Episode 1546 - Next gen: growing & scaling your business

Alan Fredendall // #LeadershipThursday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE COO Alan Fredendall highlights the key principles behind growing & scaling your practice, using McDonald's as an unlikely but successful example.

Take a listen to the podcast episode or read the full transcription below.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 ALAN FREDENDALL Good morning, PT on ICE Daily Show. Happy Thursday morning. Hope your day is off to a great start so far. My name is Alan. Happy to be your host today. Currently, I have the pleasure of serving as Chief Operating Officer. I'm a faculty member in our fitness athlete division. We're here on Leadership Thursday. We talk all things practice, management, ownership, small business, leadership, that sort of thing. Leadership Thursday means it is also Gut Check Thursday. Gut Check Thursday this week is a workout I actually did this past Monday. It is 9, 15, 21 calories on a rowing machine, power snatches with a barbell, 75 pounds for gentlemen, 55 pounds for ladies, and pull ups. Ascending reps game automatically. You should proceed with caution as you get more tired. The reps go up, something we don't like to see too often. Also very redundant in this workout on pulling and grip, right? Pulling on the rower, you have grip on the barbell, and then you have grip and pulling up on the pull-up bar. So it gets redundant, gets really grippy, even with that light barbell. That barbell should be so light you could do all of those rounds unbroken if you really needed to. Maybe one break in the round of 15, maybe one or two breaks in the round of 21. Definitely should be aiming to get that workout done under or around the 10-minute mark. I did that, rested three minutes, and then did 9, 12, 15, rested three minutes, and did 6, 9, 12. I don't recommend doing the extra two rounds. Just stick with the 9, 15, 21. That's plenty of fitness for the day. Courses coming your way from us here at IEFCE. I want to highlight our Extremity Management division led by Lindsay Huey, Mark Gallant, and Cody Gingrich, the newest lead faculty to join the Extremity Management team. You can catch those three out on the road this fall. A couple of different courses coming your way. September 9th and 10th, Mark will be down in Amarillo, Texas. Lindsay will be out in Torrington, Wyoming. The next weekend, September 16th and 17th, Mark will be on the road in Cincinnati, Ohio. The weekend after that, Lindsay will be on the road September 23rd and 24th in Twin Falls, Idaho. The first weekend in October, the 7th and 8th, Lindsay will be up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and Mark will be in Rochester, Minnesota. November 11th and 12th, Mark will be down in Woodstock, Georgia, which is north of Atlanta, kind of out in the suburbs. The weekend of November 18th and 19th, Mark will again be on the road, this time in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. That's a little bit southeast of Nashville. Cody's first weekend as a lead faculty in the division will be the weekend of December 2nd and 3rd. That'll be out in Newark, California. That's the Bay Area, the Fremont area. And then December 9th and 10th, the last chance to catch extremity management for the year will be in Fort Collins, Colorado with Lindsay. So that's what's coming your way from the extremity division. 03:21 GROWING & SCALING YOUR PRACTICE Today we're going to be talking about hiring from the viewpoint of growing and scaling your practice. And I want to highlight the McDonald's story. So I want to talk about kind of what's always in our mind when we're thinking about growing our team, which is that little voice in the back of our head that says, geez, I hope the person that I hire is mostly like me, right? When we think about growing our team, we're often thinking about how to basically mirror or replicate ourselves. And while that's not 100% possible, that is the goal as we grow and scale. That what we're really talking about when we're bringing new people on the team, we're growing our current practice. We're thinking about maybe even a second location. We're thinking about maintaining our standards of how we run our business, of how we practice physical therapy and preserving our company's culture. So we're going to talk about the who, the what and the how. The who today is going to be McDonald's. Yes, McDonald's, the Golden Arches, the fast food company. The what is going to be talking about how they grow and scale their businesses. And the how is going to be the foundational training that every member of the team has, how that relates to your team as a physical therapist growing your practice and how shared belief systems are really important. So as a company grows, those things tend to get diluted over time. Over multiple generations of leaders and employees, teammates, whatever you want to call the folks who work with you. As we tend to get many generations deep, we noticed a subtle decline in quality and culture of when you first went to the business, when it was a single owner operator, you knew the owner. You knew how things went. You had a relationship with that person. And maybe when you come back to that business, our business in this case being physical therapy, maybe you can't see that provider before. Maybe their schedule is full and they offer to have you see another provider. As the customer is the end user, how do we know that that person is good as the first person? And how do we know that the 10th person is as good as the third person? And so on and so forth. And unfortunately, what we see happen is companies tend to grow, especially as they tend to grow to new locations and maybe even start to franchise. We see that that stuff just gets diluted over and over again until the current business that we are going to no longer resembles the initial encounter with that business. Maybe even to the point that as the customer is the end user, we decide not to give that business our money anymore. So how do we avoid that? How do we avoid the customer coming to that conclusion? 07:26 THE WHO: MCDONALD'S Well, we need to start with the who. We need to start with McDonald's. If you're not familiar with McDonald's, we'll talk about that and we'll talk about how they grew and really the foundations that allow them to grow there. So love or hate them. Everybody has their thought immediately in their mind, their knee-jerk reaction about McDonald's, but they certainly know how to run a business. They know how to deliver a consistent product. That product, at least in my personal opinion, may be quite mediocre. But dang, when you go to McDonald's in Texas or McDonald's in Michigan or McDonald's in Seattle, it doesn't matter. McDonald's in Hong Kong, it is maybe mediocre, but it's consistently mediocre, right? A McDonald's hamburger in Texas tastes the same way as a McDonald's hamburger in New York and the fries are the same and the experience of purchasing from McDonald's is largely the same as well. So they know how to deliver a consistent product and we want to figure out how they do that. They also certainly know how to grow. McDonald's has been in business for 83 years, almost 100 years of continuous business. We've talked here on Leadership Thursday before about how many businesses don't make it to the one-year mark, to the five-year mark, that about the 10-year mark, 75% of all businesses are gone. They have gone out of business before they reach the 10-year mark. So to have been in business almost 100 years continuously is quite impressive. They are the largest restaurant business in human history. They have $24 billion a year in gross revenue. Now that is an amount of money that can be hard to conceptualize. Let me break it down for you. If you haven't heard of ATI Physical Therapy, they are the largest chain of physical therapy clinics in the world. They only grow $600 million a year in annual gross revenue. So any town that is big enough to have a McDonald's, a Walmart, probably also has an ATI Physical Therapy for reference. Nonetheless, McDonald's is almost 40 times larger. They are present in 120 of the 195 countries on the planet, and they are the fourth largest employer in human history. Of the largest employer on the planet currently is Walmart. The second is the Chinese Government Railroad. The third is the Chinese Government Police Service, and the fourth is McDonald's. So of the jobs that you could currently get, you can't go work for the Chinese Government Railroad or police service. You can't just go drop an application and start. We're talking about the second largest American-based employer on the planet. Now if you haven't seen the movie The Founder, I highly recommend you watch that movie. It's one of my most favorite movies. Every time I watch it, I take something away from it. Came out in 2016, and it's really kind of the tale of the start of McDonald's and the growth of McDonald's across the country and ev