ļ»æSecrets for Success
Episode 7:
Episode 7 Transcript: This is Secrets for Success. Welcome to the Secrets for Success podcast. I'm your host, Greg Todd. Thank you as always for joining me. Today I want to talk about building an online business, an online business that turns into an empire. And then it's the the fall starts and the crashing that came with it. So. You probably heard in the last solo episode that I did, I talked about SSPT and me now being able to have students and work with students online and it was pretty epic. It was, it was awesome. It was just so cool to be able to serve people all over the country, all over the world and have them come into our programs. I remember having my first student. From Israel that joined one of my programs in 2017 and flew in from Israel to come to my event and just being like, Oh my gosh, this is like the most epic thing ever. And, and it was, it was absolutely wonderful and there were so many things that were done, right. And I'm going to talk about the things that were done, right. So that you can learn some of the secrets for success with the things that I did. Right. But I'm going to also tell you. A lot of the things that I did wrong. I think a lot of people think that if you have an online business, it automatically creates time freedom. It creates flexibility, it creates financial freedom and it creates decision freedom, right? Cause you can do things your way. And a lot of that is true, but there's also a lot of things that come with having an online business. If you don't do it right, it will eat you alive and spit you out. And, and that's some of the things that happened as I built this mission of SSPT. So smart success for physical therapists. That's what it was. It started March 29th, 2016. My first ever client was Calvin Randolph. The one thing I want you all to get from this, this is the first thing that I think is really important is you must focus first. On your offer and making what you are bringing to the marketplace. Good. Okay. Besides getting awareness, you got to get people aware of who you are, give them an opportunity to come into your world. You must focus on actually having something that is good because the reality is this. I spent money in the beginning to get awareness in 2016. I just paid Facebook money. I said, Facebook, put me in front of the audience I want to be in front of. And Facebook was like, sure, give me your money. And that was it. And I gave Facebook my money and Facebook started to get me people that they believed would be suitable for my offer. Now, did any of those people buy right away? No. But those people became aware of me. Okay. Now, here's the deal. They can't just become aware of you. They have to then become interested in you. So what I did is I gave people an offer for them to just give me their name and their email. And in return, I was going to give them something that was going to better their lives. And I did that. And so they became aware of me. They were then interested in me. And then I gave them the ability to consider working with me. Did people take me up on it? Nope, not right away. But over time as people's situations got worse and worse and worse, they started to move from considering working with me to having intent to do something to change your life. And what I did is a few times a year, three to four times a year, I would give people the ability to evaluate me. And I would do that through doing a webinar. Through doing a challenge through doing a live event and you can evaluate me and evaluate if you believe I can help you with your problems and then it would allow people to come into our world. So just to give you some context, my first ever season of SSPT, I got one student to join my program. I'm reached out to so many people. Actually, the first time I reached out to 10 people that I already knew would buy and nine of them said no. One person bought. And then over time, over two months, I was able to get 10 people to join my program. But this is why I'm telling you, it is so important for you to focus on making your stuff actually good. Because if it's good, it will automatically sell itself. Okay, it will sell itself. So what I did is of the 10 people that I eventually got, nine of those 10 gave me a full testimonial. And then from those nine of 10 that gave me a full testimonial, I put that out for the next season and then the next season I actually said, Hey, look at these people that took me up on my offer and look what they said. And now instead of it, instead of it taking two months to get 10 people, it took me two hours to get 17 people. So now I had 17 people that joined my program the next time around. Okay. I did the same thing. I served those 17 people. 16 of the 17 gave me an amazing testimonial. And then from those 16, I then launched it again and I got 73 people and guess what? I did the same thing. I got those people to be able to say, Hey, is this program helping you? And more than 50 percent said, yes, it is. But at that point, the person that was helping me with all this stuff, I couldn't, like I couldn't get 73 testimonials. I didn't have a big team like that. So the program went from 1 to 10 to 17 to 103. Okay. And that's how it grew. It grew because it was actually good. So if you want to grow your business, if you want to grow whatever it is that you're doing, please focus on it actually being good and it will be so much easier for marketing to get leads, to get sales and to get new customers. Okay. So that's what I did. And I did that from 2016 all the way up until 2018 and 2018 things change a little bit. Uh, I had now done my second event. My first event was 70 people. The second event was 210 people. And when I did that second event, after I finished the event, people were like, uh, this wasn't a ton of people, but there were three people that came to me and said, Hey, I'm an occupational therapist. Can I join this? And I was like, yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking, Macho. Yeah, that would relate to you, Macho. Yeah, that would relate to you, Macho. Yeah, that would relate to you as well. Yeah, Macho. Okay, that would relate to you as well. And then people started to join more and more and more people started joined from other disciplines. Registered dietitians came to me and said, Hey, could you open this up to registered dietitians? So I did. And then, uh, a personal trainer came to me. Could you open this up to personal trainers? I did. And then a PTA came to me and said, do you want to, can you open this up to PTAs? I did. And that's what I did. I just continued to open it up. And then the person that was doing my testimonials for me in 2019, his name is Ken Carey. He's who does the testimonials for the Olympics, for Hooked on Phonics, for all the big infomercials that you see on TV. His company does it. I met him at an event and. Me and him became friends and he's the one that did all my testimonials and he said, Greg, you really need to consider changing this from smart success, physical therapists to smart success for healthcare providers. He's like, as I'm doing all these testimonials, I'm seeing all these people from different professions and you're hurting yourself by not doing that. So I was like, okay, I was like, gosh, that's a big move. But then in 2020 I decided that that's what I was going to do. So I moved it to no longer smart success for PTs. I called it smart success for healthcare and the first season I had of it, I got 150 people to join that cohort to come through the program. That was the first and last time that I did that program. Uh, I was on top. I was on top in healthcare. Uh, we were doing absolutely amazing. It didn't matter what I put out at that point. Everything was hot. Uh, but I was hot in another way. I was burned out. I was so burned out. Um, I had developed, in order to build that, I developed so many personal relationships with people. And when I tell you that of the 700 people that I had in my programs, um, probably 620 of them had my personal phone number. Uh, every single one of those people had talked to me at some point. Some of those people were talking to me on a weekly basis. I was having anywhere between 80 to a hundred calls with clients every single week. I was training people. Um, I couldn't sleep. Uh, it was just so much stress on myself and my family. And I gotta be honest with you, it's a really tricky thing because you love what you do. I had someone, I have so much passion for it. Uh, I could do it all day. But there's other things that I love besides serving you guys. Just being honest with you, I love my wife. I love my kids. I love myself. I love having time to be able to fill myself up spiritually. And there was not, uh, the ability to do all of them. I felt torn between serving my wife, serving my kids, serving my business, serving my other businesses. And I can tell that my family was starting to feel, they were starting to become very resentful to the people. And they were angry that the people were taking up My time. And I realized that that had nothing to do with the people that had to do with me. So, at the top of it, I told people I was going to leave. And I was going to leave for a minimum of three months. And, even though I'm leaving, there will be a program available. And if you want to be a part of it, that's fine. But I'm not going to be here. And still, 75 people signed up for it. Uh, and so, so I left. And during that time that I left, a lot of things happened. There was a lot of stress. There was a lot of... Uh, number one is I needed people and I brought in a special individual to help me with getting some boundaries back in my life. I realized that number two, I was going to have to start to say no a lot more than saying yes. Yes. Got me to this point, but yes, was going to take me out. And so. I realized that I had to change that. And, uh, and yeah, that's basically in essence what I had to do. So I brought in, um, Brittany Lewis who helped me with kind of writing a ship, but it was a painful, it was a painful steer. I'll put it like that. Uh, but without going through all of those things, the SSHC mission doesn't exist today. This podcast doesn't exist because I wouldn't even be here. So. I'm saying all that to you because I want you all to understand that one of the main secrets for success is if you want to have success in business, you must focus on how you are going to fulfill the things you are telling your clients you are going to do for them. Now, you might be like, gosh, I'll do anything right now because I just need a client and you might need to do that right now, but you're going to get to the point where you have to be willing to change things and fulfill in a way. That not only makes you money so that the business can run, but it saves your sanity in the process. And that's what I learned throughout this process.
