Finding Purpose in Physical Therapy | Larry Lawson

Larry Lawson: I am a very relationship driven person and whether we had somebody call and they hadn’t been in in three years or something, but they only wanted to see me, it’s a very small thing, but that’s so gratifying to me that I was able to make that kind of difference. You know, if I’ve written a letter that helps get somebody into PT school. If I’ve made that little change that made somebody’s job that they weren’t liking easier, so that now they’re having a better time, we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes in people’s lives.

If we can help them overcome them, give them the tools to continue to do it, to me there’s nothing better than that. I like people and I want the best outta it, and I want the best for them.

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Everyday Heroes, a podcast from Shore Capital Partners that highlights the people who are building our companies from the inside every day, often out of the spotlight.

With this series, we wanna pull those heroes out of the shadows. We want to hear their stories, we wanna share their stories. We wanna understand what drives them, why they do what they do, how they might inspire and support others to become everyday heroes too.

In this episode I talk with Larry Lawson, a Regional Director with Greater Therapy Centers, a partner in Therapy Partners Group. Larry came to physical therapy later than most after a fascinating and exploratory life and career that he describes as quote all over the place.

From a Master’s in English to teaching in academia to doing landscaping, to working on pools, to managing a multi-site massage therapy business. His experiences are honestly too broad and too fascinating for a single podcast, but Larry’s sense of clarity and purpose in his work as a physical therapist are proof of the old adage all who wander are not lost.

Larry Lawson: My name’s Larry Lawson, live in the Dallas area. I’m married. Got three kids that I’m convinced are conspiring against me on a moment by moment basis, you know, you know, I love spending time with them. They’re actually kind of the center of my life. If they’re ever gone, I don’t know what to do with myself.

But outside of that, I love sports. I don’t get to watch much of it, but enjoy it. I love being outside, so like hiking, going to the beach around here. I ride a bike a lot. It’s something that I found later that’s a lot of fun. I spent a lot of my life being kind of a meathead, like to be in the gym, lifting weights, and then probably about 40, I started hurting all the time.

You know, you’re like, you’re supposed to exercise to feel good, and I wasn’t feeling good. So, I bought a, a bike at Walmart. It was like 90 bucks. And probably weighed 150 pounds. It was like the worst bike ever but, I loved it getting out on it. And so since then, you know, when I have time, that’s what I

like to do.

That kind of transitioned into doing sprint triathlons, which are little short triathlons, you know, it’s about a 300 meter swim and a 12 or 15 mile bike, and then a 5K. I normally come in much closer to last than first, but yeah, I like to think of myself as a inspiration to guys with dad bods everywhere.

You know, it’s, it’s fun.

Anderson Williams: Well consider me inspired Larry.

Larry Lawson: Well, good, good. Yeah, we can, we can get out sometime. I’ll, uh, I’ll show you how to do it very slowly.

Anderson Williams: Well, it’s not everybody who starts with saying that their body starts hurting at 40 and the end of that statement ends in sprint triathlon.

So I am curious. About that evolution, but it sounds like that heavy Walmart bike was the pathway into that experience.

Larry Lawson: Yeah, it was. It was a lot of fun. And it’s a good excuse to get together with friends. You know, our, our motto is we’re earning our wings and beer, you know, when we get out. So yeah, burn enough calories to say, we deserve that.

Anderson Williams: That’s awesome.

So will you just describe what you do and where you do it, just from a professional standpoint?

Larry Lawson: Yeah, absolutely. So the bigger company that I work for is Therapy Partners Group, but within them, it’s kind of a bigger company that has taken charge of a lot of smaller companies, but they allow us to keep our branding in the specific areas.

So the company that I kind of fall under is called Greater Therapy Centers. We’re in the Dallas area and there’s 32 clinics here. They’ve been around for 27 years or something like that. And then it split up into regions and overall, the whole company has kind of regional directors. The role is a little bit different where I am, but here, I’m a Regional Director. Right now there’s five clinics that I’m kind of directly over. There’s a couple of others that I kind of help out with.

Anderson Williams: What got you into physical therapy in the first place, as a career choice?

Larry Lawson: I got into physical therapy when I was older. It was around the time I talked about my body breaking down. I didn’t graduate school until I was 39, started working at 39 or 40 in this field.

So, for me it was a, you know, a young person thinking, Hey, I’ll probably like to do this. I was older, I needed a direction to go into, and I really kind of had the world ahead of me and I wanted to do something where I really felt like I was making a difference in affecting people’s lives. And so made that decision at that point. And really, you know, it’s made all the difference.

You never know, you know, you say you’re older and so you think you’re wiser, but you’re still taking a risk and hoping at the end of the day you made the right decision. But I really feel like I did. I feel like, you know, on a daily basis, I

really get to make a difference in people’s lives and it’s a powerful thing.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. And do you mind sharing what you did before?

Larry Lawson: I was all over the place. I actually, I have a Master’s in English, so that goes back a long time ago, and degrees in English and philosophy. So there was some teaching, but to be honest, once I got done with that, I kind of wanted to be outside of academia.

So I was doing landscaping and working on pools. Had different jobs like that, managing sites. There’s a lot of art and framing shops. There’s a lot of different things that I did. Had management roles in a lot of them, but I fell in, it’s a longer story, but to doing massage. It was kind of, my mom and sister were going down this direction.

I wanted to be involved in it a little bit. Ended up managing a lot of clinics there. And then as I got older kids come along and you’re like, Hey, I’m need to be a grownup at some point. You know, I can’t just run around being a hippie my whole life. And that’s why it mattered to me when I was making the decision, okay, this is the decision that I’m gonna use to hopefully raise my kids and all the financial concerns.

But I want to feel like in doing that, I’m getting into an area where I can be happy with what I’m doing and proud of it. And kind of that’s what led me here.

Anderson Williams: Well, I’m interested. My background, I have an English degree and a fine arts degree, and a Master’s in Fine Arts. Yeah. So you’re talking to a kindred spirit. If I were smarter, could have done a philosophy degree as well.

Anderson Williams: What was it that drew you to English and philosophy that connects with where you are today? I mean, you mentioned you couldn’t just be a hippie or whatever, but you didn’t just turn, you took something that at, you know, 39 years old and found a career that has obviously profound meaning to you as well.

And how do you connect the dots between those two?

Larry Lawson: To me, I think they’re very connected and um, but this resonates with you as well. You’ll hear people when they hear that you have those degrees and they’re like, oh, well there was money wasted. But to me, it made me the person that I am in a lot of ways. I needed those things. I needed to grow and to look at the world differently, to think differently.

People talk about education in general and they’re like. Well, we should just, if somebody wants to go into business, they should just go into business. But those people have to vote, they have to raise children, they have to, there are all these different factors that, that go into it. And how are you gonna approach that?

And you know, hoping to be a thoughtful person when it comes to that, I think is what that gave me at the time. It’s something that I needed, you know, there’s some thing, and I’m not saying everybody has to be a huge nerd like me, you know, or you, I don’t wanna throw you under the bus, but you know,

Anderson Williams: I’m happy you, I’m happy to join that party.

Larry Lawson: Yeah, exactly. So not everybody has to go down that road. But, you know, I think being a thought. Person and approaching the world in a thoughtful type of way where things do have meaning to you, people have meaning, and you have meaning in that way that like, who do I want to be? How do I want to present myself or address the world, or how do I want to view the world?

And for me, that made all the difference. And so right now I’m a physical therapist and I deal with spreadsheets and numbers and stuff too in the director role in all of that. But at the heart of it, I still have the decision of how I want to approach that, how I wanna approach the people I work with, or the people that work here, all of those things.

And so I think it’s still a major vein of who I am and a big part of, I think at least, you know, what makes me decent at my job, you know, comes directly from that.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, no, I tell people because I get the same sort of response. Oh, you got a Master’s in Fine Arts, bet you’d like to have that money back, or what did you ever do with that? And I think I’m doing every day with that. It defines how I approach literally everything I do in my life as a parent, as a business person, as a coach, or a trainer or anything else.

How do you think that those studies have made you different as a physical therapist or even broader as your career has evolved, as someone who’s able to go into and lead multi-site physical therapy clinics, how does it make you different?

Larry Lawson: You know, it kind of goes back to a lot of the things that we thought before, but how I think about the people around me in a lot of ways and how invested I am in them, but not only that, you know. With anything. If we’re gonna be actually motivated to do something, we all, a lot of the time, we need a core understanding of why we’re doing it.

So if we’re approaching people and it’s in this kind of more haphazard way or whatever else, the interactions can be inconsistent. You can have difficulties with that. And I think that, especially when you’re managing larger groups of people, inconsistencies can be a very big problem.

But to me, a lot of my studies are a lot of what I looked at, it came down to me to valuing an individual, and that can be somebody that I work with. And I think it helps me because a lot of times what people want to do is stratify the people that they’re working with. This guy’s a manager, so he’s more important than this person that’s way down the totem pole.

Where to me, if you’re approaching them just as a person, as a person, they may have different goals and different roles, but you want them to fulfill those. Goals and you wanna be a part of that, of bringing them along. It’s really changed the way that hopefully I approach the people around me.

And then it’s a hard road. It takes a lot of work to get from point A to point B, and you know, if we’re talking about the English and philosophy and all that, I’m not even at point B. You know, it’s this big journey and you’re trying to get there. And so realizing that if I have something that may help somebody else along that journey or you know, open their eyes or whatever else, that helps.

But also being a person that’s willing to learn from the other people around me, I wanna take wisdom wherever I can get it. And you know, sometimes that’s. From a philosophy book, but sometimes it’s from some 19-year-old that saw something on TikTok. And I wanna be open to that a hundred percent anyway.

I always tell people I’m not that smart. I’m just smart enough to steal from people that are smart, you know? And so wherever I can get wisdom, that’s where I want to get it. And I think that approach is healthy, and I think it resonates with people when you’re not approaching them as this superior being that you know, you’re one of them, you’re on the ground floor with them, and we’re all trying to pull this thing together.

Anderson Williams: At this point, I kind of just wanted to listen to Larry talk, his complex but thoughtful journey from a self-described hippie to becoming a dad to a physical therapist, keeps bringing him back to one thing people, it’s about people. So I wanted to ask someone who knows Larry at TPG about what this people focus really looks like through his work.

Here is Dena Aitken, the Chief Operating Officer at Greater Therapy Centers.

Dena Aitken: You know, Larry just has a fantastic personality, as I’m sure you guys noticed when you interviewed him. He really goes, I would say, above and beyond for his patients and especially his team members. He sends like weekly emails, giving his team members kudos, really pointing out all the things they did during their week to really make the clinics run smoothly and do what’s best for the patient.

We always have that as our ultimate goal to provide the best patient care. And to do that we need fantastic team members. And Larry’s just a great leader in that aspect. Like I said, he really communicates well. He lets upper leadership myself and our other leaders know, you know, who are the top performers and gives him kudos. When they deserve it. So I think sometimes that’s lacking in leadership, but Larry really highlights all of that.

He’s a great teacher, so he’s really done a lot of taking our less experienced therapists and meeting with them one-on-one and really cultivating clinical skills. Sometimes you get outta school and they kind of get thrown to the fire a little bit as far as, you know, you’re now seeing a pretty full patient load. And so he really takes the time to advance their clinical skills, which, you know, ultimately helps the patient, but also just helps them with their career and keeping them on track for, uh, future professional growth.

He does a lot of fun things. I mean, he’s just a fun guy to be around, so, you know, he visits all of his clinics on a regular basis. He treats alongside of them on a regular basis. You know, in all the clinics, he kind of goes around and does a little bit of treatment, all five of his locations, and I think that’s huge because they get to see kind of him in action and he knows what they’re going through on a daily basis. So he can relate a little bit better.

Anderson Williams: From his managers to his patients, to his team, to a new generation of physical therapists entering the field. Larry is taking care of his people and it’s in part because of the people who have had a profound impact on him. And as he suggests, it doesn’t have to be complicated or deeply thought out to make someone’s day or even their career.

I can’t help but think, Larry, that there is a philosopher that you studied many moons ago that talked about this very thing. That’s all I can think about. I, I don’t know who they are, but this is deeply rooted in philosophy, right?

Larry Lawson: Yeah, I think so. And I think it’s a lot of people. As I said, I, and I mean it.

I’m not the smartest guy in the world. I just steal from people that are, and there’s a lot of philosophers. A lot of the people that have made the biggest impact in my life were just that, were the people that actually invested in you or saw something in you, and it doesn’t even have to be on a big level.

You know, I tell people all the time, you can change a, a cashier’s day at Walmart if they’re having a bad day and they look down and you’re just nice to them, all of a sudden you see a smile pop out on their face. It doesn’t have to be a huge philosopher or, you know, Buddha or whoever else it is. You know, I’m not a Buddha.

I just mean that, you know, in general, like some this great mind. I think that you can get rewarded on a daily basis by following a lot of these tenants, and it’s important.

Anderson Williams: It makes sense now, having heard your background that your Everyday Hero nomination spoke specifically about a project you’re working on related to the student program.

Will you just describe what that is and give us a sense about what you’re doing there?

Larry Lawson: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m really interested in teaching or training. I don’t know necessarily if it’s going back to be a professor. As I get older, you know, right now I’m 48 and my kids are still young, so I’m probably gonna work until I’m like 97 years old.

So as a backup plan, I’m getting a degree, it’s a doctorate of science, which is a terminal degree, kinda like a PhD, but it’s aimed more at teaching. And so within that, I had to come up with a project at the end and you, you teach and you run all this background information on it and I was doing something else that’s specific to pt that’s really interesting.

But the more I’ve gone along and the more I look at some of the great training programs that Therapy Partners Group has, I started thinking about me coming out of school and how I told you that I didn’t feel like I had a bunch of information, but I didn’t really feel like I knew how to treat a patient and what a awful feeling that is and you know, the insecurity that comes with it.

And I wonder if there are programs that we could instill that would help either universities or larger companies like therapy partner groups better prepare people for when they hit the ground to feel better about it. And Therapy Partners Group has a great training program that goes along with new graduates that helps them out through the first year and kind of gives them information.

And so I looked at some of that and for me, for my project, I really wanted to hone in, okay, well where are the areas that people feel most inadequate or most difficulty with. So I set up a questionnaire and I sent it out to some student groups and then through Greater Therapy, my company, but then Therapy Partners Group was nice enough to let me send it out there.

And so it asked general things that could be about, you know, body parts, whether neck or low back and shoulder. How good do you feel diagnosing this? And then how good do you feel about treating it? Some of the other parts that I thought were very important, were talking about documentation. In the medical field documentation is very hard, and when you see as many patients as we do, it can become a burden if you’re not skilled at it and if you don’t work at it.

There was a study done and I think under 35 years old, I’m probably gonna butcher this exact number, but it was over 60% of physical therapists were looking to change jobs because of burnout. But a lot of the reasons that were given for the burnout, it wasn’t the people, it was more documentation, some of these side things that go along with it.

So are there ways that we can help on that front and got a lot of good information back kind of percentage wise? And a lot of it, if you’re in this world, you would expect is the back, you know, problems, neck problems that eats up so much money just in the healthcare system anyway and can be very hard to treat.

But other things that you saw were things like that, like documentation. So to me, trying to come up now, you know, we’ve got that information and a lot of it was kind of in line with what I thought it would be. And the hope is creating that next step of, well, what are the ways we go about this? And as I said, uh, the company that I worked for already has a great setup, but how can we possibly hone that?

So I’m sharing this information, obviously with them. How can we hone that even more? And hopefully helping those people that come outta school and changing that dynamic of so many people, maybe leaving PT because of the stress of it.

Anderson Williams: With all he’s done and for all the ways he has grown and invested in other people’s growth. I wanted to know what Larry had accomplished that he’s most proud of.

When you look at your career, and we can use that broadly, and with air quotes, the way I use career in my life, what are you most proud of?

Larry Lawson: Ooh, that’s a really good question. To be honest with you, I think sitting here, being a part of this company, I got very lucky to be part of a company that a lot of these things I’m saying jive completely with them.

But seeing an area, and so this isn’t one of the things that we talked about as far as the region goes where I am, but it can be a difficult region. Some of the areas that lie outside of Dallas are a little bit more difficult to keep staff, difficult patients, all of that stuff. And it, they are jobs I think where people could get burnt out or at least be that person that can’t wait till five o’clock and it’s just cashing a paycheck.

I think one of the things I’m most proud of, one is bringing in great people. I

think they’re, I have great people from top to bottom, but keeping them all, pulling in the same direction. I think when things get hard, I think they pay people in management positions for when things are very difficult, when things are going good, anybody could manage, and we all have that moment where in the middle of it, and you just want to throw your hands up. You know, and the fact that you’ve been there means that these other people are too.

I think the thing that I’m most proud of is keeping all of those people, having good people there, and then being able to have them continue to believe in me for whatever reason. You know, sometimes may be smoke and mirrors, I don’t know, but pulling them all along this route to where we’re working together and to where even during those tough times, I have people that are very willing to dig in and do the right thing. You know?

To be part of a group like that is very special, and I’m proud of them, and I’m proud to be a part of it.

Anderson Williams: Larry Lawson is an Everyday Hero whose superpower is his philosophy. Whether it was learned from a philosopher he studied, or his own personal experience, insights developed or “stolen” as he says. Larry’s people first approach to work and life is clearly core to who he is and how he relates to the world.

Finding a career at 39 years old in physical therapy has only magnified Larry’s philosophy and put it into practice and created impact that I suspect a younger version of Larry could have never even imagined.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our other Everyday Heroes at www.shorecp.university/podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts. There you will also find episodes from our Microcap Moments as well as Bigger. Stronger. Faster. series each highlighting the people and stories that make the lower middle market space unique.

This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners and recorded in the Andrew Malone Podcast Studio with story and narration by Anderson Williams, recording and editing by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Larry Lawson and Dena Aitken.

This podcast is a property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the terms of use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.