The 4-Step Framework To Success With Greg Todd Of Smart Success Healthcare

The 4-Step Framework To Success With Greg Todd Of Smart Success Healthcare

Hello and welcome to the show. I'm your host, Adam Robin, and this episode is a special one for me. Here's why. Before I was in physical therapy school, I was constantly searching for people who were doing big, bold things in healthcare. I was drawn to leaders who were shaking things up, bringing energy, and finding unique ways to create value and level up the industry. That's when I discovered our guest, Greg Todd. 

If you don't know Greg Todd, you're in for a treat. He's a serial entrepreneur, private practice owner, and perhaps most widely known as the founder of Smart Success Healthcare. Greg is on a mission to empower 10,000 healthcare providers, helping them break free from burnout and financial stress, so they can make a real, lasting impact while building a life and career they love. I knew I had to get Greg on this show. 

I wanted to hear his story, but even more than that, I wanted to understand how he thinks. How does he stay motivated? How does he set priorities? How does he lead himself so powerfully that he creates abundance, not in his business, but in life as well? This conversation is packed with value from one of the true GOATs in the healthcare business. Stay tuned. You don't want to miss a single insight. Let's dive in. 

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Serial Entrepreneur And Business Coach Greg Todd

For those of you who don't know Greg Todd, you've been living under a rock because the guy has been around. You're the OG of business coaching. 

I'm the unk of business. 

I remember studying anatomy and physiology and watching your YouTube videos. I know you're in Clearwater Beach, Florida. You've got a couple of clinics, two or three clinics. I don't know what you got, but I remember you being on the grind. I was like, “This guy is grinding. He's always bringing energy. He's always trying to do new things.” For those who are reading, I stalked Greg. I sent him a message on Instagram, and I was like, “Do you want to be on the show?” I want to let you know I'm a huge fan. 

Thank you so much. Let me tell you this, and this is for anybody reading. I was telling this to two guys that are pretty big in their respective industries that I spoke to, and not to big up my head or anything, but they were saying the same thing, like, “I can't believe I'm in a room.” I was like, “Hold on.” They were saying, “I don't know what type of value I can give.” I was like, “The greatest value you can ever give to someone is letting them know that they are good at their craft and letting them have confirmation that they are doing whatever they believe is their purpose.” Adam, you said what you said, it's not to inflate my ego. Every single day, I want to do what my purpose is. That's it. 

I believe that God will bring people like Adam Robin. God will bring others into my life through these little snippets. You're able to do this in 25 seconds to say, “I've been following you throughout your journey, and you've helped me on my journey. Keep it up.” If that's all you did, you gave me more value than I could have ever asked for. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Thank you for giving me that value. Let's rock and roll. 

What attracts me to you is that you're not afraid to be yourself. Whenever I see you speaking, you're on fire with whatever it is you're talking about. You bring the energy, and you're super authentic. I admire the hell out of that. The other thing that I admire about you is your hustle. You are a worker. You work hard. I don't think it's anything like any tips or tricks that you ever said that made a light bulb go off. It wasn't what you said. It's who you are that inspired me. 

That truly is the key to the success that people are looking for. Success could mean, “I want to make a lot of money. I want to have a big impact.” At the end of the day, everybody wants to feel like they're doing something that means something. That's hard to do when you are wasting unnecessary energy. Everybody says, “He brings the energy.” No, it's that I'm able to channel my energy to where I'm having fun. 

Most people aren't having fun. What I have learned from many years of being a physical therapist and an entrepreneur is that the highest-level clients that I work with are playing a game. Everybody else who's struggling, who's barely getting by, is doing an obligation. They're doing a job, whereas we're playing a game. I don't believe you can do that, not truly be yourself. If every single minute you have to hold back, “Should I say that?” You're not being yourself. You're wasting unnecessary energy on, “I can't say that. I can't do this. What if this person gets upset? What if that person does? What if I get canceled over here?” That's a waste of energy. I don't even think I bring the energy. 

I think that I've deployed the energy that I have. I don't think I have as much energy as you. What we have said is I'm an unk. I am the unk of the industry. I believe that I've been able to deploy my energy in a very productive way because I'm not thinking of all the other stuff that people are thinking of. By the way, I used to think that a long time ago, but when I decided that I was going to go all in with business, I was going to take out a $180,000 line of credit on my house and go for it. I took on that financial strain and that financial risk, but that was to give me the ability to be able to now deploy my energy, and I don't have to worry about a boss or UnitedHealthcare. 

I can deploy my energy, and I can be who I feel like I'm called to be. I could say what I need to say, and I don't have to put myself up on any pedestal. I don't have to act like I'm this perfect entrepreneur. I have my ups. I have my downs. I win a lot. I lose, too. I'm good with it all. I'm good with the whole damn journey. I'm cool with it. I don't want to identify as some successful entrepreneur. I want to identify as a servant of God. That's it. I'm trying to serve at the highest level that I possibly can, and I'll let the chips fall where they may. If you can lock into that and you can turn this into a game, you're unstoppable. You are. You're unstoppable. You're deploying energy differently. 

What I heard there is you're in alignment. You know who you are. You know what you're built to do, and you do it unapologetically. You're not tied to any type of outcome or expectation. 

Most people have the ability to have that, and they still don't use it. 

It's scary to do it. For me, it comes from a place of fear of rejection or fear of what other people might think about me. 

At the end of the day, it's for what? God forbid, but if you were given a diagnosis of a terminal sickness, in three months, you were no longer here, and we were having the funeral for you, are those people that you are afraid to get rejected by going to be there? Let's use common sense with this. Are they going to be there? I'm going to go out on a limb, and I'm going to say nine out of ten of them won't. Let's talk about the one out of ten that's going to be there of those people. 

Of those people, a year from that day, are you going to be flooding their thoughts? Probably not. At the end of the day, the people that we are afraid to be rejected by will have no part in fulfilling the legacy of Adam Robin. What do they matter? They don't. It's more of us. The majority of us are living in a very comfortably uncomfortable situation. We are comfortable being not at our best. 

We're okay. We're satisfied. We're settled. 

It pisses us off when we're by ourselves, when we're alone. We're like, “I know I'm made for more. I know I could be crushing it more. I know the things that I see, whether it's on TV, this, that, or whatever, I could do it. I'm just not willing to become the person that I need to become for me to be able to help those people, and in turn, get the things that I want.” We're comfortably uncomfortable. That is it. By the way, I'm not here to judge anybody for being comfortable. If that's you, more power to you. You do you. 

I've had my share of near-death experiences where I realized that I am playing with house money. I shouldn't even be here anyway. I'm going to say what I need to say, do what I need to do, and help who I need to help until my time is up. That's it. I'm operating at a level of freedom that most aren't because most haven't had that conversation that you had. 

I wrote down three steps to success. Number one, the first thing you said was that you had to decide to be more. Maybe not be more, but be more for yourself. You have to have this inner drive to want to do more with your life and your business, not be settled. That has to come from somewhere.

Let's talk about that. You said, “decide.” What most people do is they don't decide. They choose. When they choose, they choose, “I want to be more, so I'm going to pick becoming more this week. I got inspired by GT and Adam on a show, and then this week, I'm going to pick being more.”

“I'm going to do one extra email this week.” 

“I'm going to reach out to one other person. I'm going to follow up with another person. I'm going to choose that.” Guess what happens? To the email, nobody responds. The person who goes to you, this happens. Then you say, “I picked that this week. This week, I'm going to pick being average again. Let me go back to comfortably uncomfortable.” That's called choosing. You said, “deciding.” “De” is “to cut,” and “cide” is “all other possibilities.” When you truly decide, there is no turning back. 

This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to make it happen. It's hard to do that, being comfortably uncomfortable. It's easy to do that being uncomfortably uncomfortable, where it's like, “I got nothing to lose. Anyways, I'm at rock bottom.” Most people can do it, then. Let's look at what happened in 2020. Do you know how long I've been trying to get people to do online? If you've been following me, I've been doing telehealth since I was working with the players on the WTA and ATP tour in 2005. I did it on Skype. That's what I did. Nobody wanted to do that. 

I remember when I came into this game, and I started consulting with people and doing all my stuff online in 2015 or 2016. I had people send me hate mail, saying, “You're ruining the profession, trying to teach people how to do things outside of the clinic.” Fast forward, 2020, when we started living COVID-a-loca, everybody all of a sudden got uncomfortably uncomfortable. All of a sudden, everybody is a telehealth expert. At the end of the day, we all have it in us. We can do it. 

It has nothing to do with tactics. It has nothing to do with skillset. It has to do with how bad your situation is. Most people are very comfortable not living to their full potential. They're comfortable living a life of being in glorified shackles and not being able to say what they need to say, do what they need to do, and try something because they're so afraid of failing. They're so afraid of getting rejected and failing in front of people who don't care about them, and not coming to their funeral. It's sure as hell they are not going to lose any sleep over them once they're gone. That's reality. 

This is going to be GT's recipe for success. Step one is to decide. Maybe there was a step one A or step one B, which was, you need to be resilient. You've got to move through the discomfort. Once you decide, it's still going to be hard. 

Step 1: Have Awareness

I'm going to give you my true steps here. Here's what we've got to do first. The first thing is that we have to have awareness. In order to truly change your life, you need to have awareness first. Awareness is being in front of something that I didn't even understand was available before. I was telling this to my kids. My son was complaining because he works at a local grocery store here. He was like, “Daddy, I had a disgruntled customer at the end of my shift yesterday. She wanted to be able to open up this fruit thing. I was like, 'You can't do that. You've got to pay for it first.' She was like, 'You're going to get fired.' These people don't even know. They think I'm some young kid. I don't need this. My dad's rich.” He's a humble kid. 

I said, “In my first job, I made less than $0.50 an hour. I was working for the Sun Sentinel, which is a newspaper in South Florida. I was selling papers, and I sucked at it. The difference to me, making $0.50 an hour back in 1980 something, versus making what I make today, being worth millions of dollars, is awareness. I had to be aware of certain things that I didn't understand existed when I was fourteen years old.” That's the first thing, being aware. 

The cool thing about awareness is that you can listen to a podcast and learn stuff. You could go on YouTube. There's so much stuff that's totally for free. They are getting in front of people's access. Awareness is step number one. You've got to do that. If you're not reading, if you're not listening, if you're not exposing yourself to people who have the thing that you are trying to go after, that's on you. That is the first step. 

Step 2: Setting The Right Intention

The second step is intention. This is how you catch trout, this is how you catch group, or whatever. For some other people, they are like, “I don't care about that,” but for me, I now have an intention on, “I want to do this. What do I need? What's the bait that I need? What's this I need?” It's the same thing with business. Once you're aware of the thing that you want, you have to have the intention that, “I'm going to go and start doing the thing. I'm going to start searching. Who's going to be my guide? Who's going to be my mentor? Who's going to be the person that I'm going to follow? What other tools am I going to need? What are the resources that I'm going to pull from? Is this thing going to be hard? Who's going to be my accountability partners?” 

Step 3: Making The Decision

Now, we go to decision. You've got to be ready. If we're going to make the decision and not choose, we can't come back from it. We can't come back once we get on the road. I live in Indian Rocks Beach. When I go to my home in Georgia, it's a cabin. Once we get on the highway, we're 30 minutes from home. If my wife says, “I left my sweater,” there's no returning. We're too far. It's one way to Blue Ridge, Georgia. We're not returning. It's no different than being on a plane. Once the plane hits 300 miles per hour, that's it. We've got to thrust it back, and we're gone. That's it. There's no returning. That's why you've got to have the intention and your ducks in a row so that once we go, we're all in. No dabbling. You go all in, no turning back. 

Step 4: Embracing Discipline

Here comes the fourth step. The fourth step is the hardest, and that's discipline. The first thing you said to me before I started this show is, “You've been showing up all the time with the energy year after year. That takes discipline.” I'll tell you how I stay disciplined. I told you this before we even started. I play games. This is how I stay disciplined. I play games. It is not every day that I wake up like, “Let's go after it. We're going to help the profession. Let's do it.” 

Some days, honestly, I want to do nothing. Some days, I want to chill. Some days, I want to go out on my boat. I'm a nature boy. You all see me as hype, but I love nature. I love to be with the salt. It doesn't matter. I have discipline. What I do is I play games. The way that I do it is that for all the things that I know that I don't want to do, I give myself some type of reward for doing it. I don't have an alarm. I use an alarm maybe five times a year. That's only if I have a 5:00 AM flight. I need to get up because I need an Uber to get me. I don't want to miss that flight. 

I don't use an alarm at any other time of the year, but I still get up. Why? It is because I'm able to play a game. Here's the game that I play. You've probably seen in the mornings, if you've ever seen my walk and talk with GT that I've been doing over the years, I'm using a superhero shirt. I love Marvel. I'm more of a Marvel guy than a DC, but I love the superhero shirts. I have these Under Armour spandex. My kids call it the daddy shmedium. The Under Armour thing has got the muscle thing on it. 

I set out my clothes because I know tomorrow morning, as soon as I get to wake up and get out of bed, I'm going to be a superhero. I'm playing a game. The first thing I do is I trick myself. I got my clothes out. Next thing is, here's what I'm going to do. Do I want to go downstairs and read my Bible every day? The Bible is not the most entertaining book. It's got the most wisdom in there, but it's not the most entertaining book. 

There are no cliffhangers in that book. 

I do know that the Bible allows me to live and conduct my business off a code that has made me tens of millions of dollars. What do I do? Here's what you're going to be able to do. You've got to read your Bible inside. You've got to read at the table. After you read your Bible at the table, you can go outside onto the patio. I live on the bay. For me to see the water, I have to read the Bible first. This is how I'm able to play this game of constant discipline. 

If you want that, you've got to do that first. That's what I'm constantly doing for all the things that some days, I'll do it, and some days, I won't. Most people do whatever they feel like doing whenever they want to do it. I've got to be honest with you. They come across as flakes. They're flakes because one minute, you're excited. You're on top. You're this. You're that. The next minute, you're a ghost. If I'm a client and you're asking me to invest $15,000, $20,000, $25,000, $50,000 in you, you show up whenever you want. By the way, clients don't trust themselves. Why? It is because they're perennial quitters. 

I tell my clients, “You were perennial. The only reason you are paying me is because you know I won't quit. You are trying to borrow the confidence off of me right now until you can get your own.” If you guys want to become that person, you're going to have to develop some level of discipline. That's how I do it on a day-to-day basis. Those things, awareness, intention, decision, discipline, that's how you do it. 

Setting An Ideal Vision

I was having this conversation with I don't know if it was a colleague, but I would say that 90% of the coaching that we do is around that. It's not around like, “This is how you start a practice. This is how you put together a marketing plan.” It's like, “Here's all the stuff you can buy. It's all free on YouTube.” Most of it's around being the person that you say you want to be. 

Most people don't know how to do that. They don't. The question is, how bad do you want the thing to become that thing? I'm in the Tampa Bay area. This is something I ask every single one of my clients. I'm like, “If there was $20,000 waiting for you in San Diego, California, would you walk to go get it?” Pretty much, most people say no. I'm like, “Me either. Here's my question to you. If there's $50 million waiting for you in San Diego, California, and it was a big old briefcase at $50 million, would you walk and go get it?” Ten out of ten say yes. 

The only difference is how big the reward is. This is the reason why it's so important for you to be able to create a vision for what it is that you are trying to go after. That's worth it for you to change. It's worth it for you to do what I said. This is the problem with a lot of people in the healthcare world. They're going into business so they don't have to deal with the bureaucracy and all the crap that they had to deal with when they were working for someone. They had not only their boss, but they had the boss of Aetna, Cigna, Humana, United, etc. They don't have any type of big aspirations or dreams that they're going after. They're trying to get out of the hell that they're in. They haven't done that part of saying, “I'm trying to build something epic here.” 

If I'm trying to build something big, it's not a big deal to get 50 nos. If I'm trying to build a $15, $20, $25, $50 million company, if I believe that, investing $20,000 or $30,000 is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Most people haven't done that part. They want to escape the current pain that they're in, but they haven't done the next part in the intention phase. It is like, “What am I trying to build here?” For some people, it isn't worth it, but for me, it is. 

Get In Touch With Greg 

For those who don't know you, whom do you help? How do they get in touch with you to learn more? 

I initially was helping only physical therapists from 2015 to 2019. We have over twenty different healthcare providers, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, chiropractors, nurse practitioners, and MDs. We help people move away from trading time for money. If you just want to grow a practice, I'm probably not the best guy to work with for that. 

My main thing is how you leverage what it is that is in front of you. We do that through online programs. For those that are brick-and-mortar, we do that through something called solutions-based offers, which is where you are getting paid for a result instead of per visit. The whole idea is to leverage yourself to be able to make more money with what you already have in front of you. That's my main way. You can follow me on @GregToddPT on Instagram and Greg Todd on YouTube. My business cell is 813-534-6453. My team sees it, and I see it as well. 

For those who haven't been introduced to Greg at all, I've been following the guy for many years. It's been a while. The guy's great at what he does. Check out his stuff. Check out his website. If you want a little more taste, we're going to be doing a webinar to talk about how to grow your practice and get more awareness around your place. I appreciate the time, Greg. 

I appreciate you, brother. Thank you so much for having me on.

Important Links

• Greg Todd's Website
• Smart Success Healthcare
• Greg Todd on Instagram
• Greg Todd on YouTube
• Linktree PPO Club
• Private Practice Owners Club

About Greg Todd