The EntreMD Podcast

The Secret to Scaling Your Private Practice to 7-Figures Without Burning Out!

• Dr. Una • Episode 412

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Before I became a physician entrepreneur, I thought that once you grow your business and it becomes more successful, everything gets easier and easier.

I thought that growing and scaling was a natural process that happens on its own.

But I’ve seen many entrepreneurs grow to seven, even eight figures, and decide out of nowhere that it is too much. They just couldn’t do it anymore.

They burned out, and they burned their business down with them.

That’s why today, I want to talk about how to scale your medical practice without burning out.

In this episode of EntreMD, I share three powerful tips for scaling your business in a healthy and sustainable way.

Tune in! 


Key Takeaways: 

  • 00:00:00 Intro
  • 00:02:15 Getting your priorities straight
  • 00:05:53 The three shifts you need to make in your business
  • 00:07:05 Doing work through people
  • 00:11:14 Documenting your unique way
  • 00:15:36 Profit over revenue
  • 00:18:52 Outro 

—

Additional Resources:


When you are ready to work with us, here are three ways:

  • EntreMD Business School Accelerator - If you are looking to make a 180 turnaround in your business in 90 days, this is the program for you.
  • EntreMD Business School Grow - This is our year-long program with a track record of producing physician entrepreneurs who are building 6, 7 and 7+ figure businesses. They do this while building their dream lives!
  • EntreMD Business School Scale - This is our high-level mastermind for physicians who have crossed the seven figure milestone and want to build their businesses to be well oiled machines that can run without them.

To get on a call with my team to determine your next best step, go here ...

Speaker 1:

As somebody who wants to scale without burnout, you start to recognize that it's no more just about what you can do, but what you can do through people. It's that you're getting the big results. You're being able to create the revenue, you're being able to build relationships with the referral sources, you're being able to serve your clients at the highest level. That's amazing. But one is too small a number for greatness and one is definitely not the number of scale. Hi docs. Welcome to the EntreMD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, dr Una. Well, hello, hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of the EntreeMD podcast, as always, super pumped to be in your ears, and we're going to talk about something that I have found super fascinating. I thought I was of the opinion that as you build your business and it becomes more successful, things will just get easier and easier and people just tend to grow and scale and all of those things. And to my shock, I've seen so many entrepreneurs get their business to the seven figure mark, multiple seven, eight figure, and just decide it's too much, I can't do it again and they burn out and they burn the business down, and so what I want to talk about today is how to scale your company without burning out. Okay, so I have watched so many people in the process of building their businesses and you know they had to give up their health, right, and so they've done all you know. For so long they've ignored taking care of themselves, they've ignored their relationships. So this could be relationship, you know, family relationships, so their spouse, their kids, their parents, their siblings, all of that or just critical, like really great friends and you know, like nurturing relationships, relationships you get to get. You know, like you hang out with them and your cup is filled and all of those kinds of things giving up whatever spirituality or faith or whatever they do for their mental health, their habits, their meditation, all of those kinds of things, and just gave them all up and at the end, crashed and burned right.

Speaker 1:

And then there's some other business practices. So this is something that I've thought about a lot, because I am an entrepreneur, I am a serial entrepreneur, I love business, I love helping people build businesses. I believe that business is a way to monetize your mission, so you're free to do whatever it is you feel you're really on this planet to do, because you understand how to make the numbers work. And so it puts you in a position where you never work again because you're doing what you really want to do, but because you've learned how to monetize it. It's almost like doing your hobby and it's your job. It's fantastic, but at the same time, entrepreneurship is not my first priority, it is not my second priority, it is not my third priority. Okay, so entrepreneurship is a vehicle that helps me do these things, but I'm never going to sacrifice the thing for entrepreneurship. So I'll give you some examples here, in my order of priority.

Speaker 1:

The very first thing that is there is my relationship with God. That is like the top of the tops. I'm not sacrificing that for anything, right? So that's there. The second is a relationship with my family, so my husband, my kids and my extended family and all of those kinds of things. And for me, I feel like, especially as somebody who trains, coaches, all of those kinds of things, I'm like I want to change the world with the things I know and train so many people and help so many people and do all of that, but it starts at home. I want to be there for my husband. I want to be there for my kids. I want to help them become everything they can be. I want to serve them at the highest level. I want to enjoy those relationships. I want to have a great relationship with every single one of them, and so I am not willing to sacrifice that for entrepreneurship.

Speaker 1:

Now, entrepreneurship helps me do some of the things as far as creating time and all of those, all of that but this ranks above that. And then the third thing is my mission, and when I say my mission, it's what I feel I'm on the planet to do, and for everybody it's different. Our missions are as unique as our fingerprints, but there is something that you can't shake off. It's something that maybe even as a kid, you've wanted to do. It's something that you're in and you're out. You keep thinking about it. You have everything you could ever want. You have the family, you have the finances, you have the career. You have all of it.

Speaker 1:

But there's just something that keeps tugging at you, and for me, I could never quite define it, but I just knew that I'm just wired to help people be better. I'm wired to help people see a version of themselves they've never seen before. I am wired to, like. People are like I cannot believe that you believe in me. And I'm like, oh my goodness, like you're amazing, you're a unicorn. You just don't know it. Yet I can see it, you know, and so for me, I knew it will always be something around personal development, like being a catalyst for people, and so people feel stuck and they know, maybe, where they want to go and they don't know how to get there. And I'm like I can show you the roadmap and when I talk with people, I see the roadmap. It's just that. But for everybody it's different and the more you lean into it, the more you'll discover it.

Speaker 1:

What you do as a doctor could absolutely be your mission. For my dad it was. We used to make fun of him, like if he passed out and we said, oh daddy, there was this patient. He'd probably wake up because he was wired for it, right. So, anyway. So these three things I'm not willing to sacrifice for entrepreneurship, like I'm just not willing to. So the question becomes how have I set myself up to continue to build bigger and bigger businesses while still keeping the main thing? The main thing when my priority is still my priority. My priorities have not changed after being an entrepreneur for almost a decade and a half, like they have not changed, right, and so I wanna show you three shifts. Three shifts you wanna start embracing. So it sets you up where you can scale, you can grow, you can do all of these things and you don't burn out and you can still keep your priorities, your priority. You can still live a full life. Now we're not going to talk about it from the personal angle there are many things to do from there but I'm going to talk about three shifts that you want to make in your business.

Speaker 1:

The overarching theme of this is in your business, right, like, you have a limited amount of time, right, even if you have eight hours to work on your business every day, it's still a limited amount of time. It's not unlimited and so, at every point in time, you want to be doing the absolute highest level work. You can do the work that gives you the biggest bang for your buck. If you remember the Pareto principle, 20% of the work gives you 80% of the results. You want to live in the 20%. The more you live in the 20%, the bigger your results will be, and the less time it will take to pull it off. So that's that magical spot where people are like how are you doing this, don't you only have 24 hours? So the shifts are designed to help you to spend more of your time maybe most of your time in the 20%. So the first shift, first shift, is going from doing the work to doing the work through people. Okay, doing the work to doing the work through people.

Speaker 1:

And this is all about team building, whether that's hiring, firing, building company culture, holding your team accountable, empowering them so they can work at their highest level possible, and all of those things and a lot of the times. For entrepreneurs, this seems like a bother, like, oh, I have to hire people, oh I have to train them, oh I have to coach them, like, can they just get it all together, can they just know what to do, and all of that. But as somebody who wants to scale without burnout, you start to recognize that it's no more just about what you can do, but what you can do through people. It's that you're getting the big results, you're being able to create the revenue, you're being able to build relationships with the referral sources, you being able to serve your clients at the highest level. That's amazing, but one is too small a number for greatness and one is definitely not the number of scale. Okay, there's no scale without a team, like you know what I mean and there's no scale without a team. And so so you want to start making that shift from oh, I'm so good at this and I can do it, and my clients love me and my patients love me and my patients don't want to see me, and all of that. You start making that shift from that to how can I train people, mentor people, coach people, hold them accountable and all of those things, so that they can start creating those kinds of results by themselves. So where you go from being an A player to being the A level leader of A players Once you make that shift. Now let me be very clear this shift is a multi-year shift.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so when I started my business, I do everything fast. Okay, when I started my business, I'm like I make a decision, I execute it, I get all the results, I go to the next thing, Like that. That was the way I did things, but after we crossed the seven figure mark, I came to this realization that this is no longer a kayak, right? This is now a cruise ship. So a kayak, you can just flip it around, and you know like you can just flip it around and do things and move away so quickly. But with a cruise ship, you make a decision and you start turning, but it takes a while for that turn to happen. So, when it comes to team building, it's not kayak mode at all, right? Same way, raising children is not kayak mode. You know like it just isn't, and so you want to embrace this thing of this is what I do.

Speaker 1:

This is some of my most important work. The work I, the time I invest in my team, is some of my most important work, right, because just leveraging one extra person means I've replaced me doing it for three. There's three of me and not you like. They're not exactly like you, but now you have exponential growth. Exponential growth by yourself is nearly impossible. Exponential growth with the team is powerful. So if you're someone who is like I'm going to grow this and I'm going to keep growing this and I'm still going to have a life and I'm still going to be able to keep my priorities my priority, guess what you're going to need. You're going to need a team, and building a team is not this work I also do. It's the work. It almost becomes more important than doing the thing, right, because now you're training other people to do the thing.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I've had team members. Like now, the way we've built up our company, when we have new team members come on, we literally do a 30 day bootcamp, like we're. We're training you this, this, this is your job description, these are the outcomes. You're responsible. This is how you do those outcomes, this is how you manage when you need to troubleshoot this. And you know like I'm coaching them all through the process, training them, mentoring them, and all of that. Why? Because it takes a minute. If you want to have a team full of eight players, it takes a minute. But changing that perception changes everything.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so that's the first thing, that first shift from doing the work. Now, does that mean you don't do the work? No, it's just that you now prioritize training other people to do the work. Okay, so you can still do it, but that's what you need to do. So that's the first thing. The second thing is going from doing the work in a unique way to documenting your unique way, okay, so I'll give you an example of my private practice.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I have really great bedside manner, all right, as a pediatrician, and you know, patients would come see me and then they're like they only want to see me, okay, which you know is a great ego stroke for for some people. But for me I'm like, if I'm the only one who can see patients, then you know, then I can never get to the point where I'm working four days a week or three days a week, or if I'm not there, the practice falls apart. And I was for some reason, you know some reason, and I read Michael Gerber's book on the e-myth right, and I started learning about working on the business. So I started thinking about retirement very, very early. I started thinking about retirement my first week as an attending, because I was like, actually my first day, and I was like, yeah, no, no, I'm going to give this 10 years and then I'm out. You know, and that's because of the mission. I knew I didn't know what it was, but I knew that there were so many other things that I needed to do. So it's not for every physician, it's just for me. That's my story. And so I started learning really early and working on the business.

Speaker 1:

And so one day I stopped and I was like you know what? There is a specific reason. There are specific reasons why people will say I only want to see Dr Una. It's not because I am unique. Now, of course I'm unique, I'm special. There's nobody like me, nobody has my fingerprint and all of that. But there are certain things that make them say that I had a unique way. But this is the deal Most of us have a unique way. We've never thought about it, we've never documented it, so we can't reproduce it.

Speaker 1:

And so I started thinking. I was like what is that? What is it that makes people say that? And I started identifying them, because these were things that I did by default. I never documented them. So, for instance, when I'd walk into the room, I walk into the room to. I walk in as a thermostat, not a thermometer, right, and so what that means is I walk in to control the atmosphere. So when I walk in, I walk in with my sing song voice, good morning, like so, even if the person was slightly upset by traffic or whatever they have, they mirror my energy, right, and so I can pull them out of whatever that was. Now, of course, if people had like tragic things going on is what it is, but for the most part, and so I walk in with that. That's one Another thing I realized I always do is I always compliment the parent or the kid.

Speaker 1:

So, oh, my goodness, red hair, that looks good on you. Look how handsome this little man is. Mom, you're doing such an excellent job. I would always do that. I also always compliment something. It takes two seconds to do this stuff, right? So I didn't realize you know what my default was. And so there are a number of things that are like six or seven things, and I documented them and I'm like guys, this is why they say that, and if you can learn these things, then they're going to stop saying it. And to my amazement.

Speaker 1:

Then people come to the practice and they're like I don't want to see Dr Una. Well, you can see this doc today and then we'll get you on schedule for the next time. And when they come up front to check out, they're like I only want to see Dr Una and that doctor. I'm like yes, right, so you want to start, you want to make that shift from doing the unique work to documenting your unique work. And I use that example like private practice, but it's anything the meetings you run, how do you run? What is your actual framework for running? So, side thinking, ip, because you have it, you have a lot of it, you've used it. It's just like scrambled spaghetti in your head and you just want to unscramble it and document it and you'll be able to reproduce that right. What that will do is the energy, the culture, the feel, the atmosphere, the excellence all of that. You can reproduce it where it's not because you did it, because now your team is doing that. Like, imagine a team of people who do things the way you imagine they should be done, right and there's clarity because they cannot get in our heads and figure it out. Like it's our job, you know to do that. So start thinking in that kind of way. Right the processes, even your processes for doing things like how do you do that? So say, you're a coach, you run a coaching call, how are you doing that? What is the framework? Document them okay. That way you don't have the heavy weight of scaling by yourself. You can then scale with others because others can do what you do, okay.

Speaker 1:

The third one is the shift from being impressed by revenue to being impressed by profit. Okay, being impressed by revenue to being impressed by profit. And again, we did an episode that was really about how to scale without going broke, so I'm not going to go too in-depth here. I want you to listen to that episode, but think about it. Right, like so, your revenue as your business becomes bigger.

Speaker 1:

The truth of the matter is, I'm going to say this and I'm using the word and putting air quotes there right, but it is a vanity metric. Your revenue is a vanity metric because you don't take revenue home. What you take home is profit. Right, like your cashflow is not revenue, it's not just revenue, it's profit. Right, there's profit and there's cashflow and all these other things.

Speaker 1:

But you want to start making that shift Now. Does it mean you don't look at revenue at all? Of course not, like you're going to look at it, but you're going to look at it. You're going to look at profit. You're going to look at your profit margin. You're going to look at cashflow. You're going to look at the actual things, like money in the bank to pay bills, like profits. So, okay, how much can we take home in distribution? You want to start thinking in those ways because just your revenue, especially as you begin to scale. Now, if you will do these things, I want you to think about it. So you set yourself up where you start doing the work of building a team that can run your company. So you build a team, the team builds your company.

Speaker 1:

I cannot tell you how much peace and quiet I've had. So many students in EBS scale, which is our tier for doctors, doing over a million in revenue and still interested in hyper growth and, you know, building companies that will run without them. It is just beautiful to watch them. You know, build the team In fact. In fact, this is you know, at a meeting we had last week, one of the doctors and she's been in scale for about a year at this point and the beginning was like building the team, seeing that you can lead this caliber of team, putting the ideal job out, interviewing, finding the rock stars, all of those things. Putting the ideal job out, interviewing, finding the rock stars, all of those things. And she made a statement. She said I love my clinic. Now she's doing over seven figures.

Speaker 1:

She's like I love my clinic, I have a team of rock stars. They are so efficient. We get done before the end of the day. In fact, our schedule is so efficient that I think I can fit in 10 more patients there. I'm able to have more time off, right, and they are carrying the weight of the practice with me, right, and you could just hear the relief and the joy and all of that. Like I said, this was not a two-week process, this was a drawn-out process.

Speaker 1:

But imagine getting to the place where you're like I love clinic, we finish early and all the work is done and I have a rockstar team and the team. They are bearing the weight right, the weight of making the practice work, making the practice profitable, making the practice work, making the practice profitable, troubleshooting and all of that stuff. So that is the result of doing the work, of building the team. So imagine that that's you. You build a team and the team is building the business. You set yourself up where you start documenting your IP. You start documenting your way of doing things. What makes your business excellent, what makes your business excellent, what makes your business profitable? What makes people come back after you time after time? What do you do to create the demand for your services? All of that where you're documenting that so your team can run with it and you have your eyes on the profit, so you're able to make data-driven decisions that keep your practice, your business cashflow, positive and keep your business in a state where it is sustainable.

Speaker 1:

If you grow that way, you will grow without having to deal with the excessive burnout that makes people just go like burn it all down, I'm done with it. Right, these are some of the things you can do to safeguard so that, five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, if you still want to, the business still exists. From now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, if you still want to, the business still exists. You're still running it. You're still growing. In a way, you choose, right, like, we get to choose, we're entrepreneurs, we get to choose and you're loving being an entrepreneur. I love being an entrepreneur and I would love to see you enjoy the journey of entrepreneurship, even though you're growing a big company.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so, if you know, like, if that sounds like something you want to do, do the work, do the work, make these little shifts. And, of course, if you've crossed the seven figure mark and you're like, oh, my goodness, like that sounds like music to my ears, because once I crossed seven figures, it was nice. Everybody was like congratulations. That is amazing, but I've just wanted to throw the whole business away. Then there's a place for you. It's called the OnTremity Business School Scale EBS Scale, and you can book a call with my team ontremitycom forward slash call, and they'll be happy to talk with you to see if this is your best.

Speaker 1:

Next step. Of course, there's no hard pressure sales. We just don't do that. We are looking for people who we are positioned to help and they're willing to do the work to be helped, and it's a match made in heaven. Okay, now I want you to take this episode, take a screenshot of it on your podcast, your podcast app, and I want you to post on social media your biggest lesson from this, the commitment you're making, and you can tag us hashtag hashtag EntreeMD. I'd love to shout you out and share this with the doctors in your world. They will thank you forever. We need physician-led businesses to stay in business. Okay, that's what the healthcare space needs. All right, so thank you for watching, share this and I'll see you on the next episode of the EntreeMD podcast.