Tod Stillson's Doctor Incorporated Catalyzed a 6,000-Member Community and a Multi-Million-Dollar Company

★ Scribe Media · Author Case Study

Dr. Tod Stillson, MD

Author of Doctor Incorporated

A Scribe Media author success story

Dr. Tod Stillson spent 30 years as a family physician in rural America before he sat down to write a book about the one career move most doctors never hear about. That book became the catalyst for a 6,000-member physician community, a six-figure coaching business, and a multi-million-dollar telemedicine company, none of which he set out to build.

From Employee to Owner

For most of his career, Tod Stillson did what nearly every doctor does. He kept his head down, tried to be the best employee he could be, and slowly burned out in the process. Then, about a decade into practicing, he made a change that looked like nothing from the outside and felt like everything from the inside. He stopped being an employee of his hospital and started working for the same hospital as an independent contractor.

“From the standpoint of the whole community, it looked like I was still wearing the team jersey. Everything was the same. All the work was the same. But now I was an owner rather than an employee,” he says. That one shift changed his sense of well-being, his finances, and his whole outlook on the business of medicine. And it left him with a conviction: most doctors have no idea this is even an option.

The Book Nobody Had Written for Doctors

When Tod went looking for guidance on becoming an independent physician, he found a gap. There were no books about it. There were almost no business mentors for doctors. So he decided to become the resource he could not find. He was not chasing revenue and he was not planning a pivot. He looked around at physicians with their shoulders slumped, stuck on the hedonic treadmill, and he wanted to hand them another way.

“It wasn’t about making money. It wasn’t about what I was going to pivot into. It was really just about helping my tribe.”

— Dr. Tod Stillson, MD, Author of Doctor Incorporated

Learning to Write It a Whole Different Way

Tod is a lifelong avid reader, so he assumed he understood how books worked. His first draft proved otherwise. He had written what he calls a cathartic manuscript, a self-reflective journal he was sure was already great. Then he started the process with Scribe and a professional editor who treated the work like a coach, not a cheerleader, asking the critical questions and pushing him to rebuild the catharsis into a real story.

It was harder than he expected. He would finish a full day of seeing patients, come home, and work on the book until midnight, night after night, until his wife started looking forward to the day it would finally be done. But the difficulty was the point. The editing, the cutting, and the wrestling over the title all made the finished book more professional and more readable than anything he would have shipped on his own.

“And the Scribe team were just wonderful in walking you through the process.”

— Dr. Tod Stillson, MD, Author of Doctor Incorporated

The Book Became a Catalyst

Tod expected the book to help a few physicians. What he did not expect was that readers would want more of him. They wanted to meet with him, get coaching, take courses, and read his writing. To support them, he launched the Physician Entrepreneur Academy, and over the next three years it grew into a community of nearly 6,000 members, with Tod writing a blog every other day to keep feeding it.

“The book really became a catalyst for the development of the Physician Entrepreneur Academy, which I started.”

— Dr. Tod Stillson, MD, Author of Doctor Incorporated

The Academy also turned into something he never planned for: a real business. What started as a way to answer the same questions over and over became a source of income on top of his medical practice.

“Quite honestly, it’s a six figure business for me that I didn’t expect coming out of it.”

— Dr. Tod Stillson, MD, Author of Doctor Incorporated

A Community, a Coaching Business, and a Multi-Million-Dollar Company

As Tod spent more time talking with doctors about ownership and the marketplace, his own capacity as an entrepreneur grew. That growth led him to build ChatterX, an on-demand urgent care telemedicine product and, in his words, a new version of being a doctor. He traces the whole arc back to a single origin point: the employee who became an owner, wrote a book about it, and watched the opportunities keep multiplying.

“And you know, [ChatterX], multi-million dollar company that really is just the result of that origin story.”

— Dr. Tod Stillson, MD, Author of Doctor Incorporated

The book keeps working in quieter ways too. It gives Tod a credibility in the marketplace that opens doors he never knocked on. He gets invited to do international speaking for continuing medical education companies. And the readers keep finding him on their own timeline, which is exactly what a book does that a single conversation never could.

“It just sort of compounds, one person hears it, another person reads it, another person shares it, and it just sort of keeps rolling into a life of its own.”

— Dr. Tod Stillson, MD, Author of Doctor Incorporated

His Advice to Doctors on the Edge

Tod knows exactly what stops most doctors from writing, because it is the same thing that stops most doctors from going independent. It is perfectionism, and the fear of not doing it exactly right. His answer is to hire a team that will walk you through the process, and to stop letting the fear win.

“Just don’t let perfection be the enemy of the production or contribution you wanna make.”

— Dr. Tod Stillson, MD, Author of Doctor Incorporated

He did not write Doctor Incorporated as an investment, and he is quick to say he is a missional guy, not a money guy. But he is just as quick to admit how it turned out. “I really wasn’t thinking about it as an ROI,” he says, “and it sure did turn out to be a pretty good ROI.”