Fitness Matters: A Deming Success Story (Part 1)

Travis Timmons shares with host Andrew Stotz how a decade of frustration running his physical therapy practice turned into joy once he discovered Deming's philosophy and embraced systems thinking. Through PDSA cycles, clearer processes, and genuine team involvement, he transformed Fitness Matters from chaotic growth to a scalable organization getting stellar outcomes. His story shows how small businesses can create stability, joy in work, and remarkable results by improving the system rather than pushing harder. TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest Travis Timmons. Travis, are you ready to tell us about your Deming journey?

0:00:19.7 Travis Timmons: Hey Andrew, thanks for having me. And yeah, very excited to share our journey and how impactful it's been on both our company, but also me personally and my family. So, super excited to kind of share where we started before Deming and where we're at today. So I'll just dive right in if that sounds like a good...

0:00:39.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think just for the audience here, I'll just mention that Travis is physical therapist, founder and president of Fitness Matters in Columbus, Ohio, going on his 27th year of business. And you know, you and I have had some discussions. You've had a lot of great things that you've written and we've gone through and I think it's really an exciting story, particularly for a small mid sized business owner who's just frustrated as hell that things aren't going the way that they want. And I think your frustration a long time ago was a driving force. So I'm excited for you to share your story. So yeah, take it away.

0:01:22.6 Travis Timmons: Yeah, very excited. Yeah, 2000 is when we started, January 2000. So coming up on 27 years, as you mentioned, do physical therapy and wellness. And the first 10 years I was in business, pretty good at being a physical therapist. Started my own business and had no idea how to run a business. I knew a lot about physical therapy, but just kind of shooting from the hip in regard to business. Spent about a decade struggling, frustrated. We were growing, but growing slowly, growing chaotically. No process, it was just a, it was a heavy burden, to be honest with you. We were growing, but it was kind of Herculean effort on my part.

0:02:10.1 Andrew Stotz: I'm just curious how you were feeling at that time. Like there's gotta be a better way or this is the way business is and I just gotta muscle through this or how were you feeling at the time?

0:02:21.0 Travis Timmons: I was feeling frustrated and isolated. Didn't quite know where to turn. Yeah, I guess that's how, and just a burden. Didn't want to let the team down, I did not want the business to fail. I knew we had something different to offer. Just really had no idea how to scale that in a professional way. And along the journey was very fortunate to have a client who had a very successful business, took me under his wing. Ray Crook is his name. Started mentoring me and as luck would have it, he was familiar with Dr. Deming and a very long story short, after several meetings with him over time, some mentoring, I'd read the book along the way, the E-Myth Revisited and had some learnings from that book that really jumped out at me and came to the conclusion, both with reading that book and some feedback from Ray of basically, hey, it's time to grow up and turn this into a real business. If you're going to do this, let's do it right. And at that, around that time he introduced me to Kelly Allen with the Deming Institute. And you know, so we were 10 years into some chaos, had really no process, just would try stuff, see if it stuck or didn't.

0:03:43.5 Travis Timmons: If that didn't work, didn't really have any way to measure if stuff was working well. So really just a lot of chaos. And became introduced to Deming through Kelly Allen about 10 to 11 years into our journey and man, was that a breath of fresh air in terms of like having a direction to go in. After a few meetings with Kelly, him getting a better understanding of what was important to me, I think him just really understanding that I was serious about wanting to turn our organization into a large, professionally run and well run organization that would have a positive impact on people's lives, both team members and clients. I think he kind of, I think that we were so bad off he took pity on me to begin with, just to be honest with you, and he was like, man, this guy needs a lot of help. He could do some good in the world with what the services they have to offer. But if he doesn't figure out how to run a business professionally, they're never going to scale.

0:04:44.0 Andrew Stotz: And it's interesting that you reached out. I mean, there's a lot of people that are stuck in that situation and they really don't, either they don't reach out or they're afraid to reach out or you know, maybe they think there's no solution or nobody's going to help me. And you know, certainly when you're small, you also don't have huge budgets to hire people to come in and fix your business. You know, I'm just curious, like what drove you to even reach out?

0:05:09.8 Travis Timmons: I think I was fortunate enough to, A, have the mentor with Ray. And then secondly, have always been a believer in you got to check your ego at the door and know that you don't know everything. I think I've seen Business owners that are afraid to admit they don't know everything and so they keep things insulated and that just doesn't get you anywhere.

0:05:35.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.

0:05:36.3 Travis Timmons: So I just was fortunate kind of how I was raised as arrogance isn't a good thing, so check your ego at the door and learn from, learn from people smarter than you. And so I kind of took that fully at heart and like, all right, I have no idea how to run a business. I need to learn how to do that from really smart people. Read a lot of business books over the years, but the Deming philosophy, when I was introduced to that at the two and a half day seminar, went to that. I got to the Deming two and a half day in, I think that was 2013. So I was 13 years into the entire journey by the time I had met with Kelly, done some learning. And then at a time where the Deming two and a half day was offered in Ohio to where I could get to it, to your point earlier, budget plays into things for small businesses. So I was able to drive to that one and that two and a half day seminar just opened my eyes up to things that I knew in my heart but had no idea how to make that happen.

0:06:46.2 Travis Timmons: And what I mean by that, Andrew, is one of the key things I took away from that first two and a half day is Deming's belief that roughly 96% of issues within an organization are not people issues, but they're process and system issues. And that aligned with my worldview of if you hire good people, which we did, they show up every day wanting to do a good job as long as they have a good system and process to work within something that's professionally put together. So that was takeaway number one that really resonated with me. And the person responsible for said system is me. There's no passing the buck as the owner. And that resonated with me. It's a big responsibility to own a business in terms of the people and clients you're responsible for. And there's no passing the buck. You're responsible for the system at the end of the day.

0:07:42.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I remember when I was 24 attending Deming seminar, when I was working for Pepsi, and it was a little bit different situation than yours. I could see, though, the same thing resonated with me. I could see that people were hemmed in by the system. And even though many people in the factory had really good intentions and they wanted to do a better job, they literally couldn't because they didn't have the tools or the budget or the this or the that. And a lot of times it's easy for senior management, particularly in a big company, to say figure it out, your job is to figure it out. But that only goes so far and there's eventually a point of exasperation for people working in a company that, like, I just, there's a limit here and I'm not going to kill myself trying to do something that I can't change. And so it just, I was coming from a very different perspective as an employee in a huge company versus you at a perspective of, this is my company, I set the rules.

0:08:46.5 Travis Timmons: Yeah, can do whatever we want. And you mentioned something there. It reminds me of a quote from that first two and a half day, and it still sticks with me a decade and a half later. Almost a lot of businesses complain about the term. We have a lot of dead wood in terms of employees. And the quote, I remember Kelly sharing this, it's like, well, did you hire dead wood? Because if you did, that's on you. Or did you hire live wood and kill it and that's on you from your standpoint of, from a system. And I'm like, man, 100% true. And I hired, I had good people on our team, but we didn't have good processes to keep from killing that live wood I would say. So, yeah. And to your point on budget, yeah, I had and still do have quite a bit different budget than Pepsi. Right. So one of the other things that jumped out at me early on that made Deming very approachable and something I could engage with very easily as a small business owner was the concept of PDSAs, the Plan-Do-Study-Act.

0:09:58.5 Travis Timmons: That was a game changer for us because I was like, all right, I don't have to hire a big business consultant. We don't have to hire or pay for a bunch of software. There's very simple things we can do via the Plan, Do Study Act PDSA method that we can create systems or improv