#181 How I Got Started in Entrepreneurship

Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast, where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe. Now let's get on with the show. Okay. Hello and welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Passive Income MD Podcast. Thanks for tuning in each and every week. You're amazing. I know. You're driving to work, you're listening in between cases while you're walking your dog. I hope you're getting a ton of value from it. This week, again, we're rewinding to PIMDCON 2023, the physician real estate and entrepreneurship conference, where we had the pleasure of hearing from over 30 experts in the area of real estate and entrepreneurship. We had some really amazing panel discussions and they were a ton of fun. And so we're gonna give you up close and personal paths into the panel that was titled How I Got Started in Entrepreneurship. If you missed a live event, this is your chance to listen in. This panel is moderated by Dr. Pranay Parikh and filled with some amazing physician entrepreneurs. Again, if you weren't able to join us live, I know you missed out, but we'll be releasing the dates and locations soon for PMDCON 2024. Just so you know, in this panel, the panelists will be revealing and talking about the highs and lows of business, the lessons learned, and those aha moments that propelled them forward. They're not just stories, they're roadmaps that come with a ton of insights that can help someone like you who is thinking about building a business. So sit back and enjoy this pass into PIMDCON 2023 and enjoy the panel titled How I Got Started in Entrepreneurship. Enjoy.

Hey, everyone. I'm Pranay and today I am joined by some amazing entrepreneurs and physicians. So super excited to hear about their story. And we'll start with Mike. Give me 50 words and encompass everything you've done ever.

50 words. Okay. In the form of a haiku, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

Hi, my name is M. A family practice by trading. I haven't done that in a long time. I run a multiples multiple location boutique mental practice in Southern California as well as I'm the lead business coach for Freedom 5 mastermind. So I'll be. That's me. I think that's 50 words.

That was awesome.

Hi, I'm Manas. Everyone's like, why is she still on stage? Okay, so I'm a pediatric hospitalist by training and I launched a company called ahimsa, which is a line of stainless Steel dishes for kids to replace plastic wherever they dine. So at home we have a consumer product. Good. And in schools we have a commercial line. And we've been able to successfully scale our business using kind of the branding and the knowledge of being a physician.

Jessica Albayu says that's right. Sawade.

Hey everybody, I'm Zwade Marshall. I'm an anesthesiologist by training. I'm an interventional spine doctor as well. You'll hear a little bit of an accent when I say certain words. I'm an immigrant from British Guyan and I own two surgery centers in Georgia. And I'm the CEO and co founder.

Of Doc2Doc Lending Dhal Dalvo Banasali. I'm a board certified dermatologist in New York. What do I do? I do some tech stuff. Health, tech things. A company called Skin Medicinals, Air Health, a couple skin care lines, road one with Amazon, one with Martha Stewart coming out. And I think that's it.

All these people are extremely modest and we're, we're going to hear about some of the amazing things that they've done. So a lot of us don't realize, you know, you don't grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur. Some, some of us do, you know, but we grew up being physicians. So Manasa, tell me, like, when did you feel or did you realize that you, you need to do something outside of medicine?

Well, I wasn't looking for this opportunity. If someone told me, hey, entrepreneurship will take up all of your soul and your time and your money, I wouldn't be like, oh, let me go do that. So I accidentally got into entrepreneurship and the reason that outcome was there is because I didn't have mentors at the start and the plan in the start to really understand, which is why I love this group. And so I really just felt compelled by a problem that existed with plastic. The American Academy of Pediatrics actually came out in 2018 with a food policy statement talking about all the food additives and really talked about plastic being harmful to children's health and to use glass or stainless steel instead. And it was this medical policy statement that now 67,000 pediatricians were supposed to say to families. But then those families would go to the targets and the Walmarts and the stores and it was just littered with plastic bottles and plastic tissues for kids. So there was such a disconnect between what we were recommending as a medical community and what industry was offering for these families that I just felt like I had to do something that's why I did it. I wasn't really looking to start a business. I accidentally started a business.

Yeah, you had a similar story, right? And how you started your own journey.

I just think I have add Honestly, the problem is it's like you sit there every day and medicine is a beautiful, beautiful thing, but there's so many things you want to just bang your head against the wall and you're like, why is it like this? And I think at some point you get tired of waiting for people. Each problem you have and you fixing them yourself. So for me, with skin medicinals, it was very simple. I couldn't get affordable medications, patients. I texted around to my friends. We all had the same issue. And so we had to solve that problem started there.

So I think you'll see a lot of these people, they saw a problem. And a lot of times we see a problem and we're like, hey, someone should do something about this, right? But these people, and you can as well, you can be the person that fixes the problem. Just like this conference, we realized that people, doctors, needed a way to invest in real estate and entrepreneurship. Zawade, you found a niche in lending. And a lot of times people are like, okay, you know, I feel I want to do something. I feel that I have this problem. But people tell you to niche down. How did lending be the way that you make your impact?

Sure, like the other side. It was a personal pain point for me. And I think a lot of entrepreneurial stories begin with the founder having experienced the pain themselves. Then you really live it, you understand it, and you kind of feel exactly what your customers will experience as you begin to solve the problem. In my case, I had done my medical training at Emory in Atlanta, a relatively low cost living city. And I was moving to Harvard, to Boston for anesthesia training and needed to borrow the money for that relocation expense. And that relocation expense was a microcosm of a larger problem of capital access for doctors. Because we look like ugly ducklings on paper to banks. We've got 200 plus in student loan debt, which is what I had. I was making $54,000 a year as a resident and my FICO score was considered to be sober, near prime. Not because of bad behavior, but because of the drag, that educational debt and that time in our lives when we're kind of mortgaging our future to existing bills. So I was surprised that I couldn't access money at a cheap rate or at any rate in some cases. And it felt to me like doctors will just perform Better at repaying loans than a FICO score might predict. And our thesis has proven true. So we raise money from doctors and we lend to doctors at rates that make sense. And we're seeing our repayment performance surpasses the market sixfold simply because we're reputation conscious in times we're struggling to pay to fund our future or businesses. And it's been an incredibly rewarding experience so far.

I remember I graduated on the 21st and my hospital pays on the 20th. And I was like, how am I going to pay rent for the two.

Months out of residency over the last 35 years?

MLG Capital, they focus on making smart investments in real estate and building relationships with their investors. They call it an investor centric fund structure. That's what they focus on where accredited investors, they can invest their money with confidence in funds that target diversification. They prioritize cash flow as well as low leverage with a what they call a unique dual sourcing strategy. So if you're unsure about investing due to rising inflation or volatility in the stock markets, well, I want to let you know that investing real estate, it's been historically one of the best hedges against inflation. In fact, I've been investing with this company for years. So if you're a medical professional and you'd like to learn more about investing with MLG Capital, make sure you visit passiveincomemd.com MLG Again, that's passiveincomemd.com MLG now back to the show.

Mike, your story is a little bit different with medical spas. Tell me, how did you decide on doing that and creating a bunch of them?

I think I have ADD as well. So kind of my story is I actually left medicine at 34 years old because I was kind of burnt out with family medicine and started a software company for businesses. And that was out of medicine for like six or seven years. But I still loved medicine to that and I started doing on the side doing consulting for physician entrepreneurs. And I had a client who was telling me she loved my coaching, but she couldn't continue because she got a letter from her state saying because she had also been out of practice, that if she didn't start seeing patients, she would have to go to, quote, retraining at the cost of $50,000, basically going to medical school again. So I don't know about you, but the thought of me going back to medical school again is kind of a recurring nightmare that we have. I don't know, it's just me. So I wanted so had Been out of medicine. And I go, I don't want that to happen to me so I'll do something to get back in. And one thing that I tell doctors, especially doctors who are out of medicine, is even if you're not practicing, just do something like once a month just to keep your license going because you spend a lot of time and money with that. And for some reason I did some volunteer work like my son's school, sports, physical. So I kept it active. And then, okay, well I need to start seeing patients again just to keep it active. And I went to locum tenens and then after 30 minutes doing a pap smear after several years ago, I don't know if this is for me. Employee medicine is for me. So my dream was always to start my own practice. And I did it. And I said, I'm going to do this in Southern California, which is managed care, as you know. And I said, I've got my background in software and other businesses and I can do it. I think I can do it in my own practice. So I don't know if I was just pig headed and being stubborn, but I think that's a trait you need as an entrepreneur. And I just started making work and I said I'm going to do things that I'm interested in. And it's weight loss, hair loss. I go, those are the things I'm interested to hormone therapy. And I said, I'm just create practice where I be the ideal patient for it. And then from that it just turned into we're helping people lose weight. And then one of my RNs or my nurses was like, you work for a dermatology office. We've seen these people that are losing weight but now they want to do other things. And they would come in for weight loss, but they would go across the street or across town to get like botox done. Well, that's something we can do. We trained them. Then it just kind of grew. And it kind of shows that if you have an audience that knows, likes and trusts you, then you have one service that they do and then you can do additional services that feed that audience. That's our group.

So Manasa we have as entrepreneurs, very few people would actually go into it if they realized a lot of work. But as physicians we have so many skills that carry over. Would love to hear about how you dealt with kind of that uncertainty. We were talking about finding funding, how to market fit. How did you learn how to do things? How did you take the next step?

I did it the Wrong way, which was Google. My way through business, truly. And I think had I had known about these kind of communities and true mentorship and coaching and masterminds, I think I would have saved a lot of time, money, energy and heartache. But I really just did what I knew how to do best, which is learn. And I just read a ton of books and I just went on a lot of websites and I learned about steel manufacturing and then I learned about startups and how to create an LLC and then, you know, how to figure out funding, which is why I'm doing. What I'm doing now is like showing up here and making sure that people don't go down that route because it is so much more streamlined to have. You know, in medicine we're used to a curriculum and a pathway, right? Like here's what you learn, here's some apprenticeship and now you go and act it. It should be that way for entrepreneurship. It's just so foreign and you often don't have the network at the start to know that there are other doctors like you doing it. And so I did it, in my opinion the wrong way, which was alone and haphazard. And I think being in these kind of communities and leveraging networks, leveraging knowledge, leveraging a lot of the knowledge sharing that's going on there, an excellent way.

I don't want to hear anyone say they don't have a network here. Awesome. So Dhaval, you said you had add, so it's difficult sometimes to be in entrepreneurship. You have to do a lot. So are there any systems or strategies that you use to just get the work done while being a practicing physician?

I think the hard part is in the beginning. I call it the running in the mud phase. Everything is slow, everything is painful. Getting, you know, insurance, filling out things for your accountant, all these little things that they add up to this stressful, anxiety provoking, like madness and you have to go through it. And in a weird way, that's the joy as you feel like you're accomplishing something slowly but surely brick by brick. I think once you get things starting to move, the first thing you should do, starting to look at how do you take a step back and be able to look at the entire map, not just each individual task, but what does the entire board look like and how do I start moving the pieces in the right way? And I think as, as physicians were sometimes kind of bred do everything ourselves and we're just not good at everything, even though we think we are, myself included. And so the idea Becomes who do you bring on? How do you bring them on? How do you create structure? Because again, we have a very, I think you had mentioned it before, we have a very specific skillset and you want to maximize that. I'm not an accountant. I'm not, you know, if you need financial help, hire an MBA or do whatever you need to do. Right. But it might cost something short term, but long term you get connects the value. Right. And extra time, which really enhances that value. And so I think part of it for me was, you know, again, it's understanding when do you take that step back and start really strategizing more instead of just a do do to do. And it happens. But you have to run through the mud first. And it's the best part because that's where you feel like you're earning and you're building something and you get to watch it grow.

There was a lot of regulations in the finance industry and you had billions of dollars that you've been able to invest for people. How, how did you face that scrutiny? No, they don't teach you anything about finances in medical school. And it just, it feels like a wall that are hard to go up.

Indeed. And I went to business school as well, and business school didn't teach me this kind of finance because it's evolving. It's high stakes poker, literally. And one of the fears that I had as an entrepreneur was asking my peers and my family members, strangers for money. It's a highly intimidating thing to do. They know you as a successful doctor or student or coworker, and you're saying, believe in me that I understand this adjacent business that's completely different from anesthesia or pain management, and you're asking for their resources. And one of the ways in which I kind of mitigated the anxiety that came about from being in something that's alien and foreign to what I know well was to invest the initial two years of company building. Myself, my co founder and I did it ourselves. And so we wrote the first $500,000 worth of checks on big white shoe law firms to help us to build the underpinnings of a real company that's compliant from a regulatory perspective, that had the infrastructure within our website and application that would allow us to build upon that to give loans. So when investors were coming in, it was not to fund the overhead, but to fund the actual loans, but mitigated risk for them. And I felt a lot better saying, believe in us. Write us a check for a half a million bucks. And it's going to your peers who you know will repay because of the operating pieces. And our community really leaned into it. You know, we did 2 million of loans in our first year and that was three years ago. And we've done 78 million over the course of the last three years. So it's been a rapidly growing business because of the faith that physicians place in the business.

I think that's one of the big perks of being a physician. You have a salary, you have a steady income, have some savings that you could put intelligently into business. Like a lot of times people have fear. They have fears when they start a business. And one of the fears is they're going to be burnt out. Right? Entrepreneurship's a lot of work. You went from family medicine and you were burnt out. How did you know that you weren't going to get burnt out in entrepreneurship?

I think it was because I saw the alternative. So when I was in corporate medicine multiple years ago, I met a family practitioner. And if you're. I was in a group practice and in my group practice, a lot of family practitioners, internists. And it was like a gung ho fp, like we don't believe in hospitalists. We're going to take calls. So I'm doing 12 admissions a night and being the new person, they say, hey, we're going to put you on Christmas, Thanksgiving. And like on Y2K, I was on New Year's Day they put me 2000 because they don't know what the heck has happened. But we'll put Wu Ming on it, figure it out. But anyway, so I was in the ER and I talked a little bit about this. I'm speaking tomorrow, a little spoiler alert. But I was Christmas Day, like 5 o' clock in the morning. And there was another doctor there that we knew, we kind of shared call with, but he had a solo practice. He was in his mid-70s and just me and him, the only doctors besides the ER docs were working up. I said, why are you working here? Shouldn't you be with your family? He goes, mike, I get another $300 if I work Christmas day, work the holidays. And so I said, is that when my life is going to be 30, 40 years doing holiday? And I go, this isn't for me. And my thing about fears is it motivates you what you want to do and what you maybe want to avoid. And so I said I was never the person saying I want to work a 9 to 5 job and do this for 30 years. And I think that Newer generation know this. You know, many doctors are just going from different opportunities. But back then it was like I thought, okay, I'd go into medicine, I'll work for someplace for 30 plus years of a 401k. And I said, this isn't the life for me. So I was willing to make a leap and to see what else was out there. And what helped me get over my fear was having mentors who had showed me that they had success doing it. And I think it's very difficult to be an entrepreneur unless you have some type of mentors. You can't learn those folks on YouTube. You really got to find people who can shortcut your success and they're going to show you the way how to do it.

YouTube there on TikTok.

TikTok.

Hey everyone, I have a question for you. What if there was a way to make your money work for you instead of the other way around? Let me ask you, are you looking for a way to create passive income and secure your financial future? Or maybe you've stayed away from real estate because you don't have time to be a landlord? Then I want to introduce you to Passive Real Estate Academy. It's the revolutionary platform that we created that teaches you how to invest in real estate passively with little or no effort on your part. In just four weeks, our comprehensive course will teach you everything you need to know about passive real estate investing and help build that confidence in you so that you know that you're making a great investment choice. We created this course for busy people like you and we're going to guide you from every step of the way, from understanding even the most basic information to understanding the jargon and understanding underwriting so you can make sure that you you're making a great investment, that you're maximizing your returns and minimizing your mistakes. And the best part, you can do this all from the comfort of your own home with absolutely no prior experience required. So it's time to prepare yourself and learn so that you can be ready for these deals that you see. Because the time is coming. So don't let the demands of your job or the current economic climate dictate your financial future. So join Passive Real Estate Academy and build that confidence in your Know that you're making a great investment when it comes to syndications and funds. So visit our website@ passiverealestateacademy.com to learn more and take your next step to financial freedom.

You know, a lot of times people ask me right now, where do I invest in when it's not a good time to invest in real estate. What I do is I take that money and I invest in myself. I get more education. I get mentorship. I pay for mentorship. I get go to masterminds, go to this conference. That's. That investment in yourself will pay multiple dividends. Tell me, when you. You wanted your dermatologist, you wanted to start a skincare. How. What resources did you. Where did you Google how to start a skincare line? Where did you even start with that?

So it depends. I had some cheat codes in there. So our first one was with Amazon. The second was with Hailey Bieber. So there's. They have bigger distribution than I do, but I think inherently where. And I'm shifting this a little bit, but I think the perspective is important. I think a lot of my colleagues want to do skincare lines or something like that. Right. But they don't feel like they know it. Then you ask them very simple question. So if your patient's not responding to X, what do you do? Like, why add Y? Okay, why do you do that? Well, it does this. Okay, so then how do you think about that with skincare? So if you're adding this ingredient to that ingredient, what happens if you do this? Well, it would be a little bit better. Like, okay, so you actually know more than you realize. We live in a world where people tend to fake everything and fake it till you make it. In medicine, we're like, we know it, and we just pretend we don't. Like, it's bizarre. And so sometimes you just have to kind of, like, really put pen to paper and realize, like, hey, look, like, we've been given a blessing. We get to be the privilege of caring for people. We have literally 16 years of knowledge in our brain. Like, again, I think you mentioned, it's like we just don't realize the powers that we have.

Right.

And so you look at, like, a lot of these skin care lines that go out there. They have no science, no anything. You just have really good marketing people starting. And I'm like, whoa, whoa. And so actually this morning, I had to do an interview, a media interview on a road brand. And it did pretty well. And it's doing pretty well. They're like, what do you think separates it? And I look, they leaned into science. They let me, you know, have that discussion at the very beginning. Like, we have to do it the right way, do it the right way. You know, I always joked with Haley or, you know, if she does her, you know, does a great job they're buying it once. If I do a great job, hopefully they buy it more than once. Right. And it's, it's like that idea that I think science will always win. Marketing will take you so far. But you know, again, we, we know more than we realize. We just have to let ourselves kind of understand that and let ourselves know it's okay to think that.

Duade, as the person on the panel with an mba, you talk about some of the benefits. Who is a physician and wants to become an entrepreneur? Who should get an MBA and who should.

I think it's a highly personal decision. And just because you want to build a company or get into entrepreneurship, that is not necessarily a reason to get an MBA. I think that MBAs don't teach the hard skills. You're not going to come out of business school and begin to do your own spreadsheets necessarily, or your own income statements and balance sheets, or the financial modeling. It makes you conversant enough to know how to hire, how to assess quality of the people that work with you, how to lead teams of folks who are smarter than you, and how to inspire and motivate them to continue to work and feel heard and get that we're all working towards a common goal. So you get the language of commerce and it changes the lens through which you see the world and how you see opportunities. It's expensive, it's an outlay of cash and it's an opportunity cost, especially if you are already in practice. Going back can be extraordinarily expensive and may not be worth it. But I think now with the advent of evening programs and part time and very specific master's level courses that can be finely tuned to specifically what you're trying to accomplish that could be worthwhile. I did it when I was in medical school. We didn't have a formal MBA program, but at that time the Affordable Care act was being contemplated and there was a lot of fear in health care around what it meant for reimbursement for payers, for systems within health care. And I thought that it was a prime time for me as a student to gain another skill set, which not surprisingly actually shaped what I did for my residency in anesthesia. Because it's one of the medical fields that reward you for having an mba, whereas at least specialized fields tend to punish you for it. They want you to want to know that you're going to go out and practice and do the thing that you trained 16 years to do and not become a consultant or some kind of a business head and then it also kind of helped with the way I did research while in training and, and how I began to build the infrastructure for my future practice and in my future business. So a long way of saying that it's not necessarily the place that you get knowledge to do something.

It's.

It's a place where you learn a network and you get that big picture. You're able to strategize from a big picture perspective and take a step back from the weeds and help and have the doers do under your leadership.

Vanessa, we physicians are pretty good at working with teams. We have nurses, we have techs under us. But in entrepreneurship, we're so scared to wear first hire. Build a team to get the skill that you've had, you've had to build a team. So we'd love to hear your thoughts on going from that idea to building a business.

I appreciate what you just said because that is exactly the answer to this for me. When you start off and you don't have any, any kind of high level strategy knowledge, you really just jump into the weeds. You're like, what's next? What's next? And you just solve for each of those things. So if you look at an org chart and I teach this, it's. You start with an org chart, that's the visionary, the integrator, and marketing, sales, all of these. And you just put your name by all of them because that's what you're doing, right? You're like, Manasa Monisa. Oh, crap. Monasa. Monasa. And you're like, you know, and so that's how it starts. But I think there's value to that, especially when you've not done it before. So one of the things for me, while it was hard and while it is really overwhelming to do all of those roles because we know how to learn so well, I think it's really important. I wanted to learn how to spend my money on those Facebook ads. I needed to learn what those financial statements were because that would affect my business. And I needed to learn how to run my supply chain and understand, like, what is the quality control that I need at my factory? What is, what are the customs fees, where are the regulatory? Because at the end of the day, it's my business. And so there was value to doing that all myself, because then when I made hires, I started to really understand because I'm not an expert in it, but I know enough to know who's really good. And so that's kind of how I started hiring. And I went with the stuff that mattered the most first and the stuff that I hated the most first. So finances, like a good accountant and controllers, where I started. And then actually my next hire was a strategist because I couldn't see the forest through the trees. Once I could see the forest and had a bigger roadmap and had already done the little things, then it really was a puzzle that started to come together and I knew where I needed to go next. So I really still take control a lot of the marketing and sales because, you know, it's part of the branding and it's part of the innovation, but the operations and the finances and a lot of those are just off of my plate, you know, So I would.

Just reiterate, that's like, super valuable. And again, and I said it before about, you know, hiring an MBA or whatever it is, you still have to do the initial parts of it. So you have a fundamental basic knowledge because you want to be able to talk to people. Because it's one of those things where if people can take advantage of you, they will, but. And so you need to know just enough where you can kind of situate yourself, where you're like, you understand what they're saying. They still do the weed work and all that kind of stuff. But then again, you're sitting 30,000ft, like, okay, so your job is to do this. This. Okay, you want to. This is growth. Okay, how does that work? Especially on the skincare side, it's like, okay, so what is growth? What are the KPIs we're looking at for growth? How are you going to do it then? Their job is to go integrate those little steps and come up with a plan. And you just make sure that they're actually doing it. And that's where, like, I think the different phases of building a project or a company, and especially on the commercial side, it's absolutely necessary because pressure bills as you're scaling and growing. You need to know lead times and ship times and all this. So you need people handling each part of that. Make sure you're successful, and the people.

And the skills will change as the company grows. So the team that got you from 0 to 30 will not be the team that gets you from 30 to 100. And recognizing quickly when you've outgrown personnel, when you've outgrown your skills is highly important because you can start making a lot of mistakes and you can be waffling and spiraling and not realizing that you are.

I just did that. So, yes, that is true. Really important. Somebody told me, what gets you here doesn't get you here, and what got you there doesn't get you there. So it's the same.

Mike, let's talk a little bit about hiring people. So we just talked about the importance of hiring people and hopefully hiring people smarter than you in whatever they're doing. But how do you even do. How do you find people that are smarter than you? I want to work for you.

There's nobody. Yeah, that's like, a sore subject because I, like, hate hiring. So I'm. I've got a brick and mortar clinic. And, you know, and during COVID like, everybody, like, or after Covid, everybody want to work at home.

All right?

And so we would have people like, oh, yeah, I can come in. This is for, like, a zoom call. Zoom interview, and I'd like to apply, but, you know, the parade is in town. Can we do this, like, later? Like, it's a zoom call. Like, seriously, that's all you got to do. You don't even have to wear pants right, to show up. And so, like, in. In terms of hiring and. And it's better now, but, like, we would have people. Like, I have a lot of mid levels that I've hired, so I'd have, like, people have triggered motives, like, why they want to be hired. Like, I remember this one PA that we hired, and his question for me was, so, of all the different services you have at your med spa, which one was the most profitable? And then in order one through five, he obviously wanted to open up his own. What I learned about hiring is, like, in my. So we have 20 employees besides myself and my son, who does our social media. It's all women. And what I learned was someone interviewing with me would tell me something different than what they would tell my staff. So, like, for example, I heard this. I interviewed one nurse practitioner, and I thought she did well, and she got to meet all her staff, but I wanted to know what their feedback was. And so I asked Maria, I said, what did you think of her? And she says, I hated her. Why did you hate her? He says, you know, she seemed very cordial because didn't you see how she treated, like, Jeanette, her medical assistant? She just basically walked over her and doing that. And what I learned when hiring, it's not just for me. I have a. I said, it's a drama free zone, all right? I do as best as I can, because it just takes one person, one bad apple to, like, totally spoil a bunch of. So it's very important to whatever you're doing is make sure that it's an ecosystem in terms of people who are hiring that are for different tasks that you do, just like yourself. I hate looking at finances and QuickBooks and all that stuff, but it's a necessary evil for you to look at your KPIs and things like that. I think it's important to know at least a little bit about something that they're doing. I work with a lot of doctors who have their own clinics, and I hear a lot of stories like I hired this person and doing finances and she stole $100,000 from me on it because he totally trusted her. The doctor says, well, I don't want to do finances. And that's what happens. And they were just taking stuff under the table slowly after a period of time. So I think it's important to know something about business. Like, you need to know marketing. Even though you're not doing the ads, you need to know what works and what doesn't. And just like you said, when you have talent, you do everything you can to retain that talent as they make or break you. Like, for me in my, there's no way I'm going to go to multiple clinics, but I have, you know, manager, operations who are going to these things. And she's like their executor. The importance that you have a visionary as well as somebody executing what you're doing. Great book is who not how. You guys familiar with that? Is that finding that who instead of like, how can I build a website? Who could build that website for me? And the way that you find great talent is to go to places like this is to network and being in the golf club or the med spa to interact and find out who's actually better. And then just make sure that you do everything you can to understand your vision and they want to grow with you.

I would just add one thing to that. Always overpay for good talent. To your point, when you find it, you hold on for dear life. And the opposite, don't underpay for somebody who may be okay and feel happy that you underpaid somebody because they always bite you. My favorite story is my first year of practice. If you guys heard my talk yesterday, I opened in New York City, 2019, I think it was. I was giving cookies to all the doormen, all the buildings around me. I was hoping to get people to walk through my door. And the first year I hired this, like, virtual office manager because it was a little bit cheaper. Like, oh, this is cool. I'm a tech guy. I can figure this out. And I think they missed credential. I don't know exactly the details, but every time I'd ask them, hey, is that insurance money coming in? They're like, no, no, it takes. Takes a little bit of time. Don't worry about it. Three months, like, okay, like, supposed to come in now. They're like, no, it'll come. Six months. I'm like, man, like, it's kind of. And you know, obviously we're blessed to do cosmetics as well. So I had some money coming in so I can pay the bills. I was like, man, this is like paying a lot of this out of pocket too. Like cover stuff. Eight months comes in, still nothing. She's like, oh, yeah, I think we may have had an issue. What's that? I didn't think I credentialed it correctly. So all those expires after three months. So that first six months, seven months, actually, I think all of these have gone incorrectly. You're not going to get paid for it. So more or less. My entire first year, I had $0 coming for any of my medical visits. I don't know how many people I saw. And you can't even get mad because you think back, you're like, whose fault is it really? My fault. Like, it's 100% my fault. Like, I put. I picked somebody out of convenience because I wanted to save a few dollars. And I didn't get upset. I didn't get angry. I kind of did one of my. And I just. You chalked that up to experience. And, you know, God willing, it worked out okay long term. But hopefully the next story. One of you guys are thinking about hiring somebody you shouldn't. Please don't. And invest that extra capital into somebody who deserves it.

And it's not even just the money, right? It's your time, it's your sanity. Like, you sleep better at night.

It's.

And you have more time back when you hire those A players. So it's priceless, really.

Duade. We all want to hire A players, rock stars. But sometimes someone seems like one or maybe they are one for a while and life changes and they no longer are one and we have to part ways. Would love to hear your thoughts on kind of how you go about assessing that and then actually doing it.

This whole hiring, firing discussion, I think is probably the most challenging part of being an entrepreneur. The skills of company building, product market fit. You kind of learn that pretty quickly if it's going to work or not. People are Complex. Their motivators are interesting and varied, and they're also irrational at times. So when you think you're overpaying someone because they ask for equity and they have no idea what equity actually means, and equity for you as a founder, that's gold. That's highly appreciating, accretive stock. For them, it's monopoly money. I need more of it. And so it creates this mismatch of values in terms of how you're compensating someone with something that they don't value like you do.

But.

I find the people part of the job to be the hardest one because it's an investment. It takes from me to manage my body language in meetings and ensuring that I'm not signaling that I'm dismissing an idea from someone who's got an idea that they want to have me here. And I may have a visceral negative reaction to it, but if I'm shutting it down from the onset, it can change how they interact with me and share future ideas. And so there's this kind of micromanagement of how people perceive me as a CEO leader that's extraordinarily draining, and I know that it is. So it takes me being intentional about being coached around issues that I'm dealing with about assessing talent and outcomes. I think it's very important for your question that the employee should be clear upon what their goals are, what are the outcomes by which they're being measured, and have them deliver input into those goals as well, so that they feel like they're growing and advancing in their careers. And if they're going to be falling short, it should be clear. And there should be frequent touch points with their direct supervisor and with the leadership to ensure that they know that. That you care about their performance. I don't think it's productive or constructive during a firing conversation to remind them of all the things they did poorly. I think I find it to be very impactful to tell them what they did well and how the company is now maturing beyond where their skills are. And depending upon the reason for the transition, I'll oftentimes offer to recommend them if they're good at the thing that they helped me with up until that point. But my mantra is you hire slow and fire fast, and so you'll invest the time upfront in building the right rfp, the right profile. Interviewing widely, spending the time nurturing the person when they come on board. The onboarding process can really sink a highly talented person if you have not trained them to what their job responsibilities are when they come on board as well. So the investment in people is really, really a huge undertaking in early stage companies especially because when you hire that first employee, they're going to be filling in a bunch of different hats that they may not have expected to. And so how do you continue to motivate them and reward their work and efforts?

And if I could add to that, people wonder why, like I'm interested in AI and artificial intelligence. Because they don't get sick, they don't ask for a raise, they don't get pregnant. But yeah, but that's it.

But if you do get pregnant and have kids, you should be able to have time off to take care of those kids and come back. So I'm just going to put that plug in there.

We actually try to hire mothers because we have a lot of flexibility in our job. It's remote work from home. I think it's an untapped market of women and men that want to be caretakers at home. So you're looking for great talent caretakers at home. Amazing.

The one thing I wanted to add on to in terms of people having those KPIs and clear cut goals also gives you like an objective measure of their performance which is helpful to understand if that person is performing and because they're seeing it and you're seeing it. And as long as you are aligned in having those clear cut, what are your roles and responsibilities, what are the goals, what are the KPIs then it makes things easier in terms of expectations. And when you have to fire someone, it is more objective than subjective and.

Unless they do something egregious, it shouldn't be a surprise that you're firing someone. It should be like, hey, I expected this. It's just not working out. If it's a surprise someone did something wrong. Awesome devil you have. Amazing. You mentioned this earlier about distribution, especially for actually all four of you. Anything you do distribution is super important. Would love to hear kind of how you set the foundation for being able to get your skincare line out into the world.

I think your point it's anything you do right. The idea is not necessarily the rate limiting step on execution, it's how are you going to get it to the world. You can have the best X or best Y, but if nobody ever sees it or never gets to them or it's not useful for them, in whatever capacity you're providing it, you're going to fail. So I think part of it is understanding with us. I think the interesting Thing. We have a company called Air. We actually do distribution for skincare brands within Durham offices. For me, it's a cool kind of win, win, win, because the doctor can now recommend the same products that we write on a piece of paper to their patients digitally so that the patient gets email or text and they can get it at a discounted price. They create new revenue for themselves. They can donate, they can keep it, whatever they want to do, but it's essentially a new kind of like employee that pays them, which is kind of weird. Brands now have a new distribution because retail is expensive. They take what, like 65%? A lot of times, maybe more. The DTC is getting really expensive because just customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed. I think before it was a couple cents and now it's going to be 20, $30 for CPG goods. So instead of our problem solved with that is if this vertical was getting saturated and this one was saturated, let's just build our own. And it's again leading into our superpower. Because we're doctors, we can kind of understand that system a little bit better than most people. But I think inevitably, like, I'm sure with your, with your company, it's like, how do you like you. The basis is very simple. How do you get people aware of it? How do you do this with your company? You've created a solution to a problem that most people don't realize is a problem. Right? So, you know, once you figure out how to educate people, how do you get it to their hands? Like, is it online? Is it in retail? Who is the retail? Right. Skin care. We look at, you know, the Sephora's, Ulta. Are those the best bet? You know, there's a lot of brands in Sephora. You have Target now, Target's interesting. Who goes into Target, right? Walmart. I mean, there's a lot of different places you're seeing, like, brands like Puma who are having, like lifestyle influencers do sneakers and things. Because why? Because they have crazy social media distribution and their fans want to engage with them in some kind of fun way. You see a brand like Kith Kith does all these clothing collaborations with like Coca Cola and this and that. And it's just you're leveraging different channels to kind of create synergies. And so I think in 2023, it's okay to be a little bit more creative and really think about like, okay, this is my vision or dream, but how do I get it to people? And if you can solve step one and step two, and at least you have a plan, then you do it. If not, you just take some extra time to figure that out before jumping fully into it.

And government contracting is another one for commercial products.

Zawade to end on an inspirational note, would love to hear a win that you had in the early days of entrepreneurship.

Sure.

I think it's always important as you get through the mass of hiring people and figuring out how to market new acquisition channels and product market fit, that you stay core to the customer who you're serving and how you're serving them. Our aspirational goal as a company is to be the USAA for doctors, that brand. Just hearing that, you know what I mean, right? Like when you call USAA as a veteran, they know what your E6 rank means. They can empathize about your deployment or whatever it is. We speak the language of medicine because we've lived it. And the win that we had is remember speaking to a board myself because we do that doctor to Dr. Conc. After we approve your loan, we want you to hear from us and the borrower was actually borrowing for fertility treatments. He and his wife were trying for some time. He was an immigrant like me and had applied for loans and couldn't get anywhere else when we funded the loan, I heard the tears in his voice. He was choked up and ungrateful, but hopeful for the promise of maybe being able to conceive when they did. Several months later, he sent us a note with the ultrasound picture and everyone on our team was choked up about it. That kid is now 4 years old, 3 years old, and that borrower is an investor and leads our research committee. And so there's this kind of passion around what we do because we feel like we're left out. It's hard to gain empathy from society when you're a doctor. We're supposed to be the ones that make a lot of money and do so well. And folks don't understand the pressure that we have financially when we're dealing with the pressures of learning how to save lives and care for people. And so we're extraordinarily proud of that.

Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. Learn more at our website passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.