Understanding Friction Coefficients in Business

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE Chief Executive Officer Jeff Moore discusses how friction opposes the momentum of starting a business but offers different solutions on how to overcome the initial friction encountered when starting. 

Take a listen to the podcast episode or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog.

If you're looking to learn more about courses designed to start your own practice, check out our Brick by Brick practice management course or our online physical therapy courses, check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

INTRODUCTION Hey everyone, this is Alan. Chief Operating Officer here at ICE. Before we get started with today’s episode, I want to talk to you about VersaLifts. Today’s episode is brought to you by VersaLifts. Best known for their heel lift shoe inserts, VersaLifts has been a leading innovator in bringing simple but highly effective rehab tools to the market. If you have clients with stiff ankles, Achilles tendinopathy, or basic skeletal structure limitations keeping them from squatting with proper form and good depth, a little heel lift can make a huge difference. VersaLifts heel lifts are available in three different sizes and all of them add an additional half inch of h drop to any training shoe, helping athletes squat deeper with better form. Visit www.vlifts.com/icephysio or click the link in today’s show notes to get your VersaLifts today.

JEFF MOORE All right, team, what is up? Welcome back to the PT on ICE Daily Show. My name is Dr. Jeff Moore, currently serving as the CEO of Ice, and always thrilled to be on the Daily Show, Mike, and always happy to be here on a Leadership Thursday that is a Gut Check Thursday. As always, let's start with the workout. It's gonna be a little bit rough. We got five rounds for time. It's just a simple couplet, but there's no rest to be found. The workout is five rounds for time, you are gonna do 30 calories for the gents, 25 calories for the gals on the rower, and then you're gonna do 15 burpees over that same rower. and you're simply going to, I say simply, but ouch, going to repeat that for five rounds, okay? So thinking a little bit about time domain as always, you got to think about maybe that row is going to take you what? Maybe up on two minutes and then a little bit over a minute for those burpees. So a great target would be 15 minutes. Try to keep it inside of 20. I think that would be a reasonable goal for the workout. It was a qualifier workout. It's gonna hurt. The heart rate's gonna be peaked. There's just nowhere to hide during those five rounds. So enjoy that. Make sure you're tagging Ice Physio. Make sure you hit Gut Check Thursday with that hashtag. It's so fun for us to be able to follow along with you. So enjoy that workout today.

"IS IT WORTH IT?"Let's talk about friction in your business. Specifically, Let's talk about friction coefficients and how it relates to your business. So I get to talk to a lot of people who are in the process of starting up their companies, kind of in that early phase, okay? And many of them engage with me when they're in the harder part of that phase, right? Where they're starting to wonder, is this worth it? Like maybe the excitement of starting something new and all the fervor that comes along with that has legitimately turned into the daily grind and some real questions about, is this going to turn over? Is this going to catch some momentum? Is this gonna work? Are really starting to come to the forefront? Is the ROI there? The first thing I want to say is don't shame yourself. If you're in these shoes, don't shame yourself for asking that question. I think that this latest generation of business gurus, this mantra of everything is going to work as long as you keep going is the most ridiculous mantra of all time. That makes absolutely no sense. I can list off an innumerable people who have hit dead ends and pivoted and had drastic levels of success because they were willing to say, this route, the way I went about it, this approach, this area doesn't make as much sense. Now that I've seen around the corner a bit, that does not make sense. I'm going to pivot. I'm going to pull back. I'm going to redirect. And those people have a huge amount of success. So don't feel like It's not logical or you're less than because you're asking the question, is it gonna be worth it? It isn't always. That being said, if you've hit that spot and you've thought, is it worth it? Do I really wanna be in this space? And the answer is a hell yes. You say, I love serving these people. I know it's what I'm called to do. I know I bring some unique value to this area. I know that I've got something to share in this space. I wanna keep going. I want this to work. If that's you, then I want to share with you what I think is both an accurate and helpful analogy from physics that correlates beautifully with the business journey.

OVERCOMING FRICTION So, in physics, If we can get you to think way back, right? When an object is stationary and you want to move it, to do so, you have to overcome static friction, right? And this is really hard. You know this because you've encountered it in plenty of places on a daily basis, maybe even in your workout. So if you're in the gym and you're trying to push a box, right, you're trying to do box pushes across the floor. You can all picture how agonizing that is. You know the worst part is getting the box started, right? It's that initial setting into motion. Once the box is sliding across the ground, I'm not saying it's easier, but it's certainly better, right? The same is true for plate pushes. Like when the 45 pound plate is on the ground and you're trying to push it across the floor, it's getting it started that's the absolute worst. Keeping it moving isn't nearly as hard. Mathematically, The reason for that is that the coefficient of static friction is larger than the coefficient of kinetic friction, right? When you're doing equations, the thing you multiply the forces against is larger when you're talking about static friction, things that are not yet in motion. Now, you don't have to, if you're not a math person, you don't need to gravitate towards that part of the conversation. It's best illustrated visually probably that, let's imagine that you had two hand saws, okay? We're talking about like the saw that you would cut a Christmas tree down with, right? Let's say this is one hand saw. These are all the teeth of the hand saw. This is the other hand saw, okay? So you're putting teeth to teeth on these two hand saws, yeah? Like this, okay. If they're sitting stationary, the one on the top, settles into the one at the bottom, right? And they've been sitting there for a while. And now you wanna move the top saw relative to the bottom saw. This is gonna be tough, right? Because you've gotta break all of that and get things moving. However, once the top saw is moving across the bottom saw, as long as there's decent speed here, there's not enough time for the top saw to sink and settle into the bottom saw. Thus, you kind of click across the top significantly easier than it was to break that original static bond. Once something is in motion, it's not settled into the other object. Keeping it in motion is not nearly as hard. Team getting a company going and keeping a company going is the exact same scenario.

BUSINESS IS PHYSICSThe business rules follow the physical world. It's why we use all the same terminology all the time, right? How often do we say, oh, it's an uphill battle, right? I've got the wind at my back. We've got momentum, right? Momentum. We're talking physics all the time because the same mechanics happen. They're in different environments, but the same terminology, the same laws apply. Okay, so if what we're saying is, you gotta get some speed going, because that is significantly easier once built up to keep it going, well, what do we mean by the speed of our business? We gotta break that down, because that's where the action item lives for today. So, the speed of your business, getting the saw moving over the other saw, is best looked at as a compilation or an aggregate or a sum of the speed of all the different parts of your business. And this is where it can get actionable. First of all, appreciate that at the beginning, they all start at zero. They are settled into one another. Each part of your business has to break the static friction to get things into motion. For example, idea or concept generation, right? The hardest thing is thinking of that first original concept that's paradigm shifting. It's got static friction. It's hard to create that first great idea. But once you do it, once a unique and valuable concept has been created, building off of it seems effortless, right? Then it's like, once you've done that, you're like, oh, now we should do this, and now this opportunity becomes available. Once you get that first great original idea, Building off of it seems effortless. Team building has significant static friction. Think about it. People want to join a great culture. Well, you need a team to have a culture. So in the beginning, there is no culture, which is why there's so much static friction to team building. But once you get a couple great people on board, they naturally attract a bunch of other great people. Once the saw is moving, it's really easy to keep it moving. You just got to get it moving. It's all about finding those first couple people that will then attract other great people almost effortlessly.

ATTRACTING BUSINESS IS OVERCOMING STATIC FRICTION Attracting consumers or customers has significant static friction. Think about when you walk by a restaurant and there's nobody in there. Do you want to be the first people to go in, especially if you're not familiar with the area? Absolutely not. But once there's a few people in there and they seem to be having a good time, other people just naturally come in. Why do you think happy hour is always so discounted, right? People want their restaurants to look full and bustling, so people will come in and actually have dinner. That's what draws them in. Consumers attracting them has significant static friction. When there's none, it's hard to get one. But once you have a few, it's easy to keep the saw blades moving. This is how I want you to think about your business. And your action item is to realize that you can get each of these going, or any of these going, and the beauty of getting them going is you can use them to nudge the other one. This is where you got to get clinical with it, right? So when you've got that box for that box push that you know is going to be tough to get moving, right? The best, the hack would be, could there be another moving box that you could slam into this one just to break that static friction? So then you could then push it from there once it's already in motion. The answer in business is yes. You could choose any of those boxes if you will. Idea generation, team building, attracting consumers. Those are all individual physics scenarios that you could focus on and get one of those in motion and I promise you it'll ram into the next one. If you break the static friction of team building and you get a couple of great people, I promise you, you'll get more great ideas, right? So that one box that's now moving will slam into the other box and you won't have to do quite so much work to break the static friction of the other one. So you can use success or momentum in any of these individual areas to nudge into the other one and make it easier to get it into motion.

FINDING THE LOWEST BARRIER TO ENTRY IN BUSINESS TO BUILD MOMENTUM The key then is to figure out which one for your business has the lowest barrier of entry. Which box, if you will, can you get moving the easiest? Is it team building? Is it attracting consumers and getting social proof? What area in your business can you get moving so it can slam into the other boxes and get them moving for you without quite as heavy of a lift? That's what I want you to really think on today. Before I let you go though, there's a couple other thoughts that go along with this topic that I've got to share, especially because I think they give you a lot of hope. And the first one is, you only do this once, in most cases. There's exceptions, things happen. But in most cases, you only get it going, if you will. You only get the box moving or the saw blades rubbing. You only do it once. Once you've got momentum, once you've got speed, once you're only dealing with kinetic friction, you just keep it moving, right? You don't have to start and stop again. So realize that if you're feeling like, my gosh, this is a heavy lift, it gets lighter, because the boxes, once moving, are easier, but they also slam into each other, and overall, the momentum builds and it does get easier. You don't have to keep facing that your entire career. So if that's you and you're in that spot, hold onto that. And number two, to get even more exciting, to think a little bit bigger this morning, soon, it's not that one component of your business bumps into the next one. A couple of years down the road, what begins to happen is your businesses begin to bump into each other, right? If you're playing this game right, if you've got one business that's really humming, Oftentimes, that can help to create an offshoot business that doesn't have nearly as much labor required to break the bonds of static friction because you have so many resources from the first one. So pretty soon, what you realize in the game of business is that every time you create, it's a little bit less effort and a little bit more impact. If you're watching this and resonating, you're probably at the hardest part right now. But if you can think about how to use one box to bang into the other, you can get this thing moving. If you can realize that you only have to do it once, hopefully that can help you have the effort you need to build the speed. If you can really dream and realize that soon one of these lifts can make all the other ones happen almost for free, you can realize this game becomes, you never want to say effortless, but you do want to say a return on investment that you probably never imagined. when you were first starting off and maybe sitting right now in a bit of a tough trough looking at a big mountain, right? The top is brighter than you could ever imagine. So think a little bit about how the physics of friction in your business work together and think about the upside of that, not just how hard it is to get that damn box started to begin with. I hope that gives you a little bit of hope this morning on Leadership Thursday. Team, There are so many courses going on. I'm in Reno, Nevada right now. I'm doing all the logistics for Ice Sampler. Ice Sampler is sold out for this year. It's been sold out for a long time. Those of you coming to the event, this is going to be an absolute banger. Carson City is so beautiful. The gym is so beautiful. Carson City CrossFit. So if you're coming to Sampler, get excited for that. Other than that, we have some online courses that are almost sold out. Essential Foundations Level 1 only has a handful of seats left. We are more than half sold out for Pelvic Level 1, which starts in March. Point is, a lot of these online courses, especially, are selling out like crazy. So get on ptinex.com, jump in, grab what you need, get it done, break that static friction. Cheers, team. Have an awesome day.

OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on Ice daily show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review, and be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ice content on a weekly basis while earning CEUs from home, check out our virtual ice online mentorship program at ptonice.com. While you're there, sign up for our Hump Day Hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.