The Four Fundamentals of Business with Martin Holland
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Kate Grandbois: Hello, everyone. Welcome to SLP Nerdcast. I am Kate Granbois, and usually I am joined by my co host, Amy Wonka. Uh, she is not here today, but I am not alone. I have the pleasure of welcoming a repeat guest, Martin Holland. Welcome, Martin. Hi, Kate, how are you? I am fine. I am very excited to have the second conversation with you today.
You've been on our show once before talking about private practice, um, and today's episode is going to be a slight extension of that. Um, I have a cute little story I want to tell about how we met, but I will save that for a few minutes from now. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Where did you acquire the knowledge that you have and where are you coming from [00:03:00] today?
Martin Holland: Well, I'm coming from Norman, Oklahoma. . I've been in private business for 49 years, uh, soon to be 50. I've started eight businesses from scratch or reorganized, reorganized one.
Uh, two of them failed, sold four of them and still active involved, actively involved in one or two, one of which is my wife's pediatric SLP OT. Physical therapy and feeding therapy business, which she started in 2014, after teaching speech language pathology at the university level. So, uh, my experience comes from having lived it after I sold my last business in 2011, I decided I didn't want to do that again, because as your listeners might understand, business can be a strenuous exercise, thought I might be able to help other people.
With my, uh, history and found out it took a couple of years [00:04:00] to find out how to be a business coach. But eventually, I kind of figured it out. And that's what I've been doing since 2011
Kate Grandbois: and onto my cute little story. I guess it's I'm not sure. Cute is the right word, but you and I got connected. Sort of by happenstance.
So you wrote a book. I know we're going to be referencing this book quite a bit today. Your book is called the profit problem. They say I make money. So why don't I have any? And as our listeners know, I'm a business owner. I've been in private practice for about 12 years. And there have been some fundamental components of business that have always eluded me.
And my brother in law, who knows very little about speech therapy, he's in a completely different field, said to me, hey, I just read this book and I really think that you would like it. So he gave me a copy of his book and lo and behold, this is the way I describe your book that I hope you take as a compliment, is it's business, it's a business book meets beach read.
So I was able to finally understand some of these very complex components of [00:05:00] accounting of business strategy. Um, I, and it was just such a great book. I have recommended it to probably 10. I'm like your best saleswoman. I 10 or 15 recommendations I've made for this book and I connected with you on LinkedIn.
And lo and behold, you messaged me back and said, Hey, are you a speech therapist? And so the story goes, we got to chatting and now you're here on our podcast. And, um, just to sort of preface this conversation with you have a very good book that's out there. Our link to it will be in the show notes. Uh, and before we get onto today's topic, which is the four fundamentals of business, I do need to read our learning objectives and disclosures.
So I will get that over with quickly and then we'll jump right in. Learning objective number one. Describe the four fundamentals of every business. Learning objective number two, list two strategies for getting started in business. Financial disclosures, Martin's financial disclosures. Martin is the author of a book titled The Profit Problem.
They say I make money, so why don't I have any? Martin also runs a business [00:06:00] coaching firm called Aneal Business Coaching. Martin's non financial disclosures. Martin has no non financial relationships to disclose. Kate, that's me. I am the owner and founder of Grand Bois Therapy and Consulting LLC and co founder of SLP Nerdcast.
My non financial disclosures, I'm a member of ASHA SIG 12 and serve on the AAC Advisory Group for Massachusetts Advocates for Children. I'm also a member of the Berkshire Association for Behavior Analysis and Therapy. Okay, we got that over with. Let's move on to the fun stuff. Can you start by telling us a little bit about the four fundamentals of business?
Sure.
Martin Holland: Uh, as I said, when I started coaching, it took me a while to learn how to, to be a coach. And what I came up with was a construct, a mental construct, um, that has borne up over time. I've worked with over 500 individual business owners since I began coaching, and I found this to be true. That there are four fundamentals of every business, [00:07:00] regardless of what it is.
I've had contractors, I've had psychiatrists, publishers, retailers, SLPs. Manufacturing and these four fundamentals hold up the way I use them is that I'm always cycling through the four fundamentals of business and saying, where's the weak point? Where's the thing that if we started today, if we improve that, stop doing it, started doing it would make the most impact on our business.
So it's a mental construct for me, but the four fundamentals of business are guiding the business, getting the business, doing the business. and administering the business. And I think I talked to you before we started recording that most people start business to do something they're good at and know how to deliver and are passionate about.
But what most don't realize, and I say most based on my experience is that being in the business of [00:08:00] doing something is a completely different animal than doing it. Speaking to SLPs and perhaps other therapists, most of you will not. Go out of business or suffer terribly because you don't know how to apply your trade because you don't know how to be a good speech path.
it will be something else. It will be something in one of those other three. So there's guiding the business, getting the business, doing the businesses, delivering whatever you sold, which being a speech path, delivering therapy or administration, it will be in one of those other three areas that it will get you.
And if, if it's okay, maybe we dive into what are in there.
Kate Grandbois: Yeah, I, I, absolutely. I just, I'm having a lot of personal reflection as we have this conversation as a business owner. who got into business to work. My particular patient population is [00:09:00] pediatrics. I wanted to work with, with a pediatric population.
I wanted to provide therapy in the homes way back in the day when I first opened my practice. Um, I still don't know very much about marketing and it's my biggest, my biggest weak point. So I'm looking forward to sort of unpacking all these different areas outside of my clinical expertise.
Martin Holland: Well, let's start with leadership, um, or guiding the business, which is leadership.
And so what, what's that, you know, leadership word. If you Google it, you'll get 800 million hits. What's leadership. But leadership includes things like having a vision for your business. Matter of fact, that's number one. Number two in leadership is having a culture for your business. If you're a solo practitioner, culture, It's a little bit easy, but you're starting at it.
People. It's how do you hold people accountable? How do you incentivize people? How do you organize yourself in your company? So it's all these matters of leadership that people have all heard about. But in my [00:10:00] experience, very few people have done anything. Um, but it begins with having a vision or am I going to be a solopreneur?
Or do I intend to bring people in? Do I want to be at multiple locations? You, and why am I doing this? I'm very proud of, uh, the vision for my wife's company, which is two, two items. And one is to be the clinic of choice for moms. And the second one is to be the clinic of choice for the finest pediatric therapists.
And that sounds like something you might want to put on your website, which I think she does, but it is who she is. It guides everything she does. And just as anecdotally, she hired an SLP that we needed last week. And she said, I don't want you to come here because you're running away from something. I want you to come here because it's your dream job.
Take some time. And make sure that this is where you want to be. [00:11:00] And the young lady said, I already know this is where I want to be. I got goosebumps when you told me what your vision was. Okay. So what's the vision for that company, right? What's your culture again, you can culture a bad culture in a business.
We'll blow up the business more quickly than running out of cash, and I just won't be a whole lesson on that. But we can talk about that at great length. So that's that's a little bit about what the leadership is. Where are we going? Which direction? What's my purpose? Why am I doing this? Um, that should be articulated not only for you, so you know what you're doing in the morning, but for anybody you bring on board, they need to buy in to your vision and your culture or there will be trouble.
Okay. The next one that was guiding, getting the business is marketing and sales and marketing, of course, is generating leads. Sales is closing the deal. It's a little bit, um, [00:12:00] different in an SLP practice than it is for a contractor because you're not really selling people. But the most important question in marketing is to whom am I speaking?
Okay. So what jumps out at me immediately. Is, um, in SLP, or at least in my environment here, I know they're different one, different types of environments is who is my target audience and a lot of times you can spend tens of thousands of dollars a month with like digital, uh, Marketing and being in magazines and maybe billboard.
I don't know. I've seen any billboards, but what you're really after is the doctor, the referring doctor, at least in our case. So, 1 of the 1st questions is what do doctors want and more particularly, the doctor scheduling nurse. What do they want? They want to know you received the facts. They want to know the [00:13:00] status.
There are some reports you can send back to them unsolicited that they can just look at and know that you haven't forgotten them. And that doesn't cost nearly as much as 5, 000 a month for AdWords, right? And besides that, if a mom fives you on AdWords, that's no guarantee that you're going. If you're insurance, that's no guarantee that you're going to get a referral.
So when it comes to marketing and sales. Sales, uh, doing the evals quickly and things like that, but marketing, where you get enough clients, uh, referrals, your role in it. Isn't necessarily to be really good at social media. It has to be really good at understanding what your target market wants. That target market is the scheduling nurse, right?
So guiding the business marketing and sales is getting the business, doing the business. I'll drop off a little bit, but I will say doing the business. Which is what you're already good at is [00:14:00] really having processes so that you repeat it. That's oftentimes guided by, by rules, uh, with insurance company is guided by software, uh, that if you have a practice management software, it kind of creates those for you.
So that takes us to the fourth one, guiding, getting, doing, and administration administration. I tell people, Uh, who have started their own business. I describe administrative matters as all those things you had never even heard of when you started business. It's finance, it's bookkeeping, it's HR issues, it's IT issues.
You know, your software management, it's legal issues, it's regulatory or I'll call it regulatory ASHA. You know, what do you have to do? Schedule, credentialing, insurance.
It's just like, oh, my gosh, it's a never ending stream of things, uh, it's corporate governments. Do you have an [00:15:00] operating agreement in your, in your new LLC? And are you current? I don't know. Everywhere, but where we have a, it's not really a franchise tax, but you have to pay a fee every year. Nobody tells you to pay it, but if you don't pay it, you're out of standing.
And if something happened, you're in trouble,
Kate Grandbois: right? I recently learned that I was supposed to have a business, several very specific business permits in my town hall. I mean, here in Massachusetts, we do everything by individual town, not county. And I was registered with the county. I was registered with the state.
And it came up that because I do work at home and I have a home office that I was, you know, nobody had ever told me, but I, and I came across this information accidentally and panicked. I had to write my 40 check. I had to go get this application notarized. It was like a whole 18 hours of, of panic around this one.
This one piece of paper I hadn't filed with my town clerk. So there are so many loose ends like that in my personal experience that have come [00:16:00] up. And I, I really appreciate taking a minute to highlight all of these things because I feel so many of us and I'm only speaking for myself and my colleagues, I suppose, but we go into this business for the primary purpose of doing, doing the business, the category of doing the business, doing the clinical work.
Working with families, doing the counseling. Um, and I think many of us, we go into private practice, we're solo preneurs, we get some of the basics ironed out, we have our malpractice insurance and some things that are obvious that we know about. And then as business grows, it becomes this snowball effect of, Oh, but there are all of these other things that I.
That I forgot to do, or I think I need to hire someone. Is it an independent contractor or an employee? And how, how on earth do I do payroll? You know, it becomes this domino effect of questions. That's extremely overwhelming. One of the things I loved about your book, and one of the things I love about this, this explanation is that it is [00:17:00] compartmentalizing all of these loose ends into these very easily digestible buckets,
Martin Holland: I'll call them.
And that's, that's why I came up with it as much for me as my clients. But my, it resonates with my clients. They know what we're doing and you're always, I'm always cycling through all the, is we've got an issue. Is that a leadership issue? Is that a culture issue? Is that a sales issue? Is there a marketing issue?
Is it, we ran out of cash. Is it, you know, you mentioned insurance, which you got all the ones you need. How do you remember? To renew them next, next year, right? Hopefully your agent calls you, but how do you, I mean, getting organized as a whole kind of a, it runs through all four areas, but how do you remember that?
How do you remember to pay that little franchise fee and that town hall fee? And I'll just give you one story, uh, because if people need to be terrified.
Kate Grandbois: It's being a good terrified. It's healthy fear. [00:18:00]
Martin Holland: It's a healthy, healthy fear. But I have a lady, she's not a speech path. She's in the home care business and she's the most wonderful, kind, Generous person you will ever meet. She is all give, but she decided on her own that she would do her workers compliment comp through her 10 99, have her 10 99, uh, workers, which really aren't IRS issue.
She would have them get their own workers comp. Well, she called me one day and she'd received a letter from the Oklahoma, whatever Bureau of workers compensation. And it announced a fine of 1, 470, 000 because she was out of compliance. And this lady's sales were 500, 000 annually. We negotiated that down to 43, 000.
Oh my God. My stomach just
Kate Grandbois: dap, just
Martin Holland: dipped out. Yeah. That's my point. That's my point. What you don't know about these [00:19:00] things can really get you. I am not trying to scare people off from going into business. I think we had a discussion before we got on that, talked to people I know, I said, had you known everything that you were going to have to do, would you have ever started your business?
And the honest answer was no. Well, I certainly don't want that. I want people who are so inclined to do it. Business owners are the backbone of the country that everything originates with small business owners, in my opinion, but I want them to go in and not have the terror of receiving a letter that finds you for over a million dollars.
And by the way, the last. Sentence of that letter was, please enclose your payment or please return your payment in the enclosing of low.
Kate Grandbois: Oh, that's hilarious. And
Martin Holland: absurd. Yeah, we got it worked
Kate Grandbois: out. So any anybody who is listening or any speech pathologist who is [00:20:00] interested in opening a small business or is already operating in a small business.
Listening to this episode. I think you mentioned this maybe before we hit the record button. You also say this in your book, no one is good at all four of these things out of the gate. So if you, you know, if you're listening and you have this pit in your stomach, I don't know these things. That's okay. I think that that's, you know, we go into these business to do the business, to work with the work with our clients and patients to, um, maybe have more flexibility, maybe to be self employed because we can operate our own schedules.
There are a lot of wonderful things that come with being self employed. And one of the points that you make in the book that I really appreciate is when you identify an area that is a weak spot, there are things you can do to mitigate those, those, those weaknesses.
Martin Holland: Absolutely. And almost universally, or at least the place to start is get help.
And I'm not pitching business coaching here. I'm pitching, [00:21:00] if you're in business and you don't have a CPA, then you need to get one this afternoon. Right. And there are, I talk about different kinds of CPAs or CPAs who just do taxes and they're not of that much help. You do need to pay your taxes, but there are CPAs who will help you keep good books so that you know, if you made money last month, , I make a grand statement, but I'll stick by it.
That 90 percent of the businesses in the United States do not know if they made money last month or last quarter, or even last year. Until they get their tax return. And if says some number that they don't understand because it has depreciation and cash basis and all these things, you must know, you must know.
If you're making money and if you're not, you must know what to do about it. Specifically, is it in our area? My wife's [00:22:00] issue is not finding referrals. We have a huge backlog. It's finding the therapist, right? So there's always something, but you need to know what it is that's holding you back, fix that and then move on.
And if you don't know how to fix it, get an advisor and the minimum, uh, you You should have a bookkeeper, which is not the same thing as a CPA, somebody who can help you with HR, like the lady with a million dollar fine. If she had had an HR person, she had known you can't do that, which she just decided to do.
Uh, you need somebody who can deal with benefits, uh, somebody who can help you. With leadership and developing a culture and recognizing what those things are, but you are exactly right. Nobody is good at all of those things. And even if you're that 1 in a 1, 000, 000, who [00:23:00] is pretty good at him 1, it's not the best use of your time in 2, you can easily get somebody who's a lot better.
If you can keep books, you can for 3, 400 a month. It's somebody who can do a much better job than you.
Kate Grandbois: I think this is, you know, something that I want to expand on a little bit, I suppose selfishly from my own learning experience. Before I launch into my, my comment though, I want to say that our first episode that we did went deep into accounting and how to use your book.
So if you are listening and you want to learn more about that. Please feel free to go earlier into the season. Um, in our episode with Martin, I believe it's called, you can't run your business from your cell phone. So go back in time and your podcast player and find it and to learn more about, um, accounting and using your books to make sure that you know, if you're making money.
The second, the comment that I was going to make selfishly about my own learning experience is that delineated, that [00:24:00] deciding factor. So that moment where you're trying to decide whether or not to hire someone and go get help, right? Because help costs money. And as you're growing a very small business, at first, many of us are doing, we're wearing all the hats.
So we'll wear the clinician or the business owner or the administrator or the marketer or the salesperson. We're the HR compliance officer. We're, you know, we're, we're making all of the decisions, particularly as solopreneurs. And at some point the hats need to start coming off because nobody can do all the things forever, a hundred percent of the time and trying to decide when to make yourself better at something or when to hire out or bring in a specialist and how to make that decision.
Can you tell us a little bit about
Martin Holland: that? Sure. Two, two things. One, you can hire somebody without having to hire them, right? In other words, you can get somebody to help you with marketing without making them an [00:25:00] employee, right? Or you can get a rental bookkeeper. I mean, I have a number that I've put together who work with a lot of my companies and they only cost them some fraction of what an employee would.
Would cost, um, but you're kind of bringing me to the, uh, point we would like to talk about is how do you get started on this? Okay. And I described you before we got on, you just draw a line on a whiteboard and put 3, a horizontal line, put 3. Vertical lines in there, and you've written out 4 quarters for the year.
Right 3 month quarters, and you can sit and say, you know what? After listening today, I haven't emphasized it enough, but if you're not there, you need to start with good books. Okay. So, uh, everybody should start with books. If you don't have good books, you need to have, well, for the first quarter of this year, the next three months, whatever, wherever we start, I am going to do something about [00:26:00] books.
I'm going to call a CPA. I'm going to call a bookkeeper. I'm going to find something out and I haven't spent a penny yet. And what else could I do? I can buy books, meaning paper, audible books, such as mine. I can watch YouTube videos. I can go to webinars. And so what I do is commit a little bit of time each week for three months to learn about books so that your role in the world.
As the owner is very seldom the one who does it, your role will be to recognize if you're being well served. Okay. Marketing is a key place for that applies. There are countless people. You probably get inundated I do every day. They're going to do your SEO, or they're going to do your social media, or they'll design a website.
And there's no doubt they can do all those things. But do they generate leads? And I mean, I measure marketing. [00:27:00] You can measure marketing and bounce rate and hits rates and all this. I measure markets. Have they brought in for sure identifiably, have they brought in more money than they cost me? If not, I'm going, eh, well, it's brand awareness.
I go, you know, the best brand awareness is a satisfied paying customer doing referrals, right? So you can take three months and say, I need to explore this idea of marketing. And I can recommend some books and read, read a book or two. And matter of fact, I just have to mention Donald Miller marketing made simple, so the best there is he is by that book and do what it says.
Okay. And we'll put the link
Kate Grandbois: in the show notes.
Martin Holland: Yeah. Yeah. He's just, he's brilliant. Oh, I can learn some things about marketing and I can learn to recognize what Martin said. The most important thing is to whom am I speaking with my marketing? So why, you know, why [00:28:00] advertise to a mom's group, although they, they matter until you've advertised to that scheduler at the doctor's office.
Again, presuming that you're, Need referrals for insurance, right? So you spend three months thinking about that stuff and take a step get an advisor Maybe you're maybe you are doing some of it yourself. Maybe you take doughnuts to the doctor's office those kinds of things But do that and concentrate on that for three months.
Then the next thing might be whatever the next thing
Kate Grandbois: is Again, not to keep using the analogy of a beach read, but I really love how compartmentalized this is, this approach is in terms of professional development, identifying something that you're, that you're not great at, giving yourself a goal. You know, giving yourself a finite period of time, breaking things up to feel slightly more manageable.
So instead of, Oh my gosh, I'm so overwhelmed. And believe me, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner overwhelmed, sometimes just [00:29:00] becomes your baseline, just becomes like your status quo, because there are always so many things going on. But being able to compartmentalize things and break it down to more digestible, approachable goals is a really wonderful strategy and it makes things feel so much more
Martin Holland: manageable.
There's you can only, you know, there is no such thing as multitasking. I've read a lot of research on that. There's fast switching, but when you've got when you've got to, I mean, that's literally what they found. You cannot. Well, nevermind that's another subject you cannot do all these things. I just mentioned, you can write out all the topics I mentioned.
You can download that. Advisor and mentor checklist mentors checklist from my website and have them there, but you pick one, you pick one and you get better at that one. And you still have to do your speech, your [00:30:00] therapy, and you still have to pay the bills. Yes, you do. You still have to do that. It's the chaos of transition.
But pick one and get better. And then pick another one and get better. And if you use my quarterly thing, by the end of the year, you've done four major things. And you look back and you go, wow, I know, I am a different person. And I thought I than I was at the beginning of the year, there's a lot more. I can learn about marketing.
There's a lot more. I can learn about books. There's a lot more. I can learn about time management, which I threw up under the leadership thing. There's a lot more. I can learn about how to maintain a healthy culture, but you are making progress. You're always looking for the short stave in the barrel that limits how full it can get.
Once you've shorn one up, go look for the next one. Work on that one. But constantly making progress, one thing at a time.
Kate Grandbois: So one of the things that I have found to be really helpful in my own development as a [00:31:00] business owner, and I don't know if you have comments of, you know, something to say about this.
When you're in that early development phase, learning something for the first time, trying to get better, better at marketing for the first time. That's just the example I'm going to use because I'm still terrible. I'm still terrible at it. I think there are a lot of very low cost things you can do to teach yourself.
You've already mentioned YouTube videos, um, having some good books at your fingertips, something, some sort of self study. Um, there's some continuing education about these kinds of things in our fields. I personally have found looking outside of our field to be most helpful in terms of learning about business.
But the other thing that I've found is you, Loosely mentioned coaching, coaching and consultation. So I, for example, earlier in my career, knew someone through a friend who was an accountant and I didn't necessarily have the capital to pay for a weekly bookkeeper, to [00:32:00] pay for a monthly bookkeeper, but this lovely accountant, I paid her for an hour of her time or two hours of her time.
I can't remember, which was much lower cost, lower barrier of entry for me. And she sat down with me. with my books for an hour and taught me some there. It was a class of one on one. She taught me a couple of things about how to use QuickBooks. She taught me some basic fundamentals. I didn't quite understand all of it, but I got, I had some, some guardrails.
I had some, for taxes, definitely don't XYZ. I would definitely do XYZ, some black and white rules I could follow just as guideposts until I got to a point in my business where I could hire a weekly bookkeeper or could hire a CPA. How do you feel like that's a reasonable
Martin Holland: suggestion? 100%. The other thing that you have is a phone number and a relationship, right?
So something happens, you go, whoa. You have somebody to call. That's a good point. They might charge a 75. They might charge you 100 now or something, but that's better than a million dollar [00:33:00] fine. HR is that way too. People make HR human resource decisions all the time. I'm going to hire him.
I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And I'm going to do that. Well, you know what? There's just a whole lot of things you can't do right now. And it behooves you to know what they are. So maybe you get a stab at a, an HR manual, you know, something very bare bones, but you have a relationship. And if you've got an employee who is presenting issues, you have somebody to call rather than just say, well, I'm going to fire you.
That doesn't always go that far, but you have somebody to call. So build those relationships. Another one is a banker. Maybe you don't need money or don't anticipate needing money or scared to borrow money, have a relationship with a banker who can tell you, yes, I can give you a line of credit if you need that because of cashflow issues.
What's cashflow issues? [00:34:00] Well, we're going to call that bookkeeper back, right? Everybody knows what that is, but maybe they don't know how to track it and so on. But, uh, yeah, it's, it's. Establishing the relationship, picking somebody out. That's something you should do in every one of those quarters is who can help me with this.
Can I take somebody to lunch? Can I buy an hour of time and say, can you tell me what things I need to work on? The unfortunate thing is the 1st person you pick all the time may not be the right
Kate Grandbois: one. I am definitely around. Yep. I've had to shop around a lot. Um, I think another. Another thing I found, I don't know if you have.
Anything to say about this, but working with someone who's local. So I know, for example, here in Massachusetts, we have a lot of regulation around a handful of things. We have very strict laws on what constitutes an employee versus an independent contractor. And it's very different in New Hampshire, which is, you know, you know, An hour and a half drive from [00:35:00] my house So I think there is also something to be said for reaching out to a local bookkeeper accountant attorney somebody who knows What regulatory body bodies you're beholden to?
And I say that only because you know now in our digital age with electronic medical records and electronic payroll systems There are Many blanket companies that will give you a service for a low cost subscription and you get quote, you know, HR HR advice at the click of a button, but you're getting an HR specialist who could be in a completely different state who maybe isn't well versed in the nuances of the regulatory bodies in your in your local jurisdiction, for example.
My, the, one of those companies would never had known, have known that I needed to go drop off that duly notarized, tiny piece of paper to my town clerk after being in business, you know, so I, I think there's something to be said for that too.
Martin Holland: Yes, and I, uh, certainly do a lot. I mean, more [00:36:00] than half of my, Coaching sessions are around the country and on zoom and so on, but I like a personal relationship.
I really do. You can call up and say, man, and you anyway, I, that's still me. I think a lot of people are still that way too. I'm not dealing with a computer screen and a website.
Kate Grandbois: In our last couple of minutes, I wonder if you have any additional guiding principles or words of advice for anyone who's listening, who's maybe hearing about the importance of fundamentals of business for the first time.
Martin Holland: I'm going to quote it, quote a guy. Who's, who's book I read recently, uh, he's talking about contractors, but he said, these things that we've just touched on today, you must do, okay, you must do them. You don't have to do them in one day, but you have to make that quarterly progress. [00:37:00] You must do them if you are unwilling to do them.
Don't be in business. Okay. That's a harsh message and I don't want to run anybody off. But by the way, if me saying that runs you off, you probably weren't going to make it through the there are 30 million businesses in the United States. So it can be done. It's tremendously worthwhile in my, but be aware of these things.
So you don't get ambushed and then do them. Because otherwise, the way the guy described it, whose book I'm quoting, he said, everybody wanted to be out for football because you got the uniform. But if you weren't willing to do the work, you weren't playing. Right. And said, you're just better to not do it.
So anyway, that, you know, everybody thinks it's freedom. And, you know, I get set my own hours. I set my own wages. And I take, I had somebody, uh, tell me, oh, you and Diane both own your own businesses. That's so great. You can take off 6 months a year if you want. And [00:38:00] we were at a football game in another state.
And both of us had our computers out. Right. And I said, you know, No clue, but we love it. We love it. Um, most of the time, sometimes it's, it's terrible on the overall it's, we love it. So take the time to figure these things out. And educate yourself and do not expect to become an expert immediately, but educate.
Do you've heard what you've heard about bookkeeping and break even? Maybe you'll start hearing those words. You'll hear people say, wow, and you'll, you just grow like a weed. So I don't know if that was helpful or not, but that's
Kate Grandbois: my closing. It was very, very helpful. And I, every time I speak with you, I feel a wave of, of inspiration that, you know, we can continue to learn and grow.
And for those of us who are business owners, this is professional development. It's outside of what we typically think of in speech therapy as professional development. We think so much about professional [00:39:00] development in a clinical sense. Learning a new therapy technique, reading about a new research article in some sort of assessment method.
Um, but as business owners, this definitely is a different kind of professional development where we're constantly learning and growing and improving our skills. And I just really appreciate you. And I can't, I can't say enough about your book. I know I'm like a broken record at this point, but I appreciate it.
Thank you. Anybody who is listening, all of the references and resources that we mentioned during today's episode will be in the show notes as well as on our website. Um, a link to Martin's book will be on our website. And as a matter of fact, you have a blog post, um, and free download about this exact topic available on your website as well.
So if anybody would like to print it, save it. We will link, um, we'll send a link over to your website for that as well. Thank you again so much for being here. It's always a pleasure to [00:40:00] have you.
Sponsor 2
Announcer: Thank you again to our corporate sponsor, Practice Perfect EMR. Billing, scheduling, documentation, patient communication, business metrics, and more. Practice Perfect EMR specializes in speech therapy practices like yours, connecting everything. Check them out at www. practiceperfectemr. com.
Outro
Kate Grandbois: Thank you so much for joining us in today's episode, as always, you can use this episode for ASHA CEUs. You can also potentially use this episode for other credits, depending on the regulations of your governing body. To determine if this episode will count towards professional development in your area of study.
Please check in with your governing bodies or you can go to our website, www.slpnerdcast.com all of the references and information listed throughout the course of the episode will be listed in the show notes. And as always, if you have any questions, please email us at info@slpnerdcast.com
thank you [00:41:00] so much for joining us and we hope to welcome you back here again soon.
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