Build Your Practice on Purpose, Not by Accident

So you're a five-year-old practitioner by the end of six weeks.

When I graduated, I didn't know what I was doing.

Like most of us, I had some modeling that I think benefited me over other clinicians.

My partner was a dentist.

You know, they have a very strong recall program in dentistry, right? They tell people when to come back.

You book your appointment for your cleaning six months out before you leave.

There were some inherent business practices that I watched happen in that profession that I benefited from immensely right away.

I also had graduated from school without a ton of student debt.

And that is a massive leg up.

It is a massive privilege that I had between working opportunities that I had throughout my undergraduate degree, the time I worked before I went to naturopathic college.

I was a lucky person that I was able to leave school without a massive amount of student debt.

And that really did change my ability to make certain choices early on.

Thank goodness, because I made so many mistakes that I'm hopefully going to save you from.

But at the beginning, and so my number one mistake was that originally I actually just copied a lot of other people.

I copied what other people were doing in order for me to try and build my practice.

I kind of made the assumption that if other people were doing it, it must be right, which is weird because I literally never make those kind of decisions anywhere else in my life.

I always like, want to do the information gathering and the fact checking and look at people's bias and patterns.

And, you know, I critically appraise everything, except when I started practice, I really didn't critically appraise anything.

So I made a lot of decisions based on what other people were doing.

And I made a lot of decisions based on fear.

I even had a position really early on in my career that paid me $30 an hour as a naturopathic doctor.

And I took it because I was afraid, right? The narrative in my class Facebook group was that we were never gonna be able to afford daycare to pay for our kid to go somewhere and for us to go to work.

And when I realized that daycare was, I think I forget how much it was, 50 bucks a day, that I could get paid $30 an hour, I actually took the job thinking, okay, this is a really safe way for me to make more than the cost of daycare, right? If I work more than two hours, I'm ahead, right? Wasn't very long before my practice was slammed.

I had started attracting people into my work, into the practice.

And when I went back and counted my last hundred new patients, 99 of them had come through my own personal connections.