From Practitioner to Practice Owner: The Real Path No One Shows You
11 Jul 2026 · 15 min
In this podcast episode, Kelly Alhooie outlines the hidden journey healthcare providers must take to evolve from hands‑on clinicians into true practice owners and CEOs. She argues that staying in "practitioner mode"—doing all patient care, marketing, and admin work herself—keeps providers stuck and limits growth. Kelly walks through the stages of transition: (1) recognizing the problem of doing everything yourself, (2) hiring support staff and avoiding harmful waitlists, (3) bringing on additional providers and delegating patient care, (4) developing leadership, communication, and management skills, and (5) investing continuously in business education, coaching, and systems to scale. She highlights common psychological barriers—fear of hiring, control issues, the ingrained "patient‑first" mindset taught in school, and low financial standards—and urges providers to raise their standards, set clear revenue targets, and build repeatable systems. Throughout, she emphasizes that a practice’s impact multiplies when the owner steps out of the treatment room and leads a well‑run organization, rather than remaining a solo clinician.
Chapters
Healthcare entrepreneurs, the real path from being a practitioner to actually being a practice owner. Today I'm gonna go over that because many people just stay in practitioner mode trying to run a business, and that is the biggest problem that I see moving forward. And when I say practitioner mode, typically you're doers, you're helpers, you want your hands in the pot. You want to put your hands on people, you want to stay a practitioner. And yes, you can— I always say you can go in at any time in your business and actually treat patients, but the faster that you could actually be able to remove yourself from the actual patient care, the faster you can become a true business owner. I think that's huge. So the biggest things that I see when trying to become a business owner is at first you are seeing all the patients. So first step is you're seeing all the patients, you're doing all the marketing, you're talking on the phone to all the clients to get them to come in. And that is the number one thing I see. After that, then what I start to see is maybe you hire an admin to unload. So that's great, you're buying back some of your time. And then from there, you are like, okay, well, now I have a waitlist, so good for me. Waitlists are not good at all, okay? They are, you do not want a waitlist. That is like something for you to be proud of, but no one else is proud of it, and you're actually losing money, and you're actually gonna make your place go down the drain because people are waiting on a waitlist. So I highly recommend do not do a waitlist. Okay, but that gives you like, yay, I'm proud of myself. Okay, great, that feeds the ego but does not feed the business and doesn't help patients at all because they have to wait now to get care. So it's not good for anyone, let me just say that. From there, what I see is like, okay, I'm kind of really scared to hire, um, I don't really know how to hire. And so that's where a lot of people get stuck, or they tell themselves this story that being a solopreneur is way better than hiring people because it's just way more to manage if I have people on board. And that's actually not the case. You are such a liability to your business when you only have you in your business and you can't grow it. It's just— you're basically saying, I'm going to cap out. So you create another job, you're always going to have to be in it. And people's mindset, they think that they have to do more with employees. And the reality is I've been there, done it with both companies. You do less with employees, period. Um, I've seen it time, time and again, and it's just that people are scared, so they're telling themselves these stories that are false, and that's not the case. So then they get busy. That is when you must hire. So you hire another provider, they come on, then you have to fill that person's schedule. From there, then you actually pull yourself out a little bit of patient care, and you become the marketing machine. Once you start to market, um, from there you are, um, going to have to now lead a team and be able to learn leadership skills and be able to learn how to communicate. You have to learn people's different personalities. This is the hardest skill, okay, which is why you get paid the most. This is the hardest skill that people have to learn. Because it is way easier to be treating clients and patients because you have been rewarded over and over and over again for that. And like, you know that best. They didn't teach you how to hire in school. They didn't teach you how to manage. They didn't teach you how to lead in school. They didn't teach you how to communicate differently in school. They didn't teach you all the things that you need to do to run a business, which is where we come into play, where we help you actually do that, especially at those higher levels. Is that is what we systematize, is leadership, leadership, leadership. Because I can tell you this, the only reason why I was able to actually leave my clinic and be across country multiple months out of, out of the year is because I had a damn good manager and there was leadership. If they didn't have those two, there was no business. And so that's why it's really, really important to have that dialed in. And I feel like that's so underutilized because people always talk about like the numbers and the marketing, but like, you could have all the marketing in the world, but if you don't have leadership and you don't have a staff, then you don't have a business. You got a job. And here at Pelvi Biz, we create people to have— actually have a business that wants to scale and massively impact their life and change so many other people's lives. Like, that's what we truly believe in, not just creating you as a solopreneur. And so I say that because the real path to becoming from a practitioner to becoming a true COO or CEO is that you have to learn new skill sets besides treatment. And I find many of the clinicians just want to treat and learn treatment, but that's not gonna— how— that's not how you grow business. And so you have to learn all those skills that I just said to be able to massively grow a business. So if you're a true entrepreneur, you have to be willing to always be investing and learning, investing and learning, investing and learning. And it's not in con ed. I cannot stress this enough. It is in business skills, leadership, management, um, marketing, sales, uh, communication. How to best communicate. Are they tactile? Are they visual? When are we going to have meetings? Like understanding what to do in those meetings, which is part of leadership. Understanding truly how to audit and see where the leaky pipes are. Like these are all things and skill sets that you must learn and be consistent with it so that you can actually grow a company. And what I— again, I just find that they just want to treat and then that's really it, or shiny object syndrome. They think this one thing is going to be like the magic bullet to like save the company, and then it's not. And it really just comes from doing the same stuff and tweaking it over and over and over again, which a lot of times practitioners also have a hard time auditing because numbers are not their strong suit, and/or just understanding patterns. And so I have to coach you on how to understand patterns and recognize patterns, and then like what to do with that pattern. And like, what does this mean? And so I find that that's also a business skill practitioners need to learn, is like understanding pattern recognition. Tony Robbins said that's one of the top skills. I feel like I'm fairly good at it, is like looking and seeing trends and then saying, okay, this is like the path we need to go on. And so I coach that. And so we just have to change mindset shifting. Like, I have clients right now, they're about to bring on their first full-time employee and they're really good at their business, but I can already see like, uh-oh, I'm seeing red flags because they— it's like their baby and they don't want to let go. And then also the control thing. Most of us have control problems, and so especially women. Um, and so you got to let go of the control and know that it's going to be okay and trust the system. But for some people too, it's really hard to do that. So it's allowing the system to work that you actually implemented And then being able to say, you know what, like, we may make mistakes, that's okay, but we're only going to make it once and we're going to learn from it. And then that's when the leadership part comes in. And so I find like this is the struggle that most providers and therapists have, is they don't know how to keep getting unstuck and they just stay stuck. And the reality is they should be investing when they're, when they're stuck. Because that's when they have major problems, and staying stuck is going to cost them a lot of money. So to get unstuck, you have to invest, you have to learn new skills, you have to be willing to listen, and then take action on that. And, um, yeah, I just find most providers have a hard time getting out of provider mode of, I need more con ed, I need to, I need to be the one treating because I know this patient best. And it's like, no, if you learn it, someone else can actually learn it. So there's a lot of mindset shifting the higher up we get and first starting out that you have to understand that it's not— your skills are not as valuable. And I think this is very hard for providers because you went to school, you went into so much debt to actually learn skills that very few people have, which is amazing. However, you then have to learn new skills. And let go of the ego and let go of your old self to be like, okay, I'm gonna move in this direction because I know this is what's going to be best, even though you love treating, okay? But eventually you won't like treating when you're sick and you got to still be in clinic. You won't like treating when your kid's sick and you still got to show up on Zoom online because you got teletherapy appointments, okay? You won't like treating when all of a sudden you want to take a month off and you can't because you got to be in a treatment room. Like, they're— everyone says they love treating, and I understand that. Okay, I understand. I was obsessed with treating too. But when I saw the other side of this, I was like, crap, I actually— and you guys as CEOs, you have to lead. You can't treat. So if you want to be a true CEO, you have to learn new business skills to then be able to get you out of clinician mode and actually be in business mode. And that doesn't mean that you're not helping people. You're impacting more people being the business owner than you are being the clinician, because you get to hire on more people and you get to actually bring people in. Not only are you impacting them, you're impacting their— you're impacting the family's life, you're impacting all the patients' life. You're going to help more patients. Like, all this stuff happens, but we tend to tell ourselves that, like, this isn't our thing, or I'm not meant for that, or I don't want to grow big because that just seems scary, or that just seems like so much work, like, I don't want to even get there, I just want to replace my income. And we all freaking dream small, and that's the beginning of this journey, is everyone freaking dreams small. Stop dreaming small. I'm actually tired, I'm actually really tired of hearing all healthcare workers dream so freaking small.
Why? Why?
No lawyers do this. No other, like, people do this. Why are us providers are like, we just take whatever's left over. I guess I'll take $2K a month and pay my employees way more than I make.
It's okay.
Like, why are we in this mindset? Like, really, it makes me angry because I'm like, guys, Stop just saying, I'll take whatever's left over. And I think honestly, I blame school because they always said patient first. I don't know when you guys went to school, but like, you know, I've been practicing for 16 years and the number one thing was patient first, patient first, patient first. Don't be friends with your patients, patients first. And like, it's just been ingrained in our head that like, don't care about you, which, which is the stupidest advice I've ever heard. Because if you don't care about you How the hell are you supposed to take care of other people, including patients that don't give an eff about you if you get sick?
Like, it just makes no freaking sense.
So like, ugh, yeah, it just gets me fired up. It pisses me off that we don't have higher standards. That like, raise your freaking standard. Because when you raise your standard, you actually get your standard.
But all of us have just like this, it's okay, whatever I kind of make, I make, and like whatever kind of happens, and I'll be here for 12 hours trading and it's fine.
Like, that's not fine. So like, raise your freaking standards and what you say you want and go after it.
If you say you want time with your family and you are still a solopreneur That makes no sense because you being a solopreneur does not give you time with your family.
How does your business run without you?
It doesn't. So it doesn't make sense. Stop contradicting yourself. If you say, I want to go on whatever vacations and take my kids on whatever vacation that I want, but then you don't set and you're like, oh, but I'll just take whatever's left over at the end of the month. Stop contradicting yourself. Stop it. Stop playing. You're lying. Because if you know that taking your kids to Disneyland, which I don't even know how much that costs, probably costs like $10,000. I don't know, making this up. But like, if you say you want that, but you're literally making in 3 months $10,000, how the hell are you supposed to take your kid to Disneyland? You can't.
You can't go on 2 vacations a year. You can't go on 3 vacations a year.
Y'all are saying you want that, but then why are you not acting upon it?
Meaning, okay, this month I cannot make less than $30,000 so that I am now able to take my kids to Disneyland. You got to raise your standard. But when you raise your standard, what happens?
You got to raise your business skills.
You gotta raise your business skills.
And yes, it's going to be uncomfortable. Yes, you're going to feel like you're an idiot. Yes, you're going to feel like you're back in kindergarten trying to learn a new skill. That's why you hire a coach to help guide you more and say, here, here it is, it's gonna make a lot easier.
And some of y'all won't even do that.
You won't invest. So if you won't even invest in yourself, then how are you supposed to invest in Disneyland for your kid? How are you supposed to invest in employees? How are you supposed to invest in anything? It's a mindset shift. I tell literally my people, I'm like, go buy a Louis Vuitton purse, go buy expensive shit because I need you to go invest. I don't need you to save coupons. No, thank you. It comes from here, guys. Stop playing games. Like, just stop it. Like, that's what I have to say today. Like, stop playing games with yourself and stop lying because that's your problem.
