“Grit and Success” with Vinh Pham Founder of Myodetox

Vinh Pham has been a licensed physical therapist for over a decade, graduating from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Pham is the Founder of Myodetox, a group of design-forward manual therapy clinics that is reimagining the traditional therapy and rehab experience. His unique system of manual therapy and movement programming is widely viewed as an effective solution to get you moving and feeling better.

Over the years, his style of therapy has attracted athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and industry leading health and wellness brands. He has one of the largest Instagram followings in the healthcare space on his company’s page @Myodetox and his personal @vinnierehab account, where he posts daily educational videos to over half a million followers on how to effectively take care of their body.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I used to love biology and would hang out with my Biology teacher during lunch times, I was a total nerd. I trusted him and always asked him what he thought I should do with my life after high school. He told me both his daughters are physical therapists and he thought I might like that career path because of my love for Biology. With that idea in mind I thought maybe I would apply to become a PT. When I graduated from my PT school and was on my hospital rounds, the same Biology teacher who had inspired me turned up one day and was my patient! I felt very humbled, how amazing that things come full circle.

Can you share your story of Grit and Success? First can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

Quite a few of our friends and clients who have grown with us over the last decade remember the early days (pre Myodetox). There were a lot of late nights, treating until 2am in my apartment by the light of the laptop. I used to fly to LA and just turn up at a gym, set up my treatment table and hope to treat some of the personal trainers. I can’t tell you how many thousands of hours I did this for in my first few years. Once I had a steady practice it was really scary going from having a regular paycheck to putting all of my savings into opening of the first clinic. Starting a new business with the fear of the unknown and not really having money to do anything is very real.

You know when you take the plunge that this is it! It will either take off or it won’t. The first year I did everything myself, I mean everything. I would open and close the clinic, do the billing, marketing, fix things when they broke, doing every single role and having no money, not knowing if you will fail or not.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

I already knew this, but after starting my company I saw more and more how there aren’t a lot of great therapy options for people out there. It sounds really cheesy but knowing what we do works, and how much good it brings to people’s lives, going from being in pain to being completely pain free, it really drives me to create major change in the world, specifically in the health care that’s available and to peoples lives everyday. The question for me isn’t how to keep going, I know this is my sole purpose on earth and I’m grateful to be living out my purpose every day.

So how did Grit lead to your eventual success? How did Grit turn things around?

My Parents are immigrants and have the classic story. They arrived in Canada from Vietnam with nothing, absolutely nothing, they escaped through the mountains to get here, didn’t speak english and had to completely start from scratch in their 20’s in a new country. If they could do that and still work really hard and give us a normal canadian upbringing as kids, I feel like me trying to run a business was nothing compared to what they went through. Watching my parents developed my my grit which showed me that no matter how difficult things were, we just needed to keep going. In life things never go as planned, a lot of people find things going in a difficult direction and just stop. On the other hand a lot of young people work really hard for years and just don’t make it. I feel like there is grit, but there also needs to be an element of timing, and sometimes even luck. I just kept going until we finally started to get going.

So, how are things going today? :-)

Things are going great, we just opened our 9th clinic, and our first in the USA and we plan on opening several more USA locations soon. Myself and our core team have worked really hard to grow into the USA market, it’s been years of planning and hard work from every one of our staff, we are so proud of the result and excited to grow. A weekend to myself every now and then would be awesome but its not on the cards. I love my team, love the work and love working with the people we treat. It is a LOT of work but I wouldn’t change it for anything.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I think a lot of new business owners including myself try to be flashy when they can’t afford it, when we opened the first clinic I was certain it need to have this specific type of light bulb which was of course the most expensive, that alternated colour, so the person on the table would look up at these fancy light-bulbs and be reminded of the CN Tower (an Iconic building in Toronto). I spent thousands of dollars of these stupid light bulbs and realised pretty quickly that nobody cared about the lightbulbs, they just wanted really good treatment.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Besides the obvious, our branding, nicer clinics, next level design aesthetic aesthetic, our internal education system (we have a specialised team of educators who’s whole job is leveling up our therapists), our free community events, and our specialised system of therapy.. The number one thing is we just care more.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

Burn out isn’t something you can avoid when you’re trying to get a new business like this off the ground, it would be easy to say I meditate every day and go to sleep early every night, get 8 hours sleep, but it’s just not true. When you want to grow like we are, burn out is just part of the journey, and it’s not about avoiding it but managing knowing that it’s going to happen. Having a solid team who genuinely are friends and care about each other means when someone is feeling more stressed out, we all rally to support them or take on some of their load if we can. For the most part we are all just grinding, it’s definitely not for everyone, I’m going to take my first vacation in 5 years this year.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

Having a mentor is absolutely crucial for you when you’re starting out or moving into a new market. Paul Marcus, a talented operator in the boutique fitness space is one of our mentors. He believed in us from the beginning and helped us immensely along the way. Coming from a Canadian background we are less risk averse than our USA counterparts. Coming to the USA and being around people like Paul taught us to move 10 times faster than we thought we could. He always pushes us to our max and to be the best, actually better than what we thought our best could be.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Our success is based on literally changing people’s lives, I mean is there anything better than that? It’s not about the money for me, I could make way more money doing other things. There is something really amazing about educating someone who has been crippled by pain and helping them find a way to be pain free again, it will never get old for me, I want to do this until I die. If I can help even 1 person every day move a little better, so they can live a happier life? That’s all I need.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me before I started my company” and why. Please share a story or example for each.

If you think once you open your doors you can chill, you’re so wrong. It’s just the beginning, especially if you’re in a service industry like ours. We all still work 7 days a week still most of the time, be ready to work an obscene amount relative to your time off and be ok with that or figure a way out to balance the workload (and tell me when you find it!).

When you go from being a one man show to a team, everything changes. Get your systems ready before you open the doors. Sure there’s a lot of trial and error in the first few months and sometimes years but be prepared for the volume of people you work with to increase, have your finances, operations and staff ready for growth.

Not everyone will support you once you make it. This was really hard for us in the beginning, a lot of people who showed us support for years, dm’d us all the time sending love all of a sudden got weird when we blew up. I didn’t get it, our work hasn’t changed but when you start to be publicly recognised for what you do people can get weird about it, realise its about them and not about you, keep it moving.

Be adaptable. Things hardly ever go the way you will want them to go, be flexible, grounded and ready to make quick decisions as needed.

Every day I need to make important decisions under massive time pressure that affect the future of the company, affect the lives of our staff, or sometimes our clients. Keeping a level head is a requirement of working in a high stress situation. I sometimes have to make decisions that make other people unhappy, or uncomfortable, it’s part of being the boss. Get comfortable with this.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I think I’ve already started it! My mission is literally to heal the world. We want to go everywhere, every country and educate people so that they have the skills they need to heal themselves.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

www.myodetox.com If you want to book in for a session with us.

@Myodetox and @Vinnierehab

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Thank you for having me.