The Faster Way To Wealth, Stability, And Freedom with Greg Todd, PT

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Listen to the podcast here:

The Faster Way To Wealth, Stability, And Freedom with Greg Todd, PT

My guest is Greg Todd out of Florida. You might have seen Greg around. He’s got a ton of stuff going on. He’s the owner of multiple PT clinics. He is the Creator of coach and consultant companies called PT Builder and Smart Success PT. He’s a mentor. He’s a fellow podcaster. He’s got a great event coming up. Look out for that. I’m excited to bring Greg to you because in his story, he came to recognize early on in his career, and that was even prior to owning his PT practices, that it wasn’t the traditional PT skill set that was going to get him where he wanted to be in terms of success, significance, the effect on his community that he wanted and the wealth that he wanted to achieve, and even the freedom that he wanted to have in his life. He turned to recognize that he needed more non-traditional skill sets and the build-up of those skills. Whether that was learning how to lead others, doing better in marketing and sales or at least having the ability to communicate better with other people and becoming the visionary of his own life and the visionary of the companies that he wanted.

I’m excited to bring Greg to you because it harkens back to the same message that came upon with my interview with John Woolf where we recognized that it requires a change of mindset, that it is not the traditional skill set that’s going to get us further as PT clinic owners to achieve the goals that we want to achieve. Read into Greg’s value stages that he brings up for any member of a company, whether you’re an employee or the owner, and how that correlates to the amount of money and freedom that you have in your life. That’s invaluable. He also talks about four different types of people that exist in the world. I’m sure you can relate to all four of them, whether that’s yourself or others that you’ve come across. I will let Greg put his own words to it. Read his story. You will get a lot out of it because he brings a lot of energy and a lot of wisdom to the story and to the message that he’s carrying forth.

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I’ve got Greg Todd, a physical therapist out of Florida. He is the Creator of Smart Success Physical Therapy and also the Co-owner of three physical therapy clinics and soon to be four. Todd, first of all, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Tell me a little bit about you, Greg, where you started from, what got you to where you are and what you’re doing nowadays.

I’ve been a physical therapist since late 2000 and got into the field because my mom told me to. My mom was a medical transcriptionist for an orthopedic surgeon. She told me and indoctrinated me that, “Greg, you need to have a skill.” She loves her husband but, “Don’t be like your dad.” My dad was an entrepreneur and he used to work for a company called Primerica. She says, “You want to have a stable job. You want to have a skill so that you can get a job when you get out of college.” Initially, she wanted me to be an orthopedic surgeon. The orthopedic surgeon that she worked for, the day that I went to go meet him and shadow him, he was in a pissy mood that day. He said, “Don’t do what I do. I’m on my third wife. My kids don’t know me. Do what they do,” and he had physical therapists that worked in his office.

That is the story of why I decided to go into physical therapy. I knew that I needed to get a stable job because my mom told me to. I knew that physical therapy was in demand. It was between physical therapy and pharmacy. I’ve always wanted to do physical therapy because I love sports, but I was leaning towards pharmacy because I had a speech impediment and I stutter a lot. I was very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with clients because of my stuttering that I struggled with all my life.

I ended up deciding on PT and that’s how I got into it. I was not planning on being an entrepreneur. I just wanted to work 9 to 5, come home and have a good living. I always knew I wanted to have a family. Within four months of me being a physical therapist, I was married to my college sweetheart. I quickly realized into the profession that there was a hard ceiling and it wasn’t necessarily the money, but it was the time that I wasn’t able to get back with the hard ceiling that I was experiencing. We had our first child and then that turned into two, three, four and I realized that this is not going to work. It’s such a hard salary cap and more importantly, it was such a hard time cap. I realized that I was not going to be able to ever win the time game if I was just a staff physical therapist.

I thought that I was going to reach my ideal pay by year ten. My first job, I make $39,500 a year. My plan was to make a 4% increase every year. That wasn’t bad back then because I was coming out in 2000, 1997 is when the Balanced Budget Act came. You are lucky to have a job. $39,500 and I had a full-time job. I was like, “We’re good.” I was making $7 at the most. I’m like, “This is great. No problem.” The issue was that I was under the assumption that you’re going to get a 4% increase every year and I had a plan to make $50,000 by ten years. I know it sounds crazy now, but back then that was like, “$50,000, I’m going to get a 4% increase every year. I’m going to hit the corporate numbers. I’m going to hit the company numbers. I’m going to take care of patients. I love physical therapy.”

On my first year, the company that I was working for was a big corporation. They had continuing education courses every single weekend that were company funded and that was within the company because it’s such a big company. I did 180 CEUs in my first fifteen to sixteen months. I thought that was the way to achieve the 4%. I had done over 100 continuing education units by month twelve and I’ve got a 1.5% increase in pay. That was the first a-ha. When I went to my boss, I was pissed. I’m like, “Why did I only get a 1.5% increase in pay?” He was like, “You didn’t do anything wrong. That’s what we give for staff PTs.” I was like, “How do I get an increase in pay?” She says, “You’ve got to be a clinic director.” Now, I understand how the whole levels of earnings work. It was the first time that I realized you don’t get rewarded for being a better clinician in the real world. You get rewarded for moving up in management and you get rewarded for other things, but you don’t get rewarded for clinical excellence, which is sad but it’s the reality of the situation.

That’s no different than being a PT owner. You don’t get rewarded for your skill set.

You get rewarded for running the business right, but I didn’t understand that and most people don’t understand that. If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense because we put so much effort into CEUs, into this and that. You’ve got to get this. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to become a CSCS. You’ve got to become an OCS. You’ve got to become an SES. You’ve got all these different things but nobody talks about that does not get you any closer to having financial freedom and any closer to having time freedom. I went through this journey for about three and a half to four years. My wife and I started to have marital problems. It’s nothing crazy. She was frustrated that I was working so much and that I was on this quest to do every single CEU course there was out there. At that time, I also got the opportunity to work with professional tennis players. I was working on the WTA and ATP tour. I was trying to become an OCS. I was trying to get every single manual therapy certification there was on planet Earth. At the end of the day, I was getting nowhere in terms of earning more and getting more time freedom.

Where it culminated for me was when I asked my boss where I was a clinic director at a brand-new clinic. I had achieved the numbers that they wanted after a year of working in that clinic and gone beyond 50%. I said, “All I want is one day off a week. I want to work four twelves. You are paying me a salary for 40 hours anyway. Let me work four twelves and let me get that one day back so my wife and I can start to spend more time with one another,” because that’s where the frustration is coming, that I’m never there. He said no. That was the day that I knew that it didn’t matter. I had to become an entrepreneur. I had to go and open up my own thing so that I could be in charge of my schedule. I did not want to do this, but they forced my hand and that’s it then.

It wasn’t tragic but in a sense, it’s a challenge. It’s not even failure but something took you to the point where, “I’ve got to do something different.”

I’ve got no choice. It was either that or the marriage. They made it very clear. Just to give you an idea of my schedule. People may go like, “What was your schedule like? Was your wife being a brat?” No, she wasn’t. Here is my schedule. I started seeing patients at 7:00 AM at the clinic I was working at. This is a company called CORA. I was seeing patients until 8:00 PM. When my tennis players were in town and they weren’t out of the country for tournaments or whatever, I was going to their houses or their condos in a place called Saddlebrook after work. It’s about five to ten minutes from my clinic. I was going there and I was working with each person an hour to an hour and a half at a time. I was sometimes leaving Saddlebrook at 11:00 PM.

I’m getting home by midnight to 1:00 AM, eating, then staying up until 1:00 AM and she’s asleep. She’s waking up to take our daughter to her mom so she can go to work. This was the normal day. Then the weekends were going to Continuing Education Courses. At that time, I was trying to get my Manual Therapy certification to the University of Saint Augustine. That was Monday through Friday for us, then Saturday and Sunday, I was in Saint Augustine trying to become this better clinician. It was a rat race to the bottom. That’s all it was.

I love having you on because I’m all about stability and freedom. My story is similar. I wanted stability and freedom, unlike my father. Something that could give me the opportunity to be like my uncles who were in the healthcare profession. They had time and money, and I wanted that. I love having you on because that’s what I’m all about on this show. Was it at that time that it finally clicked for you that your clinical skill set made no difference or did that come up a little bit later?

At that time, I started to get it but I didn’t still fully get it. I’ve started to realize that I was blaming the companies. I was like, “I think they’re trying to screw me over. What I’m going to do is I’m going to leave and I’m going to open up my own thing.” I had a non-compete so I had to leave the area for one year and then I came back. During that time, I ended up with this guy who saw that I was working with all these tennis players because the tennis players followed me. He had a very small clinic called Renewal Rehab. He’s like, “Let’s team up. You will have all the insurances if you work with me.” We decided to become partners. We’ve been partners for fourteen years.

At that point, I still think clinical didn’t mean anything and it does mean something. What I did realize at that time was that the corporate system wasn’t set up for me to be autonomous, for me to make decisions, for me to do things that I feel were in the best interests of the patient. I knew that at the time. I knew that enough to say, “I’ve got to get out of their system.” I thought that if I went on my own, all these awesome things that I had: OCS, CSCS, all the Manual Therapy courses that I did, and all these different things were going to flood all these people to me. At one point, I was working with three either current or former number one players in the world. I truly thought everybody was going to come to me but it didn’t work like that.

You had to come to the realization after stepping aside, working with this other guy and partnering up with him that patients didn’t show up, I assume.

There are a couple of things that happen. At that point, I was still working a lot with physicians. I had verbal agreements that, “When I come back to this area, will you send me patients?” They’re like, “Yeah.” Until you come back in the area and you say, “I’m open,” they don’t give a crap. There are a lot of things that I had to come to terms with. A lot of PTs think, “If I know this person, if I have this certification, if I do this, if I know dry needling and if I know that, all of these people are going to want to come to me because they are going to want the best.” That’s not how it works. That’s not how the game works.

What are you telling owners nowadays? What’s cool is you’re also working with physical therapy students and telling them what the game is like. What are you telling them to focus on? What are you telling them about the system? What do you encourage them to do?

I’m explaining to anyone that wants to get clients into their door, “No one gives a crap about you. They just care about themselves.” That’s the main thing you have to understand. The big thing that I’m telling them is everything that’s in life or the way that things are with your clients is they don’t give a crap about you. They don’t give a crap about your certifications. You have to learn how to communicate with them at a very high level. When I say at a high level, I’m talking at a low level. That means we have been trained to communicate the way that we communicate with our colleagues. That’s not how it works in the real world.

In the real world, you have to treat everything like an advertisement. You have to talk to people in a way that they’re interested in. You have to be able to do things that are going to connect with them for their needs. That’s not something that we are trained on. You have to hook people. People are interested in stories. They’re not interested in facts. I was trained that the way you need to do it is you need to bring out your JOSPT or the journal article but nobody gives a crap about that. I had to train myself that the higher level of communication is communicating at a third to fifth-grade level with people. That’s the big thing that I tell owners. That’s what I’m having to do for my clinics and make it very simple for people to understand what it is that we do.

A lot of your focus then is on what people might call soft skill set. It’s sales, marketing and patient engagement. It’s interacting with people and building relationships.

I’m going to tell you what one of my coaches trained me on. I don’t think most people understand this. At my conference, I have him speaking three times because I know that people’s minds will be blown once they understand how this works. What he trained me on is that there are four levels of value. We have been trained for our entire life pretty much at the lowest level of earnings, which is implementation. Let’s talk about the four levels of value. Implementation is the lowest level. The next level is managerial and unification. That third level is communication and the fourth level is imagination/vision.

Let’s break it down. If you take the lowest level, which is implementation. Implementation is somewhat like if you go to a hotel and you want your room cleaned. You want to make sure that your room is clean day-after-day that you’re in it. If you check into a hotel and the room wasn’t clean, you’d be pissed. You’d be like, “Can somebody clean the room?” That’s not a good experience for you. That’s a low level of implementation. Someone that’s like a maid or a cashier at Walmart. As physical therapists, we are also at the implementation level as well. It is the lowest level of earnings there is. The next level and I didn’t realize this when my boss was telling me this in 2001. She was saying, “If you want to get higher than 1.5% increase of pay, you need to become a clinic director.” What she didn’t even realize is that the next level is managerial. That is someone that’s overseeing all the implementers. You get paid more to make sure that the implementers don’t kill themselves, don’t kill each other and that they give a good service to your customers. That’s a higher level of earnings. Not a lot but it is a higher level of earnings.

In the corporate structure, that brings more value.

When I look back now on my journey in 2004, that was what my boss was telling me. My boss was saying, “If you want to go up in this company, you need to go into regional management.” That’s the only level to go. There’s no 97110-OCS code. It’s 97110. It doesn’t matter who does it. It doesn’t matter if there’s a 97110-eighteen years of experience. It doesn’t matter if there’s a 97110-36 years. There’s a 97110 code. It’s just for implementation. There is no way that it’s going to pay you any more. What I realized is that if I can go up more in management/unification, which is the second level of value, you can get paid more but it’s still a hard cap. There’s only so much you can get up the corporate ladder. Here’s what I’ve come to understand. The third level is communication. Meaning that if I can learn how to communicate, if I can learn how to market, if I can learn how to do the hardest thing for any business, which is to get clients and keep clients, it is the highest level skill that you can have.

Think about the people that make the most amount of money in this country. It is the best people that are in sales and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are salespeople. They’re selling you on their vision. It is the high-level authors. The first job I ever had was a sales job when I was fifteen years old. I sold newspapers for a company called the Sun-Sentinel. I made $11.50 over two weeks. I sucked in sales. Now, I’m good at sales. I did a webinar and I made $138,000 in two days. It’s a skill that if you get good at, you can make a lot more money. I was watching Kevin Hart’s Irresponsible tour on Netflix. That guy makes gazillions of dollars by doing a stand-up act for an hour. It’s something he’s got good at. The best singers make a ton of money. It’s all communication. It all falls under the communication umbrella.

They’ve got a robust sales program in social media, you name it, it’s all about sales. You build a brand.

It’s all communication. Best actors, best singers, best authors, salespeople are all great communicators. Communication is an amazing skill to have. That’s why it’s the second highest level of value. Then the top level is the visionaries. It’s like this. When you think of Apple, who’s the first person that comes to your mind?

Steve Jobs.

It’s interesting that you didn’t say Steve Wozniak, because Steve Wozniak was the person that actually built the machine. You said Steve Jobs because he’s the visionary. At the end of the day, the visionary is the one that’s like me having the vision of this program called SSPT. I make the most because I was the one that envisioned it. I was the one that was able to sell the program. I was the one that was able to build a mission and turn it into what it is now. I get paid the most. That’s what people don’t understand. They don’t understand that throughout your entire educational system from pre-K to grad school, you’ve only been taught at the lowest level. It sucks but it’s also optimistic because it’s like, “If I go and learn these things, I could accelerate my income and my earnings to astronomical levels.” That’s what I try to teach people.

You had to go down this path yourself to figure it out that you were losing money or at least you weren’t tapping into your potential as long as you stayed an implementer. To those physical therapists, I know you’ve come across them, that are still working on patients, what are you telling them? How are you getting them into increasing their value and getting out of that?

I don’t have a problem with people working on patients. The big thing that I need people to understand is that you want to make it a goal to do more things at the higher levels of value than just stay at the implementation level. I’m not saying for people to go from, “I’ve been treating patients for the last one to twenty years that I’ve been a clinician and just go cold turkey away.” I’m saying to respect the other things and start to work your way up to those other levels of value so that you can now burst through the ceiling. The reality is most people aren’t even paying any attention to it. They’re frustrated. They’re like, “Why does my career suck? Why am I burning out? Why is this happening? Why is that happening?”

They don’t understand those four levels. They don’t understand this is how it works. They don’t understand that every single CEU course that you go to, what does it teach you? How to implement more. There’s no CEU course out there that is saying, “We’re going to teach you for a day and a half how to implement, but then we’re going to take the other day and a half and we’re going to teach you how to communicate what we taught you.” Nobody does that. They don’t even know it. I figured it out and it was my coach who put the pieces together for me. He was like, “This is because it’s the four levels of value.” I’m like, “That makes so much sense.” That’s how my whole career has gone.

Tell me about that a little bit because I’m a big proponent of coaches. You’ve got to step out and recognize that you’re not creating more value by simply treating patients all the time. You’ve got to be a visionary if you’re going to own a practice, make more money and have more stability and freedom. I highly believe that coaches and networking are integral to making those steps. Tell me about your journey towards getting a coach and working with a coach. Did you start right off the bat or did you get to a point where you’re like, “I need some help.”

Let me bring it back to maybe 2004 or 2003. My older brother has always been the entrepreneurial type. I’ve always been the anti-entrepreneur. That’s how it was in the family. I just wanted a stable job. He was always the one coming up with ideas and this and that. He’s always been telling me about Tony Robbins, about this person and about that person. I’m like, “Whatever.” I always thought that personal development meant that something was wrong with you like you needed to see someone. I didn’t understand the whole thing. It wasn’t until I experienced pain as in the way that I thought things were going to work out is not working out, that I started seeking out direction. My older brother was probably one of the first people that I’m like, “Maybe you are right. Maybe I should go open up my own thing.”

From there, I never got my first coach until 2012. I started realizing the power of having how much people knew that I didn’t know. I always thought that coaches were CEU like continuing ed people. I realized that there was another world out there that I had not even tapped into. It was in 2011 or something like that when I went to my first real event. I started realizing that there is so much crap I don’t know. I started looking, “Is there anybody in physical therapy that does this?” Nope. There’s no one in physical therapy that does this stuff. I had to take coaches from outside of my profession, learning and then how can I implement and incorporate this into what I do? That’s what I did.

I realized that there was definitely a need to have people that thought the way that my coach has thought and be able to apply it in a field like physical therapy where people have no concept to any of these things. Now, I have many coaches. I have one person that I’ve employed as more of my mentor and then I have coaches for different things, those different levels. I pay a lot of money to have coaches because I’m realizing that you tell me one or two things and it can be the difference of doubling my businesses. It could be the difference with allowing my missions, all the things that I’m doing to take it to another level. I believe in self-education and I believe it has catapulted my career infinitely more than traditional education. I’m willing to pay for it.

I love that you shared your insight on that and especially what you pay for it. You didn’t share dollar amounts.

I pay over $100,000 a year.

I’ve done the same in the past. What it turned out to be the following year was easily double that in increased revenues. It’s funny because I will talk to friends who are like, “I’m thinking about getting a coach, but this guy wants $10,000 for a year and they’re hemming and hawing.” I’m like, “You don’t even know that $10,000 investment could triple, quadrupled or do more in the next six months to twelve years that you don’t even realize.”

Nathan, I want to tell you something that’s important about this. I was Facebook Messaging a guy that’s like, “I’ve been listening to your podcast. I’ve been doing this and doing that. I’m ready to take this one course that you have. Tell me something to get me over the edge.” I was like, “Here’s the deal. I don’t convince people. I’m not into that.” I do persuade, but I don’t believe in convincing. Convincing is getting you to do it for my reasons. Persuasion is getting you to do it for your own reasons. I need to have you come to the conclusion that this is in your best interest. I’m going to say the reason why people are like, “Yeah, but I don’t want to get screwed over by a coach.” I was like, “This is why every single coach I’ve had, whether it’s been a great experience or not a great experience has been beneficial for me.”

We are in a profession where everything that we’ve done, for the most part, I’m assuming the majority of your audience have only done traditional education. People are like, “How is it that you’re able to do all these things?” I have a $30,000 coaching program that people work with me for a year and people are like, “How can you get to the point where you charge that?” I was like, “It’s when I started paying for it myself that I realized that my worth has gone up.” I can tell the person like the one you’re talking that’s like, “$10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000.”

What I’ve learned is that there are four different types of people out there. This is something that my coach taught me as well and I will share it with you. There are feeple people, there are freeple people, there are cheaple people and there are premiumple people. This is how it works, but it makes perfect sense. I can say for me, it has changed everything in my businesses when I understood that I’ve been all four of those people. The first person is freeple people. These are the people that want everything for free. What ends up happening is that when it’s time for them to sell anything, they have a hard time selling anything. They’re so used to getting everything for free that they feel like a hypocrite for charging. The problem is nobody gets results in them because if you give me free stuff, you don’t take it seriously. It’s the way it is.

Then you have cheaple people where everything they want are discounts. The thing is when it’s time for them to get people to buy into their stuff, they’re discounting everything. What happens for them is they’re like, “I give so much and I’m not getting anything for it.” Those people end up quitting because they’re not charging their appropriate fees. Then you have feeple people. They are people that are comfortable with paying a fee. They don’t want to pay for the best, but they’re comfortable with paying a fee. What happens is in return, you get people that don’t want to treat you as the best. They just want to treat you as, “Okay, you’re decent, whatever.” Then you have premiumple people. Premiumple people is where I finally got myself as somebody that used to be a feeple person and now I’m a premiumple person. I’m willing to pay premium for the best.

I have my event and I’m paying someone $25,000 to speak at my event because I want the best. I’ve looked at my bill so far for that event and I’ve racked up over $100,000 of bills because I want to have the best of it. I will make a ton of money because I’m willing to accept it. I know that I only give the best so I don’t have any hiccups with, “First, he was going to pay me $2,500 a month or $30,000 for the year.” I have no problem with it because I know that I give the best of my people. I don’t even know how to not give the best. I’ve had to train myself to get to that level. I think most people don’t understand that and they have this hang-up with selling, “I don’t want to sell.” You don’t want to sell because you’re a feeple person. You probably get everything for free. You should feel awkward. It’s like me cheating on my wife and asking her to be faithful to me. It doesn’t make sense. That’s not how it works. If you’re faithful to me, I’m faithful to you. If you love me, I love you. If you don’t love me, it’s hard for me to love you. That’s the way it works and most people don’t get that.

It comes back to mindset. You hear about the mindset of abundance and making sure that, “There’s plenty of it throughout the world,” instead of a mindset of scarcity, “There’s only so much of it out there. Whatever you got, you’ve got to keep it. Someone’s out there to screw you over.” Instead of thinking, “There’s an abundance of money to be made out there. There’s an abundance of love to provide to people. There’s an abundance of knowledge to provide to people. We can all share in this boat together.” Switching from that scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset is hard for some people to get over.

I’ve been there. It’s very difficult for people to get over. I’m at a point in my career where I have four kids. My wife’s love language is time. I don’t have to work anymore. I have an exit plan where I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. I want to do this but what I have come to understand is my wife would prefer that I hang it up. She’s made it very clear. She says, “I would rather you hang it up because you’re giving so much to people.” What I’ve noticed is this. I started Smart Success PT on May 29, 2016. It was for one year that I was coaching and educating people for free.

Do you want to know what my show up rate was for the calls that I did? At this point, I’m only working two days a week in my clinics. I only do evals, everybody else does all the other stuff. I had all this time for myself and my wife, but I told my wife I want to help out this new generation of physical therapists and teach them the things that I’ve learned. I would block off six to eight hours a week for complimentary coaching calls with me. My show up rate was 30% because I was giving free stuff. I was attracting freeple people and they didn’t respect it. What I did was instead of me hitting the dream at 38 years old back then when I started this whole SSPT thing, I was creating another nightmare in my marriage. My wife’s like, “Here you are taking time away from me to give to these people that don’t even value your time.” Now, I have to charge $30,000 a year because now my show up rates are 100%. It actually saved my marriage. We don’t need the money. I don’t want people wasting my time.

You have to recognize that you provide value and you’re worth something. There’s something to that. There has to be a monetary obligation. Otherwise, people do exactly what you’re talking about. They keep in the value of the service that you provide if you’re not willing to charge a premium for it. That’s a constant battle for physical therapists because at our core we feel we should give away even our services for free. We feel bad asking for a co-pay. We feel bad for asking for a deductible. It hurts to our core to ask people for money. We’ve got to get over it.

We’ve never been trained on any of this stuff. That’s why everybody struggles with it. They’ve never been trained on value, personal development, how money works and that you not collecting the money from people is hurting them with regards to getting them to commit. There’s so much stuff. Trust me, I struggled with that as well. I struggled with it mightily. Then people are shocked when they get canned. It’s like, “They cut my hours. How did this happen?” It happened because nobody paid attention to money. Nobody paid attention to value. “I don’t know why patients are canceling. Maybe it’s the weather.” No, it’s not the weather. The value’s not there.

Here’s the interesting thing. I give the most amount of free content out. I have 900 videos on YouTube. I’ve been doing this four to five days a week for four years. You could see that I go on Facebook Live pretty much every single morning and I turn it into a podcast as well. I’m on episode 500 of my podcast. Here’s the deal. I give out free stuff because I have made a commitment that I’m going to dedicate six hours of my week to serve my healthcare profession. I’m going to give out but everything else is paid. This right here is one of the six hours. When I and you talked, I knew that I had one more hour this week of my six hours that I give away. I was like, “No problem.” This is one hour but after that, if you want to work with me, you have to pay.

What has happened though is that people have seen, “This guy gives so much value for free. What does his paid stuff like?” It’s not a problem for people to pay me money and they pay me a lot of money. It’s no problem. When they pay, they realized, “This is worth it.” I’ve had 475 people take my course. It’s the only online course that I’ve never had a full refund. It’s never happened before. It’s a $3,000 course. That’s the entry level to work with me. The deal is that we have to get over this whole money work that we have. You’ve been taught that money’s evil. You’ve been taught rich people are stingy, this and that. There’s so much crap you’ve been trained on. You’ve been indoctrinated on that so that you would stay at the lowest level of earnings, which is the implementation level. What people don’t want you to know is that anyone could get to the other higher levels, but then it screws up all the people that are at higher levels. Now they don’t have implementers and they’re panicking. That’s why I’m getting so much flak from different establishments because they’re like, “This guy’s turning all these people into entrepreneurs.” Now they’re all waiting, “Who’s going to work for us?” It’s freaking people out. I’m having fun with it. I’m loving it. I love watching all this happen.

You’re doing great and I love the energy that you bring in. I know that you have a conference coming up. Is your conference a lot of this like how to market, how to sell, how to change the mindset or am I off base? Tell me what is your purpose.

That’s what it is. It’s called SSPT Live, which is my flagship course, Smart Success PT. The conference is three days. It’s based on how I have my method set up for SSPT. The first thing that I believe everybody has to do is they have to calibrate themselves. We have to change their mindset. They’ve had a worker bee mindset, “This is all I can do,” and we need to help to calibrate people. It’s like having a compass. We need to know where we’re going first. The first day of the conference what I do is I’m going to show everyone there’s not one way to do it. There are many different ways to do it. The people that I’ve been coaching that are now at a level to where they’re at the top 1% in earnings in physical therapy, I’ve been able to do it for our practice owner, for mobile concierges, for people that are doing online coaching, strictly online, canine physical therapists. I’ve been able to get all of them, at least one person beyond the 1% in PT.

The first day is about giving you the belief that you can do it in any way that you want. The second day of the conference is about teaching you those higher dollar value skills: the communication, how to be a leader and how to have a vision. That’s what the second day is about. If we can focus you on the first day and then we can start to teach you those skills, the third day is about giving you the ability to have a legacy. It’s showing you. My whole thing is calibrate, care, create. Calibrate you and getting you focused. Care is showing you the high dollar value skills. They are true care skills that you’re going to need in order to win and then create. Create wealth, time, financial freedom. Until you create those things, you cannot create a legacy. You don’t have the time to do it.

People say like, “It’s such a nice ride.” There are many nice physical therapists out there, but they’ve never created time and financial freedom. They can’t do the things that I’m doing. They are good people but they can’t do it because they have never focused on creating time and financial freedom. They can’t give back, which sucks. Overall, if you think about it, our profession typically attracts people that are good at the core, but they suck with making money and with knowing how to create time for themselves. They can’t do anything impactful.

That’s where you see a lot of burnout. You don’t see a lot of 40-year-old practicing in physical therapy out there. You get to the 40-year-old mark and you’re looking at you can’t be a staff physical therapist anymore if you’ve been a manager for a period of time. There’s a hard ceiling there. They’re not fulfilling their potential. They’re looking for other things. They will get a realtor license or something like that.

Do you want to know what the sad thing about it? When you think about it, the entrepreneur is always telling the implementers what to do. The problem is that in our profession, you don’t have enough entrepreneurs. I’m an entrepreneur and I have clinics. Why is it that my employees are happy? They’re happy because I am an entrepreneur, but I’m a physical therapist at heart. I want to set it up so that my people are happy day-in and day-out. I have a very unique set up at my office to where the culture is amazing at all three of my clinics. Here’s where the problem is in physical therapy. The problem is that most entrepreneurs that are running physical therapy locations are not physical therapists.

They don’t have that, “We need to do what’s right for the patient, but we need to also do what’s right for the physical therapists.” They don’t have that pull. What’s happening is they’re like, “Blue Cross Blue Shield has decreased by 10% in pay, add more patients in the schedule.” Easy fix, go work harder. What’s happened is that the entrepreneurs never had that moral code entrenched in them on what it’s like the moral code that we have as healthcare practitioners. This is the reason why I’m trying to create many entrepreneurs in healthcare so that when they grow, expand and scale their businesses, they now have already indoctrinated them the moral code of a healthcare practitioner. Whereas if you think about it, most of the people that are running these big organizations are not healthcare professionals. They don’t care. They only care less.

I know you’ve got to get going. You shared a ton of content. I’m sure we could go down another road with another topic, especially that one in particular. Unless you have something more to share, make sure people get your content or at least your contact information.

You can find me @GregToddPT. That is my handle on Instagram and YouTube. If you want to opt-in to my mentorship list, I send out an email every single Monday called Mentor with Greg. It’s something that is on my mind that I feel I can help people. I’ve been doing it for two and a half years. That’s MentorWithGreg.com and you can opt-in to that. My event is SSPT Live. We’re nearing in 500 people for the event. That’s pretty awesome. On Facebook, it’s www.Facebook.com/ThePTBuilder. I go live at about 7:30 every morning. I usually do a 20 to 25-minute talk of whatever I feel can help people. I also turn it into a podcast and the podcast is called The Hunt for Greatness. I’m everywhere. If you want to binge on my stuff, you can binge on it as much as possible. You will be bingeing for months.

The stuff that you’re sharing on your Facebook webinars and also your podcast, is that stuff specific to PT or is it more business in general?

It’s for everyone but I have an affinity towards physical therapists. My program has taken in the first five or ten OTs, we have dieticians, chiropractors and we have people that are not even in healthcare. It’s going beyond because at the end of the day, if you think about it, no one’s learned any of this stuff.

A lot of it is basic business principles or entrepreneurial principles that are beyond just the PT.

It’s funny, 10% to 15% of my people aren’t even in physical therapy school yet. They’re learning the stuff and they understand, “I’m taking this information. I could become a consultant.” They’re making money to pay off their entire physical therapy education. I teach people how to create money. That’s what I want to teach you. If you can learn how to create it, that money is just exchange. I’m teaching people to be more valuable so that you can make whatever you want.

Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. I wish you the best with everything. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Nathan. I appreciate it.

Important Links:

• PT Builder
• Smart Success PT
• John Woolf – previous episode
• @GregToddPT – Instagram
• Greg Todd on YouTube
• MentorWithGreg.com
• SSPT Live
• www.Facebook.com/ThePTBuilder
• The Hunt for Greatness
• http://GregToddPT.com

About Greg Todd, PT

For the past 18 years, Greg has dedicated his life to helping people with the skills that he has learned in his physical therapy career.

In the last eight years, he has helped thousands of people in physical therapy (and now other allied health professions) because of the skills that he learned beyond traditional physical therapy schooling.

This has led him to live the life of his dreams for himself and his family, and now helping others, just like you, create the life of their dreams for their families as well.