The Book I Almost Didn't Write Launched a 6,000-Member Business. Here's the Story

The Entrepreneur's Life

The Book I Almost Didn't Write Launched a 6,000-Member Business. Here's the Story.

A few weeks ago I sat down with Eric Jorgenson, CEO of Scribe Media, for their Author Hour podcast. Scribe, for those who don't know, is the company that helped me write and publish Doctor Incorporated: Stop the Insanity of Traditional Employment and Preserve Your Professional Autonomy back in 2023. The conversation covered the origin of the book, what the writing process actually looked like, how the book became the catalyst for the Physician Entrepreneur Academy, and what I'd say now to any physician who's been sitting on a book idea and has not yet pulled the trigger.

The episode is live now on YouTube and all major podcast platforms. You can watch or listen here: Tod Stillson on The Book That Catalyzed a 6,000-Member Community.

I want to share some of what came up in that conversation, because I think it contains things worth reading even if you have no intention of writing a book. A lot of it is really about the origin of everything this community has become.

Listen or watch now

Author Hour: Tod Stillson on The Book That Catalyzed a 6,000-Member Community

In conversation with Eric Jorgenson, CEO of Scribe Media. Available on YouTube and all major podcast platforms. Full interview: approximately 33 minutes.

Watch on YouTube ›

Why I Wrote the Book in the First Place

Eric asked me to walk through the career background that led to the book. I have told this story many times now, but it still feels true every time I say it out loud.

About ten years before I wrote Doctor Incorporated, I made the transition from traditional employment at my rural hospital to an independent contractor arrangement through my own professional corporation. From the outside, nothing changed. I still wore the team jersey. Same colleagues, same patients, same clinic. But from the inside, everything changed. I went from employee to owner. The mindset shift that followed that structural change altered my sense of professional well-being, my financial trajectory, and my general outlook on what was possible in medicine.

The problem was that nobody around me seemed to know this option existed. Eighty percent of physicians in this country are traditionally employed. The other twenty percent are independent in some form. When I transitioned, I did not have a book to read about it, and I did not have a mentor to learn from. I found my way there through observation and experimentation. And I kept thinking: there are thousands of physicians right now with their heads down, shoulder-slumped, burning out on the hedonic treadmill of employed medicine, who have no idea this is an option.

That is what the book was. Not a business plan. Not a revenue strategy. An attempt to tell the people about something that had changed my professional life, because I was an avid reader and I knew that the right book could do what no conversation ever quite manages: reach a physician at exactly the moment they are ready to hear it.

Related resources

Free digital copy: Doctor Incorporated -- the book the episode covers

Blog: Physician Employment 2.0: The Secret World of Employment Lite

Blog: I Discovered the Holy Grail for Doctors: Unlocking Professional Autonomy

Blog: Every Doctor Needs to Preserve Their Professional Autonomy

What Writing the Book Actually Looked Like

Eric asked whether the process was easier or harder than I expected. I told him honestly: much harder.

I started with what I can only describe as a cathartic manuscript. I had been carrying these ideas for years, and I thought when I finally sat down and got them out on paper, it would be close to done. I was wrong. What I had was a personal journal with chapters, not a book. The difference between those two things is larger than I understood going in.

Working with the Scribe team meant working with a professional editor who asked the kinds of questions a friend would not ask -- critical questions about whether the structure actually served the reader, whether the argument was clear, whether the stories earned the weight being placed on them. That process required rewriting at a scale I had not anticipated. My wife will tell you that I regularly worked until midnight on this book for months, on top of full-time clinical practice, because that is what it took to make it what it needed to be.

The title was its own extended wrestling match. I knew I wanted to call it Doctor Incorporated -- that was always the main title. But the subtitle took a long time to land. Stop the Insanity of Traditional Employment and Preserve Your Professional Autonomy is longer than my wife thought it should be, and she was right about that. I wanted to tell the reader exactly what the book was about before they even opened it. She tried to warn me. The subtitle is a little long. I stand by it anyway.

What I got on the other side of that process was a book that physicians who read it consistently describe as one of the best they have encountered in the genre. I say that not because I think I am a great writer. I say it because a physician reading a book written by a physician about physician life resonates at a frequency that no outside observer can quite hit. The book speaks directly into an experience the reader is living. That is what makes it land. And it got there through a professional process that I could not have navigated alone.

Related resources

Book site: doctorincorporated.com

Free digital copy: simplimd.com/doctorincthebook

Free eBook: The Entrepreneurial Physician's ESCAPE from Corporate Medicine (PEA Explorer)

Free eBook: Business Mindset Shift: Mapping the Transformation of Your Professional Identity (PEA Explorer)

What the Book Became -- Which I Did Not Expect

This is the part of the conversation that I find myself thinking about most.

I started with a hundred people on my email list when the book launched. Fewer than ten of them were physicians. I genuinely thought the book might land in an echo chamber and fade out. What I was motivated by was altruism, not business strategy. I saw physicians burning out. I knew an option existed that most of them did not know about. I wanted to get that information into their hands. The ROI calculation was not part of my thinking.

What happened instead was that the book became a catalyst -- Eric used that word in the interview and it is exactly right -- for something I did not plan. Physicians read it and wanted more. They wanted coaching. They wanted courses. They wanted a community of physicians who were building what the book described. The Physician Entrepreneur Academy grew out of those conversations. It now has nearly 6,000 members. I write content several days a week. I coach physicians one-on-one. I speak internationally. It has become a six-figure business that I did not set out to build -- and it emerged directly from a book I wrote out of a desire to help people who were struggling the way I had struggled.

And then the book became a catalyst for something else I also did not fully anticipate. As I kept talking to physicians about ownership and entrepreneurship, my own vision of what was possible kept expanding. I began to see opportunities I had not seen before. That expanding vision eventually led me to build ChatRx -- on-demand virtual urgent care for $25, physician-governed, AI-assisted, now operating across multiple states. A med-tech company that emerged from the same origin story: a family physician in rural Indiana who transitioned from employee to owner and started seeing the marketplace differently because of it.

"I call it the light bulb moment. It's the moment a physician transitions to being an owner, and they start thinking and looking at the marketplace and the business opportunities in a different light. When you become an owner, you start to look differently. And it was like opportunities were everywhere -- invisible to them when they were an employee, but as soon as they begin to have that owner mindset, it's like they just start seeing them everywhere."

That is what I said in the interview and I mean every word of it. The identity shift from employee to owner is not a tax strategy. It is a perceptual transformation. The marketplace looks different from the owner's side. Not because the opportunities changed. Because you changed.

Related resources

Blog: Most Physicians Are Renting Their Careers. Here's What That's Costing You.

Blog: Ownership: The Key to Physician Freedom

Free eBook: Why Every Doctor Should Form a Micro-Corporation (PEA Explorer)

ChatRx: You can join me on the ownership journey with ChatRx-- the on-demand urgent care company that emerged from the ownership origin story

What I'd Say to the Physician Who's Been Sitting on a Book Idea

Eric asked me what advice I'd give to a physician who is five years behind where I was when I started writing -- someone who has the idea, knows something important needs to be said, but has not started yet.

I told him the same thing I tell physicians who are afraid to go independent: perfection is your enemy.

Physicians tend toward perfectionism. It is baked into how we were trained. The same trait that makes us careful clinicians makes us reluctant authors. We are afraid of doing it wrong. We are afraid of putting something out into the world that is not exactly right. And that fear -- of the business savvy we might not have, of the writing craft we have not practiced -- keeps a lot of physicians from writing books that need to exist and from going independent in ways that would genuinely change their professional lives.

What I found with Scribe Media is that the professional support structure -- a team that walks you through the process, asks the hard questions, keeps you on track, and refuses to let you publish something that isn't ready -- is exactly what dissolves that obstacle. You don't have to be a writer to write a book worth reading. You have to have something true to say, the discipline to keep working when it is hard, and a professional team that cares about the quality of the outcome.

And I will add what I did not quite know when I started: the book is not the endpoint. The book is the igniter. The community, the coaching, the courses, the speaking, the business relationships, the doors that open because you are now the person who wrote the book on that subject -- all of that comes after. The book makes it possible. But the book is the beginning, not the destination.

Is This Deductible?

Book Research, Writing Expenses, and Publication Costs Through Your S-Corp

Deductible -- ordinary and necessary business expense

The scenario: You write and publish a book directly related to your professional expertise and business -- the same expertise you use in your coaching, speaking, and consulting work. Publication costs, editorial services, book design, ISBN fees, printing costs, and author platform development total $25,000. Can these run through your professional corporation?

The ruling: Yes, with structure. Book writing and publication expenses are deductible as ordinary and necessary business expenses when the book is directly connected to your professional work and serves a genuine business purpose -- not when the book is purely personal. For a physician whose coaching, speaking, and consulting practice is built around the subject matter of the book, publication costs are a legitimate business investment. The key question the IRS asks is whether the expense was incurred in connection with carrying on a trade or business. For a physician entrepreneur whose professional brand and income are tied to the content of the book, the answer is clearly yes.

The practical note: Publication costs incurred before the business generates revenue may be treated as startup costs under Section 195 rather than immediately deductible business expenses. Once the business is operational, ongoing book-related expenses -- speaking preparation materials, updated editions, promotional costs -- are fully deductible in the year incurred. Pay all book-related expenses from your S-Corp business account, document the business purpose, and categorize them under professional development, marketing, or business development costs. Work with your CPA to determine whether Section 195 startup cost treatment applies to your initial publication investment.

For physician-specific business expense guidance, see the free eBook Tax Deduction Guide for Micro-Business Owners (PEA Explorer) and connect with Cerebral Tax Advisors or IncSight for physician-specific guidance.

Join the movement

The book that started all of this is still the right place to begin if you are new to this community and new to the idea that your professional life does not have to look the way it currently does. It is where the employment lite model, the micro-corporation framework, the ownership mindset, and the retained income philosophy all come together in one story. It was written for the physician who has their head down doing good work and has not yet been told that a different arrangement is available to them.

You can get the free digital copy at simplimd.com/doctorincthebook or find the print and Kindle editions at Amazon.

And if the podcast conversation resonated -- if you heard something in it that described your current situation or pointed toward something you have been thinking about -- book a $500 Business Strategy Session. That is the one-hour version of the conversation the book opens. We will look at your specific arrangement, your income structure, and the specific moves that would change the picture.

Join the PEA community at $99/year for Explorer membership. Nearly 6,000 physicians are already building what the book describes. The community that grew out of one physician's decision to tell people about something that had changed his professional life is where the ongoing conversation continues.