In 1994, Dan Rootenberg was about to sign with the Philadelphia Phillies.
He was the captain of the Binghamton University baseball team and a free-agent deal was in front of him. Then Major League Baseball went on strike and every contract froze. Three years earlier he had lost his father. He had a single mom he refused to burden by sitting around waiting for the game to come back.
So he made the call I have watched founder-CEOs avoid for entire careers. He let the old plan die.
Dan enrolled in the physical therapy program at Touro University the moment a spot opened on the waiting list. In 1999, he and a fellow Touro graduate, Dave Endres, opened one physical therapy clinic. Today Spear Physical Therapy is the number one practice in the New York City and Tri-State area. More than 80 locations. More than 1,300 team members. One and a half million patient visits a year. Inc. 5000 nine times. Three times larger than its closest rival.
Dan has been in my Vistage group since 2017. The story starts before that, and it’s worth telling. The lesson is not the size of the company. The lesson is what he did every time the floor dropped out.
He got told no, and he didn’t argue
Here is a detail most people skip past. When Dan first found Vistage in 2010, he wanted into a specific group. He didn’t get in. His company wasn’t big enough yet.
Sit with that. A driven, accomplished CEO is told he hasn’t earned a seat. Most people in that moment do one of two things. They get insulted and walk away, or they argue about why the rule shouldn’t apply to them.
Dan did neither. “I needed to grow bigger to be a fit for the group, and I understood that,” he told me. Then he went and almost doubled his headcount and revenue, and two years later he joined.
I have thought about that response many times. It tells you everything about why he scales. He didn’t experience the standard as a rejection. He experienced it as information. The group had a bar, and instead of negotiating the bar down, he climbed.
When he got in, he was the guy taking an absurd volume of notes, hanging on every speaker, applying whatever he could the same week. Five years later he had become the revenue leader of his group. At that point he asked to be moved into a tougher group, where the other CEOs were ahead of him again. In 2017, that tougher group was mine. He does this on purpose. He keeps putting himself in the spot where he is the smallest company in the room.
Then COVID took 80% of his patients
By 2019, Spear was the second-largest practice in the New York market and everything was moving the right direction. Then the pandemic hit and Dan lost 80% of his patient volume almost overnight. He and his partners went without pay to keep the lights on and the staff employed.
Watch what he did next, because this is the whole game.
While competitors laid off talented therapists, Dan hired them. While other operators broke their leases and ran, Dan signed prime New York real estate for less than 50 cents on the dollar. He put money into a rebrand with the help of a fellow Vistage member, Mark DiMassimo, at the exact moment everyone else was hoarding cash.
His logic was simple. The market was going to shrink either way. If he took share while it shrank, he would own the recovery. “The strategy worked,” he told me, which is the understatement of his career. Spear came out of the pandemic as the number one practice in the region.
I cannot teach a CEO that instinct in a workshop. But I can tell you where it comes from. It is the same muscle from 1994. The plan you wanted is gone. Stop mourning it and find the move that’s actually in front of you.
Three things I’ve watched make him hard to beat
People want the resilience to be a personality trait Dan was born with, something they either have or don’t. It isn’t. It shows up as three habits, and any CEO reading this can build them.
Curiosity is a growth strategy, not a personality quirk. Growth creates complexity, and complexity punishes ego. The CEO who already knows everything stops getting information from his own company. Dan kept a beginner’s posture as the business got bigger, not smaller. That is rarer than it sounds. Most founders get more certain as they scale, right when they can least afford to.
He builds leaders, then actually pays for it. Dan put eight members of his senior team through Vistage leadership development programs, the Emerging Leader and Key Executive tracks, rather than trying to be the hero who personally solves everything. He built a path for therapists to become equity partners in their own locations. He created a year-long internal program that turns clinicians into clinic leaders, and he borrowed pieces of it straight from Vistage speakers and Chairs, including the way we process issues in the group. He isn’t building a company that depends on Dan. He’s building one that runs on the people he developed.
Care and challenge, together, every time. This one I’ll keep short, because it is the simplest and the hardest. Dan holds his people to a high bar and genuinely loves them at the same time. Most leaders are good at one of those. The ones who do both build the kind of loyalty that shows up on the days the company can least afford to lose it.
Why I’m telling you this
I didn’t grow Spear. Dan did, and Dave, and 1,300 people who get up every day and do the work. My job was never to have the answers. My job is the group.
For years, my job has been to make sure Dan is sitting at a table with other founder-CEOs who have no agenda except wanting him to win. Not consultants with a next engagement to sell him. Not employees who need to keep him happy. Peers. People who will tell him the truth because they’ve been in his chair, and who get nothing if they flatter him.
When the strike froze his contract in 1994, Dan had to find that move alone. When COVID took 80% of his patients, he didn’t. He had his group.
That’s the work I do with founder-CEOs running $1M to $350M companies in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I find the ones who, like Dan, treat a closed door as information instead of an insult. Then I put them in a group with people who will both challenge them and care about them.
That’s peer advisory.
Dan’s full story first appeared in Vistage’s Perspectives magazine.
Mark Taylor is the #1-ranked Vistage Chair in the NY/Long Island region and holds all three of Vistage’s legacy awards.
