In the fast-paced world of entrepreneurship, achieving success often comes with its own set of challenges. From managing business operations to maintaining personal well-being, entrepreneurs face a myriad of obstacles on their journey to success. In this episode of The Agent of Wealth Podcast, host Marc Bautis sat down with special guest Dr. Lance Knaub. The best-selling author of The 4% Break-Thru, Dr. Knaub helps overwhelmed entrepreneurs with 6-figure businesses avoid burnout, and instead create the life they love while scaling by developing a leadership team and creating a self-sufficient business that is an asset.
Dr. Knaub brings a wealth of experience to the table, having transitioned from being a physical therapist to becoming a successful business owner and leadership coach. His journey is not only inspirational but also educational.
In this episode, you will learn:
- How to identify early signs of burnout and prioritize self-care to prevent exhaustion and maintain mental well-being.
- The significance of delegating tasks, documenting processes, and hiring the right people to support business growth and sustainability.
- The necessity of strategic planning in achieving business goals, including developing clear objectives, prioritizing tasks, and allocating time effectively for long-term success.
- Insights into setting boundaries, prioritizing self-care, and making time for personal activities to achieve a healthy work-life balance while pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors.
- And more!
Resources:
Denali Consulting | The 4% Break-Thru | Download a Free Workbook Companion Guide to Lance’s Best-Selling Book | | Bautis Financial: 8 Hillside Ave, Suite LL1 Montclair, New Jersey 07042 (862) 205-5000 | Schedule an Introductory Call
Disclosure: The transcript below has been edited for clarity and content. It is not a direct transcription of the full episode, which can be listened to above.
Welcome back to The Agent of Wealth Podcast, this is your host Marc Bautis. Today I’m joined by a special guest, Dr. Lance Knaub.
Dr. Lance Knaub, best-selling author of The 4% Break-Thru, helps overwhelmed entrepreneurs with 6-figure businesses avoid burnout, and instead create the life they love while scaling by developing a leadership team and creating a self-sufficient business that is an asset. Lance founded Breakthru Physical Therapy + Fitness, which is now operated by his leadership team.
Dr. Knaub’s first publication, The 4% Break-Thru, includes all of his hard-earned lessons with entrepreneurs and leaders to help them save years of time, avoid burnout and overstress, and prevent them from joining the 96% of small business owners who fail within 10 years.
Dr. Knaub, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to dive in on all of this.
Yeah, I am as well. Burnout is real, and we talk to a lot of business owners experiencing it, and they’re not sure what to do. To start off, can you tell us a little bit about yourself… How did you advance from Physical Therapist and owner of a physical therapy and fitness business to coaching as a revenue stream?
Dr. Knaub’s Entrepreneurial Journey
As you mentioned, I’m trained as a physical therapist, and so is my wife. I grew up in a rural part of Pennsylvania in New York County, Pennsylvania, on a little 40 acre farm in Spring Grove. Went to York Catholic High School, went to Rutgers College, had an opportunity to study physical therapy abroad, and I really didn’t think I had an entrepreneurial bone in my body. I was a thousand percent focused on becoming the best clinician possible and really mastering my craft. So I did that for the first few years after graduating and became board certified, got my doctorate on evenings and weekends, and then had a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit rise up in me and I felt like I could create something better. My wife felt the same way. So we really wanted to uniquely bring fitness together with physical therapy. So we rented a 300 square foot base within a fitness center the size of an average bedroom, and we were very frugal.
Our startup costs were less than $2,000. Within about a year, we bought the fitness center that we were renting from. And then over the next few years, thanks to some good mentors, I studied partnership and we stayed on track and I really started to fall in love with the entrepreneurial part of things and we really grew and scaled. And in 2018, one of our partners took over the CEO role, which allowed me to spread my wings. However, there were some real challenges along the way, right? In 2011 we had our third child and we had three locations, about 30 employees, and I was working round the clock, just abusing my body as many entrepreneurs do, just really not sleeping enough really. Sleep was wake up, back exercise was non-existent, eating well, and my body revolted. My GI system, my digestive system stopped working and I was helpless. So fortunately it was temporary and I had to go through endoscopies and roll out cancer and Crohn’s and celiacs, but that’s really my message even as a physical therapist, personal trainer, and in that industry, I want to help entrepreneurs stay healthy while they scale because fortunately for me, then when our partner took over the CEO hat, I was able to create a self-managing company and now move into a lot more lifestyle, geographic and even financial freedom. I’m loving serving other entrepreneurs through coaching who are feeling some of these stresses.
Yeah, your path sounds like it’s common that we see among a lot of entrepreneurs. I think one of the differences though is that you wound up, it looks like embracing the entrepreneurial or the business running a business side of it. We see a lot of business owners who they’re almost like accidental business owners. They love whether it’s being a physical therapist or like a CPA and they love preparing tax returns and all of a sudden it grows and to the point where now they’re having to devote a lot of time to running the business, and that’s probably what leads to some of this burnout.
What is burnout, and what are the common signs and symptoms of burnout?
Understanding Burnout
Burnout became an official medical diagnosis within the last five years, ICD 10, they call it in the medical world. But really there’s three basic characteristics that are part of the classic definition, low energy, like mental distance, like retracting and pulling yourself back really. Lastly, a feeling of negativity and cynicism. Of course, there’s physical components. For myself, I mentioned gastric and digestive problems are part of it. So I think keeping your antenna up and knowing the early warning signs because many entrepreneurs are so good at putting themselves last. Unfortunately, we’re just supporting everyone else, and as you say, we’re wearing multiple full-time hats. So even if we are the world’s best accountant or attorney or doctor, when you’re wearing the director of operations and the director of marketing and the director of finance and probably the CEO had all these full-time roles, when you have a growing organization, you’re really setting yourself up for failure. So that’s sort of the definition some areas to look for. So when you’re mentally just drained and not feeling right and you’re starting to feel some physical signs, really low energy, like you’re in a constant fog, don’t ignore some of those symptoms. Take some action and prioritize yourself a little bit more sooner.
In your experience, what are some of the main causes of burnout among entrepreneurs?
Really, it’s an unbalanced lifestyle. If you look at some of the biggest tenants in health, mental health, nutrition, sleep, exercise, and then posture and even play and laughter, all of those things get really hammered with the entrepreneurial lifestyle. Often in my book, I caught it, no life syndrome. I really didn’t have any time for myself. So I think you could do a self-assessment right now and say, how are you doing with your mental health? Are you taking some time for yourself to do some meditation mindset work? How’s your nutrition? How’s your sleep? How’s your exercise? I’m 52 now, and I was just watching Peter Atia now for the healthcare people. He’s really the foremost physician leading the longevity charge, and he slices those main pillars and just to share some good news. So even though you might not be doing perfect on all those, exercise is probably the biggest opportunity for us, and that’s in our control.
We can really control exercise and for quality life and lifespan, just lifestyle in general, it was generally thought to be like 70 to 80% of our quality life and lifespan attributed to lifestyle. So more recent studies have shown it’s probably even higher. It’s in our control. We can’t blame our parents. It’s not like nature versus there’s a lot of nurture. It’s not just nature. So think about those basic areas and how you’re doing and start to make some small changes, make some time for yourself. But of course that goes back to getting some fundamentals in place, probably deciding in advance what’s most important to you. And then also building the business fundamentals. Do you have some structure to the company? Do you have processes? Do you have systems? Do you have a business plan that you’re executing against? Are you actually measuring your marketing? I just spoke to someone earlier today and they were like, if you’re not actually measuring against your marketing, it’s just an expense rather than an investment, you’ll never get return on investment. And then lastly, are you integrating those health areas? However you want to slice ’em the way I just did or the way Peter Atia does?
Yeah, I want to dive into some of those about systems processes. But before that, as you’re going over making time for yourself, and not to try and tie this back to financial things, but the exercise sounds a lot like budgeting. When you put together a budget, you have money coming in and you got to figure out where’s the best place for that money to go to and avoiding burnout or improving it. It’s almost like there’s 24 hours in a day. Where are you spending your time? I’m sure some people do an audit on themselves, they’ll find out that they’re not getting enough sleep or they’re not getting enough exercise, they’re not having time for themselves, and maybe is an exercise in reallocating where their time is going.
Yeah, thousand percent. I’ve never heard anyone make this connection and I love it. So Sage, the fifth step in my book is called a success schedule. In my process that I help entrepreneurs and with, once they’ve done some of this introspective work, then it’s really a time map. They’ve got to commit to where they’re going to do things, what their priorities are, and make them non-negotiable, their sleep, their exercise, their family, right? Because there’s a high divorce rate among entrepreneurs, all these things get compromised. So that is such a good analogy, and you’re never going to be a hundred percent no matter where you allocate your resources, but if you don’t have that framework, you will absolutely go off the rails.
And especially I think the exercise is good because it just gives people visibility the same way you do a budget and you’re like, whoa, I didn’t realize I was spending this much on this category, this category to go through that I didn’t realize I was only exercising 30 minutes a week or only sleeping six hours or five hours a night. And a lot of times, that’s the motivation that helps people reprioritize, like you said,
Totally. Even when you or are in the trenches and you’re just caught in the hamster wheel and you’re stuck in the trap in the cycle, you may not even be looking backwards to analyze and to learn and look forward, right? You’ve got to break out of the day to day, take a half an hour and look back on your schedule the following week because where you actually spent your time is where your priorities are. You could say that they’re your family or they’re your health or whatever, but your actual time spent does reveal the truth.
Yeah, you can’t avoid the truth.
Right, time and numbers will reveal it.
The 4% Break-Thru
Now, let’s talk about your best-selling book, The 4% Break-Thru. Can you explain what the 4% represents in the context of overcoming burnout?
For sure. So as I was working on the book and just really paying all the lessons and skills forward, I didn’t have a working title. I didn’t have any idea of a title. And over time, I’m a big Michael Gerber fan, the author of the E Myth Revisited, which you kind of alluded to, right? He’s the one that coined the term working on the business versus in the business. And the data he uses is 80% of small businesses fail in the first five years. And by the way, if you’re not 20%, don’t get too excited because 80% of that 20% fail in the next five years. So if you actually do the math, it’s 96% of small businesses unfortunately fail within 10 years. So that’s where that came from. And really when you look at other studies, the results vary, but there’s a very high failure rate. And just on the flip side of it, if you look at franchises, the success rate is the opposite, 90 plus percent. So there’s probably some reasons for that like capital and resources, but 90 plus percent is pretty atrocious. And that’s actually really my big audacious mission to really help reverse that number. So 96 plus percent of entrepreneurs who have small businesses and doing entrepreneurial things can actually succeed.
So even if we go through a couple of the topics in the book, one of ’em, like you mentioned Michael Gerber and the e visited, you’re big on documenting processes and systems. Do you see that that’s one of the things that a lot of business owners don’t have in place and are something that they should need?
For sure. Absolutely. And it’s kind of like that audit, definitely processes are not easy, and I’m sure many people listening have seen the profit and Shark Tank, and even when Marcus Lemons on the Profit was buying a franchise business. And even for me, I considered both ends of franchising, franchising my physical therapy company as a franchisor and being a franchisee, but certainly many franchisors don’t even have their processes established. So in today’s world with ai, it’s a lot easier and definitely work through your teams because let some of your best people actually just document what they do every day. So it can be a more realistic task. And you can also start with a checklist and you can take advantage of video and just have you or some of your teammates start outlining your top 10 processes and make a video for them and then have AI transcribe it and start to build a library. So the answer is yes, it’s very common not to have everything documented, but in today’s world, there’s a lot of easier ways that you can start to build your systems because again, in Michael Gerber language, which many people know Michael Gerber, you want to build your business like a franchise, even if you don’t want to franchise it, you want to be that organized. You want to be like the McDonald’s, which is the most widely known business for excellence and processes.
I think you make a good point about having your team document a lot of what they do, and that’s probably one of the problems that business owners have is that at first they don’t like to give up control because it’s just they feel they can do it probably better than anyone else can. When in reality, if you create a good team, if you surround yourself with a good team, they can probably do it better than you can
For sure. And if they’re the ones doing the process, definitely, and you’re empowering them, and then you can teach them to do one process, and then they can do all the processes in their department. And by the way, then they might be able to oversee somebody in a different department and support them and their team in writing the processes. And pretty soon you’ve got a complete library of your processes.
And something you mentioned earlier was about putting together a business plan. I’ve seen this go through different ways of doing it. I’ve seen everything from the one page business plan to the a hundred page business plan. Is there a right way to do it? And what are some tips on putting a business plan together?
Yeah, you are really going to the heart of some things I’m passionate about and love. So thank you for bringing this topic up because from a high level, just to get everyone’s interest, what I’ve identified in five years is less than 2% of entrepreneurs are doing business plans. So I think it’s not an accident that’s close to the same number of entrepreneurs that fail. And I was fortunate enough to be mentored in a traditional business planning process. One of my physical therapy patients, she was on a shoulder patient on an arm bike. And in 2004 when we just started, she said, Lance, do you know what the company mission is? And do you know what your vision is and who are your target segments? And I was just like, I think so. I’m not sure, maybe. And she’s like, well, I’d be happy to help you document all this and create a business plan.
And I took her up on that and she became a mentor and we’re still great friends. And for the 13 years that I was, the operator breakthrough got better and better at a traditional plan. Now in 2018, when I started to help other entrepreneurs, I realized that even for Denali, I had a 50 page business plan. It was a little too bulky. So I boiled down the process and I did add one simple step, which is for an entrepreneur to think about their cause, their reason, their why, their purpose, their priorities, and I want them to look through that lens. And then I do believe they can go through a strategic planning process in under two hours because it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It’s really easy to create something that’s functional, but your strategic time cannot be zero. It’s kind of like standing on the mountain.
If you just run down one side of the mountain, you might run into the enemy’s strongest troops. So it probably can be less than 10% of your year, your month, your week, and your day, but it can’t be zero. So that’s a really quick backstory of how I created what I call a jolt, a fast and functional planning process, and I should call it a life and business plan. By simply adding that first lens to look through the entrepreneur’s priorities, I think it becomes a life and business plan, and I guess connected to your world. I’ve heard some financial planners talk about similarly rather than just sort of help people blindly reach their financial goals when they really know the why behind the people they’re serving, I think it becomes a lot more powerful in your world as well.
Yeah, I think it comes up a lot too because everyone thinks of a financial plan and they think of the numbers, the quantitative aspect of it, can I retire by this age or will I run out of money? Or How much should I save here? And it’s all definitely necessary data to calculate, but always ask that question of what’s important to you and get to the qualitative stuff. Is it leaving a legacy? Is it setting up an education foundation for their grandkids or whatever it is? We call it this advice value stack where you’re trying to, you have the numbers at the bottom of it, but you’re really trying to go up that stack to get to the why. I don’t think anyone is on their deathbed and says, oh, I wish I would’ve worked more. I wish I would’ve saved more money. So yeah, it definitely correlates on the financial side as well.
And along that topic for your audience, there’s a great book that I’ve just gone through twice Die With Zero by Bill Perkins, and rather than to get the maximum net worth, he advocates trying to get the maximum life experiences. And I totally resonate with this because so many people save too long and he actually recommends using a life expectancy calculator and just making sure that you are living along the way. Are you familiar with that and what are your thoughts on it?
Yeah, so our company has our own little book club. We’ll do one book every month or every other month and Die With Zero is the one we did a couple months ago. It was actually recommended to us by a client. It’s a different way of looking at it, and I think it’s a way that people should look at that at it. But one of my favorite parts was everyone thinks of dividends as a company pays a dividend and the dividend can be reinvested and it compounds over time. Well, he says there’s an important thing called the memory dividend. So you have an experience, you have a memory, and that memory builds over time and it keeps paying back. You might be with those same people years from now and you relive it and you really have that great experience. And like I said, it’s just a different way of thinking about it. But yeah, I thought that was a great book
And you sparked my memory on the memory dividends so valuable for all of us really to think about, you’ll have your memories for the rest of your life, but there’s a lot of things that will come and go.
Leadership and Team Development
Yeah. Now, you mentioned about how important the leadership team is or the team that you have. What are some tips, I guess, for, because we talked about earlier, the CPA or the doctor or the attorney, they’re used to doing the job, the job that they know how to do, but if they can build a strong leadership team or strong team in general, I think it can one, put together a more effective business, but also help them scale.
The medical world has the advantage of a practice manager, dental offices and physician offices. They’re kind of set up where that’s the normal style. And a practice manager, it’s beautiful because they’re kind of like the operator. They literally know marketing and finance and ar, accounts receivable, accounts payable, human resources. So they’re really the operator in franchise language. So take advantage, make sure you have a good practice manager if in that setting, if you’re in another industry, then map out your chess board, your org chart, your org structure, and just realize what hats you’re in and then have those position descriptions laid out so that you can rapidly replace those roles because you will not be able to grow your accounting practice, your law, practice, whatever it is, and wear all those hats together. As we’ve talked about earlier, you have to decide where your passions are.
And by really dreaming and declaring your vision in advance, it’ll be fun because some of you may similar to me, fall in love with the entrepreneurial part of things. And in 2023, it was the first year that I actually did zero treating, and that was a big change because even in 2018 when I handed off the CEO hat, even though I didn’t have those leadership hats within Breakthrough, I was still doing some of what I was trained in. And I was obviously been very passionate about being a physical therapist as a clinician. So you’ll continue to have to reevaluate and decide really what you want to do.
And I think having that strong team in place, it kind of lends itself to, I think in your book you say the most fundamental concept in business is perfect, the product and carve time to focus on the business. Everyone knows how to work in the business, but it seems like it’s challenging to actually implement.
Totally. No, I mean, just breaking out of the chaos is not easy. So I can think of a small business with two owners right now who are hiring some people to their team. And what we’ve done for them, just as a step one, is create an agenda for a CEO meeting. And they don’t even like to use the word this particular entrepreneur like CEO, but we’ve created just a few basic things. So from a high level, they can look at their finance and their personnel and their marketing slash demand creation and just step back once a week for 15 to 30 minutes to start to look at some of these bigger things, quality assurance, compliance. So that’s a good way. You really have to just free yourself up from the time, make it a priority, and just know what parts of the business you’re going to look at it, because you also have to be realistic. If you spent two hours laying out all these functions, there’s just, most small businesses don’t have enough arms and legs. They don’t have enough resources to do massive amounts of work. So be realistic, 15 to 30 minute meeting as you’re in your CEO hat, whatever term you want to use, operator executive, and then you’re going to need at least 30 to 60 minutes a week to start to follow through on those priorities that you lay out.
Is it as simple as just taking all the things that the owner or the CEO does, listen them down and kind of knocking them out in those 30 to 60 minutes and saying, okay, I spend time doing this, this, and this, and this may be something if I had a, like you said, practice manager or someone in that role or in a different role that I could delegate to them and they would be able to do, is that the best kind of approach to actually breaking up all the things that a CEO or owner is doing?
Yeah, definitely. That’s a great way to hire that first person. They may not be in an exclusive hat. Let’s say you hire an executive, they may be your director of operations and your director of finance. So besides doing the roles, then to really prepare to hand them off, you do need to have the expectations laid out in writing. And of course, you need to financially have enough profit that, and I just heard a great suggestion this past week, somebody recommended literally putting money into an account as if you were paying that next role and do that for three months. And then not only do have, you’ve proven that you can support it, but now you actually have a little buffer to go with.
I like that approach. One of the things, right? It’s the chicken or the egg. I want to hire someone, but there’s no money to hire someone. And taking that approach of setting that money aside, you kind of learn to run the business without that money going into this side bucket. And like you said, you also now have the money there that you can at least get started or so that you can get started, and it doesn’t put you in the hole or behind financially. So that’s a great tip.
Awesome. Yeah, no, that’s good. But you’re right, it’s so hard to break out of the noise and just all these moving day-to-day parts. So that’s why to me, there’s no one right way to do it. I think to answer your question, but you really do have to have probably a framework that you’re going to follow or an expert that’s done it before. And for me, it’s very simple on this part. It’s build your chessboard, your org chart and then start to put in the expectations or position descriptions and make sure they match, and then those processes and then that business plan. And then lastly, a skills gap assessment. You have to be eyes wide open on what gaps you’re going to have, and it may be finance or legal, whatever it is, just know it and then keep working, just like we talked about with the bank account towards being able to support that role because really mature companies, I can remember looking at some commercial real estate for our locations, and the person that showed me around, he was just confident in his company and the words he said were, we’ve got one person for every role because most companies, you’re wearing multiple hats.
So he was just really confidently saying, we’ve come to the point where the director of operations is not wearing three other hats and so on and so forth.
And you’re alluding to, it’s not something that happens overnight, but you have to get started, and that’s always the hardest part of doing all this, but break it up into chunks and get started and just have that as part of the business plan or as part of the path just over time, work to that and it can lead to success over time.
Alright, Lance. That’s all of the questions I have for you today. Thank you for joining me on The Agent of Wealth, and providing valuable tips on how to avoid burnout and go from stress to success. How best can the listeners learn more about what you do, and where can they pick up a copy of your book?
Well, thank you for having me. For everyone listening, please make sure to follow and subscribe to The Agent of Wealth. What Marc is doing here is so valuable, connecting financial acumen with health, and really serving the community’s needs.
I’m available on LinkedIn and Instagram as Dr. Lance Knaub, or on our website, denaliconsultingteam.com. For anyone trying to figure out a life and business plan but doesn’t have any strategic work in place, I’ve got the framework that I mentioned at denaliconsultingteam.com/jolt. Anyone who actually really rolls up their sleeves and takes a first cut at it, I will offer a complimentary, 30 minute strategy call to help navigate you through it. Please take some strategic action. That’s one of the things I really recommend.
Great, we will link to that in the resources section of the show notes. Thanks again, Dr. Knaub. And thank you to everyone who tuned into today’s episode. Don’t forget to follow The Agent of Wealth on the platform you listen from and leave us a review of the show. We are currently accepting new clients, if you’d like to schedule a 1-on-1 consultation with our advisors, please do so below.