avoid paying taxes, but it's my fault because I didn't tell him we were in that situation. We had 3 or 4 offers over the course of the previous 3 years before we sold.

In any one of those times, I could have told my CPA, “We're looking to sell or there's the potential that we will sell here soon, FYI.” If he had known that, he could have said, “If you guys are looking to sell, you might want to consider X, Y, and Z.” I didn't give him that opportunity to do that. I was that guy who said, “Mr. CPA, we're selling this month. Is there anything I need to do now?” That was me.

I'm not going to put it all on him then, but I doubt there could have been some discussions.

That's not their forte. You've mentioned that before. Their forte is not to find those tax shelters and how to leverage the system to minimize the capital gains hit. In fact, they're more than likely to be the ones that are going to say, “That's going to raise a red flag. I don't know about this and about that.” That's where I'd rather trust a financial advisor who has more certainty and knowledge about all of the tax laws. Thanks for sharing and coming on. If people want to get hold of you, how do they do that?

How To Connect With Econologics Financial Advisors

The simplest way is to go to WealthForPTs.com. That will take you to a landing page and will probably prompt you to maybe take an assessment or do something. If you're unhappy with the condition that you're in, if you think that there is something that you can do better, if you look at where you're at, and you're unsure whether or not you're on the timeframe that you want to be on, then that's worth connecting with us. We can give you some excellent data and advice on making sure that you get back on track.

If you want to hear more from speakers like Eric, make sure you come to our conference in October 2026. Go to PPOClubEvents.com. Remember, that's October 15th through 17th in San Antonio. We’d love to see you guys there. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it, as always.

Thanks. It is always good to see you.

Go America 250.

Important Links

• Eric Miller on LinkedIn
• Econologics Financial Advisors
• Physical Therapists - Econologics Financial Advisors