And of course, I'm able to see your name, but
please do me a favor for those that aren't watching.
Show your first name, last name, where you're
located, and the name of your business. Sure.
Jovanka, thank you so much for having me here.
For everyone, please make sure you like and subscribe.
Jovanka and the team do an amazing job. My name
is Dr. Lance Knob. I live in Medford, New Jersey,
right between Philadelphia and the, quote, Jersey
Shore. I think that's all you asked me, right?
The name of your business. And I think you got
a book out, don't you? Yes. The name of my business
is Denali Consulting. And I'm a physical therapist
by training and background. And our first business
was Breakthrough Physical Therapy and Fitness.
And that's all the lessons that I learned are
really, I poured my heart and soul into my first
book, The 4 % Breakthrough. to kind of share
all that experience and journey. And I'm working
on a second book right now, which you will probably
talk about. Nice. Look at you. So a physical
therapist, that's what you did for how long?
Well, for, I was treating up until 2023. So 25
years of patient care. Nice, nice. And now you're
an author and you own a consulting business.
Of course, I'm going to tell you to begin to
share with me about all of this and where it's
going and how it's going. Okay, well, it's all
going well. I'm humbly blessed to have really
created my dream life in a lot of ways, which
ties into the podcast theme, because I really
think having a clear vision helps with that.
And I wish I would have. Spent more time and
got more clarity sooner. One of my mentors who
I talk about in the book, she always challenged
me to draw my vision. And I did have a two -page
vision for our company that really served as
a roadmap and really clearly helped everyone
know the expectations. So that was an amazing
tool. So yeah, things are going really well now.
You know, have so much freedom, lifestyle, geographic
and financial freedom. And my wife and I are
both physical therapists. We met in Aberdeen,
Scotland. We lived and studied abroad and a little
bit of a fairytale meeting. And we came back
to the States, got married. And when we got back
from our honeymoon, we actually jumped into entrepreneurship.
We rented 300 square feet, very humble beginnings
from a little boutique fitness center. And after
about a year and a half, we bought the fitness
center. And then We expanded next door to a 6
,000 square foot space, which is very large for
physical therapy. And we really integrated fitness
with physical therapy, which we believe is the
perfect model to serve the world and serve customers.
So we grew our practice and grew our family at
the same time, which was a challenge. And by
the way, I don't necessarily recommend immediately
getting married and starting a business with
your wife. It's not the... easiest initial path
but um you know it it'll either make you or break
you and for us it made us stronger so it was
all good and yeah we we really you know tried
to create the best business yeah we won the best
practice in the country in um 2007 after three
years in practice and you know so that was super
exciting and i can remember going to san diego
with our our daughter who is like nine months
old in our arms to accept this award at the private
practice section so that was pretty cool and
then i studied partnerships and really wanted
to create an opportunity that's not common in
physical therapy where our best people could
actually join as equity partners so we did that
and some of our best people joined as partners
and in 2018 well you know one of our partners
took over our five location multi -million dollar
practice and that's when i had to figure out
what i was going to do next and after speaking
to a franchise broker and kind of being on the
the other side of of shark tank you know people
were presenting me businesses and my wife um
i realized i wanted i didn't i was too entrepreneurial
to be a franchisee and i just wanted to help
other entrepreneurs and share everything that
i've learned so i've been doing that now hard
to believe going into my eighth year now of coaching
and serving others and i did take my treatment
down over time and two other quick stories that
are relevant the first one is you know when you
really build up a valuable asset as a business
there will be people attracted to it so we powered
through the pandemic under our ceo our partner
who's a ceo's leadership and you know we we made
it and um At that time, there was a lot of investor
money available in the world. A lot of people
with the government printing money and doing
all kinds of things to make it through. So long
story short, a private equity -backed company
approached us, and we ended up partnering with
a private equity company. So it kind of deviated
from my vision, which was to stay independent.
So that was hard, but it's... It was a first
world problem when private equity is trying to
buy you and you don't necessarily want to sell
and they just keep offering more and more and
better and better. So that happened in 2021.
And then 23 months later, they literally 5X'd
our remaining shares. And it's what was called
a recapitalization, the next private equity firm
bought in. And the other story that I'll just
mention along the way is in... 2011, when we
had three offices, about 30 employees, and we
just had our third child, I was working 80 plus
hours a week, abusing my body, not sleeping enough,
not exercising. And my body finally revolted
and my digestive system stopped working. And
I was brought to my knees. I couldn't. couldn't
eat. I was either embarrassingly in the bathroom
or running to the bathroom, had to see specialists,
rule out cancer, celiac Crohn's disease. So fortunately,
nothing was permanent and it was all temporary.
And I had to get my lifestyle in a better place.
And I also had to build the business in a better
place. So that's what I did over the coming years.
And that's really what I shared in that first
book to help other people stay healthy. while
they're scaling create a healthy business where
they can get paid for the roles they have have
profitability make it a valuable asset sell it
if they want to keep it if they want to which
is my second book how to create partnerships
to actually build a self -managing business how
did you come up with you know what i'm just going
to go into consulting yeah as i mentioned i i
knew i wanted to diversify from a small business
you know we had all of our you know, life savings
in this small business. And it was scary and
exciting to have somebody else driving, you know,
the, being the captain of the ship. But they
had my full confidence and I was still supporting
them in the owner hat. So, you know, once I realized
that franchise wasn't the perfect world for me,
you know, I wanted to be, do it my way, do it
a smarter way this time. Even at that time, pre
-pandemic, you could still do some coaching virtually.
Definitely, I wanted to create more geographic
freedom, lifestyle freedom, and continue to have
the finances to also be free to do anything I
want with who I want, and especially the most
important people, which had a lot of sacrifice
over the years, my family, myself. So yeah, those
were some of the bigger things and thinking about
it because, you know, one of the good things
that came out of the pandemic was that, you know,
video conference became the norm. So I have zero
travel except for when I want to see somebody
in person. Last night we had a celebration dinner
in Princeton, New Jersey with two amazing entrepreneurs
who I just helped bring together to create a
self -managing company. In Ben Hardy's words,
they're each other's perfect who's. One of them
is going to take over the CEO and it's pretty
amazing. But besides that, I don't have to spend
hours flying and traveling and driving and sitting
in traffic and all those things. Tell me about
your vision in this era of your life. For sure.
Yeah. And this is something I really love to
do because I love... strategy. I was telling
Jennifer on your team this yesterday. I realized
that it's about the same number of entrepreneurs
who, about 96 % of entrepreneurs fail in 10 years.
And my survey now over seven and a half years
has been, it's about that same number of entrepreneurs
that don't have a plan in place. And I really
was fortunate enough to be mentored in strategic
planning and business planning. we called it
a marketing business plan we brought the marketing
plan together with the finances and i helped
boil that down because i realized the typical
entrepreneur doesn't have enough time to spend
80 to 120 and plus hours on it so i'm asking
people they're you know trying to draw visions
out of people all day long that's part of my
passion as well so i've got the business vision
which i'll share with you now and then i'll i
always Love to help people with their bucket
list and philanthropy, how they want to give
back to have fulfillment. So with Denali, my
dream vision is for my children to actually take
it over. And they're 18, 16, and 14 now. And
my oldest daughter is heading towards business
school. And yeah, they're all becoming more gravitated
towards entrepreneurship. uh so that's exciting
and i've certainly been pouring into them so
that would be a wonderful outcome and if they
don't and they're by the way they're working
for the business now for the last two years they've
been helping with marketing so for everyone out
there definitely get your kids involved there's
a lot of benefits to that including you know
tax uh you know benefits you can use your children
as write -offs and then put some of that money
straight into a roth ira so that's the real dream
with denali and In addition to that, and I've
kind of paused on this, but I want to build a
team of 10 consultants and really just serve
more entrepreneurs and reverse this 96 % failure
rate to make it a 96 % success rate. So, and
then, you know, other than that, you know, my
wife and I both love to travel. So I really want
to at least minimally, I want to become fluent
in Spanish and Italian. I want to live six months
of the year in Spain and Italy and just keep
rotating and maybe half of that time in gorgeous
places like Boulder, Colorado, but just keep
exploring. We're both really explorers. And as
far as like philanthropy and kind of giving back
so many causes that are worthwhile. But our youngest
daughter just got type one diabetes last year.
So that would be something that I'd really want
to address and try to solve. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
that sounds like a lot, but you've made many,
many, many different times in life. I mean, and
again, I. I applaud you, you know, for what it's
worth. I'm super proud of you because there's
not many people that can last 25 years. Right
now, I think I'm all over the place as far as
entrepreneurship and what that looks like. But
most importantly, I really, as I'm sitting here,
I didn't share with you earlier that I too am
a listener. And as I'm listening, one thing I
hear you say is strategy. you know there's a
system to everything and i believe maybe is that
a portion of why some people don't go as long
as you because they don't know the strategy to
staying afloat i believe so i believe that's
part of the critical success factor part of our
secret sauce and it doesn't for everyone listening
right even like the term business plan is despised
by many um I don't think you have to spend a
hundred percent of your time doing strategy.
Obviously you have to roll up your sleeves and
do the work. I really think it only needs to
be about 10%, 10 % of you really back up and
do a vision, you know, only 10 % of your time.
And then you can back that into a year and a
month and a week and a day. And I just saw the
most powerful social media posts by Kevin O 'Leary,
Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank. And he was speaking
about when he worked with Steve Jobs. And he
said that one of the things that made Steve special
was his signal to noise ratio. He knew his three
things that he would have to get done in the
next 18 hours and everything else was noise.
And he made sure he had an 80 % signal to noise
ratio. So yeah, that's what strategy is. Some
of the smartest minds say it's knowing what not
to do. So you really do have to just take a little
bit of time. to do some high level thinking do
some strategic thinking make sure you're not
running in the wrong direction climbing the wrong
ladder whichever analogy you like to use and
then of course it is a scientific experiment
you're going to have to test and retest you're
not going to get it all right the first time
around but the quicker you can be a little bit
strategic run the test get the results then you
will actually lead your industry, which is where
you need to be. Because if you're not leading
your industry, other people are more profitable.
And unfortunately, they're going to be ahead
and probably win. Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision
Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your
reactions as these episodes continue to move
forward. This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a vision pro yourself.