[00:00:00] Speaker A: We've created an industry.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: As an entrepreneur, I was certainly looking for more.
[00:00:03] Speaker C: The usual story of the immigrant, when.
[00:00:06] Speaker D: It'S scary is when it's great.
[00:00:08] Speaker E: I'm Richard Gearhart.
[00:00:09] Speaker F: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. You just heard some snippets from our show. It was a great one. Stay tuned to hear tips about how you can start your business.
[00:00:19] Speaker G: Ramping up your business.
[00:00:20] Speaker E: The time is near.
[00:00:22] Speaker G: You've given it heart, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:30] Speaker E: I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:37] Speaker F: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups and podcasts.
[00:00:44] Speaker E: Welcome to Passage to Profit the road to entrepreneurship where we talk with celebrities and entrepreneurs about their stories and their business ventures. We have a very special guest, Louis Belanger Martin, and he is the visionary founder of DTI Software, the company that pioneered the in flight entertainment systems, and the co founder of W Investments, a private equity firm based in Montreal, Canada, where entrepreneur founders invest in entrepreneurs. In addition, we have the very special Clint Arthur who is in New York City joining us from his gorgeous Acapulco estate. So we're glad you could make the trip.
[00:01:26] Speaker D: Thank you. Great to be with you.
[00:01:28] Speaker F: And then we have two amazing entrepreneurs presenting Matthew Safeli, physical therapist and founder of Attain Physical Therapy. And he is taking physical therapy where it's needed most. And I think his business model is amazing. I'm not going to talk too much about it because you want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth. And then we have Tonya Taylor, who is a financial coach, author, TEDx speaker, and she has grow your wealth. She is really doing phenomenal things and I love her story, rags to riches. And later on, we'll hear from our friend Alicia Morrissey, a great jazz singer. And we've got Secrets of the entrepreneurial mind.
[00:02:06] Speaker E: Perfect. But before we get to our distinguished guests, it's time for your new business journey. Two in five Americans are thinking about starting a business or are already small business owners. And we like to ask our panel a question that is of relevance to them. So our question this week is going to be why fear is the secret to entrepreneurial success.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Louis, I think fear will fuel the ability to pivot, will fuel the ability to think outside of the box. And fear will probably remind you that business is fragile and that you have to adapt to your environment.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Matthew Fear in my business journey, I think amounts to being held accountable as a leader. It kind of pushes you up against the wall in certain situations. And as you continue to grow, you bring more people on your journey. You're held accountable to those people.
[00:03:05] Speaker E: Right. You don't always know how something's going to turn out and it's natural to have a little fear around that.
[00:03:11] Speaker C: Tanya I like to think of fear as a healthy thing. A lot of times it's looked at as a negative. But when I think about fear, I think it's a thing that's going to drive us to whatever it is that we're trying to achieve. And you turn it into a learning moment and you use that moment to continue to grow and to continue to move forward.
[00:03:31] Speaker E: That's great. Well said, Clint.
[00:03:33] Speaker D: Hey, when I was on the Today show, Brooke Shields was interviewing me and she goes, you know, you talk a lot about being comfortable outside of your comfort zone. And I said, life begins where your comfort zone ends. And she said, that sounds scary. And I said, when it's scary is when it's great in life. You know, if you don't feel the pain, if it doesn't hurt a little bit, the victory is not so sweet.
[00:03:54] Speaker E: I guess the moral of the story is fear is a motivator. It's an uncomfortable piece, but it's one that we all as entrepreneurs live with. Now, on to bigger and better things. And while I find this slightly hard to believe, a recent study by the American Customer Satisfaction Index showed that customer satisfaction across airlines hit an all time high of 77%, exceeding even pre pandemic levels. So joining us today is Louis Belanger Martin, a man who is likely responsible for 20% of that 77% satisfaction level because he is the co founder of DC, the company that pioneered the in flight entertainment systems we now take for granted. Today airlines are incredibly cost conscious and they're very concerned about, wait, how did you ever convince the airlines to put all of these expensive video screens on the back of airplane seats?
[00:04:56] Speaker A: It started with my first flight where I had very high expectations and I was super excited of thinking that I would be flying at 40,000ft and I would live a moment. I would lift something, I would, I would, I was really excited. Little that I knew that my excitement would be basically watching the rear of a seat in front of me.
[00:05:21] Speaker E: Sort of like watching paint dry, I think as nails grow.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I think nail growing is more exciting than what I had experience. And so I figured, well, why is this? Why am I bored? Why is just the mere fact that you're boarding an aircraft, there should be a band, there should be a disco ball.
[00:05:42] Speaker E: Air travel used to be like that. I have pictures of my relatives in the 70s sitting in these wide coach class seats, about as big as first class. Now, they were bright orange and they have a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other hand. And they look like they were having a lot of fun.
[00:06:00] Speaker F: Dressed up too.
[00:06:01] Speaker E: Yeah, they all dressed up.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Then the airline went for profit. That's when the experience started going down. And so I took upon myself to bring something new, to bring something, to have anyone that would be flying live and experience. And so that's how it started. So to the question, how did I convince airlines? It took eight years, first of all, to break even. And once I was able to really make the case that flying could be dynamic, flying, you could have a moment where you learn something, where you have something different, where you have something that is so unique that the customer behavior would be, I want to do this again, therefore I want to fly again, I want to come back on this aircraft. Then once you convince one, there's 300 airlines out there on the globe that represents the market of in flight entertainment. So I created that notion that, well, you don't want the other airlines, passengers to say, I want to fly on that specific airline. So all the other airlines, every airlines in the world had something that resembled in flight entertainment. And so I think that as much as the journey was a difficult one, we talk about fears earlier. I mean, there was a lot of fears when we started the business. The vision has always been crystal clear. The North Star has always been what we wanted to achieve. And it was as simple as we want to make flying fun. We want to make flying something a unique experience. There's no reason why it shouldn't be.
[00:07:29] Speaker E: So when did the airlines, though, realize that this was something that they wanted to do? They wanted to go to the extra step, incur the extra cost of putting video screens in. Seatbacks. Right. So when did that happen?
[00:07:44] Speaker A: I think it's a movement. I think it's at some point if you communicate. So for eight years, I did seminars, conference videos. There's not a country I haven't stepped foot on. There's not an airline I haven't spoken to. There's not. And the message was consistent. So for eight years, passengers deserve to have something that is in line with what you're doing already, which is phenomenal. You're bringing people up in the air from point A to Point B in a record amount of time, let alone supersonic flights and so on. But commercial aviation passengers should deserve or should expect to have something special and let's bring it to them. And then with this, there's additional revenues that you may think of, for example, advertising, or there's a lot of ancillary revenues that will open the door. Charging for suitcases was brought as part of a passenger experience. Now, you're not going to like this.
[00:08:38] Speaker E: No, I don't like that at all.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: You're not going to like this. But airlines are for profit. And at the end of the day, how do you balance the business model so that passengers will find a journey that they want to relive over and over again?
[00:08:54] Speaker E: Well, the statistic that we have here, 77% of airline passengers are satisfied with their experience. Does that even seem to ring true to you?
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:09:07] Speaker E: Based on your work?
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Yes. I mean, so, so punctuality is one thing. Outside the aircraft, the lounges, for example, the boarding, the, the. There's a lot of thoughts that are being put into when you leave home, how do you want to basically live that journey that once you're coming back home, you will remember that journey hopefully as much as the destination that you've had. And I think airlines have done immense progress, airports have done immense progress to ease our journey, be it tsa Pre. Which is.
[00:09:38] Speaker E: Which is the pre check. Yeah, the pre check for that, exactly.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: Some airlines will offer you to pick you up at home and drive you to the airport and at destination. Drive you to your destination.
[00:09:50] Speaker E: Sounds like a great service.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:51] Speaker E: I know that they have not surveyed me and I know that they have not surveyed me when the plane lands because usually by the time the plane lands, I'm pretty grumpy and that would be a bad time for me to fill out a survey questionnaire.
[00:10:03] Speaker F: We've had some good flights, We've had some flights canceled. We've had some bad flights. We have had some good flights.
[00:10:08] Speaker E: Right. If you have kids, having video on the plane is like a godsend.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: It's life changing.
[00:10:14] Speaker F: I think that you were really prescient with that because who knew when you started this, what year did they start going on?
[00:10:21] Speaker A: So the business started in the early 90s and the wave of what we know today is mid to late 90s. That started.
[00:10:30] Speaker F: So who knew at that time how addicted we would be to screens? Right? Nobody. So you were really forward looking. So now a kid expects that everywhere.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: My son is 20 years old and when he was 3, 4, 5 years old, we would fly, and so we would sit on the aircraft and if he wouldn't see a tv, he would get off the aircraft and. And, yeah, I would say, benji, come. We have to fly. He said. He said, no tv, no flight.
[00:10:57] Speaker E: I know, it's pretty headstrong.
[00:11:00] Speaker F: Yeah. But everybody expects it now. So, I mean, you really did change flying with that.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: So we've created an industry that today we take for granted.
[00:11:08] Speaker F: So that was a very entrepreneurial thing to do. And you recognized a gap where either other people hadn't or they were unsuccessful in filling that gap. They may have tried.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: There's a fable, there's a French fable that there's a. A shoe salesman that goes into a country or into a region and nobody wears shoes. And so there's no market here. So let's move on. I'm more of the opposite. There's a huge market here. If I'm selling shoes and nobody's wearing shoes, then let's convince them the virtue of wearing shoes, that you'll walk longer and that you'll walk in a more comfortable environment and so on and so forth. And so I think that it took, especially in my case, because I've created and we've created. I wasn't alone, but we've created an industry. It took a lot of resilience. It took a lot of perseverance. It took a lot of convincing. It took a lot of conversations and saying, this is what I'm trying to do. Just think about newspaper. So if you bring a newspaper on board, it's heavy, and there's only a few, and there's only. You can't have.
[00:12:11] Speaker E: They used to hand out newspapers.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Exactly. So we created a newspaper that you could fly from, from Montreal, from Montreal to Paris, and read the newspaper, the China Morning Post. And you couldn't think about this, think about learning a language. So in 2003, in our innovation in capsules or brainstorming, we were like, okay, wouldn't it be cool if I, as a French Canadian, could learn Mandarin on my next flight from Istanbul to Buenos Aires?
[00:12:43] Speaker E: So let me change tax just a little bit here and get to know about you a little bit more. Who were your heroes growing up?
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. My heroes growing up. I came from a modest family. I. I believe my first hero was my mother, because she was. She was teaching French to immigrants that were coming into Quebec, coming into the French part of Canada. And I think she opened our mind to the world is your oyster. And I applied this later in life. And when you want to be international. Very often Canadian thinks that international is the south of the border and vice versa. And so for me, international is the globe. And so I've applied this and that showed to be very successful.
[00:13:29] Speaker E: Louis Belanger Martin, co founder of DTI Software, the company that pioneered the in flight entertainment systems we now take for granted.
[00:13:39] Speaker F: Today you are listening to the Passage to Profit show with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. And we will be right back.
[00:13:44] Speaker H: Let me tell you a story about Bill. Bill was a normal guy in his 50s. He had back surgery about two years ago. Bill was in a lot of pain. He dealt with his pain by taking the Percocets his doctor prescribed for him. Bill took more and more and more of them to help with the pain until one day the prescriptions weren't enough to get rid of Bill's pain. Then one day Bill found someone to help him get rid of the pain with illegal drugs he didn't need a prescription for. Fast forward to today. Bill lost his job and his family. The only thing he does have is his drug dealer. If you know Bill's story and you don't want to end up like Bill, call the detox and treatment help line right now to get away and get treatment. 8009-8017-6180-0980-1761.
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[00:15:44] Speaker G: Now back to passage to profit. Once again, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart and.
[00:15:49] Speaker F: Our special guest, Louis Belanger Martin and we have had such an incredible discussion with him so far. He invented those little TVs on the back of airline seats. We all love him for that. But you have moved into being a private equity investor. Can you explain what that means?
[00:16:07] Speaker A: So what it is is that you pull different investors. In my case, it's all entrepreneurs that have had a liquidity event. And you're positioning the fund as being one that invests with a purpose but also with helping other entrepreneurs reach the same goal as what I did, meaning being successful and growing a business that eventually will have a liquidity event. And so that private equity fund, because I think the, because of the fact that we're all entrepreneurs, it allows for investment to be meaningful and investment to have probably more chances to be successful in that we all know the obstacles, we all know the traps, we all know the or we think we know more. Having walked that path before and so it has shown to be super successful just because of this is that I've walked a path that was sometimes filled with minds, sometimes filled with walls, sometimes filled with fears that allowed me to kind of coach or mentor entrepreneurs in careful because there's a wall behind that curtain. You may not want to go that path or that fast because it will have a detrimental impact on your business and so on and so forth. And so of course, when you do investment, you have to be willing to lose. So you lose some, win some. What we've done over the past decades is that we've won more than we lost. For me, I fall in love with leadership before the business. I think that it's much easier to team up with good leaders that if the industry is in evolution or if there's things that need to be corrected. Whereas I think too many investors are falling in love with an industry or with a product or with a business in itself. But then the leadership, oh, we'll change the leadership. Stories have taught me it's much harder to change leadership and to find the right people when you invest rather than we have a very good core, then let's make sure that we can adapt the business to its environment. And I've had more successes in investing in leaders than investing in a business.
[00:18:35] Speaker E: Louis Belanger Martin, the visionary founder of DTI Software, the company that pioneered the in flight entertainment systems and the co founder of W Investments, a private equity firm based in Montreal, Canada, where entrepreneur founders invest in entrepreneurs. Thank you very much for joining us. If our listeners want to get in touch with you for investing or just information, where can they Find you.
[00:19:03] Speaker A: I have a website, Winvestments CA and my email is very easy. LouisInvestments.
[00:19:11] Speaker E: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure Passage to.
[00:19:16] Speaker F: Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:19:18] Speaker E: And now it's time for Intellectual Property News. And Clint has said that he's been looking forward to this for a while.
[00:19:25] Speaker D: Every time.
[00:19:27] Speaker E: As you may know, Jack Dorsey, who started X or Twitter when he first started it, and Elon Musk have been corresponding about the future of intellectual property law. So Jack Dorsey said, let's just get rid of intellectual property law. And Elon Musk said, I agree. Now, normally I would not be concerned, but Elon Musk happens to be in a position of power right now. And so when he says stuff like that, I pay attention. So we're here to talk about that. Elizabeth, what are your thoughts on this?
[00:20:00] Speaker F: It is terrifying because Elon could just fire everybody that works on intellectual property in the government tomorrow.
[00:20:05] Speaker E: He could eliminate patent examiners, right?
[00:20:08] Speaker F: They want to be able to use any content that's out there without any repercussions or having to pay anybody.
[00:20:13] Speaker E: Clint, what are your thoughts?
[00:20:15] Speaker D: This is another example of how they're just trying to rip off the artists every time creators, the artists look at what's happened to the music industry and now they're going to take away intellectual property rights of all creators to everybody. It's just unbelievable. I am surprised that Elon Musk would be in favor of it.
[00:20:31] Speaker E: Tanya, what do you think?
[00:20:32] Speaker C: The next step, I think, is to start thinking about, okay, how. How are we going to compensate people so that they're incentivized to do the work that they want to continue to do? Because if there's no incentive to be able to do that, then no one's gonna wanna do anything. And then where are we going to end up?
[00:20:47] Speaker E: Revolution's great, but we'd all love to see the plan. You know, it's one thing to say, yeah, let's get rid of it, but what are you gonna do instead? And I think that was to your point. There's gotta be ways to compensate for their efforts.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Matthew, there should be protections in place because to your point, Tanya, people work hard to create, and if there isn't creation, we become stagnant.
[00:21:06] Speaker E: Speaking of intellectual property, if you have an idea for an invention or idea for a trademark, you can contact us, gearhart
[email protected] we work with entrepreneurs worldwide to help them through the entire process of obtaining patents, trademarks and copyrights and if you want to learn more, you can learn more about patents at learn more about patents.com or if you want to learn more about trademarks, go to learnmoreaboutrademarks.com, get a free white paper or sign up for a consultation with one of our attorneys. Passage to Profit Stay tuned. We have secrets of the entrepreneurial mind coming up soon. You don't want to miss that. We'll be back right after this.
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[00:23:29] Speaker H: 8004-3067-2280-0430-6722 800, 430, 6722. That's 800-430-6722.
[00:23:44] Speaker G: Passage to profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:23:48] Speaker E: Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show heard on 38 stations across the United States. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally and we've also been recently named as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast by Feedspot Database.
[00:24:08] Speaker F: Normally, I would do my segments here, but we had a special guest stroll into New York and we invited him up to the studio. His name is Clint Arthur. He's a celebrity entrepreneur. We have spoken to him on the show before and this is a great time to catch up. Welcome, Clint. What are you up to these days?
[00:24:24] Speaker D: Excited to be with you. I've got a lot of fun stuff going on, including the release of my new novel, More, More More, which is the first novel ever written about the topic of inflation.
[00:24:34] Speaker E: But what do you know about inflation? You're a celebrity entrepreneur, you're not an economist, Right?
[00:24:39] Speaker D: Well, I actually do have a degree in economics from the Wharton Business School, so I know a little bit about.
[00:24:44] Speaker E: Well, I guess that qualifies you.
[00:24:46] Speaker D: Well, I was really inspired by a conspiracy theory podcast that I was listening to in which the guest talked about his involvement, a plan, organization, operation to destroy the Soviet Union. And my novel takes place in the late 80s and the early 90s. I had this character based somewhat on my own life. It's a story about love, war and inflation. It is an international espionage thriller is what it is.
[00:25:13] Speaker E: Okay, I'm gonna have to get a copy of it.
[00:25:16] Speaker D: Thank you. It's on Kindle. It's a hardcover. And it's on audible, too. And I love doing audibles.
[00:25:21] Speaker E: Did you read it yourself?
[00:25:22] Speaker D: I did the performance of the audible myself.
[00:25:24] Speaker E: That voice. Right. You're getting double the value just by listening to Clint. Excellent.
[00:25:29] Speaker D: I've listened to a lot of audibles, like the novels of John D. MacDonald, who is one of the greatest American writers. And the guy who performs those audibles is really great. And my wife says that I sound just like him. So if you like the John D. McDonald audibles, then you'll enjoy more, more, more as an audible.
[00:25:47] Speaker F: Well, thank you. That was excellent. Now we are on to our next presenter. Matthew Safeli is a physical therapist with Attain Physical Therapy, and I'm going to let him talk about how he came up with the idea to do this and how he's doing it.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Yes, we're doing rehabilitation services across the spectrum. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing different. It's just how we're packaging it. During my years in academia and I was exiting grad school, finishing up my doctorate, I'd hear clients of mine always say, why are you spending so much time and money into your academics? PT is a waste of time. It didn't work for me and I could do the stuff at Home by myself. And it was the same thing. Rinse and repeat over and over and over. I said, something's wrong here. And when my time comes, I'm going to move back to New Jersey and we're going to present a product to the public that's different, that gives them a reason to walk into the clinic if they are vulnerable, they're in pain, and give them a different approach, a different lens as to what the delivery of care should be. I helped grow and start a practice together with a partner for nine and a half years. We did some amazing things. And then that came to kind of a fixation point in the road where we were thinking different. And I decided to go left, he decided to go right. And I said, you know what? It's time. It's time to break apart and start laying down some bricks in a different direction. So we happened to be on vacation and the carpet got pulled out from underneath me, so to speak.
[00:27:14] Speaker E: What was that?
[00:27:15] Speaker B: It was basically cut from all of our platforms while we were vacationing in Colorado.
[00:27:19] Speaker F: Well, that's a dirty trick. Well, so what, you went on vacation and your business partner just decided to eliminate you from the business?
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Pretty much.
[00:27:27] Speaker D: So rule number one.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:27:29] Speaker D: No partners.
[00:27:31] Speaker F: Oh, my God.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: So I had this conversation last week, and there's truth to that, but I believe in strength in numbers. We got back from our vacation, we had that incident happen. That was strike number one. Number two, we found out we were pregnant, which we were not expecting that.
So that was number two.
[00:27:50] Speaker E: Takes up the stress a little bit there.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: And then.
And then the concept of attain came to life. And I said, all right. To respect restrictive covenants. I'm gonna go south, way south in Ocean county and start the practice. Which would have been. It was about an hour and a half drive each way every single day. I was set to do. Then March 14th of 2020 hit, and that was lockdown day.
[00:28:11] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: So fear the unknown, right? The hardest part at that point in my life was there was no business blueprint for anyone. Someone as seasoned as you, Clint, someone with a legal background like yourself. I knew how to grow a healthcare business during normal times where you can go and solicit and market, but I had no blueprint. The biggest hurdle for me was to try and convince someone that I had a product, I had a good vision, and I was able to convince a young executive director in one of the assisted livings down in Shrewsbury who came to me and said, I heard about you. We need something here that is young, hungry, and different. Can you do that. And the answer was yes. So we finally became operational in June of 2020. And then the next hurdle was trying to convince medical practitioners to join my train, so to speak. My train. I say this with a great deal of passion, that my first hired employee, Colleen is her name, she was a young occupational therapist. She believed in me. I sold. You talk about selling and going in front of all different airlines. I sold the people that I was interviewing. My past history of growing a business for nine and a half years, I didn't have a product, I had a concept in my head. So I sold the concept of her. And what we were trying to accomplish in staffing is a lot of assisted livings and growing these outpatient practices. And in five years worth of time, we've grown the practice from just myself, where I was the attorney, I was the accountant, the practitioner, the janitor, everything else. And we are about 85 employees now and we service across four different states throughout the country.
[00:29:54] Speaker F: And you go into facilities.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: We go into facilities and we contract with them to provide physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy services.
[00:30:04] Speaker F: And what blew me away when I saw your website, I didn't know that people with Alzheimer's could use physical therapy.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:30:13] Speaker E: So how does that work?
[00:30:14] Speaker B: So there's a lot of things that can be done, not so much to completely 180 the degenerative process, to kind of slow down the process as they transition into a different stage in their life.
[00:30:24] Speaker F: And it's not just that, it's other things in these assisted living places and places where people really need your help. I think that's like a big thing, is you actually go into the facility and you're working with people that a lot of times get ignored, right?
[00:30:40] Speaker B: Absolutely, yes.
[00:30:41] Speaker F: Yeah. So you're really helping a lot, a lot of people with their lives and.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: You really become part of the interdisciplinary team between the primary care physicians, the nursing staff, the families.
One area that has really allowed us to grow, there was a consistent theme that families didn't know what was going on with their loved ones care nursing didn't know what was going on in the delivery of services. It was constant, over and over. And there's some big players in our market, some big private equity backed rehabilitation companies that are far, far larger than we are. But where we do it better, we put certain systems and operating procedures in place to fine tune that communication process with nursing. We talk about ip. We created our own proprietary Attain app where loved ones can gain access to the Attain physical Therapy app. Our providers are uploading Pictures, videos. They can see that Mr. And Mrs. Smith, their loved one, walked, you know, 50ft today with close supervision. Those are powerful things in that process, at that stage in life.
[00:31:43] Speaker E: So which part of the business gives you the most satisfaction? What do you like working on the.
[00:31:47] Speaker B: Most in being 15 years as a provider? Now, I often speak at a local state university by us at Malcar State. And early on in my career, I was asked, like, what's the definition of business? And I ask that question now to the students I speak to and ultimately always comes down to some sort of dollar figure. And that was my answer back then. Right? A means to earn.
Now, my definition of business, and to answer your question, is it's a platform for expression. And as a rehab provider, we put plans of care in place for whoever we're servicing and attain provides an exoskeleton, a black and white concept of what the therapy model should be. But whether the provider uses pink, green or purple to paint that portrait, or blue, green and yellow to paint that portrait, however they choose to express that delivery of care, that's on them. So my passion lies in being able to provide a safe, consistent work environment that a provider can have and share the same successes that some of their colleagues do. That gives me a lot of satisfaction. And to be able to do that across state lines and commit to providing a product that people should understand and would want to come back to, that gives me a lot of enjoyment.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Louie, what's your biggest challenge right now?
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Biggest challenge is human capital. You have a lot of these young students coming out, and now anywhere from 100, 150, 200, $250,000 in debt. And the entry level salaries don't match, usually in school anywhere from two and a half to three years. So your total academic program is going to range you seven years of school, your undergraduate degree in your postgraduate work. So I don't know if the pool of new students that are passing boards coming into the workplace is thinning out, because I know the entry is very competitive. I can tell you from my program, we had 120 seats. We graduated 34. So there was a lot of attrition over three years, it's just gotten harder. I mean, in 15 years, I've had to change the way we interview the Indeed. And the zip recruiters and how they manage their platforms. Ten years ago, you text people, now you text a lot of these young minds that are coming out, and that's the only way you get a hold of them, which is not something that everybody in this Room is used to, but you gotta take yourself down to how they operate and think. Human capital is costly. I mean, for the first time in my career, we've had to engage expensive recruiters. Never had to do that in 14 years of business. So I don't know, it might be that the talent pool coming out is just thinning and PT is a growing business.
[00:34:24] Speaker F: Right. You do a lot without the use of drugs, right?
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Very much so.
[00:34:27] Speaker F: And that's so preferable, especially as you're getting older, because your body just can't handle stuff like.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: And our professional organization has been petitioning for years to be recognized as direct access.
[00:34:39] Speaker F: What does that mean?
[00:34:40] Speaker B: So direct access means that if your grand opening event, you're lugging a luggage upstairs and you tweak your back, you don't need a referral from a physician to come see us.
[00:34:52] Speaker F: Oh, right.
[00:34:53] Speaker B: So it's decreased the cost and the burden on the medical. The medical continuum where you're going to your primary care, then you go into an orthopedic and then you're coming to see us. We're trying to, trying to mirror a lot of the model of what happens overseas so we effectively can become a primary care access point, so to speak, to triage certain musculoskeletal conditions.
[00:35:12] Speaker F: Wow.
[00:35:13] Speaker B: And then if we deem, if we evaluate Louis and his shoulder is deemed out of our scope, then we make the referral to a respective orthopedic or a pain management specialist.
[00:35:21] Speaker F: That's great for cost cutting. I think your business plan is great. I'm a little bit worried that you can't get enough people to work for you because I'm getting older.
But how can people get a hold of you? How can they find you?
[00:35:36] Speaker B: Easiest way is go to our website, www.attain pt.com if they want to reach me directly. Always accessible. Matthewtain-pt.com Great.
[00:35:47] Speaker F: Thank you, Matthew.
[00:35:48] Speaker E: Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth.
[00:35:50] Speaker F: Gerhardt and Tonya Taylor. I watched her TedX talk from her website. It's on YouTube. It was brilliant. I'm hoping we can touch some of the points from that today. She's a financial coach, author, TEDx speaker and CEO of Grow youw Wealth. So I want to hear from her how she went from having nothing to having a lot of money and how she's helping other people do it. Welcome, Tanya.
[00:36:14] Speaker C: Thank you. And thank you for having me. So my story's pretty interesting but straightforward. I was, I grew up in Jamaica, you know, very ambitious parents who taught us that we could be anything and Then I got to 16, graduated high school, and my parents just couldn't afford to do anything further with me educationally because there were six of us. So I had an opportunity to come to America. I had, like, a visa. It was expiring, like, within a month of me coming. So I was hoping to come here, go to college, and just keep moving. Except when I came here, they were like, you're 16, back to high school you go. We didn't understand the system, so I became undocumented. Right. I also didn't have any family here, so I was actually staying with people who my parents kind of begged to have me stay with them. But I realized I had an opportunity that so many people in Jamaica did not have and so many and my siblings didn't have. So now everybody was relying on me. I got here and I said, okay. I looked around, and it was very different from what I learned in Jamaica. Everybody seemed to have been living a great life when I lived in Jamaica. I come here and everybody is in an apartment. They're working two jobs, they have no credit. The usual story of the immigrant. And I said, I want to differentiate myself. I want to go to school, I want to get a career, and I want to be rich. At the time, I didn't know the difference between wealth and riches. I was just like, I want to be rich, and how do I do that? And I literally just started studying. I. The first person I studied was Sam Walton from Walmart, and I just read his story. You know, it's like, what can I mimic from here? And I was reading books like Think and Grow Rich. I was reading all these things. And long story short, I really was deliberate about the goals that I set very young. I'm 16, I'm budgeting. I'm like, I want to have a house by the time I'm this age. I want to graduate college by the time I'm this age. And I just stuck to those things. And by the time I was 25, I had purchased my first home in Brooklyn and was house hacking. So I bought, like, a multifamily house and I rented parts of it out. And I had become a CPA and just started to think, okay, what's next? And I had worked at Goldman Sachs in undergrad, and the bankers always talked about their portfolio. So I was like, okay, how does this work? I would ask them questions, so you can invest in the stock market. I couldn't at the time invest in the stock market so by myself. Because the entry point at that time was high. If you're buying a share of stock, you're paying $39 as the fee. It's not like now where there are no fees. So I gathered a group of friends and I said, let's start a stock market investment club. And so we co founded that club. I ran that club for six and a half years and I just continued to invest and I started to set just more lofty goals. You know, I want to have a million dollars by the time I get to this age. I want to leave corporate America and I really want to start to have wealth and to raise my children a different way. And I was able to do all of that. In addition to that, I started a children's financial education club as well, just to teach them how to build wealth. But I got to 45 right during COVID and I was in transition to start my financial coaching business. And the reason why I was doing that was because when I looked around me, whether it's my friends that's making multiple six figure or just the regular people in my community, they had no financial knowledge and I had gained so much financial knowledge and I felt like I wanted to give back and I wanted to do this. So I decided that I'm going to start this financial coaching business. I had done it on my own, just like teaching people in the community and in the process of starting that business, in the process of this investment bank calling me and saying, hey, I want you to head up this department. For me it was the dream job that I had. I was like, when I leave corporate, this is the job I want. Except I had a car accident and everything and my whole life just completely got thrown off course. So when you talk about PT like this is what we need, I'm not even kidding. Like I have gone through so much in the past five years just like recovering from the accident and just the process of going through it. But one of the things that I've made my mission now is to not just teach personal finance but to really talk to people about long term care disability. Because the statistics is very jarring. Whether you're a business owner or you work for an employer where one in four Americans are going to become disabled before they're 65, starting at the age of 20. And your employer does not provide you with long term disability benefits that covers your income, it generally only covers about 60% of your income. And if you are self employed and you don't have long term disability insurance, you may have business insurance. But if you don't have long term Disability insurance, your income dries out. So I ended up writing a book about it where it talks about just my whole journey and how people can protect themselves from long term disability if they were to suffer a disabling event. And that's what my tech talk was about.
[00:41:06] Speaker F: What's the name of the book?
[00:41:07] Speaker C: The book is called Limitations to Limitless and it's on Amazon.
[00:41:11] Speaker F: Limitations to Limitless.
[00:41:12] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:41:12] Speaker F: On Amazon, Yes. By Tanya Taylor.
[00:41:15] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:41:16] Speaker E: So is disability insurance expensive? I mean, how does that rank compared to life insurance or other types of insurances?
[00:41:23] Speaker C: It is really not super expensive. It just really depends on, you know, how much you need. So for someone who works in an organization, a lot of times they'll cover up to 60% of their income. Most people don't even realize that. So you're paying. They won't. They will only cover like 35%, 30% because they don't want you to have full coverage. They think you won't go back to work if you have full coverage. And you know, depending on how much income you make, I mean, it could start in a couple hundred dollars and it will go up from there.
[00:41:55] Speaker E: But it's per month or.
[00:41:57] Speaker C: Per month? Per month, yes. But it's an investment that's so worth it. Because if you don't have that and you're an employee or you're an entrepreneur and you do become disabled, you'll find that before you know your money, it's gone. And if you don't have an emergency fund, which is something that I've really talked to my clients about, you know, and just educate people about, if you don't have those things and you don't have the long term disability insurance, you don't really have much to fall back on because even with Social Security disability income, so it's been four years, almost four years since I became disabled and I applied for Social Security disability income, never got it. So if you're counting on that, that is not something that you can really say, okay, I'm gonna be relying on that.
[00:42:41] Speaker F: Right. So Tanya, what are you focusing on now in your business? Are you coaching people? Is that what you're primary businesses?
[00:42:47] Speaker C: Yes, I focus on women. A lot of women are so averse to investing, averse to managing their money, and just averse to just talking finance. Right. So I really try to focus on women to help them to realize that finance is not so scary. More women are living longer than men. So we need to understand our finances and teach them to become confident in doing that. So most of my Clients are women.
[00:43:13] Speaker E: How do you teach them to manage their money more effectively?
[00:43:17] Speaker C: So I do have an online platform where they can take the courses on demand, but we also have coaching sessions where we're sitting down and we're coming up with a roadmap on what their goals are. Because all of us in this room, we all have a different financial picture. So understanding what each of their financial picture is and then taking them down that journey of, okay, so this is the roadmap that we're going to create. Create. And a lot of it. I always start with mindset.
[00:43:44] Speaker F: Do you get in the weeds with them? Do you say, like, you were saving money and you went and bought a $300 handbag? What the heck is that all about? You can't do that. Do you ever do that?
[00:43:53] Speaker C: So we have a different approach to that, and sometimes we do have that. And they'll self report. A lot of times they'll say, oh, my God, I can't believe I did this. My goal with them when we're going through this process is to really have them shift how they think about money. So each of their dollar has a job, and they're putting that dollar to work. So they're aligning their spending with what their goals are, and that's how they get away from spending on all these things that probably are not as important to them. And I always tell them that you need to have your happy money and you need to use that to do the things that you really love. So, like, for me, I love to travel, and it doesn't matter what's going on in my life, I am going to travel. So my happy money is travel. And so I model for them. I'm like, I'm going to always go on my vacation because that's what's going to motivate me to continue down this path of financial freedom. Because what is the sense of working hard if we're just going to like, okay, this is what I have to do, and I cannot spend on myself. So they really find the things that is meaningful to them that they're passionate about and they're going to spend on it. And then the other things, that's where you're going to sort of order your dollar and a lot of things fall out. And yes, I do have people who sometimes text me or email me and say, oh, my God, I can't believe I did this. And, you know, we just talk about, okay, it happened. Let's recalibrate. Every person's situation is going to be different and Sometimes you'll start with a certain amount, but you can increase it over time because we also talk about how do you come come into other sources of income. We talk a lot about passives generating other sources of income. When you have that additional income, you can increase it. But to start out is going to really vary by each person and what their passion is. Like mine is travel. It's expensive. Somebody else's might be something completely different that's not as expensive.
[00:45:40] Speaker F: Well, that sounds like a great plan. Tonya Taylor, financial coach, author, TEDx speaker and CEO of Grow youw Wealth. How do people find you?
[00:45:49] Speaker C: So my website is www.growyourwealth10x.com and all my social medias are on that. So once you get there, you can find me on all my other platforms.
[00:46:00] Speaker E: Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gerhart will be back right after this.
[00:46:05] Speaker F: Spilling our secrets.
[00:46:06] Speaker G: Man, I had a rough night's sleep, boy. I got a letter from the IRS yesterday and I. I just couldn't sleep, man. I'm dying here. Somebody help me. IRS problems affect more than just your finances. If you're ready to take back control of your life and you owe more than $10,000, you need to call the tax doctor. There's their expert staff can immediately protect you from the IRS and state collectors and get you the best possible tax settlement guaranteed. The IRS has recently released new programs geared in helping struggling taxpayers where you may qualify to settle your tax debt and wipe out up to 85% or more of what you currently owe. If you owe $10,000 or more in back taxes, call the tax doctor right now. See if you qualify to pay less.
[00:46:50] Speaker H: 8002-2621-9268-0262, 1926.
80262, 1926. That's 800262, 1926.
[00:47:05] Speaker G: It's passage to Profit.
[00:47:07] Speaker E: Alicia Morrissey is our programming director at Passage to Profit and she's also a fantastic jazz vocalist. You can scroll to the bottom of the passage to prophetshow.com website and check out her album.
[00:47:21] Speaker F: We have had the most incred. We have such smart people on here. Clint Arthur showed up out of the blue. Tanya Taylor. We had Matthew Safeli and now they are going to spill their secrets. It is time for Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind. So Louis, I'm starting with you. What is a secret you can share?
[00:47:40] Speaker A: It won't be a secret anymore if I share one of the secret of my journey, my success was that I did not always listen to everyone because sometimes Your entourage, even your family members will say, you're crazy.
[00:47:56] Speaker F: I get that a lot.
[00:47:57] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I still get that a lot.
And why are you doing this? There's no market, so just go do something else. And I think sometimes it's better to pause or stop or reflect. But in my case, I just carried on. I carried on, and for me, it was. I believed in it so much, it made sense. But the amount of people around me that tried to either stop me, bring me down. So if anyone out there who is an entrepreneur or feels or believes they are entrepreneur, just listen to your guts, listen to your inner voice, and a lot of people out there will try to stop you, pause you. And I'm happy that I listen to myself.
[00:48:40] Speaker F: Yeah, you're right. And I get mad at those people and tell them, I don't want that negativity in my brains. Shut up. Right? Yeah.
[00:48:46] Speaker A: No, totally.
[00:48:46] Speaker F: Yeah. So, Matthew, what is your secret?
[00:48:49] Speaker B: I would say be relentless. Be strategic, be smart. Don't be afraid to lean on other people. And the journey will be rough. The journey will be smooth at times, but at the end of the day, for me, it's be relentless.
[00:49:04] Speaker F: Tonya Taylor.
[00:49:05] Speaker C: I would say, get out of your own way. There is so much that goes on in our head. And if you know where you want to go and you have an idea of the path, even if you get knocked down, get out of your own way. You get up, you pick yourself up, and you redirect if you need to, but you keep moving, but you never give up. That's not an option.
[00:49:25] Speaker F: I love that. Yeah. Okay, Clint, are you ready to spill a secret?
[00:49:29] Speaker D: Yeah. Because in my book, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Wisdom of the Men, I talked about how I went from being a taxi driver to working with international superstars and five presidents of the United States. And some of the superstars that I worked with included Buzz Aldrin. I said, buzz, what's the most important thing you ever learned? He said, nothing is impossible. I said, martha Stewart, what's the most important thing you ever learned? She said, when I was a little girl, my dad had told me I could do anything, and I believed him. And then I worked with General Russell Honore when I had an event at West Point, and he was the man who evacuated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And he said, all the opportunities on the other side of impossible, and I have found over and over, I've had some major obstacles in my way. Nothing was impossible. The real secret is that impossible is a barrier that they put up so many people think, you can't do this, you can't do that, it's impossible to do this, it's impossible to do that. But nothing is impossible. Everything is possible.
[00:50:27] Speaker F: I like that. Richard Gearhart.
[00:50:29] Speaker E: Boy, everybody is so hard to follow.
[00:50:31] Speaker F: I know in this program, I don't.
[00:50:34] Speaker E: Know if I can measure up, but I'm going to just say something really cliche, and that is hard work. So you hear that all the time. But success in entrepreneurship and business is really about velocity. How much can you get done within a certain time frame? So in the legal business, if we draft one patent application a month, we have one income. But if we draft two patent applications a month, we have a different income. So hard work really translates into the velocity at which your business moves forward. And so you have to realize it's just not spending a lot of time. It's moving things forward at a quick pace.
[00:51:13] Speaker F: Well, mine is a little more down in the weeds, a little less philosophical. But I'm telling you guys, love it or hate it, you got to know about AI. And to Richard's point, if you want to get everything done twice as fast, 10 times faster than you're doing it now, AI is your friend. I know there are a lot of ethical considerations that are bad about AI, but whether you use it or not, you've got to know about it, because it's here and it's not going away. Although takes a ton of energy to run the servers for AI, but you have to know what it is. And if you haven't used it and you want to find out, start with ChatGPT. It's really easy to use and it's. It's kind of fun, but don't get addicted.
[00:51:53] Speaker E: Just type chatgpt into your browser and ask it a question and see what happens.
[00:51:58] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:51:58] Speaker E: Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer, Noah Fleishman, and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, Rissi Kat Bussari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gerhart Law is here for your patent, trademark, and copyright needs, needs you can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
