Why Practice Owners Secretly Want Out

Let’s be honest: When practice owners start fantasising about selling, it’s not because the business is thriving. It’s because they’re exhausted. Burnt out. Done.

If you’ve ever daydreamed about selling your practice on a rough Tuesday, you’re not alone. You’ve poured a lot of time and energy into the clinic, but it’s taken everything you’ve got. You dream that someone will come along, take it off your hands, and pay you fairly for it.

But as Troy puts it:

“That’s a really poor place to negotiate from.”

The good news: the same moves that make a practice attractive to buyers also make it joyful (and profitable) to keep. The smarter play isn’t to build something to sell, it’s to build something so good you’d never want to – and ironically, that’s exactly the kind of business buyers line up for.

Below are the levers working inside high-performing clinics, drawn from a recent conversation with Troy and Scott Schuman from The Growth Wellness Show.

The Anatomy of a Business You Don’t Want to Escape From

Troy’s philosophy is simple: create a business you don’t want to sell, and you’ll naturally build one that’s valuable, scalable, and magnetic.

He breaks it down into a few key ingredients:

• Reduce key person risk. If your clinic can’t run without you, it’s just a job with overheads, not a business. The goal is to “scale yourself to zero.” Build systems and train people so the practice thrives whether you’re in the room or not.
• Prioritise cash and profit. Money doesn’t solve everything, but it solves almost anything. Healthy profit allows you to pay people well, attract better candidates, invest in tools and systems, and breathe again.
• Create leadership pathways. When team members can see a future (not just a job), they stay. Build clear growth pathways so your best practitioners can evolve into leaders and take ownership of results.
• Systematise for predictability. Predictability is what turns chaos into calm. When you know what’s coming, you can plan, lead, and rest. Systems create confidence for you, your team, and your patients.

The outcome? A business that works, whether you’re there or not.

Broken Models Hold Clinics Back

A strictly “one clinician to one patient” model is a tough way to scale. Other professions have long embraced leverage in accounting, law, and dentistry, staying ahead of the curve by using teams, assistants, and technology. Allied health can, too, without compromising care.

It’s how most of us were trained. But as Troy points out, “It’s a really poor use of resources.”

• Use assistants and support roles. Delegate appropriate elements of the patient journey – pre-assessment data capture, supervised exercise blocks, program reviews, and equipment education – so practitioners operate at the top of their scope.

• Give your team an AI exoskeleton. Start where the return is clearest: notes and letters. Record the patient consult (with consent), transcribe, and use an AI assistant to draft notes, referral letters, scripts and follow-up communication inside your templates. That alone liberates hours a week per practitioner.

• Turn conversations into systems. Recording a one-off explanation? Transcribe it and prompt your AI to “create an SOP for a private allied health clinic.” You’ve just turned tacit knowledge into team leverage.

• Close the loop on clinical quality. De-identify transcripts and ask your AI for feedback: “What communication, research, or treatment pathways could improve patient outcomes here?” Twenty consults, twenty pieces of objective insight every day.

Leverage isn’t about doing more with less heart. It’s about designing the patient journey so humans do the higher-value human bits, and technology carries the predictable weight.

A CEO’s Real Job: Focus, Constraints, and People

When asked what lessons he’s taken from mentors like Dan Martell, Tony Robbins, and Alex Hormozi, Troy doesn’t hesitate to share them.

Busy is not the same as effective. Great CEOs don’t chase every opportunity – they identify the one thing that will move the needle most, and commit everything to it.

• Install a scoreboard. If you can’t read the numbers, you can’t tell who’s winning. Build a simple dashboard for weekly visibility: new enquiries, conversion, utilisation, revenue per clinician, rebook rates, cancellations, payroll %, and operating margin. Numbers beat hunches, especially once you pass $1M.

• Work the Theory of Constraints. Identify the single choke point (lead flow, conversion, capacity, cash, leadership bandwidth), fix it end-to-end, then move to the next. No thrashing.

• Buy speed with coaching. You’re not paying for pep talks. You’re buying other people’s mistakes and avoiding them. In The Hive MASTERMIND, the pattern is clear: the owners who focus, finish, and iterate win faster.

Troy also said it plainly:

“You build the people, and the people build the business.”

He references research from Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, where businesses that trained character skills (like discipline, resilience, and resourcefulness) outperformed those that only trained business skills by 38%.

Technical ability matters, but culture, mindset, and communication determine how far your team can take you.

Discipline, resourcefulness, resilience… these create cultures where growth is the norm and retention takes care of itself.

What does this look like day-to-day?

• Daily growth environment. Micro-learning in team huddles, peer coaching, short debriefs after tricky cases.

• Autonomy with accountability. Clear outcomes, room to execute, and tight feedback loops.

• Magnetism by design. Clinics where people’s lights shine brighter attract patients, clinicians – and yes, buyers.

If you want a practice that’s magnetic, invest in the only asset that appreciates with attention: your people.

The Future Is Still Human (But AI-Enabled)

Troy’s bullish on AI, but not as a threat. As a tool for leverage.

AI can already handle transcriptions, clinical notes, letters, and admin tasks. But he sees the next step as using AI for feedback and reflection:

“Imagine seeing 20 patients a day and getting 20 pieces of objective feedback on how you could’ve communicated better or explored other treatment paths. That’s gold.”

He uses AI in his own coaching sessions and team meetings by recording conversations, transcribing them, and turning insights into documented systems and actionable plans.

The takeaway isn’t to “use AI or get left behind.” It’s to “use AI to become more human.” Automate the predictable so you can focus on connection, empathy, and growth – the things robots can’t do.

The Takeaway

A smarter business model beats working harder. Reduce key-person risk, protect cash, leverage assistants and AI, focus on the constraint, and invest in character as much as competence. That’s how you move from operator to confident CEO with more profit, more time off, and a team that steps up without you hovering.

And when you invest in people, systems, and focus on the things that matter, profit becomes the byproduct, not the pursuit.

That’s what turns an exhausting job into a fulfilling enterprise.