The Price for Continual Business Growth

If your business isn't working the way you expected, it's not because you're bad at business. It's because no one ever taught you how it actually works. We were trained to master algorithms in medicine, but when it comes to revenue teams and growth, we were never taught anything. We weren't even told to figure it out. We just assumed somehow we'd know. Like it would magically make sense. But it doesn't. The era of the seven Figure Physician CEO is here. And it's not about working harder. It's about learning entrepreneurship as a system. The same way you mastered ACLs and pals, you can master the algorithm of building a profitable scalable business. That's why I recorded the Seven Figure Physician CEO audiobook. Whether you're building a medical or non medical business, and whether your goal is your first million, first 2 million, first 5 million, first 10 million, this is where the journey starts. There is no Calvary coming to save us. We are the Calvary. So. So go get your audiobook now. Www.entremd.com 7Figurebook. And let's rewrite the narrative for physicians starting today. Hi, docs. Welcome to the Entre MD 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 Entre MD podcast. As always, super pumped that I get to be in your ears. And I say this a lot and I'm going to say it again. I'm going to say thank you and I am going to make an ask today. And that is really that you take the time today to share this episode with another doctor in your life. And I ask because, you know, we are in the middle of times like none other for the physician community. And one of the things that is really hard is that we are in a healthcare space that is an economic space, and we don't, we're not equipped to function in that space. Right? Like, we got no business education, all of that. And I am really committed to creating a podcast that can be considered a free MBA for physicians. You know, like, we don't do any fluff. Here we come. And give you, like, really high quality, top notch business strategy and business mindset mastery and all of those things. And it's just so that as a group, as a group, we can experience a shift. And you know, really, it only takes 10% of the community shifting for the whole community to shift. And you and I, I can't do this myself, but you and I can touch 100,000 physicians, right? We can put this in the hand of 100,000 physicians, knowing that once that shift happens, it's done. And Vision 2025 will be our reality, where we will be in a space where doctors are the leaders in healthcare inside and outside of the exam room. Doctors fall in love with medicine again. You know, the high levels of burnout become a thing of the past. And we have financial freedom, we have financial security. It seems like what can. Can the physician community look like that? Absolutely, if we do our part. Right. And so you're part of the calvary. I'm a part of the calvary. And one of the things you can do is just take this episode and share it. Just share it with the doctors in your life. Take the pod, tell them, listen, I listened to this podcast. You should listen to it. It will change your life. Okay. All right. So this happened a few, a few months ago. I was with a friend of mine. Big shout out to her. Her name is Mayosha Boykin Anderson. She is in the tech space. She runs a multiple seven figure company out of Houston, Texas. She's a brilliant entrepreneur. I just love the way she thinks. Big thinker, big dreamer, and big action taker. So we were just talking about, we were, we're in Florida, we're on the beach. We're talking about, you know, entrepreneurship and our journeys and stuff like that. And I remember saying that it's strange, but I know this and you know this, but it's almost as though your business goes in cycles where you have this period where you're building. And I'll go, I'll share this in the context of my journey. So you get it. You have this time when you're building, right? And in the building stage, you do get some results, but they're not quite. They don't match the. They don't match the effort you put in that phase. And so like, you're building, building, building, and you come to this season of explosive growth and then it's almost like you hit a peak and it falls, falls apart almost. And I'll explain, it's not as bad as it sounds, but it falls apart and it's time for another build, right? And it's. You have to approach it like a beginner. You can't say, oh, I'm a seasoned entrepreneur. I don't have to like. You have to approach it as a beginner. And you build and build and build and build. Explosive Growth. And then it, quote, unquote, falls apart and you have to build again. Right? And I was like, it's just a cycle, and if you don't understand will be so frustrating. Right? And it's the reason why people would quit and all of those kind of things. So I want. I really want to. I want to take the time to talk about it, because if you don't understand this, it does make entrepreneurship like a roller coaster. It does make you compare yourself to other people, which, I mean, like, it is one of the worst things you can do to compare yourself to another entrepreneur, because you start from different levels, you're in different seasons. You're like, you can't compare them. It's like comparing apples and houses. Like, there's no compare. You can't compare. Right? And this will help you understand it even more, you know, like, why you should never do that. Like, that's just setting yourself up for pain. A lot of pain and a lot of suffering. Right? Okay. So I want to put this in the context of. Of my journey, right? And so it will make a whole lot more sense. And as I go through it, I want you to think about your journey. Okay? So I started off as a pediatrician. I graduated from residency in 2008. And at that point, entrepreneurship was a pipe dream. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, like, maybe someday, 10 years from now, we could. Mike could own a business type of thing. Like, it was not on the horizon for me. I did not identify as an entrepreneur. I don't see myself as a person who could do anything entrepreneurs do. And so it was just not there. Right. And, you know, a series of things happened, and I came to this point where I was like, okay, we're going. We're going to start a private practice. That's what we're going to do. And. And, you know, I always say, ignorance is bliss. If I knew what I know now, I wouldn't probably have been like, yeah, no, thank you. I'll pass on that. But not to say, knowing what I now know, I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. I'm saying at that stage, if I knew what it would take, I wouldn't have done it. I wouldn't have had the guts to do it. So. So. So that was like my doctor phase, right? And so when I decided to embrace entrepreneurship building phase, right? Because the thing is, starting a business doesn't make you an entrepreneur, Right? It makes you a business owner. An entrepreneur is a person who has the skills and all of those kind of things. Right. And so for my building phase, I had to build the skills because I was just not an entrepreneur. And so I had to build the skills I had, you know, like so, so marketing, selling, operations, finances, legal, like all of those kind of things at that stage, right? Because again, those are things I'm working on till. Right? 14, is this 14, 15 years later, still working, still working on this, right? So it started building, that started building the practice, right? So think about the work that goes into finding a location. Like for someone who's never done this, finding location, find, looking for funding, which I didn't eventually get, but then looking for a job I could use to fund the practice and then fund my life as, you know, as we build the practice, you know, what ehr do I use? What like all of that, that's all building. So I want you to about the amount of effort, right, you put in to get a practice off the ground and all of those kind of things. And I didn't have the entre MD business school then, so I made a lot of mistakes and it, you know, it took me a lot of time to make certain decisions because I didn't really have people to ask and things like that. So anyway, that whole building phase, right, brought us to this point where we had a practice, you know, so we had launched the practice, the practice was, you know, really successful. Started bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, then a million and know like started growing and it was amazing. It was so amazing. And then I'm going to veer off to the next stage. Then I knew then I came to 2016 where I was like, you know what, that what I'm doing now is not going to cut it. Like I'm, I'm going to need to, if I'm going to need to retool myself, I'm going to need to reinvent myself because I want to own a different kind of business. I want to explore a different side of me. And it brought me back to ground level. Now, not ground level like where I started from before I started my practice, but I had to come back to be a builder, right? Because now again, I had to build different skills. I had to become a speaker, I had to learn to market online, which is very different from marketing in private practice. At least in, in, in that day it was right. Like we do a lot more online things in private practice now. But you know, like, you know, I had to learn how the online world, I had to learn to do video, I had to learn to do Facebook lives, I had to learn to network. I had to learn to do all of those things. I had to set up an online business, I had set up a coaching practice and all of those things. If I had come from the standpoint of I'm a seasoned entrepreneur, nobody can tell me anything and I don't want to have to do this kind of like I don't want to start over. I don't want to start over. If you don't want to start over, you don't want, you don't want to have continual business growth. The prize for continual business growth is the willingness to start over as many times as it takes, right? As many times as it takes. And so I had to quote unquote, get back to the building phase, right back to all the way back. I want you to imagine me being in a speaker training and I'm the doctor who's used to being a smart person in the room and I'm like the, for one of a better word, I would never use that word to describe myself. But like I'm the dumbest person in the room, right? Because I don't know how to do these things. I'm terrified of doing them and all those kind of things. If you're not willing, right. To start over, they can have new beginnings, right? Like that's the requirement. And so learned all of those things. And now we have Entre MD that is, it's a full company, right? And so now, but even in that, because I want to make sure I'm breaking this down these two companies, so I'm going to do a little bit of a back and forth. But then in my private practice I get to this point where I'm like, I want to build something that is a well oiled machine that can be self led in a way. And that required a different skill set right now. So we're talking about leading leaders, we're talking about getting results through people, we're talking about, you know, what we call the great divorce where I'm not so intertwined with my practice, like inseparable. It required me to calm down and learn those skills. It required me to calm down and rework processes, right? Because when we are the ones doing it, it's like all our processes like spaghetti in our heads, right? It's like how do I download that so somebody else can show up and the place is running as if I were there, right. And things like that. So I had to come back, have a new beginning. Like I had to start over. I had to come back and learn. I Had to come back and be the beginner student again. But what that did is it created a new beginning. A new beginning where I was able to do a 18 month sabbatical and the practice grew, right? But to have that, I had to come back and be the student again, right? Okay, Then in Entre md, I'm like, okay, I want to serve a larger number of people, which means I needed to have a larger team, which means that I had to have a little bit of diversity in my programming. I had to come all the way back, I had to start, quote, unquote, start over. I had to say, okay, so now we're going to need, now I'm going to need to expand Makeda's role. I'm going to need to bring on a success coach, if you will, accountability coach. I'm going to have to bring on a community manager, have to bring on a sales team. And, and all of those things are like, oh my goodness, I don't know how to do that stuff. I have to learn that stuff. It's like, it's like learning the Krebs cycle, right? You have to look at it and look at it and learn and pay attention to read it again, read it again till you get it like that. And it's like, I don't want to do this, right? But the longer you stay on resistance, the more painful it would be. And if you're in resistance, you can't have new beginnings. You just can't, right? And even with the programming, that's when I was like, okay, if I really want to serve the number of people I want to serve, everybody's not going to want to do one year commitment to be an EBS grow, right? So that's when we created EBS Advance. We're like, okay, if you're like, I really love the podcast. I'm creating all these wins. I want more. I'm not ready for the school quite yet, but I want to create this. And then we created this program that six months is self led. You have to, you have to, you know, live meetings and things like that and the people are there creating wins in it, right? But I had to come back to start over so we can have new beginnings. And I say that because where the quitting happens, where the frustration happens, where all of that happens is in the build phase, right? So there's the build phase, there's a grow phase and things are falling apart. So you have to build and grow, then build and grow. And in that building phase, it looks like sometimes feels Like, I lost my Midas touch. Like, I used to just touch things and they turn to gold. Like, what is this? What is going on? It's another building phase. And in the building phase, you get enough wins so that you don't quit, but you don't get the wins that match the effort right away, right? You don't get them right away, but they come or they always come, right? And it doesn't mean at those point that your business doesn't work. It's just that you have to take off the pretty dress, right? I have to put your work clothes on, put your coveralls on and get to work and get your hands dirty and do stuff. And a lot of times there's so much resistance. Like, I don't want to do that. I think I should have grown, I should have outgrown that. Nobody outgrows that. You don't outgrow that. You just do it in different phases and different stages and bigger and bigger ways. A time is coming in, in on tremd, for instance, where I'm like, okay, I have staff who are doers. I have staff who are managers. Now I'm going to need to build an executive team. I know, and I know that's going to hurt. I know it's going to hurt. But if I want a new beginning, if I want a bigger impact, if I want people to get bigger results, if I want all that, that's the price to pay for it, right? And so I share this because, you know, we were laughing about it, but I think it's a gift that we understand that, because that way you can go through the build stages and see it as a gift. Like, I'm building something that will help me have bigger wins later, right? I'm doing the work, I'm building the infrastructure, I'm building the team, or I'm reworking myself, right? Like, I've had times where I became the problem because I identified with the current state of the business, right? Like, so let me explain what I mean. So for Entre md, if I use it as an example, I can identify with where we are right now. And I see myself as a person who can run the business I have right now and I can see the business where it is right now. But if I am going to go further, I am going to have to do the work of divorcing myself from the vision of where we are right now. Because there's no longer vision. We're there. But what is that next horizon? What is that next picture? Can I see it. Because if I can't see, we're not going anywhere, right? And after I'm done seeing it, can I see myself as a kind of person who does that? Because if I don't see myself as a kind of person who does that, we're not going anywhere. Now, this is work that nobody can really see. Nobody can see that is happening. The results don't show up right away, but if you don't do them, you cannot have continual business growth, right? And so I really recorded this so that one, you understand how it works. And that too, you get out of your resistance to the building phase. Everybody likes a growth phase. I mean, it's just magic, right? But you get out of resistance, like you just take the pretty dress on or the really nice suit off. You take that off and put on your construction outfit because it's time to work. And if you can do that and you can bear the quote unquote pain and discomfort and discouragement, that can show up then because you're like, oh, I'm not getting the massive results. You know, like, I'm doing this stuff, but I'm not getting the massive. It takes a minute, but you will get it. But it takes a minute. And if you'll do that, if you understand that, you'll do that. You enjoy your journey as an entrepreneur so much more. So you can enjoy the journey. You just have to understand the rules of the game, right? So if you resist the building phase, like when you're. So if you're starting a business, right, or you're at a business, you're working on your first 100k, even all the way to your first million. Part of that building phase is building that marketing and sales engine. Most people don't want to do it. Oh, I don't want to post on social. It's not about posting on social media, it's about marketing and selling. I don't want to ask people, you're not going there. Like, you step out of resistance. This is build phase. This is what we do, right? If you're going to build that dominant brand, you're going to dominate, like with your message, you're going to dominate with your marketing message, your sales message. Like you're going to overwhelm the market with you. So I would like for you to take a moment and do an audit and ask yourself, where am I resisting the build? Where am I resisting what I need to build? It could be you, your mindset, it could be vision, it could be team, it could be infrastructure. It should. It could be collaborations, it could be any of those things, but you resisted. You're just making the journey longer and more painful than it needs to be, Right? If you can embrace it and take off the pretty dress, right, and the, you know, the $3,000 suit, if you can do that and put on your construction gear and get to work, then what you'll do is you'll set yourself up for a new season of growth. Like you haven't seen a new season of impact, like you haven't seen a new season of revenue. Like you haven't seen. And so build, build, build. Stop running away. Build, okay? And if you, if you do that again, you'll end up with the business you love. And when the next season of building comes, you're like, I know this is gonna hurt, but I know it's good for me. It's kind of like being at the gym, right? You're lifting the weights and you're like, ah, I know this. I know I'm gonna be sore. That's a good kind of sore. And I want you to have a good kind of sore. I want you to embrace the good kind of sore. And I want you to build a business that would be a shining example of what is possible for physicians. I want you to grow from one stage to another and get, not get stunted and not quit because you understand the rules of the game. Okay? All right. So this episode is a really great one to share. Really, really great one to share. You can go make an avatar of you in looking like a construction worker and tag me on it. I want to shout you out, okay? Committed to building. All right? Be creative. Do something. Put it out there. I'm committed to building a state of the art business that helps people like this, get this outcome. Do that. Tag me on it. Okay? And I. And I'll give you a shout out. I'll reshare your stuff. All right? Okay. So thank you for listening. Please go share about this on social media. Make the commitment, get the work done. I cannot wait to celebrate you now. I talk about this in the entrepreneur business school all the time. I'm going to leave you with it. I tell them. I'm like, we are the people building the most innovative, most impactful and most profitable businesses inside and outside of health. Inside, outside of the exam room, Right? And I want you to be one of us. All right, so get to work. I'll see you on the next episode of the EntreMD podcast. Hey, if you love listening to the EntreMD podcast, I want to invite you to join Entre MD on demand. It is my signature subscription program that gives you access to a library of business courses designed to help you do one thing as a physician entrepreneur, and that is to thrive. Just head out to entreandy.com forward/on demand and I love to have you join us. See you on the inside.