Ep. 72: Grow Your Practice: Effective Marketing, Communications, and Solutions-Based Offers

Join us in this week’s episode as we welcome Greg Todd, PT, for an in-depth discussion on the challenges of starting your own physical therapy practice. Having grown through multiple successes and learning experiences, Greg now shares this knowledge with other PT’s, OT’s, Chiropractors, and other professionals in his coaching programs.

This week we focus on:

• – The foundational mindset required to run a business
• – Key skills that are essential for success
• – Some different ways to market a practice and how to know which one(s) to pursue
• – The benefits of a “solutions-based offer” and how to create one

Tune in now and don’t miss out on this great opportunity to learn more about creating your own physical therapy practice!

You can find Greg and his work at www.gregtoddtv.com

Read the transcript:

Garrett Salpeter (00:01.404)
Hello, New Fit Nation. Welcome back to the undercurrent podcast. And today we’re going to pivot away from some of our clinical and scientific discussion topics and talk more about the business of physical therapy, chiropractic and similar professions. And my guest today in order to have that conversation is Greg Todd. Greg is a physical therapist and the founder of smart success healthcare, where he has this wonderful coaching and consulting business that we’ll talk about. But before that.

He was a physical therapist, actually initially working on the WTA, the professional tennis tour and then transitioned into private practice. And along the way, he learned a lot about business and he learned some lessons the hard way but was able to have a very successful business that also gave him a great balance and good quality of life. And now since 2009, he’s been coaching others to do that same thing. He works with PTs, OTs, chiropractors, dietitians and other professionals.

through his business called Smart Success Healthcare. And he helps, I love this language, he helps liberate them from burnout and financial binds so they can make a resounding impact on healthcare while also enjoying a fulfilling life and career. So yes, it is possible to do both and Greg Todd is going to tell us how. Greg, welcome.

Greg Todd (01:19.67)
Thank you, Garrett. Thank you for having me on, and thank you for allowing me to be a part of your community. Appreciate it.

Garrett Salpeter (01:25.788)
Awesome. I’m really looking forward to this one here and it’ll be a nice change of pace here to kind of talk about more business strategy and some of your perspective on that. In order to kind of frame that up and give people a sense of who you are and where you came from, can you talk about your starts on the Pro Tennis Tour and sort of your early days of how you transitioned into business?

Greg Todd (01:49.286)
Yeah, so I became a physical therapist December 26, 2000. And I started working with professional tennis players in November of 2003. So here’s what happened from December 26 to how I got to work with, at that time, the number one tennis player, female tennis player in the world. I was working at a company called HealthSouth, probably a lot of your audience knows HealthSouth.

seeing a ton of patients, working 40 to 55 hours a week for them. And I got the opportunity to work with a group of 8 to 14 year old tennis players in Pembroke Pines, Florida. I didn’t get paid any extra money for it, but I just felt like, hey, it’d be a really cool opportunity to kind of get my foot in the door with athletes, even though they were young kids and whatnot. So I did that for about eight months.

And during that time, I learned how to work at tennis players, and I was able to now put it on my resume. So now fast forward to August of 2023, I moved from Pembroke Pines, Florida to Tampa Bay, and I got the opportunity to make a lateral move from a company called Kessler Rehabilitation to…

company called Cora Rehabilitation. So these are outpatient centers. And one of the things that Cora wanted from me, and while I was able to get a 15% increase in my pay going to Cora, was because I worked with these tennis players. Those are my resume, and they’re like, hey, we have an opportunity for you to work with tennis players at a place called Saddlebrook Tennis Resorts, which is in Westly Chapel, Florida, and I was gonna be able to work at professionals. I was gonna work with kids. And because I had…

history of doing that, they brought me on. So I worked on the WTA tour. I worked with players privately. I was never officially working with the tour. I didn’t travel with the players, but I worked with top level players and I was their private therapist. And then if they wanted me to go to tournaments, I would go with them. And there was something really amazing that happened during my time of working with the tennis players. So this one tennis player I was working with, at that time she was number one in the world.

Greg Todd (04:14.326)
And I remember the first time I worked with her, Garrett, I actually went to her condo at Saddlebrook. I’m in the room. I’m already super intimidated working with this person. I feel like I have no business working with this lady. And as I’m starting to work on her and just getting to know her a little bit more, in comes these two dudes with these huge cameras. And I was like, what’s that? She goes, oh, it’s from something called Eurosport. Like Eurosport.

I’m like, isn’t that like the ESPN of Europe? She goes, yeah, it’s ESPN of Europe. So I just remember I was just sweating like crazy. I’ll sweat like Mike Tyson out of Spelling Bee. And I was just like, oh my God, I have no business being here. I am not the number one physical therapist in the world. I’m not even a number one physical therapist in Florida. I’m not even a number one physical therapist in the clinic I work in. And there was only two of us. So I’m like, how the hell am I working with this girl? And…

I ended up working with her for about four and a half years until she retired. And something she told me during my time of working with her of why she chose me and why she continued to choose me over so many other therapists that were published, that had all these credentials, that had all these certifications. She said, Greg, the reason why I work with you is because you explain things better than any other therapist that I’ve worked with. And you, I feel like you make the right decisions for me. You empower me.

And that was a huge start to how I was able to start to leverage myself as a physical therapist. I feel like the majority of us, we are what we call implementers. And what we do is we trade all of our time for a little bit of somebody else’s money because the value that we believe we bring to the marketplace is by physically doing something to someone. And what I realized with working with some of the top, not just tennis players, but top

athletes in other disciplines and other professions is that what people value is they value consulting and they value someone to help make decisions for them. And I realized that a lot of other health care providers didn’t understand that. And I knew that I probably could never be better than someone that spent 30 years learning how to do this one skill amazing. But I realized that most people weren’t focusing on becoming great decision makers.

Greg Todd (06:41.918)
So that’s what I started to focus my efforts on because in my mind I’m like, if that worked for the number one tennis player in the world, that could work for Bob, James, Susie, and Scott. And so that’s what I did. And I realized that was probably the best way I could leverage myself is just by becoming a better decision maker and becoming a better educator and explainer of conditions to common people. And that’s what kind of got me started on how to leverage myself. And…

how to become more valuable in the marketplace and not competing against all the other clinicians out there.

Garrett Salpeter (07:16.348)
That’s a fabulous perspective. I love that story. And, um, I can, I can tell that’s a through line, you know, now having gotten to connect with you and learning about what you’re doing now, and we have a couple of mutual friends like Lisa Chase and Logan Cooper, by the way, who both have been on this, on this podcast, our fabulous physical therapists, um, and, um, you know, people who have gone through your coaching and rave about you and.

Greg Todd (07:32.862)
Yeah. Yep, yeah. Awesome people. Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter (07:45.532)
I can see that sort of through line. So I’m excited then to follow that breadcrumb trail or follow that through line. And can you talk then about how, when you were getting into private practice and getting into business, sort of those next stages in your career and how you were able to take that sort of epiphany or that realization and actually put it into practice?

Greg Todd (07:51.854)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Greg Todd (08:09.242)
Yeah, so I started my practice in 2005. And I started my practice because in my mind, if the number one tennis player, and at that time I had worked with number one, number four, number 17, probably about four to five other top 50 people, and maybe another 30 to 50 people that were on ranked at either an ATP or WTA tour.

In my mind, I’m like, well, if the number one people are gonna work with me, that means that all these other people are gonna wanna work with me. And so I was like, I’m gonna go ahead and start a practice, right? So I left Quora, I started a practice, put over $100,000 in starting a brick and mortar practice, thinking everybody’s gonna wanna work with me because I work with this person and that person. And I had a goose egg, like nobody cared. And so, you know, even though I learned a lot of stuff from those tennis players,

it didn’t translate right over, like right away, to me working with the common person. And so I realized that there were other things I was gonna need to develop that was going to allow me to actually have a thriving business, because I nearly went out of business. And I realized this, Garrett, the first thing I realized is we went to school and many of us spent anywhere between three to five years learning how to practice on people.

We spent less than three to five hours learning how to get people to practice on. So I realized that there was a couple things. I was gonna have to learn skillsets that I didn’t learn in traditional schooling. I was gonna have to learn how to get customers. I was gonna learn how to talk to people before they trusted me. I was gonna have to learn marketing, which is the art and science of getting people to desire more and more of what I have, whether it’s a product, it’s a service, it’s an opportunity.

I didn’t know how to do that. What she told me, she told me that I could explain things well and I empowered her and that’s the reason why she continued to work with me for four years. That’s the top tennis player I was working with. But that only works if somebody’s working with you. It didn’t work to get people. And so I went on a path from 2000, late 2007 to present day to learn how to get people to actually.

Greg Todd (10:36.77)
have a desire to work with me, how to become a person of preeminence, which is someone that understands someone’s problems better than them, how to be someone that can convey my message to someone that makes them look at me as a person of preeminence, a person of authority, and how to get them to become my client, which is how to sell them. And what I’ve come to realize is that

I had to learn how to sell, which is I had to learn how to uncover the value of what I had to offer so well that people are happy to take out their wallet and pay me money for the value that I’m giving to them. And so that’s kind of been my journey. It’s like how to do it. I did it initially strictly off of survival. I had too many kids and not enough money and I had to figure out how the heck am I going to do this? I remember one day, I got to tell you this, okay. I remember one day, this was in 2007.

I have my practice, I had just put $75,000 into a second location. The first location was already there before I bought into the business. So I have the second location thinking everybody and their mom is going to come and work with me. Nobody was seeing me. And I remember it being a Tuesday morning, I had gone to now my 17th physician office with them rejecting me. 17 in a row of being rejected.

And when I went into this office, I remember going to the front desk and I started saying something to the front desk person. I started stuttering. The office was filled with clients in the waiting room. And I couldn’t even get out the words I wanted to say. And they said, please, can you come back another day, we’re busy. And I remember just looking and turning around to my left and to my right. And I just felt this level of shame because the people were like,

At least I felt like they’re just like, you’re a total loser. Nobody said I was a loser, but I felt like I was a loser at that point. I walked out, I went to my car, I called my wife, and I started crying to my wife saying, I think we made the biggest mistake by putting all this money into this business. And I said, I’m gonna come home and I just want you to console me. She goes, here’s the deal. I love you babe, but you’re not coming home. You got us into this mess, you gotta get us out. Ha ha.

Greg Todd (13:00.434)
So I wiped the tears away from my eyes. I went into office number 17 or 18 at that point. They rejected me there, but office number 19, it started the process of building a relationship that has now yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars. So my point in all this is that there’s a lot of skills that I learned in school. There’s a lot of skills I didn’t learn in school. And when I talk about empowering yourself, liberating yourself, having freedom, you get the freedom from building skills.

And that’s it. And it’s communication skills, it’s imagination skills, it’s being able to create offers, it’s being able to create new products, new services, and it’s being able to unify people to basically do the things that you want them to do for their best interests. And I realized that the skills that I learned in school, which were implementation skills, which is how to do the mobilization, how to do the dry needling, how to do this, how to do that.

They only allowed me to trade a lot of my time for a little bit of somebody else’s money. So that’s how I was able to get my clinics from broke to making millions. Over the time that I have my clinics, we made over $30 million in revenue. And now today I help other people start their businesses. That’s kind of the story.

Garrett Salpeter (14:19.022)
That’s fabulous and a big shout out to your wife there for giving way. Yeah, that’s right. They have their way of doing that, knowing when it’s the right time to be a shoulder to cry on or when it’s the right time to give a kick in the butt.

Greg Todd (14:23.87)
Yeah, yeah, you’re telling me, suck it up, you wimp. Ha ha ha! They do.

Greg Todd (14:36.742)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I got that kick. All right. So anyways, I thank her for that day because, you know, I was ready like many people that are probably listening. You’re 2023 has been a, it’s been a trying year for a lot of practices. And I know a lot of people are like, shoot, should I, should I just pack it in? You know, the end of the day, you know, I’ve, I’ve heard the saying the darkest hour is just before dawn, you know, no chances are you probably just don’t know how to do something good. And if you can just learn how to do something good, then, you know,

Like you’ll be okay, you know, but you got to learn it and you got to be able to implement it and your life can change really fast and it did for me.

Garrett Salpeter (15:15.572)
That’s awesome. So in terms of your experience growing your practice there, you know, we just talked about how physician office number 19 turned out to be, you know, a very successful relationship and lucrative referral source for you did when you had your own practices. So before coaching business, I mean, when you had your own practices, where were your main sources of referrals from physicians, or did you ever do any marketing also directly to patients? Or how did, how did that area look?

Greg Todd (15:29.801)
Yeah.

Greg Todd (15:43.29)
Yeah, and in the beginning, all I knew is all I knew, and I just knew go to physicians. And so that’s what I did. I just went office to office to office to office. I was just doing it wrong. I can tell you how to do it right. But what I was doing then is I thought that who I was, my credentials, my years of experience, the people that I’ve worked with was going to be impressive. I tried to be extremely interesting to them. And I made it.

very clear that I’m here for you to use me because it’s going to be in your patient’s best interest because I am the best and that doesn’t go off very well. So no one cares. All people care about is what’s in it for them and that me being the proclaimed best is not something that was in it for that provider. So look, I think marketing to physicians is a definitely, it’s one of the top three ways.

that you can get clients, okay? So my three ways are social, organic traffic, partnerships, which could be physicians, it could be other healthcare providers, chiropractors, other physical therapists, other occupational therapists, massage therapists, and businesses, right? It could be any business that has the types of clients that you are looking for. So where does your client shop? Where does your client get their food from? Where does your client work out? Where’s your client?

hang out on the weekends. Where does your client go to with regards to community events? Where does your client buy their clothes from, et cetera, et cetera? So those are the three ways. And so physicians is partnerships, and that’s one of the ways. What I realize is that every physician or every business wants this one thing. Pretty much all of them, you know what they want? They want more business, they want more customers. So what I realized is as I started to work on developing my skillset,

on how to get more customers. And I started to build my own community base, my own fan base. And then I said to them, hey, I have a leverage piece that you don’t have. I have a client base that you don’t have access to. I would love to put you in front of my client base. That’s what I wanna do. I wanna put you in front of my client base. I’m gonna do that through my newsletter. I’m gonna do that through my podcast. I’m gonna do that through my social media channel.

Greg Todd (18:07.214)
I want to put you in front of my people so my people know about you so I can grow your business. So when I started doing that, now I started to have the leverage over them and now they wanted to work with me because I was actually giving them something they wanted, which is attention and every business wants that. So that’s probably one of the biggest things that I learned from a leverage standpoint is just give people what it is that they’re actually looking for. And I know we spent a ton of time learning our amazing skills, having all these cool gadgets in our facilities.

But really, what they care about is how is this going to feed my bottom line? How is it going to pad my pocket? And once I started doing that, I now held the leverage, and now people wanted to rock with me, and that’s how I did it.

Garrett Salpeter (18:50.8)
That’s awesome. So the partnerships was one, did you say it was social media and organic traffic or paid traffic? Just so I could make sure I have the three down.

Greg Todd (18:59.215)
Yeah, yeah, so let’s put organic into its own category. That’s number two. And then pay traffic is number three. Okay, so organic traffic includes social media, right? So it could be Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, depending on where your audience is, right? I think what most people think is they’re like, well, I have no audience there and no one’s gonna pay attention to me. Well, here’s the cool thing.

I’m assuming the majority of you that are listening, you’re in healthcare and none of you have an audience. So it’s all relative. You know, you’re not competing against a TikTok influencer that has a million followers. If you have 500 followers on your Instagram channel, or even if you have 200, it’s usually 200 more than the person that you’re trying to build a partnership with in your community. They usually have nothing, okay? And it’s an easy way for me to communicate and talk.

with other providers and other businesses. So I use social media, not just to put content out, to position me as a person of authority, or perceived authority, but I also use it to build a network and to build a relationship with people. It’s very difficult. Like right now, and I still have my clinics, I’m not a part of them day to day anymore, but right now, if you were to try to get, if you were to try to get a meeting with me by coming into my clinics,

Let’s just say I was treating at the clinic still. You’re not gonna get a meeting with me. I’m busy treating at the clinics. But I do surf on Instagram, and I do play around on Facebook. If you started liking all my stuff on Instagram and Facebook, you’re gonna get my attention. So I use social to build a relationship with all of my in-person, brick and mortar, potential relationships that I wanna build. That’s how you use social media. You use it for that, and you use it

to be able to talk about what it is that you do, how you help people, and not just how I help people, but the people that I wanna serve, other ways that we can help them, whether that’s through nutrition, that’s through this, so it allows me to have partnerships, and it allows me to use those partnerships to help the audience that I wanna serve. So that’s how you do social, that’s how you do organic, you can do that through blogging as well, you can do that through having a very well optimized site.

Greg Todd (21:24.57)
And then you do pay traffic. If you have an offer and your offer works, you can make money from it, then you can pay these platforms to put you in front of the people that you wanna be in front of. And it saves you time. It’s another way of leveraging yourself. You’re using money to leverage your time. It’s like having an employee that’s doing marketing for you. Back in the day, I used to have someone that, this is prior to Facebook and…

and TikTok and, you know, even prior to MySpace, I paid someone to do marketing for me, to go out and go to different doctor’s offices and go to different businesses. I paid that person for a day’s work. Paid them like 25 bucks an hour, you know, for eight hours of work. Now I pay Facebook that. Facebook, go do my work for me. I’ll pay you 200 bucks a day. I’ll pay you 150 bucks a day. Go put my stuff in front of people that can use it. So these are all ways that you can get in front of people. You just have to have a good message and you gotta be able to talk to people well.

And if you do that, you’re going to get customers.

Garrett Salpeter (22:29.06)
I love that perspective on thinking of Facebook or Meta or Google as your marketing rep. They’re there. That’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re putting your message in front of people and it’s even a similar cost. I love how you frame that up. I also like, back when you talked about the list of skills that we need to have to be successful in marketing and communication, sales, imagination, and how to make offers. And you just mentioned if you have an offer.

Greg Todd (22:36.152)
Yeah.

Greg Todd (22:53.9)
Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter (22:56.968)
That’s what you would want to put in paid advertising. And this is, I think, really gold. I don’t know how better to describe it than actual gold in terms of your thoughts on how to make offers. So can we use that as a segue to get into your suggestions on how you recommend that people offer their services?

Greg Todd (23:05.141)
Mm.

Greg Todd (23:13.704)
Yeah.

Yeah, so I’ll say this first. The thing that I teach all my clients is they must understand the business cycle, okay? So the business cycle starts with marketing first, because you’ve gotta have a customer in order to actually be in business. My daughter recently started a crochet business. She’s 14, she started doing all this crochet stuff. I’m like, wonderful. She keeps on asking me, Daddy, can you take me to Michael’s? Daddy, can you take me to Michael’s and buy more yarn and buy more of the…

cotton powder stuff they do to make these different cute little animals. I’m like, you know, I was like, Elena, this is starting to cost a lot of money. Might want to turn this thing into a business, you know? I’m like, yeah. In other words, I’m not going to continue to pay for this for the rest of your life, just to make all these things and have all these toys. So she’s like, okay, let’s turn it into a business. All right. So, so daddy, what’s the first thing you need to do in business? Like you need to sell it. That’s the first thing you need to do. So I actually explained to my daughter the business cycle. Here’s how it works. You got to market first marketing turns the leads.

Then, because people are not ready to give you money, so you’ve got to actually give them something that’s of value. It turns into a lead. And then we’re going to start conversations with them, and that will turn into eventually a sale. And when you get your first customer, you are in business. The customer is the service. And then if you do really good with customers, then the customers will actually tell other people about you, and that helps your marketing. And it feeds. It’s just a big circle. Marketing, leads, sales, service.

marketing, leads, sales, service, okay. So now, the first thing that I work on with someone if they do not have customers is marketing. Marketing is the number one thing because if people don’t know you, they can’t flow you, they can’t flow to you, okay. It’s attention first, money next. You don’t get the money without the attention, so we need to focus on marketing. But for probably many of your people that are listening to this, your audience, they have customers. So the first thing that I work on when you have customers,

Greg Todd (25:14.582)
is change your offer. I would say 99% of healthcare providers that have a practice, their main offer is them physically trading their time to someone with the skillset that they have for someone else’s money, whether it’s through insurance or it’s through cash base. And there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s cool, and you could earn a living that way, but you’re never gonna be able to really leverage it and scale it, and you’re gonna run out of time because you’re using

physical resources. You’re using a limited resource in your body, which as you get older you move less and you get tired, right? Ask any 30-year therapist they’ll tell you, okay? It’s harder to do what you’re doing today than what you did 30 years ago. You want to know why? Because you’re old, alright? That’s why. It’s okay. It’s normal, right? It’s why people don’t, unless you’re Tom Brady, it’s why people don’t last in an NFL for 50 years, okay? Okay? It’s because we’re doing a physical job.

Right? And then time, time is a limited resource. So what I tell people to do is let’s not get paid for our time anymore. Let’s get paid for the results we get for people. Now here’s the cool thing. When I became a physical therapist, this was my first ever patient I saw Gary. I saw this young lady. She was 14 years old and I saw her for a patella for moral problem. I kid you not. I’m, I’m

I’m actually embarrassed to say it, but I think your audience will get a crack out of it. So it’s my first day. I only had one person on my schedule. It was this girl. I saw her for patellofemoral. If anyone’s treated patellofemoral, you know this is not massively complicated. This is not a multi-ligament injury. It’s patellofemoral syndrome. It took me two and a half hours to do her subjective and objective in the evaluation.

The mom said, we’re gonna have to come back and we’re gonna have to finish this on another day. I’m like, okay. So it was on a Monday and I said, okay, you guys come back on Wednesday, we’ll finish it on a Wednesday. Now, I obviously was a terrible physical, it was my first ever eval, all right? So don’t judge me, it was my first ever eval. Now, I could do that, the same thing that I did with that girl 23 years ago, I could do that in about 10 minutes today, right? Okay, So the deal is that even though we get older, we’re smarter.

Greg Todd (27:39.382)
We’re wiser. We can fix people faster. But the problem is that the way we’ve set up our compensation package is we haven’t set it up to where our life gets better, our income gets better as we get better. It’s because we’re trading all of our time for money. Actually, in healthcare, we are set up to where when you get better, you get paid less. Because people don’t need to see you as much. Right? I mean, if you suck, like somebody comes to you 15 times.

and you’re charging $200, you’re getting paid a good chunk of money. But as you get really good, you might be able to fix that person in five visits or five sessions and you’re charging $200, that’s $1,000. You’re basically cutting your pay down by 66%. So what I train my clients to do is a solutions-based offer. So you’re basically getting paid for the results you get your clients instead of for the time you’re spending with them. And so the way that I do it is I set

I, first of all, I’m, when I’m evaluating the client and I’m looking at what’s going on with them, I’m deciding if they qualify for a solutions-based offer. And there are three different tiers that we can put clients in. It’s depending on the time that I feel that I can get them an outcome that they desire. Okay, and that just varies. So the tier one can be, can I get this outcome in 30 days or less? Somebody with like an ankle sprain, they sprain their ankle on the basketball court.

OK, or I’ll put them in tier two where I can get them an outcome that they desire in less than 90 days. That might be someone that had a laminectomy or someone that had a disectomy or someone that had some type of, I don’t know, like an AC repair or something like that. Or I put them in tier three, which is six months or less. And that can be someone that had an ACL reconstruction or someone that had an Achilles tendon repair. OK?

They fall into one of those three categories. And if they don’t fall into any of those categories, then I put them in my fourth section, which is they’re gonna be on a recurring revenue program, which means that they’re gonna see me monthly. This is the expectations of what we’re gonna get for you. And we’re gonna do that month over month over month over month. And I’m gonna still set the expectations of, this is how long or how many months I believe I will need to work with you to get the desired result or to maintain whatever it is that you have. So it’s a solutions-based offer. And now,

Greg Todd (30:05.894)
I’m rewarded for actually getting the result faster. Kind of like, I don’t know, when a plumber comes to your house, right? You don’t care if the plumber’s there for five weeks. You’d rather it be done in five hours. And even better than five hours is five minutes, right? You just want the problem solved. And I think what we’ve done is we have sold people that the only way their problem’s gonna get solved is if we are physically in front of them. And the longer we’re in front of them, the more valuable it is. So we’ve actually…

pitch and hold ourselves into making less money and having us be the center of the business. That’s how I’ve been able to get myself out of my clinics. That’s why I don’t have to treat anymore. It’s because I’ve gotten my clients and my patients to be conditioned to focus on the result instead of the person, focus on the system of how we do it instead of the pieces, the time that it takes to do it.

Garrett Salpeter (30:59.104)
I love that for many reasons. Perhaps the biggest is that the incentives are aligned because if I’m going to, if I’m going to see a therapist and they only get paid, if I keep coming back, coming back, coming back, they, I mean, you know, most of them are, are legitimately doing their best and trying to get me, but I might be wondering as a, as a patient, you know, are they really trying to get me back as quickly as possible and do the absolute best for me? Whereas if it’s, if it’s.

a fee for solution, fee for outcome, rather than fee for service, the incentives are totally aligned and we are all in it together. So I really like that. Charlie Munger, rest in peace, he said, you show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome, right? And that’s what we’re doing.

Greg Todd (31:37.919)
Yeah.

Greg Todd (31:41.93)
Yeah, exactly. It’s huge. And I actually will, I train my staff to have that discussion with them, to let them know how I’m positioning this, how we’re positioning this is totally different than what you’ve been used to. What you’ve been used to was either advantageous for the provider, but not advantageous for you. So understand that in a traditional way, providers only get paid more the longer they see you.

There is no incentive for them to get you better faster. So my question to you is, are you interested in having X problem resolved sooner rather than later?

They say sooner, okay, yeah, like how we do everything else. The air conditioning guy comes to your house, you want the air turned back on sooner. You have a dental problem, you want the problem fixed sooner, right? And that’s how I present it to them. So now when you present it that way, it refrains them on what they’re used to in healthcare and they realize that they weren’t doing this in my best interest. And so now I say, listen,

It’s in my best interest and it’s in your best interest. And now we are totally aligned and that we’re trying to get this problem solved. And even though I’m doing it within a certain timeframe, if we do get it solved sooner rather than later, then we use the rest of the time as insurance to make sure that if something does happen during this allotted period of time, I’m going to continue to make sure that I work with you so that the problem stays resolved. That’s it. It’s so simple. And I don’t know why more people don’t do it.

Garrett Salpeter (33:24.98)
Well, some of them may not even know it’s possible. So I’m glad this conversation is hopefully at least lighting a little bit of a spark. I really, really do love that. And I think one question that people have might be, how would I do that? Am I gonna be seeing them unlimited during that, if they’re in tier one and it’s that 30 days or less, for example, am I gonna be seeing them every day during that and then kind of wean back? Is it gonna, I assume we’re gonna try to throw,

Greg Todd (33:30.068)
Yeah.

Greg Todd (33:46.755)
All right.

Garrett Salpeter (33:53.)
the kitchen sink at them and try and get everything better as quickly as we can, because that’s where the incentive point us to, but how does that work?

Greg Todd (34:01.294)
So there’s a 10-step framework to it, but I’ll kind of just break down a few different things. I want you to, I think one of the biggest things, and I kid you not, I just did a workshop on this yesterday. So one of the biggest things that I had to do is tell people that understand that the educational system is not there to educate you. The first thing we must understand, this was before I even started the workshop, I said the traditional education system is there to program.

So we’ve been programmed that in an insurance-based way. So we basically have all been doing insurance care instead of actual health care, okay? So now, if we understand that, now I just want people to put on their therapist cap or their chiropractic cap or their, whatever provider you are cap. And now, if money wasn’t an issue, time wasn’t an issue.

Respecting the other person’s time, your patient’s time. What would you do to get them to optimal results? That’s how many times you’re gonna see them. So, I’m gonna give you some examples. If I’m working with a tennis player, and it’s a professional tennis player, and they want to get back on tour, I’m seeing them every single day, but they’re a professional tennis player. This is their job. Their full-time job is to work with me. So when I was working with top, you know, the number one.

personal world, the number four personal world, number seven personal world. When they’re hurt, they’re seeing me one to two times a day. If Patrick Mahomes gets hurt, he is not going to therapy one time a week. He’s in the rehab facility every single day, multiple times a day. That’s a professional athlete, okay? If me, who is a weekend warrior hacker, if I get hurt,

I can’t see you or you can’t see me every single day because I’m busy. So for me, it might be once a week. It might be twice a week. It’s whatever you agree on with the client. For some people, it’s going to be once a week. For some people, it’s going to be twice a week. I think many people have been conditioned to see people based off of money. And that’s the issue right there is that you’re seeing people. And for you.

Greg Todd (36:24.83)
all that are insurance based, you’re seeing them three times a week because you know that the more visits I get out of you, the more money I make from you. Whether that is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, that’s what you’ve programmed yourself to do. For those of you that are cash based, you’re seeing most people one time a week. Why? Because you’re trying to justify to them why cash is not that much more expensive than insurance. Is that the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do? I don’t know.

more than likely it’s the wrong thing to do, mostly we’re doing. Why don’t you see them how many times you believe is the right time to see them? Based on the time it’s gonna take for their recovery to happen, that the external things that I can do where you physically have to be in front of me. And then what we do inside of our offer is we add other things that we can do that can help them get the recovery. That’s guidance, that’s giving them more accountability, that’s giving them access to our community.

and that’s also giving them tools. If you don’t mind, I wanna promote your newbie. Isn’t that a tool to help people with recovering? That should be in everybody’s offers. At least I’m assuming everybody listening has got one. That should be in your offer. That is part of aiding in the recovery. So what you’re able to do is you’re able to create something unique in a marketplace for people that’s not just you. So now you’re in a category one. Inside my offer, you have the newbie. Inside my offer, you have this.

Inside my offer, you’re working with my massage therapist. Inside my offer, you’re getting, you know, my nutrition plan that I’ve collaborated with a dietician. Inside my offer, you’re getting this. Inside my offer, you’re getting that. And all of these things combined are going to get you the desired outcome that you’re looking for sooner rather than later. That’s how you do it.

Garrett Salpeter (38:12.588)
I love that. I have nothing, nothing to add other than to just highlight and underscore everything you just said, because it makes so much sense and it would improve, you know, the industry, physical therapy and related professions so much if more people moved to that. So I love it. I love it.

Greg Todd (38:31.642)
It’s huge. Yeah, yeah, it’s everything. And it’s the fastest way for you to be able to now get rewarded for actually being good. You know, I think I told you this off camera. There’s only two professions that you get paid less being good at your job. And that is online dating and healthcare. The cool thing about online dating is that it’s online and it’s such a wide market. Like you can’t run out. The problem with healthcare is that

you’re physically doing the work. So as you get better, you’re more broke, doing it in a traditional way. This way, you get paid more, the better and more efficient you become.

Garrett Salpeter (39:09.552)
Yeah. And we have, when we talked to some people about the newbie, you know, probably not the ones listening to this podcast. Some people are resistant to it for that reason. And like, what do you mean? It gets, what do you mean? People get better faster. Well, doesn’t that, doesn’t that hurt my revenue?

Greg Todd (39:22.59)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s yeah, because they have a they have a they have a terrible business model. They have a bad business model. So, you know, I mean, isn’t that kind of crazy? It’s like we can’t get people better faster. Yeah, it’s because your business model is broken. You know, you should be able to get people better faster and you get paid more for it. You know, like that’s then and by the way, if we’re not getting people better faster and getting paid for it, then why the heck

Are we trying to get better at what we’re doing? That means you should stop doing all continuing education. You should stop doing anything. You should try to be the worst provider possible. That’s, I mean, if you’re in business, you should try to be the worst provider possible. Like, come on, make up your mind here. Which one do you want? You want to be good and make money, or you want to be good and be broke? Fix your business, fix the business model.

Garrett Salpeter (40:12.048)
Yes, yes, I love that. So if people are intrigued by what you have to say and they’re thinking, hmm, I want to hear more. What are the ways that people work with you at Smart Success Healthcare? And can you also mention your event coming up in late May of 2024?

Greg Todd (40:28.622)
Yeah, so I have an event called Smart Success Health Care Live 2024. It’s ssaclive2024.com. You can find me on pretty much every social media platform at gregtoddpt. My website is smartsuccesshealthcare.com. If you want to know more about me and my crazy life, my wacky four kids, and my wife, it’s gregtoddtv.com. So those are the ways you can find out all

Like on my websites, you’ll see all the different ways to work with me, how to learn how to do a solutions-based offer. I usually do workshops on this. Now I’m doing them like once every other month. I do a live workshop and I also have an on-demand, so if somebody wants to learn how to do this right away and put it into their business going into the new year, then you can buy that on my site.

Garrett Salpeter (41:19.936)
Awesome. And I know we’ve mentioned a couple mutual friends, a couple of really excellent therapists who also run great businesses that are part of your mastermind and square by it. And after getting to talk to you a few times now and diving into your content, I can see why I’m very excited to learn more and talk with you about potentially being there at the smart success healthcare live event and

Greg Todd (41:46.159)
It’s a fun event. It’s like a concert and you’re learning business. If you added the coolest concert and a business conference together, that’s what it is. It’s awesome.

Garrett Salpeter (41:51.473)
Love it.

Garrett Salpeter (41:59.272)
I love it. That’s great. With the concert, you get all that nice mix of neurotransmitters. So you’re gonna be primed for learning and neuroplasticity and then it’s really gonna sink in. That’s great. Greg, thank you so much for joining us and for the work that you’re doing to empower literally thousands of clinicians to build better businesses, make a greater impact and live better lives. So I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your work with our audience. And we look forward to.

Greg Todd (42:03.794)
You got it. Right. 100%. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.

Garrett Salpeter (42:28.996)
interacting with you more and yeah, thanks again.

Greg Todd (42:31.798)
Thank you, Garrett. I appreciate you.

Garrett Salpeter (42:34.544)
Awesome. And thank you everybody for tuning into this episode of the undercurrent podcast.