This week, Will steps to the other side of the mic. He sat down with Dr. Karen Litzy on Healthy, Wealthy & Smart to talk about the year he almost lost his practice, how he built a hiring system that's led to over 1,000 hires, how he handles firing without destroying the relationship, and why the $20 an hour work practice owners keep doing themselves is costing them far more than $20 an hour.

Key takeaways:

• Will Humphreys nearly lost his physical therapy practice in December 2012 after learning he had $5,000 in the bank against $10,000 in bills, a moment that pushed him to rebuild his business from scratch.
• He credits joining Entrepreneurs' Organization and being paired with a mentor for turning his practice around, growing it from 2 locations to 5 and reaching approximately $5 million in revenue while working fewer than 20 hours a week.
• Will describes his early hiring approach as the "fogged mirror rule," meaning he hired almost anyone with a pulse because he assumed every hire would share his own work ethic.
• His current hiring framework starts with building an "ideal hire" avatar document, followed by a job scorecard based on the Topgrading methodology developed by Brad Smart.
• Will argues most practice owners don't actually have a hiring problem. They have a lead generation problem, since most owners already know how to close a good candidate once one is in front of them.
• He built a recruiting pipeline for his Arizona practice by forming relationships with physical therapy universities, specifically targeting each program's third-year class president as a key connector.
• On firing, Will's philosophy is to set expectations for an exit on day one of employment, framing himself as "a steward of the win-win relationship" between the employee and the company rather than making it personal.
• He uses a quarterly gut-check question borrowed from Vern Harnish: "Would I emphatically rehire this person?" A "maybe" counts as a no.
• Will founded Virtual Rockstar, a company that places virtual assistants into physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and dental practices to take non-clinical work off owners' plates. The company now has over 300 VAs supporting close to 400 practice locations.
• He cites a Harvard study estimating that clinic owners doing $30-an-hour work themselves are conservatively leaving $750,000 in profit on the table over time.
• Will frames profit and purpose as "two sides of the same coin," arguing that ethical billing and sustainable profit are what allow practice owners to pay their teams well and stay in the mission long term.
• He sold his practice in 2018 for $7 million and later reinvested in Virtual Rockstar to help other healthcare entrepreneurs delegate and scale.

If nobody ever taught you the business side of running a healthcare practice, start here.

Learn more about Rockstar and grab a free discovery call: https://www.rockstarglobal.com/

Get the book Rise, Stand and Lead, and find more episodes of the Will Power Podcast at the same link.

Original conversation: Healthy, Wealthy & Smart with Dr. Karen Litzy

Connect with Dr. Karen Litzy at https://healthywealthysmart.libsyn.com/ and karenlitzy.com/

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