The starting point of entrepreneurship

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 ontremd podcast where it is 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. Hello. Hello doctors, and welcome back to the Entre MD podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Una. I'm so excited you're here. And today we are going to be looking at the starting point of entrepreneurship. One of the commonest questions I get asked all the time is, I want to start a business. I know there's more. I just don't know how these things work. Where do I start? And it's not what you think, but that's what we're going to be looking at today. So let's dive right in. Now, as you know, I run a pediatric practice and that was my foundational business. At this point. I'm a serial entrepreneur, but that's where I really went to the school of hard knocks and learned about entrepreneurship. So started it up in 2001. And when I started it, I was not an entrepreneur. Okay, I owned a business, but I was not an entrepreneur. I was terrified of marketing. So even though I'm a pediatrician and ob gyns have access to all my patients, I never went to any OB GYNs to say, refer patients to me. I was scared of it. I was scared of spending money. I was scared of hiring New staff. I was like, how are we going to meet payroll? I didn't want anything to do with a profit and loss statement. In fact, when I'd see it, my eyes would just glaze over. I'm like, oh, my gosh. I don't speak those kind of numbers. I was not an entrepreneur at all. My external circumstances had changed, right? I used to be an employee, and now I was a business owner. So my exterior changed. But the main thing that needed to change was still the same, which was my mind. In my mind, I was still still an employee. I still was. So the starting point of entrepreneurship is developing the ENTRE MD mindset. That's the very first place. And sometimes people want tactics. Know, how do I do this? I'm like, I can show you how to do this. But until the way you change, until you change the way you see yourself and change the way you see business and you change your relationship with money and all of that, no tactics will save you. Okay, so it's the entremd mindset. It's the entrepreneurial mindset. So we're going to look at that today. How do I do that? Okay, how do I do that? So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to embrace continuous learning. For me, when I was done with residency and I became an attending, I never really said this, but I was like, whoo. You know, I don't have to read that hard anymore. I don't have to study that hard anymore. Like, I'm here. You know what I'm saying? But like we discussed in the last episode, and if you haven't watched this episode, two, you should go watch it. Listen to. It was really good. You. When you become an attending, this is the beginning of a new phase of your career. This is not the end. Okay? You have not arrived. You've arrived somewhere, but you're going somewhere else. So it's continuous learning, and it's going to cost you time, and it's going to cost you money, and you have to be okay with that. It's not going to cost you as much as your medical education costs you, but it's going to cost you something. So when I say continuous learning, what do I mean? One, you have to have the habit of listening to podcasts. Okay? You have to have the habit of listening to podcasts, business podcasts. And a principle that I learned really early on that has served me very well is I don't listen to titles. I listen to authors. What that means is I don't follow a podcast because the title sounds great. I follow a podcast because the person speaking has the results I want. Okay? Because people can only give you what they have. So you look at. You're like, I want what they have. I want a business like there. I want to be confident on stage like them. I want this, I want that. Then you listen to their stuff on how to get there. Okay? You want to listen to people who are getting the results and not just talking the talk. So podcasts and this could be when you're dressing up, when you're in your car, on your way to work, when you're doing laundry. I mean, whenever. But you need to have a habit of listening to something that improves your business every day, at least five days a week. You can take weekends off if you want. Okay. You need to be reading books. And yes, I know there are Audible books and all this stuff, but it's nice to touch a physical book and read it because it's harder to do what we do with Audible books. So I don't know if this has happened to you, but if you listen to Audible books, I'm sure it has. Where it's been playing for, like, five minutes. But you took off. Like, you took off. You're having a conversation with your friend in your mind, and you guys went out and you've picked out the restaurant, you picked out the dress you're going to wear and all that stuff, and you come back to yourself and you're like, wait, I don't know what they said in the last five or ten minutes. Harder to do with the book. Harder to do with a physical book. Okay. Harder to do that. So you still want to read physical books? I don't give laws, but I think a book a month is like the bare minimum, right? A book a month. Read that. Something on business. There are great books out there. The 10x rule by Grant Cardone. Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy. Be obsessed or be average. Rich dad, Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. There are a ton of great books. Okay? Read books. All right? Conferences and these could be non CME conferences. And it is fine. CME is continuing the medical education. And as an entre md, your MD piece is solid. Where we have the gaps. More of the gaps is the entree part. Okay. It is okay to go for a business conference and pay for it and not have your hospital reimburse you, because it's not CME. It's 100% great to do that, and it's great to be in Business conferences that are not even your industry. Because sometimes innovation is not discovering something completely, completely new. Innovation is sometimes porting something from another industry to your industry so they can be powerful. I have gone for sales conferences by Start, like, complete sales guys, right? And at this point, I was not even necessarily speaking and coaching and doing all this stuff. I was still just working my practice, and I would take some of the things there and apply it. And people like, this is amazing. I just borrowed stuff from another industry. So conferences, you want to do that? Okay. Every year, we host the Entre MD Live, and you should be there. It's an amazing conference where we talk the business of medicine. All right, so conferences and coaching. Coaching is great. I say it's great. I say there are no shortcuts to success. People say, and I say there is. And it's mentors and coaches, right? So a coach will never cost you money. A great coach is a great investment because what they get for you far away outweighs anything that you can ever pay them. Okay. Coaches are amazing. In fact, I just got off the phone with my coach, and I had this thing in my mind. I'm like, I don't know how to work this out. I don't know how to figure this out. And in 10 minutes, it was done. It was gone. The thing that had been a problem was completely gone, Completely gone. And I was like, oh, I could just hug you. And I pay her, like, serious money to do this stuff. Coaching. Great. Okay? So embracing continuous learning is something that you must do to fix the entre, to get the entre MD mindset. The second thing is you have to let go of perfection. So this is the way I usually put it in medicine. You strive for an A. Okay? And we want A's and A plus. Think about it. If you have A, you have heart surgery, right? You don't want to be cardiac surgery. No, you don't want that. You want somebody who is a, like, phenomenal perfectionist, you know, obsessive about his results. That's what you want. If you're going to have brain surgery, you want an A because that's your brain, right? And we're trained that way. And it's excellent for the MD part of your brain. But when it comes to the entrepreneurial side, a B is great. If you wait to take perfect action, you will do nothing. Nothing. Okay? So the concept is, let's do good enough and put it out there and then get feedback from the marketplace and fix it. Let's do good enough and put it out there and get more feedback from the marketplace and fix it. Think about the iPhone. What if Steve Jobs said, I'm not going to put the iPhone out until it's perfect? We would have no iPhone because that's not the way this works. Okay, so what did he do? He put out iPhone One, and we're like, yay, this is amazing. But we have this kink here, and we want this and we want that. And the next year they put an iPhone 2, and you're like, oh, this is even better. But this and that and that, and the next year they put out iPhone 3. So now we're iPhone 11. Right. You need to think of your business that way. Make something good enough like an iPhone one. You put it out, you get feedback, you tweak, you put out a better version. Feedback and tweak, you put out a better version. So we are trained, and it's great training to shoot for perfect action. But when it comes to your business, you are going to take good enough action. You're going to take be action. You're going to put it out there and keep improving as you go. Okay? So you're going to accept messy action. And this phrase, I want you to write it on your brain. Perfection is not required, only progress. Perfection is not required. Now, I'm not talking clinically. Clinically, you need to be perfect. Ish. But when it comes to business, perfection is not required, only progress. Okay? So that's something that you need to tweak. The third thing. Oh, goodness. Is you need to give up your comfort zone. You need to give it up. You need to give up your comfort zone. I don't want to do that because I'm shy. I don't want to do that because I haven't done it before. I don't want to do that because it makes me nervous. I don't want to do that because I'm not really good at it. You need to let all of that go. You know, My new address is P.O. box. Outside my comfort zone. Okay. Now, I've been doing this for years, so I finally come to the point where I'm like, you know what? This is just where I need to live. Because all the good stuff that's happened in my life over the last few years, and this happened because I said yes to something that was outside my comfort zone. Speaking was outside my comfort zone. Doing videos was 700% outside my comfort zone. Going to ask for referrals was outside my comfort zone. Coaching was outside of my comfort zone. These are all things that I was nervous doing them, I wasn't perfect at them. I liked the results. I liked that I was helping people, but I didn't like doing them in the sense that it was just so nerve wracking. But I said yes. Okay? And that's what I want to invite you to do too. Say yes. Say yes. Okay. So give up the self preservation. How will I look? If you're not willing to suck at something, you're not going to get anything significant done. You're just not. So you need to be willing to suck at something long enough that you become great at it. Put it out there. Okay? So you have to give up the comfort zone. Give it up. And the comfort zone could mean, I just don't want to work so hard on something else. You got to give that up. If you're going to build a business that will thrive, if you're going to build a business that will let you live the lifestyle you truly want, where you have freedom, where you can take three months off a year, where you can do all that stuff, the price to pay is hard work. Now, so you're gonna put on your big girl and big boy pants and get to work. It's uncomfortable, but you're gonna do it. Okay. The comfort of. I'm familiar with doing things this way, but this other thing, I don't know anything about it. Right? So you've never been on stage. You've never been on stage and you're like, I don't know how to do that. You're still going to say yes. It's outside your comfort zone. But you're going to say yes. You are 100% going to say yes. Oh, but what of work life balance? What about that? So let's talk about that a little bit. I think this will be helpful. I truly do not believe that you have balance of every aspect of your life at the same time every time. I don't think that I think you can have work life balance, but I think it's serial. I think you have times where you work more and other things and you have other times where you have time from other things. I'll tell you what I mean, if you're starting a business, it's like having a baby. The baby's gonna wake up every two hours and it's either gonna want to pee or poop or eat when you start a business, I think it's unfair to everybody, including yourself, for you to think that your life won't change because your life will change. Right. I Mean, even if you got a fish in its own fish tank, your life will change, because now you have to buy fish food and you have to feed it on a schedule. So if you have a business, it will change, but if it changes and is busier, but what it does is three years from now, you can take two months off. You have balance. It's just cereal. I had a time where I worked a lot harder on that, and I gave up a little vacation time, and I can have a lot of vacation time. I don't have to work as hard. So you have work life balance. You just don't have every aspect of your life balancing at the same time. So when it's time to start or scale your business, it will put you out of your comfort zone. Because your work life balance would, to other people look like it's out of balance. But if you know what you're doing, you're like, no, I'm having it a little tilted this way, so I can have it tilted the way I want later, right? So the entre d mindset is a mindset of continuous learning. It's a mindset of going after progress, not perfection. It's a mindset of giving up the comfort zone. This is where you start from. Because when you start here and I tell you that in order to scale your business, you're going to need to be speaking once a month, you can take it because you've already made up your mind that you're going to be outside your comfort zone. When I tell you that your course is amazing and you should put it out in the world, you won't fight me because, you know progress is what is required, not perfection. When I tell you that you need to get off Facebook and go read a book, you won't go like, oh, my life. You know, my life is now so weird because I started. No, because, you know, continuous improvement is what I do. When friends call you, it's easier to say no if it's not something that aligns with your goals.

Why?

Because you're like, I haven't. I haven't read my book for November. I don't have time to go hang out. Like, I have things to do. Do you see what I'm saying? That is the mindset. That is the mindset that gets you where you need to be. So this is where you start from. You adopt this, okay? You adopt this. You make it your own. You get on the grind, and it's a good grind, okay? I mean, when you do residency, your path is kind of created for you, right? Like, if you're a family doctor, you're a family doctor, and stuff like that. Once you get to entrepreneurship, you can monetize your passions, which means you. You never have to work a day in your life. You can do stuff that you love anyway, right? So it's fun. It's work, but it's fun. It's great. Entrepreneurship is amazing. You can tell. I think that. Right? So this is the starting point for entrepreneurship. It's your mind. It's not a tactic. It's not a how to. It's not a strategy. It's your mind. So take these top three thoughts, and I want to invite you to join a group of people just like you. We have a Facebook community for entre MD docs, and I want to invite you to join. It's www.entremd.com join. It's that easy. You have three questions to answer, and we'll add you to the group. And you can join a group of people who think like you just started thinking. They're continuous learners. They're not trying to be perfect. They're living outside their comfort zone. And together, let's build thriving businesses. Let's monetize our passions. Let's do what we need to do so we can have the financial freedom to practice medicine the way we want and live our lives the way we want. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week. If you love this podcast, please take a moment to subscribe, share, and review it on itunes. As you go about your week. Remember, you're not just an md, you're an entree md. Don't forget to tune in next week for another great episode. Until next time.