Hey, what’s up? This is Daniel Fava, and I am the owner and founder of Private Practice Elevation.
We help private practice owners and group practice owners get more clients through digital marketing. Primarily, we do that through website design as well as SEO work and ongoing support for WordPress websites.
Oh, man, there’s so much that I love about my job and about my business!
I think number one is just the freedom and flexibility that I get to work from home. I spent many years in the corporate world and also nonprofit world prior to doing what I do now. I worked for a non-profit here in Atlanta called Care, it was a great organization, but just got really tired of being in meetings and being in meetings about meetings and all that sort of stuff.
And I’m a very creative person, with a background in Web design, and so I really wanted to have more freedom to be creative and build something. And it’s just a lot of fun to build a business.
And now I get the freedom to work from home and hang out with my three-year-old son at the time of this recording. We have another one on the way due in March! And so having that flexibility to be able to do some work in the morning, but then be able to go pick up my son from preschool or be able to just stop work at 4 o’clock and I don’t have a commute and I get to play with my son right away.
So it’s just a lot of fun. So, yeah, I would say freedom and flexibility. And aside from that, just being able to connect with so many people is just kind of a cool time that we live in, where I can work with a therapist in Australia or a therapist in California and just see the impact on their business that a great website can make.
And really, my business started when I was helping my wife get her marketing established and her website established back in 2011.
So I know the impact that it can have on someone’s business, and it’s pretty cool to see that happen to other folks and other practice owners.
OK, so the one to two things that I always do in the first 60 to 90 minutes of my day?
I always come downstairs, I grab coffee, and then I actually do some stretches. I had some physical therapy and some back stuff a couple of years back. And if I don’t stay stretched, especially with working from home and being in a chair for the most part of my day, my back starts to hurt.
So I do some stretches, sometimes some some exercise in the morning. And then just after that, I sit down and I read. A lot of times I will I’ll read my Bible, I will meditate and pray, that sort of thing. And then sometimes after that, I will continue reading, but I’ll probably read like a business book or something that is a little bit more focused on personal development.
It probably sounds a little cliché, but my go to drink for productive energy would have to be coffee.
My wife is a pretty healthy one, and we’re also pretty conscious of our caffeine intake. I also don’t sleep very well if I drink too much coffee. So I really only have about one cup in the morning sometimes two, and it’s always “half-caf.” Sometimes I’ll even trick myself in the afternoon and make a decaf cup of coffee and have that. I just pretend like it’s “full-caf” and it’s giving me lots of high-octane to be productive. 🙂
So a very productive day for me?
It really depends on the day. I’m a big fan of theme days where I focus on specific themes for that day.
So, for instance, Monday is my content day. So really all I do on a Monday is nothing really client-related, it’s really focused on creating content.
So I will record podcast episodes, I will write blog posts and articles, maybe I’ll also write the show notes for a past podcast episode that I’ve recorded, that sort of thing.
Social media content, really anything related to creating content and marketing that I’m going to be putting out there into the world? That all happens on Monday.
And outside of that, as far as like a general, what is a very productive day look like?
For me, it’s doing what I said I was going to do.
So I have a 90 day planner where every day I list out my top three to four goals for the day. Those big things that I know if I complete these things, I will be in good shape. I’ll be sort of proud of my day. I’ve put that stamp of approval on it at the end of the day. So if I get to those things, I’m feeling productive.
And so at the end of each day I’ll plan out my following day and just tackle those big tasks; I’ll assign them to a specific time block. And I do my best to really stick to that.
It’s when I get outside of those time blocks or I let things come in that I didn’t schedule for and that can happen, there are sometimes fires you got to put out. But a lot of the times I find I just let those other tasks come in and distract me from those big things that I really need to do.
So if I’m getting to those tasks that I said the day before I’m going to get to, I feel very productive.
My favorite way to rest and recover is something that I probably don’t do enough of, and that’s really being outside in nature.
Going for walks is a big deal for me.
I live north of Atlanta, and we actually used to live pretty close to this place called Kennesaw Mountain, an old civil war battlefield. But it’s this small mountain by any sense of the imagination because we’re in Georgia, but it’s this beautiful park, especially in the fall. And I used to go there and hike just it’s like a half mile hike up to the top of it. And that was just really great for recovering.
That was back before my son was born, so life’s gotten a little bit busy, but I think I need to find a new way to get out there and take more walks. And then, outside of that reading is really recovering for me.
I’m a highly sensitive person, so I need a lot of rest, and I need a lot of time to just disengage my mind. So there’s “Netflix and chill” and just reading and just being in quiet or soft music, playing my guitar is another thing.
I am a Mac person, and I can probably record a whole podcast episode on why I’m a Mac person!
Well, really, I guess it really goes back to when I was in college.
So I was in college for graphic design. That was really the the track that that I was on. I didn’t really know I was going to be a web designer, but I took all these different classes on graphic design, and that included web design and included print design, illustrating using Adobe Illustrator, using a computer to create to create graphics, also animation and stuff like that.
And so the the computer labs at my campus, they were they were all Mac.
And at that time, this was around 2001, Apple was really starting to forge ahead with the power of their computers and everything. And so they were kind of this cool, sexy thing, like you got to have a Mac if you’re going to do graphic design or if you’re going to do all this processing stuff.
The Mac is just it’s just so much better than PC. And so I really got used to using Macs then, but I always had a PC at home because they were cheap, they’re so much easier for a college kid to purchase a Dell Computer than to have a Mac at home.
So it was years that I was working on Macs in my computer labs, but it wasn’t until after I graduated and started working that I got my own Mac at home. So I was able to compare the PC versus the Mac. And I always loved the Mac. And, to me, when Steve Jobs was around, the Mac just kept getting better and better.
And the way they integrated things together to be more intuitive, it always felt like I had to do like five steps on a Dell for every like two steps that it would be on a Mac.
And so I just ended up getting very frustrated with PCs after a while and then having my own Mac, I had no issues.
And then I’d get a call, like every other day from my dad, like “why does this do this?” And he’s working on his PC at home. And I had to be his life support guy. 🙂
And then luckily the years went by and I was like, you know what, I don’t know, I don’t have a PC anymore. So I have no idea why you are getting so many viruses, why this thing isn’t working or that thing isn’t working.
And so that just further solidified my love for a Mac.
And then the iPhone came out, and then all of that just kind of integrates together and pieces together pretty well.
I won’t be one of those people who say like, Mac is the best thing in the world and there’s never any issues. But for the most part, a lot of my devices work seamlessly together and I really enjoy that.
I’d say one of the best business books I’ve read would be Profit First by Michael Michalowicz.
I found Profit First to be just a really key part in building my own business where I didn’t really understand a lot about cash flow and stuff like that.
And it felt like I was just making stuff up. And and once I read Profit First and just saw the different ways of having different buckets for your business, I felt so much more in control of my cash flow and understanding how much I should be spending on operating expenses or on my own salary and stuff like that.
It gave me a really simple system to follow. So that really impacted my business a lot and took a lot of stress off my shoulders.
So I highly recommend Profit First.
OK, so if I were a hot sauce?
That’s a hard one, because I think, though, there’s different levels here going on with this question. So I guess I’ll play it safe and just say I’m probably I’m probably a five or six on spice level, I’m a pretty quiet guy.
So, like, if we’re talking this is like a metaphor for my personality, then I’m probably about a five, a pretty even temperament as I go along.
Sometimes I maybe kick up to like a six or seven because I do like to play jokes on people!
I do like to to have fun, that sort of thing. So I guess that would be my answer, that’s a hard one to answer.
So you could find out more about me and Private Practice Elevation over at privatepracticeelevation.com.
We also have a podcast where we talk about marketing for private practices, as well as different tips on website design, SEO, anything that really has to do with digital marketing and getting more traffic to your website.
And also, if you head over to privatepracticeelevation.com/apply and you want to learn more about working together on a project, if you mention the Productive Therapist podcast and how you found out about us, we’ll take $100 dollars off of your project.
Thanks, Uriah, this was a lot of fun.
