48. Discipline in Speech Therapy Private Practice

A speech therapy private practice is not always easy or fun and games. Many people suffer from the illusion that business owners are sitting around at the beach on their laptops getting rich while paying employees to do all of the grunt work. This is far from the truth. To be successful in speech therapy private practice, one has to be dedicated, motivated and have serious discipline. Starting, growing and scaling a speech therapy private practice requires hard work, money, elbow grease and late hours but the payoff can be rewarding. In this episode, I discuss the discipline required to make a speech therapy private practice work and discuss some of the challenges along the way!

In this episode:
02:22 – Question from SpeakPipe
03:31 – The Perfect Student
05:05 – Our Second Location
09:50 – Topic = Discipline
11:38 – Retraining your Brain
12:47 – Positive Association
13:50 – Starting TODAY
14:30 – Consistency is the Key

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[Commercial]

Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 48. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time.

Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails, all the questions and all the SpeakPipes. As of today, we have well over 48,432 listeners to the show and I’m super glad you guys are out there getting good valuable information and you know me, I say it every single time, “Value is what you get in the absence of money” and these podcasts are free for you. So if you wouldn’t mind just go to the Android or iOS platform of your choice and leave some good five star feedback that way other people like you can get the same value that you’re receiving right now.

Now if this is your first episode, welcome and you can just easily go back through all the podcasts and start at episode one and you can hear all the great topics that we have all the way from Accounts Receivable, billing, referrals, there is other information on there about mindset. I mean it’s all on there and if you have any questions at all, all you have to do is just reach out to me at privateSLP.com/contact and I’ll do my best to help you. I also received a recent question from SpeakPipe and it was from a gentleman. His name is Michael and he wanted to know about getting contracts and he’s got a business in another state and he’s got some home health going but he also wanted to add another discipline besides speech therapy. He wanted to recently add occupational therapy as well to the mix and he didn’t want to do that in the home and community you wanted to do that more of an outpatient clinical setting. Now again I’m not a lawyer but I did speak to him and I thought the best way to go about this would be maybe just to start another entity another private practice name and get your contracts through a clinic based entity and just start from scratch so that way you can keep your home visits home and then you can run that separate business out of the clinic and just make that a separate tax I.D. and NPI and you can just run everything through that through your contracts and so that was one of my suggestions and again I’m not a lawyer you definitely want to talk to your attorney and make sure these things are working for you in your state in your own unique situation. So that was the advice that I gave.

I also wanted to let you know we have a space for the perfect student and that’s when you fly into Tucson work with me hand in hand and I’ll be more than happy to help you work and set your clinic up and also under unique circumstances I can fly out to your area and help you pick a location for your clinic and all you have to do is just reach out to me kyle@privateslp.com and I’ll help you as much as I can. We are accepting new students right now in the All Access Community and you can find that at privateSLP.com/coaching and I just wanted to say hi to Darla. She is a new member in the All access community and I heard from her in the forum a couple of days ago and she was just working through all the trainings. We just recently had a training yesterday about how to maximize what you currently have because a lot of people right now think that bigger is better and you got to buy all the software and tools and have multiple locations but you’ll be surprised. I spoke to a clinic owner recently who was not doing well financially and they’re losing thousands of dollars today a day over multiple locations so that’s not good. And trying to help that person adjust and readjust working on contracts and things like that.

I wanted to talk to you today about discipline. Discipline is something that I really I’m glad I have because I wouldn’t be in the spot where I am today without a ton of discipline. I’m actually recording this podcast right now in one of our administrative offices at our second location. Currently we are opening up our second location here in Tucson. We just purchased a 7580 square foot building about five to six miles away from our current location. And it’s really exciting because when I first started this business I never dreamed that I would have a building of this size and capacity. I remember I used to see a doctor at this small doctor’s office and he left the state and he was selling his office space and I remember going over there and it was a thousand square feet and I was thinking how I could raise my son at that time. He was about six years old and I was going to try to find out in the back. There was a little woodshed and I was going to try to make that into an apartment and I was going to live and he was going to live in that apartment with me and we were going to live in the back and then I was going to try to rent the front. How I can chop that up and make that three rooms and then right down the street there was a property for sale. And at the time I really didn’t have the money saved up for the down payment.

But I remember I was just trying to find a way to make that happen. And that was about a twelve hundred square foot building. But if I would have gone through with either those two deals I wouldn’t be sitting in this administrative office right now recording this podcast in this 7580 square foot building I mean this thing is huge. It’s gorgeous and again I’m not bragging or boasting. I’m just stating the facts and it’s because of discipline that I am able to sit in this little squeaky chair you might hear a little bit but in record a podcast and let you guys know that this stuff is doable and you can attain what you want to attain if you have the discipline to do it. And we’ve got this gorgeous huge gym. There’s actually three big 600 square feet spaces in one’s gonna be a motor room with single point swings. The other room’s gonna be like an office admin meant for our physical therapy and occupational therapy and assistant rooms and there’s gonna be a rock wall in there and then we’ve got a whole huge 600 square foot kitchen with two refrigerators microwaves, so the OTs can do their feeding and then on the other side and I’ll leave some pictures below this podcast so you guys can see it. We’ve got these big beautiful Speech therapy treatment rooms.

The people before us who own this clinic, it really was designed for children and they put a lot of money into this building. They kind of I think overbuilt the building for the area but they couldn’t sell it for what it was worth because they really overbuilt the building into giving examples moving some tiles the other day because this whole building was rebuilt and constructed in 2016 and they left a lot of paint cans and leftover tiles and carpet tiles and the place has a new roof and there’s five air conditioners ten ton ACs, the furniture. There were some furniture left but I was moving these tiles and these things are super heavy. I had to grab the Dolly and I look in these tiles were made in Italy and I’m like wow these people put a lot of money into this building but we didn’t pay that kind of price. We got this thing about 40 percent off and so it was just another reason to save your money and to run lean and to be able to purchase an asset.

And I did a walkthrough of this building and I put this into the All Access Community for our members to show them all the ins and outs of when you buy a clinic or when you rent and lease a space. Things to look for like safety features if you’ve got fire sprinklers and alarms things to take into consideration, security cameras, the space layout, how people check in, the workflows – checking in / checking out, the check in Windows placements all of that is included in this walkthrough that I did for the All access community. It was just really nice to show the members what it looked like, what it feels like to move in and get it ready and get the equipment going and the insurances that I need to make this thing operational.

So it’s just a real delight to be able to have a podcast and record this podcast in my new space. So I just wanna let you guys know that we are really growing and do the best that we can to help our families here in Tucson we just hired another Occupational therapist and we interviewed a Physical therapist this morning and we’ve got another interview for a Physical therapist coming if you’re looking for work in the Tucson area, you can go to therapyjobtucson.com and you can find a place to apply for a Speech occupational or Physical therapy position here in our clinic.

So I just wanted to talk to you today about discipline. Discipline is something I remember as a child when we weren’t in school we had to work with my dad and my dad was a licensed plumber. He was a really tough and still he’s a tough guy and a hard worker. And so was my grandfather. My grandfather was a union pipefitter who used to run pipe, gas pipe, water pipe and he would fit hospitals and I remember as a young boy I would go visit my grandparents and I go see my I my papa I’d go visit my papa and he would be working on this big hospital in Lafayette Louisiana. I remember just going up these elevators and up these flights of stairs and just seeing my Papa and I thought it was a big deal, there’s my Papa and he’s working on these buildings and new construction for these big hospitals.

And then my dad he had a plumbing contracting business in Belle Rose, Louisiana. He had over 100 employees at one time and I just remember growing up my dad. In the summertime, he used to wake us up early in the morning. He wakes up at 4:30 in the morning. He’d say, “The train’s leaving at five o’clock, if you’re not on it you’re going to be in some trouble, so it’s time to get up and go.” And I just remember saying, “I’m tired. Can’t we just have a day off?” and my dad would say, “No, you don’t have a day off. You gotta get up and go to work”. And that’s what my summers looked like when I turned nine and ten years of age. But there was a payoff too. I remember asking my dad how much I get paid. And he laughed. But I remember getting a company check when I was that age, I get 100 bucks sometimes 120 and that cash I had my bank account and I used to save my money. I just love making that money and saving it.

But I remember getting up and my dad used to talk to us on the way to work. He did say, “You know what boys sometimes you got to do things you just don’t want to do and you got to get up and you got to work”. And he’d give us a shovel and we’d go out there. I remember there was this man Mr. Johnny Jones and I would have to ride with Mr. Johnny Jones in his pickup truck and I had to do what Mr. Johnny Jones told me to do and my dad says, “This man when he tells you to do something it’s just like me saying it because you need to do it”. And I remember Mr. Johnny Jones would say I need you to dig a line trench. It needs to be four feet deep and needs to be 25 feet long and you need to do it. And I remember going back in the office and I asked my dad I said “Dad, it’s really hot out here and this was southeast Louisiana, like sweaty and I’m hot and tired”. And he said, “well get some water”. I’m like, “Well, can I just hang out in the A.C. with you in the office” and he says, “If you want an AC job at an office you might want to think about going to college. But right now you need to get out there and go listen to what Mr. Johnny Jones wants you to do”. And I did it and I didn’t want to. And I remember when I wouldn’t work with Mr. Johnny Jones, My daddy had me making pieces of pipe to run gas lines through attics so houses could have gas lines for heat and water heaters.

So at an early age I learned the value of a dollar and how to work. And so I really believe those experiences as a child I carried it over into my business life. So these days what it looks like I’m always up at 4:30 I don’t need an alarm. For the last three or four days, I’ve been really excited to get to work I’ve been getting up on my own at about 2:33 a.m. And got there and sit on my hot tub and I do my morning meditation. I drink my carrot juice, beet juice I do my juicing and then I go to work. Sometimes I’m at this new office getting it ready but I got to do it. If I don’t do it nobody’s going to do it. So yeah, I got help I got people to help us move around some of these walls and put our Internet systems in and have our cables going through the ceiling all the way to the back in the server room. All that stuff I’ve got people helping me with that. But at the end of the day I’ve got to be the one that’s gotta get up and I’ve got to do it and it takes discipline.

Discipline is what’s going to help you build your own Speech therapy private practice. And if you don’t do it today when are you going to do it. And I’m just going to tell you right now if you wanted to do it yesterday and you don’t start tomorrow chances are in about five years from now you’re going to look back and go, “I should really start my own business”. So I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news but I will say this, “if there’s something in your life you don’t want, change it. If you don’t like where you are living, move.” I mean you’re not a tree you can move. You can do anything you want to do be anything you want to be, as long as it’s legal, right. You can do and start and grow any business you want but there’s one thing you got to do, have discipline. Do the same thing over and over in that positive direction. And what does that look like to start. Well it might be starting to get some patients on the side and might be putting some business cards out. It might be getting some contracts with some insurance companies or getting an NPI number, a tax I.D. number starting your own corporation with a paralegal or a lawyer or getting a bank account under your business name and getting referrals out there talking to doctors, talking to other health care professionals who would deliver, recommend and refer patients to you. So that’s what it looks like.

And there’s certain steps I mean when you want to go in to a gym and start lifting weights you don’t just go grab the 200 pounds and start going. Now you got to start out slowly and that’s why at privateSLP.com, we help people just like you who want to grow scale start your own Speech therapy private practice. So that’s something to interest you get in touch with me and I promise I will work really hard to help you achieve what you want to achieve.

So I hope this has been helpful today if there’s anything you need for me. Hit me up at PrivateSLP.com and as always thank you for listening.

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