How Matt Yahes Went From 14 Hour Days To 3 Hours In 45 Days

Joe: Yeah, I mean, I think so many of us feel that way. You know, you get a private practice going. And then, you know, it starts to grow. And the next thing you know, you’re just working your tail off, you’re checking emails in the evening, you know, as you meet people that are at that phase, like, what are some mindsets, maybe that keep them there. And then I’d love to hear how you kind of deconstructed those mindsets over a really rapid period of time over 45 days. But we’d love to first just start with what are those mindsets that keep people stuck? Working those real– really long days?

Matthew: I think the thing that keeps people stuck is that this is how I felt at least and I talked to people all the time. And I know it’s a very common thing for entrepreneurs. They think and I thought I was special. Right? I thought that I was the only person that could possibly do all these tasks that are so complex, and that I would hire someone it wouldn’t get done as well. And oh my goodness, if it didn’t get done the way I did it, the sky’s gonna fall on the business is gonna fail. And I say– over and over. I talk to entrepreneurs, and they have the same issue. Right, you know, well, I like this done this way. I don’t think anyone could ever do it like like this, you know, this report is critical importance and I have some secret sauce. And you know, they just don’t want to let go. It’s not uncommon. I mean, it was my problem.

Joe: Yeah, so what what did that look like for you? What was hard to let go and then how did you work through that?

Matthew: Well, Oh, what was hard to let go was a lot of the operational efficiency stuff because I enjoy it. Right? Overseeing the customer service team, I shouldn’t say was, wasn’t hard to let go because I, you know, this is three and a half years of those kinds of days. So at the point I was ready to let go was really easy, because I was just exhausted. But throughout the three and half years, I, you know, or anything that was operational efficiency, making the operations run smoother, meaning new ideas for the– for the business, I just couldn’t fathom giving this to someone else. 

Joe: So what do you do? 

Matthew: Well, it’s actually a funny story. So my wife and I were going to China. And we were going on a family trip. And she said, You know, I was working all these– these hours. And she says, I really hope you don’t work on this trip. Right? And are you married you? 

Joe: Yeah, I am. 

Matthew: So I think you’ll agree when your wife says, I hope you don’t do something, it’s really not a hope. It’s kind of like a command. So she said, why don’t you go, you know, you have these people in the Philippines who work for you. Right? And there were lower level people. She said, Why don’t you find something in the Philippines to run your entire business? And I just had a rough like, like a push back immediately, where I said, No way. Listen, there’s just not that kind of talent. Right? Like, I don’t I know a lot of people running similar businesses, and a lot of people that outsource, I don’t know, anyone that’s gotten a high quality operator. And she looks at me with the, you know, the you’re not, you’re not so smart look. And she says, Well, it’s a country of 100 million people. I think there are some people that can run your business for you. Right? I know, the business was doing, you know, mid seven figures and few $1,000 a month. So I said, all right, but grudgingly and what I spent six, eight weeks interviewing 100 people, right going through, you know, countless resumes, until I found one person who really just impressed me. And she was chief of staff or 100 person business. I had a six person company at the time. And I convinced her to work for me. And so she came on board.

Joe: Wow. So what was it that you did that convinced her that working with you and leaving that other company was worth it?

Matthew: There’s a saying and management that people don’t leave companies, people leave people or they leave their managers. And this was the case, it was she was in an environment that where she wasn’t respected, she was overworked. She felt taken advantage of and not appreciated. And somehow I convinced her that things would be different. If and, you know, I see it actually time and time again since then, that people just want a nice environment to work work in. And a lot of the Filipino companies are just not great environments. They’re coming from a situation where it’s on Boss, I’m God. You’re a worker, you’re, you’re stupid. And no one wants any who wants to be like, who wants to be there, right? Like, who wants to get treated like that? And I’m just offering a better way. Or different ways.

Joe: Yeah. And I think this is so common, you know, people listening right now might say, Man, I’m not even that big. Like, why should I even think of outsourcing or things like that. But so I mean, just this week, I was doing a consulting call with somebody. And the person was at the point because their podcast is growing, they’re getting to that next level, they’re ready to do more consulting, but their clinical work is getting in the way. And they have to kind of make a decision. Am I going to just see fewer clients at a higher rate? Or am I going to totally retire from doing counseling, and they’re starting to exit that. But even before that final exit, I think people miss the opportunity when they’re just in that startup mode to be most efficient with their time. When you think about counselors in private practice, or coaches and private practice, what are things that maybe they can outsource that they don’t even realize that they can outsource things that they would be like, I can’t believe I can take that off my plate.

Matthew: Sure. So let me just give you from my own experience on let’s talk about specifically to coaches and counselors. But one thing that coaches and counselors have a great view into, as you know, is what’s their time worth? Right? Because you bill an hourly rate. So are you bill on a session, right? So, you know, it’s my opinion if your time is worth 100 150 an hour, that if you can have someone do everything for do a lot of tasks for you for 17, 18, 19 an hour, you should do it because it frees you up to go make that 125 or 150. So what can they do? Right? Within that pressure, as I just talked about, you can actually get people that can run your entire business, hands down, interface with clients, do all your billing, if you do social media can do that you do blogging can post things for your, they’re not necessarily going to write high quality content that speaks to your audience. But they can certainly distribute it the way you want, right. And they can also act as a buffer for you, between you, and all your clients and everybody. And so you’re able to focus on high quality, high value conversations that make you money. And you let the lower person just manage your practice, or think of it as a practice manager or business manager. 

Joe: Yeah, that idea of a buffer. I think a lot of therapists think, Oh, I answered the phone, I do my own scheduling, I connect with new clients, and they think that’s a value add. But in reality, I think it makes them look more desperate and cheap. I mean, you think about if you had a high quality doctor, and she was doing all her own scheduling, she was, you know, making a copy of your insurance card. At first, you might say, Wow, that’s really, you know, nice that she’s so involved with me, but then you’d probably say, Wait, why she’s so free, that she can do all the scheduling. It’s just, you start to second guess yourself if your dentist was the only one in the office and was like checking you out and billing your insurance. And so and even just like thinking about when someone’s leveling up, and maybe seeing fewer clients, to have your old clients reach out to you and say, oh, I want to come back and work with you. But now your rates twice what it used to be, you’re going to take their sob story and where they’re at, and you’re gonna have that heart around it, knowing that you probably shouldn’t take on those old clients at the old rate. Now, it’s it feels heartless to all of us healers and helpers in the world. But if we look big picture and say, for me to be my best therapist, for me to be my best counselor, I need to do 10 sessions a week at 200 bucks a session, okay, that’s great. If that’s where you need to be, then we need to have that buffer, we need to have that person that can kind of be the bad guy or bad gal, to say, You know what, they’re not taking new clients or they are but they’re at a higher rate than you used to be. We have these other clinicians that we can refer you to, that’s really hard for therapists to do, maybe speak a little bit more about that idea of a buffer. What are other examples of having someone else speak on your behalf and the benefits of that?

Matthew: Well, you can have people, so a lot of in service businesses, right, and at the end of the day, clinician is in the service business, they’re, you know, they’re serving potential clients, with their health, right? With their mental health. So there are people who are just not the right fit, right? You know, for me, I have to I have a buffer, certain potential clients are not the right fit for me. So Angelica could act as an intermediary. So I don’t have to focus on that. And I only focus on the clients that are a value. So I don’t think people should think about it, as you’re removing yourself from the business. Your job, as a clinician is not to run the business, your job is to be a clinician, no one I know of, in any– any sort of service business service oriented business got into it, to do billing, or to filter potential clients who are never a fit. That’s not what you got into it, you got to help people, right, I started my business to help people. And people just need to remember that, right? So you can have someone filter everything for you give better service than you can if a client has a question for whatever it is, having you answer is just have no value. They don’t even have, by the way, they don’t even expect that people are trained to have a buffer outside of treatment time. That’s just how people are trained. I mean, think of when did you ever go to a doctor’s office? Like you said, Joe, and the doctor themselves? You know, gave you the bill? 

Joe: Yeah, 

Matthew: Probably never. Probably never. So think of it like that. So you have a population, which is the entire country trained to know you are the doctor, you help them with problems, everything else goes to someone else. Right. And, you know, when it comes to new business, let’s just say you are at that $200 An hour level. Fantastic. Someone says, you know, hi Doc I can afford $100 Well, if you take that person, you’re crowding out yourself for someone $200 and you and you know and you may feel bad she made like you said take the person, your business manager can say Sure, no problem. Long, our readers $200. Right. Now, they’re not going to play on the business managers heartstrings, because it’s not you, they’re gonna play it pull on your heartstrings, because they know you might say yes. And you know, do the slide.

Joe: It’s like when my six year old and not that our clients are like six year olds, but she knows which one of us at what point of time is going to cave. And you know, if my wife is a little more stressed out, she’s more likely to be like, just go on the iPad, you know, to have that person that can say, no, no, I’m gonna stand here and protect Joe’s time. It’s amazing. I mean, even just thinking about this podcast. So I’m going to do this podcast, I’ve entered your information into our shared schedule. From there, my sound engineer gets triggered to then do the audio to upload it to our hosting, then our show notes coordinator does the show notes and coordinates with guests. And then our image coordinator does all of the image and social media management, literally, when I’m done with this, I’m done with it. And so many even podcasters spend, you know, two or three hours after a show doing their show notes and their editing and all of that. And it’s just you can produce so much more content. When you show up, you do an interview and your done.

Matthew: 100%. Ironically, right before here, I’ve forgotten with you, I had a sales call with podcaster, who I appeared on his podcast. And that is exactly the problem he faces. He has all these tasks pre and post production, and he’s managing it. So what happens, everything gets dropped, because he doesn’t have time. Right? And so the business suffers. And, you know, every business, I don’t care, you know what it is? You’ve never heard of the most successful people in your field, doing it alone. 100% of the time, they have a team, right? If you recognize that, and people say, Oh, well, you know, someone like this, to outsource some tasks, that’s going to cost money. It’s a cost center? Well, yes, it’s true. But think about it a little differently, it actually is an investment to make more money. If that person being there frees up your time to do something else that time as a value. And if that person frees you up to let’s say, grow your business, which ideally, that’s what they’re doing, you now have you make more money, because you made an investment, and your life is better, because you’re doing what you love to do, versus sending out a bill or talking to people that are just tire kicking your service.

Joe: Yeah, and I think especially for people that are growing a group practice, they’re moving away from the one on one being there, you know, you know, time in the seat is right when you get paid. And so when you start to say, Okay, if I had two or three other people that were doing counseling during the same time that I was, or even while I’m not, that’s then bringing in money that’s not based on my hourly. And so once you start to add extra clinicians, it’s pretty amazing to see how it scales. Because, you know, I can, you know, market this business and get all five of my clinicians full. I mean, that’s a ton of extra revenue coming in, compared to if you didn’t, and we see that in our group practice boss community all the time, where people are helping each other to level up their group practices. When people think about having a group practice, when and what kind of virtual assistants would you say, will help open up their time to really work on that business? 

Matthew: For me, and this is counterintuitive. In my experience, you hire the most experienced person first that’s, you know, someone who is like a business manager or a practice manager when he’s talking about outsourcing, right? It may be different if you’re talking about onshore people. But the reason you do that, and by the way, again, you’re not talking about I mean, you’re talking about not much more than minimum wage in the United States, right, and you’re gonna get a really good person. So then that person can help coordinate through multiple clinicians can help run the business of the business, which then frees you up, right. I like to say hire the highest paid person first. Then backfill to lower level tasks. And watch how your business grows. Because now you have a partner who’s helping you just do things and you don’t need to give very, very specific direction versus someone that is extremely low level and you have to really spell it out which I can tell you is utterly painful.

Joe:Yeah, I know that having those high level people like Sam and Sam and our team be able to oversee different aspects of it is just essential. They can do the interviews, they can do the onboarding, they can you know help pick out really good talent compared to I remember years ago when I brought in some people that were very entry level you know, to have to manage them felt like such a waste of my time. I’m totally agree with you. So how do you find those kinds of people like what are what actually before that like once you have one of those typing people? How do you make sure that there’s good communication? Because I learned early on that just as much of the problem is my own communication and lack of articulating my expectations as it was the actual person. Early on when I started outsourcing. I just expected people knew how to do it like I wanted them to, how do you encourage people to give feedback, get feedback, you know, have KPIs key performance indicators, versus giving the person a bunch of autonomy? Like how do you think through the ongoing management of those top level people?

Matthew: First and foremost? That’s a great question. First and foremost, you –you need to have standup meetings. Now. Depending on who you are and the size of your business, if you had a very large group practice, it’s gonna look very different than if you’re solopreneur. 

Joe: Right now define, I know what a stand up meeting is, but define that for people that don’t.

Matthew: Sure, you would have a daily meeting call for 10 to 15 minutes maximum, just to coordinate what’s going on for the day. So for one business, I have it for another business idea, and it’s really just about the size. But at a minimum, you need to have weekly meetings, on video with that person coordinating. I encourage it twice a week, or more. But that’s really up to you and the person as to what works best. You also need to have a Task Managers, which is such as Asana, Monday, Trello, all these free to use tools, Monday actually costs money, but the other two are free. All these easy to use tools to organize or task manage. So you can write down exactly what needs to be done. And that you can track when that person finishes it. Lastly, the other thing you need to do, which will be a little bit foreign for most people, is create standard operating procedures. Now this sounds like you’re writing a big dictionary, you’re not. Thankfully, in today’s day and age, you can there really, there are free tools or very low cost tools, where you click a button on your computer, it can record you speaking the task of what you want done, or can even record your video screen. And this is one click this is not very difficult. And when you do the combination of all three, what will happen is the person knows what to do. And over time, they will likely be able to anticipate issues and cut them off before you even know what happened.

Joe: Yeah, I’m with you in regards to that ongoing feedback. And, you know, meeting regularly. Since you know, CMC came out at the beginning, she was my first kind of real hire that wasn’t a consultant. Man, having that feedback and ongoing discussion and ideas. You just get in a great flow with those people, rather than feeling like you have to catch up once a month or every quarter.

Matthew: Well, you know, I would also think of it like this, if you know, first of all, now everybody’s virtual. Right? Not everyone, but many, many people, right? So there’s no difference between sitting in Manila and sitting in Manhattan. Now, if you are down, like Yeah, and also just think of them as another person, right? It’s not, you know, I actually don’t like the term personally virtual assistant because it makes it sound like like not a real person. You if you are on the other side of that, would you like to just get your tasks via email? No, you would like to be part of something. And being part of something requires video requires conversation requires getting to know each other. And through those things, what you’re going to find is that these people will go through walls for you, because they’re happy, they want you to be happy. They’re very family oriented, at least in the Philippines. And over time, they’re just going to know your needs. And I truly enjoy all the people I work with.

Joe: Oh man. Well, the last question that I asked and then we’ll hear a little bit more about kind of a call to action for the audience. But the last question I ask is, if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?

Matthew: Sure, stop thinking you’re special. You gotta get out of the day to day monotony of running your practice. It just does not add value to you, or frankly, your clients, you have a lot more to give. And just remember that remember why you got into the business or the practice in the first place. And just don’t get sucked into working 14 hour days like I did. Or Joe did. There is a better way, you just need help to do it.

Joe: Such awesome advice well, how can people connect with you and hear more about how you can help them?

Matthew: Sure. So if you’re interested in learning more, go to extend your team.com Freedom dot slash freedom. And you’ll see to see our website If you’ll be able to book a meeting with me directly, and I’m happy to just jump on a call, walk you through what this could look like, even if you’re not ready now, don’t worry about it, it’s fine. I really just like helping people to just, you know, grow their business. That’s, it’s a passion of mine. So again, extend your team.com/freedom. And we’ll go through an assessment, you can come contact me at the end. And I look forward to speaking to everyone.

Joe: Thank you so much for being on the practice of the practice podcast, Matt,

Matthew: Thanks. So Joe a lot of fun, really enjoy our conversation.

Joe: While my big takeaways from that interview, are just to continue to push myself to outsource to think differently, to really level up at every single level to try to do what I do best and outsource the rest. You know, that’s a concept I’ve really tried to live. And it’s something we need to be reminded of, you know, whether you’re just starting a business, you know, a lot of times we think we got to be at a certain scale. But for me, I just think you know, it’s so essential to get in early and have people helping you. It also kind of forces you to say what can I give this person if you’re hiring someone for 10 hours a week, and you feel like you only have four hours of work, it pushes you to then find that extra thing to take off of your plate. And honestly, outsourcing and finding team members has been such a great way for me to continue to level up year after year. Well, if you’re looking for a community of people that are going to help you get to that next level, our group, practice boss curriculum community and experts are here for you. Allison and Whitney are two group practice boss leaders. It’s a community of people that are all group practice owners. And so they’ve done their first hire, they’ve already launched their group practice. They are in it. And the conversations going on within this community are just phenomenal. It’s helping you get to the next level. It’s 1099 versus W two is how do you do compensation, all sorts of things that are the nitty gritty, the people have done before. There are some cohorts opening up soon, you can read more over at practice of the practice.com forward slash group, practice boss again, that’s practice of the practice.com forward slash group, practice, boss. And as always, thank you for letting me into your ears and into your brain have an awesome week. Special thanks to the band silence is sexy for your intro music. We really like it and this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered is given with the understanding that neither the host the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you want a professional you should find one.