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Everybody loves to talk about revenue.

How much they make per month. 
How fast they are growing. 
How big the business is getting.

And revenue matters. Profit matters. The numbers matter.

But revenue is not the only scoreboard.

In this episode, I talk about why the people you surround yourself with will shape the life you build, the standards you keep, and the ceiling you eventually hit.

I share the story of a decision I made back in 2015 to connect with 52 people in 52 weeks. Not just people who were making money, but people who were building lives I respected. Better leaders. Better spouses. Better parents. Better business owners.

Because the goal is not just to make more.

The goal is to become the kind of person who can build something meaningful without losing the things that matter most.

If you are in a season where you know you need to raise your standards, change your circle, or think bigger about the life you are building, this episode is for you.

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This past Memorial Day weekend, I stood ten feet away from Michael Murphy's dad while doing the Murph workout named after his son. Murphy was a Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan at 29 years old. His dad drove to a CrossFit gym on a Monday morning to watch strangers honor him. I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

In this episode I talk about what that experience, along with doing a rainy 5K with my son Brody, made me realize about leadership. Not practice leadership. Personal leadership. The kind that happens at 5 AM when nobody's watching and you're negotiating with yourself about whether to get up.

My 2025 theme has been Hard to Kill. I've spent time this year training with Mark Divine and Tim Kennedy, two guys who have shaped how I think about showing up in the hard moments. This episode is the result of all of it coming together in one weekend.

If you walked into your practice this week a little slow, a little behind, giving your team permission to coast, this one's for you. And if you showed up exactly how you wanted to, this one's for you too.

The man in the mirror is always your first patient. Make sure you like what you see.

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Dr. Dan Bai from Close for Chiro joins me in a Chicago hotel room at 7:45 AM after MasterClass weekend, and we get into one of the most misunderstood topics in our profession: sales.

If the word "sales" makes you cringe, this one's for you. Dan breaks down why so many docs are stuck thinking they have to sell people something they don't want, when the truth is the opposite. Patients are walking through your door already at a yes. You're not closing them on day two. You're either keeping that yes alive or accidentally killing it in the first 45 seconds of day one.

We talk about why your close rate as the owner doesn't matter if your associates can't replicate it, how to train your team to think differently about the patient journey, the difference between being in control of a process versus trying to control an outcome, and the curious tone shift that's changing how patients experience care in a post-COVID, AI-saturated market.

Dan also shares why he doesn't mind getting hate mail in his comments and what it tells him about where the profession is stuck.

If you've ever felt that pit in your stomach when you see a day two on the schedule, hit play.

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Every practice owner I talk to knows exactly what's broken in their business.

The number that's been red for three months. The doctor who isn't performing. The conversation they keep putting off.

They know. They just haven't done anything about it.

In this episode, I break down the exact system I use across all of my locations to stop tolerating problems and start solving them. It comes down to one rule: if something is red on your scorecard three weeks in a row, it goes on the issues list. No debate. No waiting. You deal with it.

I walk you through how to run that process with your team, how to find the real issue underneath the symptom, and how to turn a pattern that's been dragging you down into a solved problem in under 20 minutes.

Because the practices that grow aren't smarter than yours. They just stopped looking away.

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Two things changed my life. A fishing pole and a basketball. Neither cost more than $50. This episode is about why I bought them, what they reminded me of, and the friend I lost in his twenties who started all of it. If you've been grinding so long you forgot what it feels like to actually enjoy your life, this one's for you. Businesses don't grow. People do.

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Most clinic owners hire the same way. They sit across from someone, feel the energy in the room, and make the call based on personality.

I did it for years. And it cost me more than I can calculate.

In this episode I'm breaking down the one question I now ask every single person before I hire them. It's not about their resume. It's not about their technique. It's about where they're going.

The hire that stays and quietly lowers your standard is more expensive than the one who quits. Today we talk about how to stop making that hire.

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Since Growth Summit and the Accelerator, I keep hearing the same thing from docs: I'm overwhelmed. Too much to implement. Too many things exposed. And my response every time is the same.

Good.

In this episode I'm talking about what that feeling actually means, why the docs who pull back at this point almost always end up in the same spot a year later, and what I've found is almost always underneath the overwhelm when I dig into it. Spoiler: it's not a business problem.

If you've been doing growth work and you're starting to feel the weight of it, this one's for you

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If every person in your life threw their biggest problem into the middle of a table and you could trade yours for theirs, would you?

Almost nobody does.

In this episode, Austin talks about the invisible weight people carry that we never see, why real gratitude lives deeper than any morning routine, and why the grass is almost never actually greener on the other side.

He gets honest about watching more than half a dozen people leave his organization chasing something better, and what most of them found when they got there. If you're in a season where everything feels hard and you're wondering if a change of scenery would fix it, this one is going to hit.

Your problems aren't a sign you're in the wrong place. They're a roadmap for who you need to become.

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In 2010, I was one year into building Corrective Chiropractic. I was grinding hard, doing everything myself, and convinced I was being responsible with money. Then my business coach caught me asking a valet for $2 change — and told me that single moment explained exactly why I was stuck.

This episode is the story of that conversation, what it revealed about the scarcity operating system running my entire life, and the slow, intentional work of rewiring it. We're talking about the gas tank you fill on empty, the laundry you do on your last pair, the marketing you run in a panic — and what all of it is really telling you about who you believe you are.

Fifteen years later, I handed a valet a $20 in the Cayman Islands and didn't think twice. Same scenario. Completely different man. That gap is what this episode is about.

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Most chiropractors write their core values at a weekend seminar and never think about them again. I did the same thing. Then I walked into one of my 13 clinics and realized nobody on the team could name a single one.

So I started over. I looked at every person I'd fired in the last three years and found the pattern. The people who didn't work out weren't bad people. They just didn't fit the values we actually operated by. We just hadn't named them yet.

In this episode I break down how I reverse-engineered our core values from real data, how they changed hiring, firing, and accountability across all 13 locations, and why this is exactly where we're starting in Month 1 of The Ascent.

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