WCI #351: Physician Side Gigs

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This is White Coat Investor podcast 351 position side gigs.

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All right, welcome back to the podcast. I'm not feeling awesome today. I played in a hockey game last night and had a collision. You know, it's a non check league. It's men's league hockey. You're not supposed to be checking each other, but both another player and I.

Were going for a puck and ended.

Up colliding head on full speed. I was laid out on my back for a few seconds and I got up and he was on the ice a whole lot longer than I was, which is I think why they gave me the penalty and I got to recover in the penalty box. Not feeling too good this morning. But that's okay. We got a great episode planned for you. Also before we get into the three interviews we're doing today, students, our webinars coming up February 21st. We do this once a year. I can't come out to your schools. I cannot come to 120 or 200 or whatever number of schools are out there every year and talk to every group of students. So we try to do it all at once and we do it on this webinar. Okay, it's six o' clock mountain on February 21st. It's live. You can ask your questions live. I'll stick around afterward and answer all your questions. You sign up whitecoatinvestor.com student webinar whitecoatinvestor.com StudentWebinar is where you sign up and it's basically what medical and dental students need to know about money.

We're going to talk about why your.

Patients need you to be financially secure. We're going to talk to you about the secret to being a financially successful doctor. Show you how you can not worry about student loans. If you're one of those rare students who actually has some money to invest during school, we're going to talk about.

How to do that.

We're going to talk about saving money during residency interviews and also why you maybe ought to reconsider the knee jerk decision to buy a house during residency. So that's all going to be February 21st.

I mean, anybody can come. I guess we're not going to like check and make sure you're a student.

But it's aimed at students.

Okay.

Sign up whitecoatinvestor.com student webinar all right, so today we're going to be talking about side gigs. And docs have all kinds of side gigs as you will learn on this episode. These are just some people in the White Coat Investor community, some of whom.

You'Ve read their words before or heard.

From them on the podcast before, but they're going to talk about what they're doing inside gigs.

And it is an incredible variety.

I'm amazed at all the cool things.

That doctors are doing for side gigs.

And this helps their careers to be a little bit more interesting, helps them.

Combat burnout, helps them to make a.

Little bit of extra money, helps them develop new skills, help them find other.

Ways to improve the world. So lots of different reasons why people do this. Let's get into our first interview with Dr. Daniel Smith.

All right, our first guest on this episode is Dr. Daniel Smith. You may know him from columns he's done for the White Coat Investor. That's obviously one of his side gigs. We're actually going to spend most of our time today talking about another side gig he has. He runs an IV clinic. Daniel, welcome to the White Coat Investor podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Jim, tell us what you're doing with this IV clinic.

Yeah, so the idea is that people that have an urgent need for fluids, whether it's a stomach bug or pregnancy induced nausea or just getting behind jet lag, of course, there's always the occasional hangover thing. Those people have a need for fluids quickly. And instead of going to the error, you know, waiting a couple days to get into your pcp, it's just easier and quicker to administer them directly.

So how does your clinic do that?

So what happens is people call us and if they're a new client, what they do is they have an initial screening with me. I make sure that their medical history and medications are appropriate for what they're asking for. And then once I screen them, they go on either to the in clinic location or we have a concierge service where they actually go out to the client and administer the IV fluids plus vitamins, you know, maybe a few meds, depending on what they need. And yeah, we deliver it directly on site.

Yeah.

So 2, 2 grams of IV push, Dilaudid or what?

Man, no, the, the, the only meds that we do are Zofran, Toradol and Benadryl. You know, non narcotic for a reason. Nothing ketamine or anything like that and just, you know, standard vitamin concoctions, things like you'd find in a Myers cocktail or something similar.

Very cool.

So what do they pay for this service?

Well, the least expensive, what we call a la carte drip. And they're called drip, that's the name of the company. The least expensive drip is about 115ish dollars. We do have a membership model where if you're looking for a performance edge or, you know, hey, every trimester, you know, or every time first pregnancy, my first trimester is miserable with some nausea. You can get a membership and then the cost dips down precipitously after that. But the least expensive, like I said, off the shelf drip is about 115.

So 115 gets you a bag of LR, basically.

So.

Okay, and how much more does it cost to have them come out to your house?

There's about a $50 surcharge on top of that. That makes sure that the nurse gets paid adequately for their time and mileage because they're driving out to the client's location, usually their house.

And obviously you're doing, you're doing the medical screening, the exams, whatever you want to call it to make sure you're not giving these fluids to somebody that's already 25 pounds up with CHF fluid. Right, but what kind of do you worry about, you know, malpractice liability or an allergic reaction that someone has to Toradol at their house or what do you worry about when you think about your business?

Yeah, absolutely. So we have malpractice liability policy for myself and also for the nurses that work with. It's a 1 million 3 million policy, kind of like you'd have in medicine standard. We also have, like I said, Benadryl on site for any allergic reactions. We're going to have EPI here soon and we're going to have them carry a small bag of, you know, Solu Medrol, just in case there is something like that. All of our nurses are ACLS certified. Not that you're going to have a crash cart with you. But they're all very highly trained and so if there was an emergency, they'd be very capable. We also do pre and post infusion vitals. So if you, if you bring someone in and you know, they're not looking super great, of course, no one's getting a drip when they're feeling their best, obviously. But if you bring someone in, they're not looking super great and their vitals look iffy. The nurse always has the prerogative to either call me or just say, hey, you know, this isn't really. I don't think this is what you need. Maybe what you need is a doctor visit. And so we make sure that we kind of get ahead of those types of things. But of course, you know, allergic reactions do happen and phylactic reactions do happen, so we'll be prepared for the more serious ones as soon as the EPI and the solumedrol come in. But I think, you know, prevention worth being worth a pound of cure is probably the biggest thing for our business.

Are you getting any flack from primary doctors in the area or urgent cares or emergency departments? Do they feel like you're competition or are they just glad to have somebody else around helping people?

Right. Well, I've only gotten direct feedback from one other medical professional that was a pharmacist who was friends with a young lady who's young son got bad sick. I mean, you know, it's the, it's the cold flu, GI bug season. Her son got sick and then he ostensibly gave it to her. And so she was asking her pharmacist friend, can you do something for me? And your pharmacist said, you need, you need fluids, you need something for nausea. And she said, I can't leave my house because, you know, my son is sick. And I. And you know, we're basically, the logistics of it just worked out very poorly unless they wanted to truck over to the er. And so they actually reached out to us and we got her a bag of fluids, we got her some Zofran, we got her a little bit of Benadryl, because Benadryl is actually a really good antiemetic. And yeah, she felt great the next day. And then the pharmacist actually reached out directly to us via email and said, thank you so much for the service, I'll be recommending it. So we've not gotten any negative. I'm sure, you know, some people feel like toes are getting stepped on or maybe at some point, but we're doing our best not to compete we really want. If there's another physician who has a strong opinion for or against that, we take that into consideration because obviously someone's personal physician knows the patient a lot better than we're going to know them.

How did you learn about your state and local regulations that affected this sort of a business?

There's a lot of due diligence that goes into it, so a lot of it is just looking up the code and regulations. In fact, one of the reasons it's so difficult to do this in Alabama is because Alabama requires a good faith exam or a screening before they get it, which makes sense. But other states like Georgia, don't have that, and so the bar is a lot lower. Most of it came through direct research. Looking into other people in Alabama who also did this. You know, what are their requirements? My business partner and I actually went to a competitor and got the service and just wanted to see how they were doing it so that we could make sure that we weren't missing anything. We have a few nurses who've also done this before and they've helped us as well, saying, hey, you know, other people do this. You may want to consider adding this in. And so I'll look it up and research it. But there are definitely a lot of regulations that you got to follow because several places near where I am in Birmingham have actually gotten in trouble for administering, for example, glutathione without prescription. So certain things like glutathione, which we know is a modified amino acid or amino acid derivative, is actually a medication compounded directly, and it has to be written with a prescription from a physician. So for those patients, these other infusion centers were just basically cash and carrying them, stocking them, ordering them, bringing them to the clinic, and then just handing them out to whomever. And obviously that violates our state statutes. So a lot of it's been direct research by me, and then a lot of it's been nurses. And then a lot of it's been also just looking at what other centers are doing and making sure that we're not running afoul of anything.

Now, one of your biggest expenses, of course, is the nurse's time. So does that mean that all the fluids go in with the squeezer bag so the nurse isn't there quite as long or how do you save on your staff time? Right.

We do have pressure bags for people that need to be in and out quickly. But the way that we've set up nurses compensation is that in the clinic, the compensation is a little bit lower because they're basically getting a scheduled regular paycheck, so to speak. Also in our clinic, any tips that the nurse gets from the client go directly to them. We don't take a piece of those. And so what will happen is a nurse and a client will develop a relationship. Hey, you know, I like, I'm making it up. Susan. We don't have a Susan, but if we did, I like Susan. She knows just where to stick me. She's a great stick. We had good conversation. And people end up requesting those nurses, developing the relationship and then leaving them pretty substantial tips. One of our nurses went out to a client's home and administered an infusion and left our nurse a $60 tip. 60 bucks on top of what you're already getting paid is not a bad way to do it for something that takes about an hour to, you know, to administer.

Yeah, I'm not going to have any nurses left in my ER soon if they find out about this sort of thing going on. How much competition is there? Are there four or five companies competing with you or how much is there out there?

So, so we're not in Birmingham proper. If we were, the, the competition would be a little bit higher. We're actually in Trustville, just, just northeast of Birmingham. In Birmingham proper, there are three other clinics doing it and I think actually one recently closed their doors. I think it's because they ran afoul of, of, you know, some, some regulations. But really there's enough business in the Birmingham metro area to go around easily. I think for, for four clinics even, just because you get these populous states or these populous cities rather, where you have a hard driving group of citizens who are busy all the time or going out a lot or just living their lives. And one of the things you want to consider is where you're putting your clinic needs to be in a place where there's at least a reasonable amount of disposable income. Because this is not cheap. This is not something that your person making $50,000 a year as their household income is going to be able to get regularly. And so I think placement's really important. And so to that end, I think we're very well placed. But you know, if you go to Atlanta, I mean, there's tons of them, like you said earlier in Las Vegas, there's tons of them. And so it really just has to do with the demand. And I think when you get to the bigger cities and Birmingham's the biggest city in Alabama, there's definitely enough demand to support it.

Remind us again what your regular gig is. This isn't your main gig now, right? You're still practicing medicine mostly on the side. What do you do?

Yeah, I do non surgical sports with Andrew. Sports medicine.

And how much of your time do you think you put into this, into this IV clinic side gig?

It's been a lot. One of the things that I wanted to make sure that I did was that it didn't infringe upon my primary duties. My patients that I see at Andrews are my first priority. And the nice thing about this is now that I've put in the number of hours that I have and my business partner has a lot of it's running itself, they're booking, they're scheduling on their own the screenings. I'm trying to outsource to someone else right now, so that disintermediates me. But I would say from the startup we've probably put in, my business partner and I together, I don't know, a few thousand hours. I mean it's a lot. But one of the things about this kind of business is that once you get the legwork and you know, just from the white cut investor, you do a lot of the legwork on the front end and then it kind of builds upon itself. And I think we're to the point now where it's starting to build on its own momentum.

Well, the fun thing about having a business is not only does it make income, but there's some value that's building there. You know, the more you make is some multiple of that is what the.

Business is worth and can be sold for.

So how many years have you been doing this now? How long has it been?

It's actually less than a year. We started this in October of last year and it was at first word of mouth, just people that my business partner and I knew. And then as we created it and we fine tuned it and we polished the rough edges, it's grown now towards people are referring their friends and things like that. But only a few months old already.

Yeah.

And do you feel comfortable sharing how much profit is kicking off in a given month now?

Well, right now because the upfront costs were so great for us, they were about 60 ish thousand dollars. For myself and my business partner, we've not yet broke even on that being open only four months, but we anticipate break even about March or so once the clinic location is finalized. Currently the clinic location is being renovated. I actually bought the building where the clinic is going to be and that building is going to be split between the clinic drip and another medical practice, actually a sports psychology practice. And so I bought the building that's just on me. And then my business partner and I are going to put the physical location of DRIP in once that building's been renovated, it's going to be very high touch. But as much demand as we're getting, like in between our conversations today, I've had two more people approach me to schedule concierge drips. And that's been 15, 20 minutes. And so the demand, I think, is going to be so great that we're breaking even two months into a physical location. And I anticipate revenues will be $150,000 a year, hopefully my business partner and I netting profits once we get established. About $6,000 a piece per month.

Yeah, that's pretty awesome. I mean, that's substantial side income for just about any doctor. So congratulations on your success. Thanks so much for being willing to come on the podcast and talk about what you're doing as a side gig.

And I hope it continues for you.

Thanks, Jim. I'll keep you posted.

Okay. That was a lot of fun. And he mentioned after we stopped recording, he may franchise this in the future.

And be advertising on the white coat investors. So there may be opportunity for him to show you how to do this as well in the future.

All right, let's do our quote of.

The day before we get into the next interview.

This one comes from Warren Buffett. He said, I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street.

You try to be greedy when others are fearful.

When and you try to be fearful.

When others are greedy. Great quote. Classic one from Buffett.

By the way, I know a lot.

Of you have done our survey. Super helpful. You can find that@whitecoatinvestor.com survey one of our partners also does a survey every year, and we often use that information in a blog post and share that with you.

They're Laurel Road.

They've been a great partner with us.

For many, many years.

And they're also looking for docs to complete their survey.

Basically ask if you have student loans. If you're stressed about the amount of.

Debt you're carrying, you are not alone. We're looking for doctors within our community to take part in a survey commissioned by WCI partner and digital banking platform Laurel Road. Their goal is to capture responses and use the information to better serve their community with relatable content, valuable products and services, and more. You can take that survey today@WhiteCodeInvestor.com Laurel Road Survey All Right, let's get into our next interview. This One is with Dr. Gretchen Green.

All right, Our next guest on this podcast is somebody that's been with us before, Dr. Gretchen Green. Welcome back to the White Coat Investor podcast.

Thank you. It's great to be here again.

So remind people what your side gig or side gigs really are.

Sure. I'm a radiologist in North Carolina, and around 2015, I got a call out of the blue to review an expert witness case. I did that, found I liked it, didn't know anything about how to do the work or to build that as a business where I could get more cases. And then in 2016, I built out starting my expert witness business. Over time, that has expanded, and in 2020, I began teaching other physicians how to launch and build their expert witness businesses. Along the way, there's also been more ways that I put these skills stacked for more use building other businesses, expanding my courses now to also include mammography, malpractice and medical board case review. I've also gotten into real estate, which has had its own side evolution as another business too. But everything really came from starting an expert witness business.

Yeah, pretty awesome, really. Three different side gigs in a main gig here. What's your, you know, how do you divide them up time wise and income wise, how do they play out? Has one of these side gigs become the main gig?

It has. And I left my, where I had been for 10 years, a private practice group as a full partner. And that was in 2016 that I left that group as my time was shifting towards wanting to do additional things. I wanted to have more time not only to expand my work in other fields like expert witness work, but also for nonprofit board service, which I've now been doing for quite some time. And that plus my family's needs, all set that stage to start this as a really dynamic process that has continued to evolve. My time working clinically has decreased such that in 2023, I was doing about a day per week and my business work, doing expert witness business, building teaching coursework, now doing marketing to expand that reach for experts to help them get more cases, and also my nonprofit board work, those have all expanded over that time.

Is the nonprofit board, is that a paid side gig or is that volunteer work?

It's always been volunteer work, and this has been something that I've been very passionate about, and it's been wonderful to see these projects now come full circle. So such that my work with the National Women's History Museum, serving on their board for about seven years or so. And I have my holiday card to show the picture actually opened the first. This is my daughter and my mother that we were holding hands, as I said I would always do in front of our first in person exhibit in Washington D.C. so that was a real milestone in 2023 that I was throwing, thrilled to be able to achieve. And also through donations through many years, through additional income with side gig work as well as my main income, has really helped to fuel that. I also just completed the service as the chair of the Space Camp Alumni board chair. And so over the past few years, I've had the opportunity to really give back to that organization to help inspire and train what I hope was a whole new generation of astronauts to help make this world a better place and help everybody continue to look up for inspiration and make the world a better place. And so I got to hang out with some pretty cool astronauts and other people associated with the space industry over the past few years. And again, part of my mission with the side gig work and additional businesses has been donating some of those profits to support support these organizations that for me are so helpful for history and STEM education. And so my daughter and I, and again, you know, holiday card, this is what I send to lawyers, by the way, thanking them for retaining me and for giving business that gives back to others and supports my family. And so my daughter and I were there in front of the operations building desk that I donated. So when you walk into Space Camp and you want to know where to go, where to where your kid goes or where you as an adult get to go to your camp, you first see this welcome desk. It has my name on the front and my mantra, onward and upward always. So I hope to inspiring people when they see, when they walk in the door to remember that mission doesn't stop just with that experience.

So you're doing sounds like probably about 0.2 FTEs of clinical work still something like that. 0.2, 0.25.

That's right. And again seasonally that may change as well, but that's just about right.

So how much time are you spending being an expert witness yourself?

Compared to that, it's really flexible. And I think that's one of the ways that expert work has really evolved even since when I started teaching these courses in 2020. It's never been easier to work from home doing expert witness work and even depositions. Now I just had one this week where it's remote. Now I would say 95% of even depositions are remote. So to answer Your question how many hours per week? It's almost entirely on my own time. It may be an hour or two a day, but it gets very like our clinical work sometimes gets kind of bunchy if you have an active case that has something coming up. Sometimes there may be a few more hours, but it's pretty easy to scale that. And I've always found that it's easy to work that time in as I've learned my time management skills and refined my systems to be more efficient.

Do you think you could expand being an expert witness to 0.8 FTEs of your time?

There are certainly some specialties who typically do much more expert witness work in terms of their overall percentage of time. The states from they vary from state to state, but there are some general rules about how much time that you need to be spending doing clinical work versus expert witness work. But in general, about a day a week is a decent threshold to be able to qualify in pretty much any state that has just normal criteria. But there are certainly psychiatrists, certain pathologists, others who really have even a more criminal in addition to civil trial applicability of their skills, they can be doing a lot more expert witness work. But even for someone who works just a few hours a week at $500, $700 an hour doing that math, you can pretty quickly get to $100,000 six figure side gig income in a very short amount of time.

If you stopped working clinically, what would.

Happen to your ability to do medical expert witness work?

Most states have a period of time after complete retirement from clinical work that you can work out your cases. So it ranges from 18 to 24 months or so. And so there is an opportunity understanding that people's career life cycles will change and that you would ramp down your practice as you are approaching retirement and then you'd have the ability to work out what is a typical life cycle for a case. Cases can last years though, so it can take some time. Every once in a while, despite everybody's best efforts, you may have a case that continues even after your retirement. I do have lawyers who routinely reach out to me now for referrals for experts. As my network of lawyers has grown to more than 10,000 and my expert network has also grown to several thousand. And it's not uncommon for them to say my expert retired, I need a new one. I have one I was emailing just this morning who has a case going to trial actually in March and he needs a new expert because his expert retired and timed out. So that's a Great opportunity for the experts who I reached out to today to say, hey, this is a great way to start. And this has happened actually pretty routinely. When I do a marketing email out to my 10,000 lawyer database, they often will approach experts, and when they need you, they need you. So it's great to be ready and have these skills and be ready to go.

Now it sounds like your medical expert witness course business has certainly expanded dramatically. You've been very successful there. Is that now a better side gig than actually even doing the medical expert witness work itself?

It is. So this falls into those categories of things you probably never saw yourself doing in the future. I never anticipated doing a course, becoming an educator in this way. I remember at the end of fellowship where I was at the Brigham in Boston and the chairman had requested a meeting with me. And I remember walking through the campus and saying, I think I'm about to, to turn down a job at Harvard. I'm a girl from cornfields in Illinois, first to go to college in my line of women in my family. And I thought I better think pretty carefully about this decision before I go in there and say no to this. I did, and I chose to go into private practice. So I always thought that teaching and academics looked like what we saw in residency with residents and attendings and training programs like we're all familiar with. And this has just been an amazing opportunity to still be an educator in this role and to see my students progress along. Now, for several years, they've built five, six plus figure incomes. They've progressed from having additional money that helps them achieve new spending goals to truly investing it differently, investing in themselves, building new businesses and taking control of their time. You talk about something that gives you financial freedom. This is a great way to work towards something that ultimately gives you that degree of freedom and to really think about things that matter to you. For me, it's been about impact and service to others. It's also been about taking the opportunity to have amazing personal opportunities. And so I get to show the picture here of me on the north pole. This was 2022 and I got to go with my mom and my daughter. So we had three generations of women in my family funded from side gig income, from the course business, from my expert witness work, and then also from the businesses that I've invested in and built my skills doing. These are just priceless memories. And it's a way that I know that we've created something that goes beyond ourselves.

Pretty awesome. You also mentioned real estate. Is that more of a side gig for you or is that more of an investment for you? Are you investing pretty directly and heavily involved or is it more passive for you?

Yes, and it's active. In 2019, I took Leithi and Kenji's course on becoming a multifamily real estate owner and it's been active during that entire time. I tried to have it be passive. I talked with somebody who's really good about teaching folks how to raise capital for real estate and he said to me on the phone, gretchen, I think you can do this on your own. Rats. I was hoping you could help me out here because I feel very busy and I don't have a lot of time, but okay. So it's one of those people in my life who's just given me the right advice at the right time. And so I did. I invested in three apartment complexes in 2020 and then in 2021. That was of course wonderful timing in January of 20 to acquire 40 apartments and then take them entirely through the pandemic. With all the challenges, eviction, moratoriums, it really again forced growth that I had to stack all these skills that I'd learned from running the expert witness business and really put those to work. So they cash flow, they've been profitable. I have utilized the tax advantages to really make some big financial strides. Roth conversions, things like that. So again, magnifying the impact of some of these moves can go just beyond what is the dollar value per hour. And it's interesting though, because with real estate, it started as a way to invest the extra expert witness income in a way that would be more tax efficient. I met with my CPA and she said, you know, the more W2 income you get, the more taxes you're paying. And here's how it's impacting you with this progressive tax bracket system. And we looked at it and said, you know, how else can we do a little better with this in a way that helps leverage skills and build something that's an asset as an investment? And so when she pointed out that a lot of her wealthiest clients had real estate, that kind of lit the light bulb in my mind. And at that point, you know, I took Leyte and Kenji's course from semi retired MD. I was also doing a lot of coaching in 2020 through Sunny Smith's Empowering Women Physicians course. I've now become a certified coach. And so having wonderful mentors like these people who put these lessons to use has just been so very valuable. So I just Dec 29 at 4:56pm completed a next evolution of the real estate. And now I have sold one of the businesses from the real estate that I owned, actively did a reverse 1031 exchange and bought an oceanfront beach house as a short term rental. So now again, it's more evolution, just more using these skills, pivoting a little bit differently. But working hard on this and having great mentors and people who have supported me has really helped me gain that confidence to do these new things and to approach it with a growth mindset mentality of don't know that yet and I'm going to learn it and figure it out. And that's what really drives me now.

Are there any side gigs you haven't tried yet?

Gosh, there are so many side gigs. Peter Kim, the king of passive income MD side gig hustle, so to speak. I haven't done clinical side gigs. I have done consulting side gigs. In terms of participating as a reader in some AI studies for new breast imaging technology. That's fascinating and something that it pays well and it's a really great opportunity to work with people who are true technology and information innovators in the medical field. It's just fun to meet people like that and to hear their stories of how they fit the bill, to see this need of a solution to a problem and how they came up with a new idea. So that's been very interesting working with AI companies and for both breast ultrasound and for mammography to see how can we find cancers better and help us work smarter, not harder. But yeah, I don't know. I've always got my radar up, so I'm looking forward to hearing the other speakers on this podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of blogs, so I just love learning when people have new ideas.

Yeah, pretty cool. All right, well, it all started with Expert Witnessing and your Expert Witness Startup school is opening for registration again. Opens on January 16th, closes on January 29th. You can go to whitecoatinvestor.com expertwitness to enroll in that it offers CME credits. It's eligible for 12 Category 1 CME credits and so that allows you to potentially use CME funds or write it off as a business expense in order to take that class again. That's@whitecoatinvestor.com Expertwitness and that'll teach you everything you need to know to get started Expert Witnessing. And as you can see, that can lead to all kinds of other stuff. Gretchen, thanks for being on the podcast.

Thanks so much. And I would just add that one of the changes, we've made an update. As soon as people enroll, they get the whole course at once. A lot of people start and they are ready to go. So you can start, you can binge it, do the whole course. We do have the four live Q&As that go for those weeks to offer that kind of support. I'm here to help people to get through those mental speed bumps that we all have and starting something new. Once you take the first step, everything else just follows. So thank you for your support. Everything that you do to help with financial literacy and enable physicians to have financial freedom, and it's truly priceless.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right.

It's exciting to talk to Gretchen again, and obviously she's opening up her course.

If you're interested in doing some expert witness work.

But it's also inspiring just to see.

All the other stuff she's dabbled her fingers into and has become kind of a little bit of a side gig queen there, and yet still practicing medicine. I love people that are able to stay in medicine and do all kinds of other interesting stuff at the same time.

Our next interview is with longtime WCI.

Columnist Ricky Resella, and let's get him on the line and talk with him about his side gig.

We have Ricky Ricella here, WCI columnist, back on the podcast to talk about some of his side gigs. Ricky, welcome back to the White Coat Investor Podcast.

Jim, always an honor to be on. Thank you again for all that you do.

Yeah. All right, so the main gig for you is being a neurologist. You've got really a couple of side gigs. You write for wci. You do columns periodically for us. But the one I think we're mostly going to talk about today is you do surveys. You do surveys for money, you know, position, opinion surveys. Tell us about how you got started doing that.

So I'm not exactly sure how it began. I suspect it was when I went to a job fair in New York City, actually. So I was putting my email down for every sort of recruiting company. But I believe there was also some companies looking for doctors to do to do surveys. So this was circa 2010, 2011. So I don't think the surveys were very popular then. And they were probably like trying to just get names of doctors and their emails to send out surveys. So I believe it started then. I do remember getting surveys. I had probably told them I was a resident at the time. So I temporarily wasn't exactly when I had signed up then, but when I became an Attending physician. That's when I got these surveys. So I think when I put my email down at that job fair, I had also put down that I'm still a resident, and they made it a point to really contact me through email when I became an attending physician. So I think it was then. So what ended up happening was it sort of snowballed from there. So once I did one survey, I also got surveys from other companies. So I think not only did they give my email to, like, I got my email, like, on one list, but the companies also would send my. My information to other survey companies. I'm not sure if they sold that or whatever. But as I did more surveys, I got more surveys from other companies and it sort of snowballed from there.

All right, well, for those who are interested in doing surveys, you can do. You can find out about these. We have them all on one page@whitecoatinvestor.com mdsurveys actually had a complaint recently about that. So we have also made that available at whitecoatinvestor.com. sursurveys and physician surveys as well. But there's a number of companies listed there in Crowd and Sermo and Spherex and Zoomrx and opinion site and MD4Lives. Which of these companies do you do surveys with, Ricky?

All of them. As you usually mentioned, I that I've written about, I made 30k in surveys. It's because I deal with all of them. MD For Lives is the only one that I did have some struggle with the surveys. I am doing them now, but actually getting hooked up with them was probably the last one. But I've been actually doing years with all the others, actually, so. And they've been excellent. And they're always reaching out to me to opportunities. And because I'm a neurologist and there's a lot of new neurological drugs, that's probably the reason why I'm able to make so much within this side gig.

Yeah. $30,000 a year is not insignificant. For a lot of docs, that's an extra month. Month and a half. Two months of pay.

Exactly. Yeah. That's definitely more than a couple paychecks for me.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, some of the complaints I occasionally hear from people doing surveys is they feel like they do half the survey and then they're screened out of the survey and they sometimes wonder if they just did it for free, that they actually did the survey the company wants and the company didn't pay them. How often do you feel like you're Getting screened out of surveys.

Actually it was happening more frequently initially when I started as I've got to do more surveys, I knew what they were looking for. So I just did a survey for a migraine drug, for example. I see a lot of migraine patients. I can really talk about it. So initially as they're asking like, oh, are you a headache specialist? Like maybe one of the screening things I can say like, okay, yeah, I see they're probably going to go for a migraine patient. I see a lot of those patients. I'm not going to, I'm going to continue to continue with these screening questions. I also had another survey that I didn't even bother with the pre screening questions because I knew they were looking. It was more for neuro oncology. It seemed like they wanted a neuro oncology specialist, which I am not. I don't see those patients a lot. So I can see the frustration if you go through the entire pre screening questions because that could take five, even 10 minutes of time. But I've learned to see what they're sort of looking for. And I don't even do the pre screening questions if they're looking for sort of a subspecialty that I don't have any insight into.

Yeah, with experience you can limit how.

Much time you waste doing that. That sounds like that's the key is just stick with it and you get.

Better at, I don't want to say gaming the system because you're not gaming.

It, but understanding the system.

Right, exactly. So. But I can understand the frustration. A lot of times when I was starting out, I was going through these pre screening questions and getting screened out and it got frustrating. But then I learned to sort of, okay, I know what they're going for. I'll keep with the pre screen questions and I really set myself up for being successful in qualifying for a survey.

So how much hassle has this been for you? I mean they just each send you a 1099 each year and that's it. They direct deposit the money into your bank account once a month or how's it actually work?

So there is quite a bit of hassle because like you mentioned those multiple companies, they will all send you 1099s. It's mostly my accountant that like might get frustrated but that's, that's why I pay him. But also the sort of problem is like when you have a side gig, I guess it's with any business you have to make sort of payments to the irs. Right. So what is kind of Tough is this is very sort of, you know, I say $30,000. Hey, it could be 10,001 here. Or, you know, actually, I made more this past year. It looks like even up to approaching 40k. So. So because the swing in sort of income is sort of tough, it just depends on how many surveys you qualify for. And if there's a new drug out, it's very hard to be estimated tax payments. So that's sort of the main hassle that the psychic brings. But because it's multiple 1099. But also, you just. It's not a steady sort of stream of income, so that's the most hassle. If you don't like doing surveys, then it would be even more of a hassle because, like, I find that if I have downtime and I'm. I'm doing a survey, I'm actually, I feel like I'm utilizing my time. But if you don't like doing them, then that would also be a hassle. I don't consider it a hassle. Also, in my downtime, like at night, I do a lot of surveys, so I'm not doing much. It's. So my wife finds it more frustrating. My wife might want to, like, watch tv, you know, So I try to spend time with my wife as much as possible, but sometimes I'd rather do a survey. So she finds it more frustrating than I do. More of a hassle. But then again, she's watching like, like selling Sunset or some other mindless Netflix shows that I'm not interested. So. So. So my family, like, especially my wife, might find it more of a hassle, but I don't find it. So for me, it's really just like estimating sort of my estimated payments to the irs.

Awesome. Well, at least you're together. You know, I never thought that sitting together watching TV or sitting together watching a movie was incredibly being together anyway, so I figure it doesn't matter if you're together and one of you is doing survey and one of you is watching a show. So good for you for being able to take advantage of. Of some of your downtime.

Yeah, absolutely. And. And it's really something that it's just minimal effort, you know, so especially. And it's a good balance for my clinical work where, you know, there's a lot of mental effort where you take care of patients and trying to explain the disease or try to treat them.

So, yeah, I get the impression that this is more profitable for some specialties than others, those who tend to prescribe expensive drugs. I think Their opinions are highly valuable. Those in emergency medicine maybe not quite as much. Although I've met emergency docs that also.

Make a significant amount of money doing surveys.

Anything else we should know about doing surveys as a side gig?

Well, yeah, just to your point, really, it's because of being a neurologist and there's a lot of new exciting drugs coming out. That's why I am able to have a lucrative side gig out of the surveys. So my wife is an anesthesiologist and I'd written this in my blog post. There are no surveys for anesthesiologists unless you are a pain specialist. So I tried to get her to do some of them. And as an anesthesiologist, most of those surveys she would always screen out because they're looking more for a pain subspecialty trained anesthesiologist. So yeah, to your point, this is not for everybody, depending on specialty.

Yeah, I think it's probably great for oncologists and neurologists and rheumatologists and probably general internists, but I don't know that.

It'S actually that awesome for anesthesia and emergency medicine and maybe obstetrics, that sort of thing. I don't know.

But the only way to find out really is to try see how many surveys you get and see how often you're getting screened out.

Yep, yeah, absolutely. And also what I've been doing a lot that to make it even more lucrative is they want like a like maybe an hour interview or 30 minutes sort of interview, almost like like on Zoom or maybe just on telephone. But those generally pay much higher. So they know like you know, you know that as doctors your hourly rate might be kind of high. So you can, for an hour survey, they'll pay you $300 to $400 if it's sort of one on one, either Zoom or over the phone. So that also is what the big boost in in my side gig income with these surveys. It's not really the online ones. A lot of it is a bulk of it is those actual one on one talking on the phone or through zoom.

Awesome. Okay, well, if you're interested in doing surveys again, you can sign up whitecoatinvestor.com mdsurveys or do surveys and start receiving those and figure out how much money you can make doing a side gig that you can do from your couch or while commuting on a train or a bus or whatever. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast and telling us about that, Ricky.

Oh, Jim, my pleasure. And thank you for inviting me.

All right, that one's fun. Super low barrier to entry with that side gig. Again, if you want to sign up to do these surveys, it's not hard. We've got them all listed@whitecoatinvestor.com mdsurveys or do surveys or physician surveys, whatever.

They'll all take you to the same place. I know we've read off a lot of surveys, kind of URLs. Today we've got the White Coat Investor Survey, our annual survey we do each year. That one helps us, helps guide our content. That's a whitecoatinvestor.com survey.

There's the Laurel Road survey.

Right. They're looking for docs to complete their survey. It's a big focus on indebted docs with student loans, et cetera. But that's@whitecoatinvestor.com LaurelRoadSurvey and of course, if.

You want to get paid for doing.

Surveys, I mean, you can get paid, I guess, by doing our survey, we're entering you in a drawing for prizes, but you actually get paid by doing these surveys like Ricky's doing. And you can find those@whitecoatinvestor.com mdsurveys okay, I think we've given you enough URLs to keep track of today, but it's been a pretty great episode, I thought. I really love seeing what people are doing with side git. They're all so unique and so different and you can find one that matches your needs. You don't have to do it throughout your career. Maybe it makes sense for you to do it early in your career or mid career when you're feeling some burnout or as you're starting to wind down in your career. Later, you can look for these side gigs. Lots of options there and opportunities.

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All right.

Thanks to all of you out there. By the way, without you, this isn't much of a podcast and I appreciate what you are doing every day. I know some of you are working out, some of you are walking. Maybe you're walking the dog in the.

Afternoon or the evening or the morning while you listen to this.

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