Roland Cochrun, PT set out from an early age to be a PT owner and had a ton of immediate success. Over time, he still fell into the trap of full-time treatment which limited his ability to run his business and pursue his goals for a year. Finally, on a day off, he decided that he was going to focus on what was important to him, and he hasn’t looked back. He stepped out of patient care, focused on what he really wanted to do. He no longer lives in the same state as his practice (Oregon). He trains and coaches his PT leadership team remotely, and runs other successful businesses. The freedom he developed is exactly what small business owners look forward to. He joins Nathan Shields to share how he continues to have a significant impact in his community via his successful business.
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The Freedom Of Running Your Clinic Remotely With Roland Cochrun, PT
I’m excited to bring on this guest, Roland Cochrun, who I would like to say he’s from Oregon, but he’s not necessarily. His PT clinics are in Oregon, but Roland is an executive coach and a PT owner, who has gotten himself and his business to a point where he lives remotely. That’s why I wanted to bring him on. I consider Roland a great success in his business because he’s now developed the freedom to live wherever he wants and run his business successfully remotely. He’ll come and go out of the Portland area as he pleases. Otherwise, he lives across the country. He lives across the world for periods of time, owning his business successfully, and also doing other things in ventures that he wants to do.
I’m excited to bring Roland on not only share his story, but we didn’t get into that part of it. He’s been successful in what he’s done thus far, that he lives remotely. It reminds me of a previous episode with Vinod Somareddy. He’s super successful with his PT clinic in New York, but he lives in Florida. That’s maybe not the dream of every PT owner, but such freedom is that dream that we’re looking for. Roland shares his story and some of the tips and tools that you need to use in order to obtain that freedom as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, and live the life that you’re looking for whatever that might be. Let’s get to the episode.
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I’ve got a guest that I’ve wanted to have on for a long time, super successful PT owner, and is doing his own thing, Roland Cochrun. He is an Executive Coach and a PT. First of all, Roland, thank you for coming on. I appreciate you joining us.
Thanks for having me.
I met you at PPS and heard your story. I was like, “That is the exact type of PT owner that a lot of us aspire to be like and want to learn from.” I’m excited that finally got you onto the show to share a little bit about your story and what you’re doing now. If you don’t mind share with everybody a little bit about your adventure, your journey to this point.
From day one, I was fifteen years old and I went to San Diego. In order to have use of the car, my friend’s older brothers, we needed to paint this wall at the new business. It’s no big deal. We came there. I remember looking around. I was seeing these athletes. They’re doing crazy stuff soccer drills, sports drills. I was like, “What is this place?” I had no idea. I don’t think the signage was even up. It turned out it was a physical therapy clinic. It was a cool environment. The owners were in their 30s. They were cool, relatable, and what a cool experience as a fifteen-year-old to meet business owners who are in their 30s.
The coolest thing was they were passionate about what they wanted to do, it rubbed off on me. I came back every single summer for seven years. Looking up to these guys, I wanted to do what they did, but it was another eleven years until I was going to graduate from PT school. This is the piece that everybody can put into practice. I still do exactly these elements to this day. Eleven years I had to act. I couldn’t stand waiting. It was so stagnant. I got right into it. I went to my first Private Practice Annual Conference in Seattle when I was sixteen years old alone.
I’ve never missed a year since. I even went to October 2019 in Orlando. I went and absorb all the information I could. I sat on the Insurance Alliance when I was still in high school. I learned about payment. When you’re enthusiastic and genuine, people will invite you into their homes. I got to know all of the heavy hitters, people who own hundreds of clinics, 30 clinics. They took me right in. Between all of the involvement nationally, their mentorship and friendship, eleven years went by and I’d moved on to logo design, employee handbook writing. I absorbed all that I could and it was ready to pull the trigger.
Are you saying you started employee handbook writing prior to even owning a clinic?
Unfortunately, I didn’t update it until a year or two. I was like, “We get our birthday off and paid.” It’s a newbie mistake, but we had to keep that in. It’s since grown. That’s been an expensive piece of gratitude that I put in there when I was in high school. The employee handbook and policies and procedures handbook were written then.
Did you write them all up before you even opened the doors?
Before I graduated in high school.
You’re ready to go right out of the gate.
As you can imagine, when I opened it, it opened quickly. I would break even at month two and be profitable at month three. I 2x every year.
Congratulations. You were networking like crazy. Did you get some coaching and consulting along the way as well?
I’m a coach now. I’m a coach to my PT clinics and the people who run them for me. I also consult my services out as a profession. The funny part about that question is I grew up a little resistant because being a non-business owner and attending PPS had a different view. I was absorbing. I didn’t have necessarily an agenda in mind. I saw a lot more stuff that most people don’t see in terms of alternative gains. I grew up a little opposed to coaching because I saw a lot of self-orientation within them. I’d see them circulating and networking. At the same time, it put me off a little and it was funny. Fast forward, I realized what we all do. We can’t do it on our own. They eventually started seeking advice and coaching for sure.
My mantra, if you haven’t read my blog, is reaching out, step out, and network. You took networking to a whole different level from an early age, but you finally came around to recognizing that you needed to reach out to a coach or consultant. I’m assuming that soon after opening up, you stepped out of treating altogether. Did you even take some time to treat initially?
There was full disclosure, full honesty. There was a year where I got trapped by completely overwhelm. Once you get stuck in that 70-plus hour treatment, weeks turned into months and a month turned into a year. I got to a point where I plateaued. Here’s how I describe it.
When you say plateaued, plateaued business-wise?
I kept absorbing all the work. I was still killing it from a financial standpoint.
Financially, you kind of, but you had plateaued professionally.
It was not entrepreneurial. I looked more like somebody who didn’t know what they were doing and now that I look back on it. Here’s exactly why I made a plan. I even had goals, Nathan, that had a finite end. I achieved them. I bought the RA. I did all the cool stuff. I found myself in this, “Now what?” They always say, “Unless you take control, your default is more.” Without goals and a vision, the default was, “Let’s stack it up.” I was focused on a patent that bank account with a scarcity mentality of what if patients’ new visits drop. When it’s all about money, it’s easy to grow a scarce finite mindset because it’s transactional.
The Formula for Gaining Trust: Credibility x Reliability x Intimacy divided by Self-Orientation. Click To TweetWhat a lot of owners go through is what you’re talking about and correct me if I’m wrong, but they go from treating and to step out of treating, they don’t know what to do with their time. I’m having this conversation with some of my coaching clients who say, “Now that I’m not treating, I’ve got this vacuum. How do I fill my time? I don’t want to be surfing the internet, which will be my default. Inevitably I’m the filler inner when someone goes on vacation. I don’t want to do that, but what should I do with my time?” Tell me a little bit about your story there. How did you get out of treating? How did you do what’s best for the business after stepping out?
You can either spend 1 year there or 30. It’s an easy place to stay, especially if you’re pulling in $500,000 or something like that. If money’s your only motivation, you’ll stay there. I woke up one day and asked them, we’ve all asked ourselves this question to some degree. “Do I want to do this for another,” sometimes it’s five years? I was asking myself do I want to do this for another 40 years, 30 years? When you say that out loud and put that in perspective to time and your life and what you’re saying no to when you’re saying yes to work, that was the moment. I remember it was a Friday. I took the Friday off and I remember looking out the window and thinking, “Where did my entrepreneurial, creative, and inventive spirit go?” I can call myself an owner, but I might as well be an employee at this point. It’s plug and chug going through the motions. That was the moment where I was like, “I need to do it differently.”
What was your step? You invested in another PT. We don’t have to get too far into the details, but how did you find yourself becoming more productive when you stepped out of treating?
I’d love to give somebody an easier answer, but being coached and now coaching, maybe there’s a better way. Please, teach me about your experience. The pain has got to be great enough one day to finally say, “I’m going to hire. I’m going to give my hours to that person.” We all make up some like, “I’ll do this kind of day.” In the end, “When will you do that?” It ends up being an all or none because you find out how disruptive it is to have you with one foot in, one foot out. That’s how it went for me. We were overstaffed and rather than paying a PT to not work while I treat patients, it’s pure insanity. I gave my caseload away. I never took it back.
You have to get to that certain point. When I take on a coaching client, I’ll have them fill out a survey. Towards the end there, 0 to 10, how interested are you in changing your circumstances? The people that I want to work with are the ones that put down ten. I want to change now. I can’t keep doing this. I was at the same point that you were. People would ask me in social instances, “How’s the business going?” I’m like, “I love treating patients, but I can’t stand the business. I can’t keep doing this for another 5 to 10 years.” The burnout is real. It exists in PTs. I figured out I have to do something different. When I finally wrote the check, lots of money to the consulting firm to get some coaching, that was what was the refrain going off in my head.
We’ve got to do something different. Something’s got to change. When people get to that point, they recognize, “I will make the investment. I might lose money in the first month. The time that it will free me up to do X, Y, and Z for my business will more than make up for that initial investment. I’m going to be able to market more. I’m going to provide a structure for my business. I’m going to create a company culture that retains better. I’m going to hire a better one. I’m going to be able to recruit,” you name it. All the things that you should be doing as an owner, you can finally get to. It’s not like you said transactional. I treat this patient. I get this amount of money anymore. It’s, “I’m going to put in my time and energy. That’s going to return to me in multiples than what I do for my business.” That’s what you saw.
You have that point of reckoning where it’s like, “I don’t know how this happened to me.” That goes 1 of 2 ways. You either suppress it and try not to think about it. Some of us can have the power to make the right step. A lot of entrepreneurs spend too much time innovating, dreaming, and wanting to do the fun stuff, which is great. That’s where they should be. That’s where a coach or a consultant comes into play. It’s like, “I could hire someone else who’s an expert at organizing my dreams, and then I’ll move faster.” You can do 1 of the 2 ways. I find most people wind up hiring a consultant.
A lot of people look at what I did and hiring someone when I was 28 and frame myself from work and money by 30. People joke with me and say, “Roland, I want to be you when I grow up. They’re in their 60s and 70s.” I don’t find that funny. I try not to laugh because I don’t want it to be a joke. I look at them and I always say, “I did this in three years. I created millions in three years. Would you be willing to do it from age 61 to 64? Would you be willing to put it all in or whatever $4 million?” They always say, “Yes.” I don’t find that a joke. The moment that you decide, “I’m going to get help and do things faster,” it starts that next day. It’s a decision.
It needs to happen quickly. You need to take action relatively immediately or you’re going to sit on it a little bit longer. What are you telling the people that you’re coaching with nowadays? First off, I’ve got to ask you. You’ve got a superpower. There’s something about you, even in my short interactions with you, that there’s something different about you that would make you go to a PPS meeting at 15, 16 years of age. Having that network at such a young age, stuff that we’re learning in our mid-20s and 30s, what’s your particular superpower? What are you trying to instill in people that you coach?
That you can choose, I didn’t have a bad upbringing. I didn’t buy into the crap that people were telling me to do. A lot of people listen, “Go to this school, do this thing, work this hard, achieve this, apply for this, buy this,” and then you’re there. I don’t know if it was the chain of circumstances of how I grew up, but I never bought into that. I didn’t see why you had to do one thing because someone’s said to do it. I have to accept the byproduct and the consequences of all of those chains of events and decisions. I didn’t see why that had to be the only way. What I saw was what about the way I want to do it?
What about the life that I want? What if all of those checkboxes achieved a lifestyle and an income that didn’t serve me well? I looked around. That’s my superpower. I never knew what it was. I never thought I was special or I didn’t mean it like when people complimented me because I’m like, “I’m just a guy.” In hindsight, looking at what made me different, my superpower was doing me. Taking control of my life, my decisions, what was going to happen to me because I was not going to let it happen and find myself 50 or 60 years old and watch someone else live my life. That was not going to be the way it was going to be.
I’m sensing that you had an inner purpose. Maybe it wasn’t detailed, written, and smoking regularly by you to yourself, but you had an inner purpose and you knew there were things that you wanted to do from a very young age. I’m putting out Nathan’s theory here on Roland’s life. I like to come back to purpose because it’s usually when you get to that point on a Friday that you’re talking about when you’re like, “This isn’t working for me.” Your actions and your purpose aren’t in alignment. When you get to that point, “This isn’t what I’m living for. I’m acting like this. I know what I want and I need to do something different even if I don’t know what it is. What I’m doing now is not fulfilling that purpose and I need to go find it.” You were willing to invest in or take your patient load, push it off on someone else in order to take the time to find it. What you’ve done since then has been a lot of cool stuff.
You can either let your life happen or you can become a little bit more aware of the things that can change it. That’s all it is. Nathan, I’m talking about a tiny little bit different. It’s that what if because if you can ask yourself what if at any point in time, I was lucky to start asking myself that at about 8, 9. You can ask yourself at any moment. I had a coaching call with a guy in his 50s. The theme of the call was what if you could and it changed his plans, his perspective on, what if it could happen? You’d be surprised if you make that shift. One of the coolest things about the COVID shutdown is impossible all of a sudden is possible. All this stuff that we refuse to see, it’s changing and happening. We all joked about uncertainty is everywhere. It’s everywhere now. You cannot deny it. Every time you turn on the computer, the news, something crazy you didn’t think was going to happen happened. Anything is possible. You can take control. Even in an uncertain circumstance, you can make the choice all day long.
That’s what comes out of these uncertain circumstances are people who would take advantage of the opportunity and make changes for good. Anyone out there that’s reading, I challenged them during the pandemic to not go back to business as usual. If you did, you lost a golden opportunity to reset and make your clinic what you want. Make your company exactly what you want, make your lifestyle exactly what you want. Push the reset button, not necessarily pause, which is push reset and let’s do things differently. Get out of your clinic, do what you want, figure out your purpose to go back to that, but ask yourself questions. What if, because we have these ideas like, “I can’t hire a PT because I’m going to lose money on that.”
How do I afford that? What if you could hire the PT and make money even more than what you’re making right now? Now working into that frame of mindset leads you to action and inspiration or using a question that another coach asked, a successful PT owner that I know, Jeff McMenamy, on a previous episode as if you had all the money in the world, what’s the next step you would take? We’re not talking about go buy an island or your favorite car. What’s the next step you would take in your business?
If money wasn’t a concern, what’s the next step you would take? That takes money off the plate and focuses you back on what you’re doing and your purpose again. Are you fulfilling that? Those are viable questions especially ask at this time is what are you doing? What are the possibilities? What could you do to have a more fulfilling life, a better lifestyle and see your family more, be with your kids more, enjoy your hobby, you name it, be in Airbnbs for a couple of months at a time of going all over the world like Roland?
I liked it because PTs are a special group of people. I finally got my first PT client a couple of months ago, which was fun for me because given that was my background. It’s a fun thing to do. A little bit more knowledgeable in the area, I suppose. They’re a special group of people. They have a gift of healing that is deeper than the hands. These are individuals that chose a profession that they knew going into. It was undervalued, underappreciated, underpaid. They knew this. They didn’t care. They signed up anyways. That’s number one. Number two is the style of treatment and the way that we are trained to perform, the way we want to perform provides something almost supernatural in the sense that we provide them a safe place to heal. It’s the way I’ve seen it.
The reason I’m going in this direction is that it’s extremely valuable and everyone wants it. The problem is only 10% of the population knows how valuable it is. This shut down, they want normal. Normal is different now. It’s not coming back in the same way. It probably won’t. It probably shouldn’t, but here’s what PTs can provide people. It’s that new sense of normal within a healing and empowering environment. You can now allow whoever your ideal client is to come to a safe place where they can have this new sense of normal and almost reinvent, whatever it is that you, whatever your transformation is that you sell. If it’s chronic pain and people who have been able to yet forget about their pain, maybe for the first time, or if it’s athletes and they’re achieving a college-bound dream that transformation is the new normal.
They’re no longer going to seek the same things they did. I would also argue that I used to seek comfort and safety in social media. That’s been destroyed over this because it’s full of so much junk that even that’s not a safe place, but we’re exhausted looking at it. They’re looking elsewhere. If you don’t show up for them and become that solution, they’re going to find a different place to be normal. It’s a cool place as a business owner, especially a PT owner, to be that solution for the people. The intention is there and it’s cheap and/or free and they want it. You need to be there and be a PT for them.
You’ve mentioned that you had your first PT owner that’s a client. How does your coaching differ now as you’re working with a PT owner compared to other executives that you’re working with? Do you notice a trend with the owner that you don’t see in the others?
On my website, I created a tool. My team made one for you. It’s RolandCochrun.com/ptoclub. That will get you to my tool download. It doesn’t differ. That’s why I invented this tool. That tool made me multi seven figures and still is in my PT businesses. What I realized was it’s all the same stuff, clearly being the solution, clearly not to you but them. It’s learning how to communicate what you do for them, not the features, but the real transformation. You probably don’t know. You haven’t spent the time. It’s not your fault. We’re caught up in our stuff. Being the solution for them, positioning yourself as an expert, and the answer. Bringing your clients to you and not constantly spending money and time trying to get to them. If you do those three things, it’s the same elements in business. Business owners outside of PT are jealous of how easy it is for us to do those things. Be the solution, be an expert, and create an environment where your clients want to be. We have that easier than any other business.
The less it's about you, the more trust you will gain. Click To TweetTell me about step number three. The story that always goes around is that no one wants physical therapy. They want personal training. They want maybe diet help and that stuff, but no one wants to go to physical therapy. How do you create an environment where people want to come? You don’t have to go out, grab them, and pull them off the street.
Is this the secret that we’re getting into?
It’s no secret at all. This is the seven-figure answer. I use the same tactic with all of my clients. It’s nothing new. It’s been done around. There’s a difference between those that decided to own it and those that are too scared and want others to own it for us because we don’t want to take the responsibility. It’s bringing your clients to you can look like anything. You weren’t me and you were doing it now. We’re creating a place for safety, content, and empowerment so people can achieve whatever they want. They’re going to seek that out. You’re either going to watch other people do it or they’re going to be the ones helping everyone. That’s what it is. It’s free to help and it’s whatever is your jams.
My tool will walk you through if you don’t know what your jam is. It will walk you through why people are drawn to you and helping brainstorm there. I’ve done a good job of nailing it down, but create an environment there that people can come to you for help safety, security, success and friendship. It does not matter. The only thing that matters is you choose the one that’s most authentic to you. Nathan is a podcaster and we love it. He’s a great host. He’s a resource. He’s friendly. We are drawn to you because of that. If I need help, I’m going to reach out to you. That’s the same element across all businesses and PT brings them to you.
I love that concept because in a previous episode that I did with the founder of Keet Health. His whole history was that you can triple your marketing efforts if you focus on the patient experience. That’s partly what you’re talking about here in creating an environment that you say is safe, where they want to be and it’s comfortable. If we spent more time focusing on the patient experience, not necessarily the care so much, maybe you are. You already said we’re already masters in what we provide in our care. What’s hanging on the walls? What are the colors? What does the front office room look like? What magazines do you have there? How is the front desk presenting themselves? How do they call you on that first call? Is it drab? When are we going to get in? What’s your insurance? Is it cordial, nice, welcoming, inviting, and safe as you mentioned? Focusing on that patient experience, what his theory was triple your marketing efforts.
It’s word of mouth. I love it when people say, “My clinic’s word of mouth,” or “Primarily word of mouth,” and they blow it off. You can control word of mouth and you always were controlling it. It’s by giving people something to talk about. That’s why these successful businesses are successful is because there’s a reason to talk about you. The more we can give them those reasons, the more this thing, this mystery of word of mouth. It’s not a mystery. You can dictate that. You’re either doing great work, which is good and good for you. That’s fantastic. I agree with you. What if you could triple or quadruple that success by simply taking more time to amplify what they’re already saying about you?
Be intentional about the word of mouth marketing because I agree with you saying that. It gets me thinking. We think of word of mouth is this nebulous thing that happens outside of our control. From what you’re saying is like, what if we took control of the word of mouth and use it to our advantage? We’re intentional about getting referrals, improving the patient experience, such that they talk to their friends and family about what you can get out of blankety-blank physical therapy. It’s more than the therapy. I love the people. They’re another family. We’ve heard it all before, but what if you were more intentional on your end to make that a real strategy and a push?
The game as awareness, Nathan. It always has been and it always will be. How aware of other people’s worldviews and how they blend with yours and your worldview, that’s the name of the game. It always has been. Acknowledging that other people see the world a certain way and that when they see the world, the way that you see it, they feel something different. You want to look for what those things are because that’s the difference between a mediocre business and an excellent one. The mediocre one continues to speak to the same 15% of the audience. The aware and enlightened business owner continues to be able to speak to a wider and wider audience and still is the answer for them. Because you are more intentional and more aware of the other world use out there, you’re resonating with twice as many people. Emotional intelligence is always where you start. If you think that you’ve done a great job by the book again and read it. I always say this, unless you’re getting 100% of the referrals in town, you can always communicate better to someone else.
If you are getting 100% of the referrals in town, FYI, that’s only 10% of the population that needs physical therapy.
There’s another 90% who you haven’t been able to resonate with yet still. It’s always being able to connect with a wider variety is the ticket.
Anything else you want to talk about or have we hit all the magic that comes from Roland? I know there’s plenty more.
The thing I would say would be to speak to the PT owners. As I’ve gotten more and more involved with a privately-owned business, the more and more I have realized that PTs need to take a step back and realize what we’re doing for the community. I don’t think it’s pain. I don’t think it’s inferior glides or this and that. I don’t think it’s returning to anything. Our heads got a little inflated through the DPT era and afterward around trying too hard. When I look around other business owners and even other healthcare professionals, we might poke fun at them a little bit for these little gimmicks and shortcuts.
Let’s use dry needling for a great example. We got access to this cute little thing and look at the tremendous response nationwide. We have patients, all of a sudden, are willing to pay cash in areas that they never would have paid cash for. It’s all from us being a little open to making things simple, accessible, and allowing them to have a platform to give us money for something. I watched that example and I can’t help but think if we stopped trying to be fancy and giving them things that they honestly never asked for. That’s the thing I see in PT is the patients didn’t ask for a lot of these things that we’re trying to give them and do to them. I would ask everyone to take a step back and think about, what did they ask me for?
Gear all of your communication, your skillset, and your internal staff development around what the patient and the physicians asked you for. I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job of that. Every time I go to the conferences, it’s always fancier, more internships, residencies, fellowships. The patients didn’t ask us to get a fellowship. Keep pursuing them, keep getting better. I don’t think we need to tell them about it. We become good and show them other ways via what they wanted from us. We will disappear because the more and more obsessed you are with yourself and what you do, the less people care because you’re getting further away from what they want.
What did they want? They’ll pay a lot more money for a regular massage than a physical therapy session because they want that. Getting to the heart of what they want and when you find out what they want, then they’ll come back for it over and over again.
You’ll be the solution if you communicated that you’re the solution. I don’t think PTs do that. We take up all the real estate on our websites and our luncheons with doctors. We get this one lunch with a doctor group maybe for the first time in three years and they won’t have us back again. Maybe you’ll get on the phone with them, but this is your time to shine. Do you know what we do? They always ask us to tell and I say, “We’re here to eat lunch with you guys. We don’t need to ask away and being a resource.” Why would you botch that one lunch with talking about a bunch of stuff they didn’t even ask you to do? Every time I say that and I say, “She asks a way,” they ask about my dog’s name. They never asked about the PT until the last sentence is like, “How do we refer to you?” It’s like, “Thank you.” They never asked. They just wanted a friend.
They wanted to have lunch with a real person. Let’s go beyond patients as specific referral sources. They’re not asking for this stuff. For you giving it to them, it is a little salesy. Here’s my thing I always tell everybody, Nathan, and we can end on this, trust equals credibility, reliability and intimacy divided by self-orientation. It doesn’t matter the details of all of those. One you need to focus on is the self-orientation. This can be your phobia of asking for more money. This could be your complex about a competitor in the area who’s better. Anytime you say something that indicates a credential you took, a class you took while you’re better than someone else. They never asked you for that. You’re amplifying that self-orientation meter and it is on the bottom of the fraction. You might think you’re helping them by saying all these certifications, they don’t care. The more and more you talk about yourself, it might hinder the agenda because you might become expensive than somebody who wants to do your thing. Whereas if you listened, it would go a lot further.
I love the equation because if you think about it in true mathematical terms, the less that the relationship is orientated around you, the greater that trust goes up. The less you make it about you, the more you increase that trust. Patients don’t care about all the letters after our names. That’s nice, but when they get in the door, they’re going to say to the same thing, “How are you going to help me?” There’s a lot of different answers to that. If you make it technical, they’ll know that you’re not listening. If you ask more questions and turn it back on to them, that’s when you’ll start recognizing the true answers and what you can provide. It goes even further. I want to talk to relate that to physical therapy ownership.
A lot of owners think that they are their clinics. The less they can make the clinic about themselves, the greater their business will become. When it becomes about a culture, a team and an environment, that’s when you see multiplications of increases in business and employee satisfaction, that’s when your influence gets multiplied through the community. When your business is focused on Roland Cochrun, if the business is focused on Nathan Shields, I recognize that for years before I finally got some coaching and talk me out of it. The more that’s focused on you, the less trust you’re going to have in the community and the less impact and less power you’ll have as a business itself.
I wrote an article and it was the six stages of business self-awareness. I made them up. I don’t like to read. I was talking, but the final stage that I came up with through my coaching experience is exactly what you said, impact-driven. It’s when you finally arose above everything. It’s no longer about you. It’s not about your immediate circle. It’s not about your clinic. It’s not even about your community. It’s bigger. It’s about the cause. Once you can become obsessed with the cause and the movement that you’re trying to make and nothing else matters, that’s not only when we are the most fulfilled, but if you look at people doing that, they’ve made the most amount of money.
Everything else is a byproduct of that.
They live in their car. We glorify these software tycoons. They might’ve still been making hundreds of thousands or millions and they’re still living in the garage. Buying the house wasn’t on the radar. It was the cause. It was the mission. It was what they wanted to do that was important. They have the money now. They got a nice house, but the cause was the most important thing. Most of those guys went bankrupt in the opposite direction, even though they had the millions because it was the cause.
In that situation, it’s less about the individual. They had a vision and everyone worked toward that vision. They weren’t working for Bill Gates, per se. They were working for Bill Gates’ vision of what computing could be.
To speak to that in terms of what truly gave me freedom, it wasn’t the money, Nathan. It wasn’t the referrals. The business became free. When I developed a platform for my staff to be impact-driven and to let them define it, that was when freedom happened to me. The money was always there. I’m a business person. It wasn’t difficult for me, but I didn’t care about money. It was the freedom I was after. Until you give them a platform to thrive and make them excited to thrive, and they believe it, you’ll be owned by something until that happens. That’s across all businesses. They will never fall in love with the cause until they know you believe it and they know that it serves a greater purpose. At that point in time, they’ll work hard for you.
Thanks for your time.
I’m glad we did this. It’s been a couple of years almost since our first email. Here we did it. It took a COVID shut down, but we did it.
If people want to get in touch with you, how do they do that?
The easiest way is right through the website, you need to go to RolandCochrun.com or for purposes of this, to make it easier for your audience, RolandCochrun.com/ptoclub would get you directly right to that tool. Take that tool seriously. I don’t want to hear from you until you’re done. When you’ve done it and put your all into it, then you can email me and ask for advice. I’m going to want to hear about the exercises first before we dive into it. You’ll find the tool extremely helpful. You’ll see the dollar signs there. RolandCochrun.com is the easiest way. I’m accessible. I’m around.
People will never fall in love with a cause until they know you believe it and that it serves a greater purpose. Click To TweetI’m going to check it out. I’ll be one of those people on the website.
Thank you. I’m glad we did this. I love connecting with you. I love private practice. Always reach out to all of these guys that all of us want to keep private practice owners alive, well, healthy, free. There is no reason why things should not be exactly the way you want them. It is an abundant world out there for PTs truly.
Thanks for your time, Roland. I appreciate it.
Important Links:
- Roland Cochrun
- Vinod Somareddy – Previous episode
- PPS
- Jeff McMenamy – previous episode
- Keet Health – Previous episode
- RolandCochrun.com
- www.RolandCochrun.com/ptoclub
About Roland Cochrun
Roland Cochrun is a PT clinic owner that has successfully removed himself from his business and travels the world running his clinics remotely.
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