#38: How Our MD / MBAs Helped Us to Create a Lending Business For Doctors feat. Kenton Allen, MD and Zwade Marshall, MD

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Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast, where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. I'm your host, Peter Kim. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe so I can bring it to you every week. Now let's get on with the show.

Hey, everyone.

Hope you're having a great week. I can't believe there are only a couple more weeks till the end of the year. I guess, depending when you're listening to this, I hope you've had a chance to reflect on 2020. I know it's been a crazy year. When I look back and I look at the positives, I think that one of the coolest things about the whole year is the fact that I've been able to meet so many amazing physician entrepreneurs. I particularly love the stories of doctors who have created businesses to help other doctors out of. I love those stories, and you're gonna hear one of them today. You're gonna hear from Dr. Zwadi Marshall and Dr. Kenton Allen. They're both anesthesiologists who met during residency and saw a problem and decided to do something about it, who created a company called Doc to Doc Lending. And you're gonna find out more about it on today's show. I know you're gonna love this one, so enjoy. Hey, Zwatti and Ken, how you guys doing?

Good. Well, thank you for having me.

Yeah, fantastic. I have two of you guys here, so I'm gonna kind of try to make sure I get you guys one at a time. Let's start with zw. Hey, Zwadi, I kind of introduced you already as an anesthesiologist, but tell us a little bit more about what you do. Kind of, I'd say your day job.

Sure. So I'm an interventional pain specialist. I do mostly spine work. So I went to Brigham and Women's at Harvard for my residency and fellowship. That's where I met Kenton. And day to Day, I'm in my office right now closing the day out on Friday evening. I opened my own practice not so long ago. And so they always joke and tell you that when you start your own gig, you know, the time you spend after hours kind of closing books and doing the back end work is a heavy lift. And so I'm in the middle of that right now as we speak. But I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, in suburban Atlanta. And I was born and raised in South America, British Guyana. So you might hear a little bit of a Sing Song accent with some words that I Enunciate. Moved to New Jersey for high school and then went to Emory for college, stayed there for business school and medical school, did a dual MD MBA program and then went off to Harvard for my residency and fellowship.

And then that's where you met Kenton, right?

That's where I met Kenton. He was the smartest guy in the room. He was always very steady hands. As an anesthesiologist, when stuff goes awry, you want someone like Kenton and the team at 2am because he's not going to shake. He'll get the transfusions going and the lines in. And he's good with ultrasound. He's now does regional anesthesia. So he's the guy that you want on your team when you put a call schedule together. You want him there at 2:30 in the morning with you.

Nice. Hey, Kenton. So what are you doing now?

Peter, thanks again for having us. Dwade was our chief resident, so I'm used to following in Zwade's footsteps, but I'm a practicing anesthesiologist. I work in Southern New Hampshire out of the Mass General system currently. Similar to Zwade, my background started in an MD MBA program. Mine was out of Dartmouth. Went from there to Brigham and Women's where I met Zuade, training in anesthesiology and then went back to do a fellowship in regional anesthesia and acute pain. So I've been fully in practice now for about five years. And in addition to my clinical practice and the current president of the New Hampshire Medical Society, which affords me the opportunity to be involved with a lot of our state's public health initiatives, which you can imagine, it's an exciting time to have a role in all of that in the midst of a pandemic. So those are the hats that I wear currently.

Yeah. And now you guys are running a company together. Doc to dock lending. We're going to get into that a little bit. But what I think is interesting is that both of you guys did MD mba, and there's always been a lot of discussion whether people who want to go into business or doctors, should they even do an mba? I'm just curious, maybe from each of you, why did you decide to do an mba? Did you have like, ambitions of actually going into business, of being entrepreneurial? Was that always like a. I don't know. Let's find out. Zwadi, why did you. Why did you go into it?

I'll tell you that I was in medical school just in my second year, and this was back in 2008. And so the Affordable Care act was in the full swing of its conception. And one of my professors at Emory School of Medicine, who was in the School of Public Health, Peter Thorpe, was an advisor to the Obama administration. And so he would be in our classroom discussing policy issues around healthcare financing, insurance coverages, the public option. And I'll see him in CNN a few days later on the same topics that he would vet within the classroom amongst those academics. And in that time, I realized how critical it was for physicians to be armed with knowledge of economics, of finance, of the things that make the engine run. Healthcare is this huge organism where if you pull something here, there's a push somewhere else. And the more I read and learned in the classroom, in the public health school, in medical school, the more intrigued I became about the business side. And so it was an easier decision for me to make because I was still within my training, where the cost I wasn't losing as much as someone who's out of training in practice thinking of going back to do an mba. I'll tell you this, when I decided to go in, it was the most transformational educational year of my life. I think that year of business school reframed the way I saw the world and reframed the lens through which I looked at health care and just my everyday life forever. And I had the greatest leap in knowledge in that year because of how different the lens for business and medicine is compared to medicine from a medical practitioner's perspective. And I think that my training program for medicine, Emory, is a pretty conservative program where the emphasis is on patient care and patient care. And in recent years, we've become a lot more creative or innovative in terms of looking at things beyond the four walls of the doctor's office.

Yeah, I mean, that's. So what were some of those things that you really. I mean, like I said, you said it changed your perspective.

But.

But can you give an example of what like one or two of those things might have been, which maybe you kind of try to share with other people?

Sure. I'll tell you that. Understanding that there's so much that has to happen within a practice to be able to actually deliver cure. So understanding the dynamic between the physician and referral partners and the networking that goes into how do you get people to trust that you're going to be able to provide the level of care that extends their own brand. If you send a patient to me, I'm a reflection of your practice. I have to articulate my value proposition to you. The physician in A way that makes them feel confident in me, but also in a way that helps them realize that their patients will also value what I offer them. So you're speaking to two audiences in each interaction. And that's a skill you learn in the networking world of business, where you constantly assessing your elevator pitch. Who's the audience? How do I package what I want to say to that audience in the most effective and efficient way possible while maximizing the impression I make on them for that snippet of time that you have their attention? So that's one, I think the other part of it is I've been trained in medicine to think of healthcare as purely this benevolent thing. We're caring for people. And insofar as you're able to provide care and the right medicine, the right diagnosis, the right workup, you're doing a good job. But if you're not in tune with the economics of exactly how many Medicaid patients am I seeing today compared to Blue Cross Blue Shield, if that Medicaid to Blue Cross mix is out of whack, I'm not going to be around here in six months to see anybody knowing exactly what the reimbursement is. But not just the reimbursement, but the time I have to spend with each patient, the kind of procedures that they'll approve. If I see a Medicare or a Humana or a Blue Cross patient, it all factors into the kind of the care that I can provide and the viability of my practice as well. And so being able to look at the downstream ripple effects came from looking at the economics and seeing healthcare as what it is. It's a different business. It's not like making widgets. And so I don't want to give the impression that you can plug a doctor's office into any manufacturing line or facility. But there's some of the similar kind of value concerns are there like I think the Toyota manufacturing system and how Toyota looks at value and longevity of product. There's similar things that I have to do. Looking at how long does my epidural last? If your Insurance pays me $1,000 for an epidural and it wears off in four days, was it worth it to you? Is it worth it to the system? And so understanding the way value plays in terms of effectiveness of therapy and cost of therapy is something that the business world helped me realize at a faster rate than I would have if I just relied upon my medical training for that.

And Kenton, did you find that it did the same for you and was that kind of your motivation as well.

Yeah, there are some, there's, there are some common themes in there. I'll tell you My, my story started in medical school. So I didn't. Going into medical school, I didn't know that I, that I wanted to go into a business program. But pretty early on, one of the summers between one of my medical school years I spent working in rural Burundi providing direct patient care. So I would see we would have 60 patients in a morning in a catchment area of 120,000 people within about a 60 mile radius who would spend days to walk to this clinic. It was pretty apparent to me that although the doctors that were there providing the direct patient care were being impactful, the real impact could be made at a macro level to influence the financial position of these people because their disease were the types of diseases that could be prevented by things like having access to water and appropriate latrines. And so I came back from that experience empowered and enthusiastic to have an impact at a macro level beyond the direct patient care level. And it was one of my advisors that shuttled me into the MBA program as opposed to the MPH program, which were kind of the two avenues I was choosing between at that time and the advice that I was given. Rung true that, that, that business programs have a different kind of emphasis. They emphasize communication, what Zwade said, being really effective communicators so that you can translate your passion into a passion that somebody else shares. And it's, you know, it's. There are some people that, that comes naturally to. I'm not one of those people speaking like engagements like this is something that I still kind of work towards because it was not. I was much more comfortable in a cubby in a library with my book. But communication is a big focus there. The other thing is confidence to lead teams of people that are smarter than you. I mean I went into medical, I went into business school with no business expertise in a school that at Dartmouth they require or with some exception that you have about four years of working experience. So everybody that came there was already wildly successful in their fields and were rising stars within their organizations and came with these skill sets that a lot of times I didn't know how to build an Excel spreadsheet and these were expert modelers at consulting firms. And I was forced into positions where I would be the leader of those teams and over the course of a couple years became really confident in leading those people, even though they were a lot smarter than me. It's empowering to know that you can do that and build those skill sets, because they're not complementary skill sets that we get through medical school.

Yeah, I know. We hear that all the time. Physicians and doctors, oftentimes they just. I don't know, it's. Maybe it's a, I don't know, generalization. But they say that we're bad business people. And I've heard that quite a bit. I mean, I think that's too simplistic. I think that, you know, physicians can make actually fantastic business people, but they're just, again, they just haven't had the mindset and they haven't had the training and they haven't had the emphasis on it. Do you believe that it should be part, in some way part of the medical education system? Like knowing what you know, obviously the position that physicians are in today when it comes up against healthcare administration, all that stuff, you guys feel like this business, at least some of it, the education should be like a. It's already kind of integrated into what we already do.

I think it should be something that everybody's exposed to, but that there are defined paths for people to go down when they decide that they want to take on leadership roles early on in their career and exposure in the same sense that you would have a clerkship in general surgery. I think everybody should have a clerkship in the business of medicine to understand the basics. But not everybody needs to dedicate a significant part of their time to trying to become a physician leader within a healthcare organization. I think there are a lot of people that are. Have really rewarding careers providing clinical medicine. I think those careers can certainly be strengthened by having a deep understanding of the economics of healthcare. But to your point, there aren't defined pathways to train and get experience in leadership within medicine the same way that there are clinical pathways to become an anesthesiologist, for example. And that's where I think that we could improve ourselves, is to define those pathways so that we can give those opportunities to people who really do want to lead medicine at a macro level.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think exposure is enough. And the ones that want to dig deeper can. I think the goal would be to have most of us with a basic understanding to be conversant, to be able to kind of hear about a balance sheet or hear about peer mix or reimbursement questions, understand exactly where that's going, but not necessarily be the one to develop the model, as Kenton said. And because we're as a collective, we tend to be pretty academically curious. The ones that do have A knack for it or an interesting can go do a deeper dive.

You know, one of the actually popular kind of debates that I've seen on some of the groups that I'm part of, especially because these groups are like people that are a little bit more entrepreneurial minded, is whether they should go get an MBA or not. These are physicians talking and it goes back and forth. I want to start a business, I want to do something different. Should I get an MBA or is that necessary, you know, if I'm going to be successful necessarily in entrepreneurship. What do you guys think about that?

I think it depends. I think if you're an in practice position with an idea to start a business that's related to your practice. Right. I'm not sure that the bang is there for the buck for the cost that the true cost of that mba, if it's a two year program, it's even harder to justify because it's the opportunity cost of income lost. But then the spend and those executive programs are extraordinarily expensive. I might think it's almost 100,000 bucks a year for an EMBA. And what I found was most impactful from the MBA is not that I left there with a set of hard skills that made me better at business. It's more of an understanding of the way things interact. It's better communication, as Kenton says, a better understanding of what my personal strengths and weaknesses were and how to mitigate those weaknesses and play up to my strengths. And when you're 35, 40, 45, 50, 60, and you've been practicing medicine, heading back to get these three letters with the expectation is going to make you better at a certain job is not necessarily, I think, worthwhile. The folks that I think benefit most from an MBA in terms of job climbing a ladder are ones that are doing a career change within industry. So you are a management consultant and you want to get into operations or you want to climb the ladder within your Fortune 50 firm and the currency to get there is an MBA because no one in the C suite is missing an MBA that's a clean transactional activity. If I do X, I get Y. In the case of doctors, I'm not sure it does. It gets them what they needed and, and there's, there's more pressure you get, you cannot, you don't get the chance to immerse yourself in the true kind of pedagogical experience of what an MBA really is if you make it so transactional.

Yeah, I agree. I think it, I think it really depends and you know, divided to those, those folks who are considering it during training and those folks who are considering it after training and during training. I think if you have a sense at that time that. You want to be involved with decisions and policy and leadership at a level beyond daily clinical medicine, then you don't have to have a defined path forward. The value at that time will be that that MBA opens up those doors for you to, for you to enter into those paths at a point in the career when it's appropriate for you. And if you know that early on, then it can be a worthwhile investment for both career advancement but also for career satisfaction because it'll make those opportunities more readily accessible to you. For the folks who are in kind of already in practice and are looking to move towards something else, I think the key is you need to know where you want to end up. Because an MBA in and of itself isn't going to grant you access to a specific position. What it can do is help, is help facilitate you getting to a specific position if you already know where it is. Because at that point the experiential learning and experiential job opportunities are almost an either or to an mba. You could get there just as easily in a lot of cases and not have to sacrifice the time and the cost. The executive MBA is, is kind of a good hybrid of those and certainly I think a lot of people utilize those effectively and they become useful as well.

Awesome. That's great feedback. But why I think this story is cool from the both of you guys is that you both did MD MBAs, you went to residency together and then you started a company together. It's called Doc to Doc Lending. I've known quite a bit about it, but for those who don't know about it as well, you want to just give a quick primer on what it is and we're going to talk about how you guys got into it.

Sure. We're a physician led group that figured out that doctors are treated unfairly by the financial markets as when it comes to accessing personal loans. So because of the nature of our training and how expensive it is and kind of the financial toll it takes, many of us have north of $200,000 worth of student loan debt and certainly in residency you're making an average 55 to 60,000 bucks a year early in your careers. Still relatively modest income with debt to income ratios that are lopsided. So banks see us as high risk borrowers. Doc to Doc reframes that proposition and looks at doctors not Just for who they are today, but who they will become. And we determine that the risk of giving a doctor a personal loan is not predicted by a FICO score or debt to income ratio. And there's more. That's a play there. And so we came together, pooled our resources, got some doctors involved, and had our seed round with a predominant physician fund. And now we're scaling and growing beyond just doctors investing in the company. Yeah.

So how did this all come about? I mean, there must have been some problem. This must have. One of you two looking for a loan had an issue. How did you actually come up with this idea that doctors needed funds and that you were the ones to solve that?

Yeah, we both. We both lived through it, and we both lived through it while we were. While we were in Boston. Our stories are a little different, but there are a lot of parallels to it. Mine was. I moved from Dartmouth to Boston with my wife, and at the time, two kids. We, you know, met my kind of financial profile at that time. I carried $225,000 worth of student loan debt. My salary was $54,000 a year as a resident. My wife, who's a nurse, had some professional goals of her own and some of our family goals. And so whereas she had supported us through medical school, she was stepping back a little bit as the breadwinner now, if any. We lived in a bad part of Jamaica Plain, and still our rent was about $2,000 a month. So if you did the. And what it took to keep the engines running to advance both our personal lives, but also our professional lives, the math didn't add up. Either we had to kind of step back and put the brakes on our goals, or we needed to supplement my income. And. And when we. When we went to see what that would look like, we were surprised that we were viewed as. And particularly me was viewed as high risk, you know, and up to that point, it seemed like I was on a successful career trajectory by most measures. You know, even had some informal job offers at that time. But from the bank's perspective, what they saw was someone who carried a lot of debt and didn't make a salary that was in line with that burden, and it felt improper. And so Zwade, again, had a similar story. And as we kind of shared our frustrations with it, began talking with our fellow co residents and friends from other specialties around Brigham and Women's. And it was impressive how many people shared that feeling of stress at that time, financial stress at that time, and the lack of options to do something about it. And so after residency, Zwadana went our separate ways. Kind of got our feet underneath ourselves and three years ago now came back together to do something about it. And that was the genesis of Doc to talk.

Peter, you will like this and appreciate this more than most. When we began to formulate the idea, we stress tested it for the first time at the asa, the Reference Society of Anesthesiologists in Boston. That year. It was 2017, and we put together a series of Shark Tank style pitch sessions. We hosted, I think about seven or eight with five to six peers from the conference in the lobby of the. It was the Boston Marriott, I think it was Kenton. And we weren't asking for money. We were saying, we got this idea, let's present it to you guys and poke holes. Tell us, as a physician, as someone who went through this process, what do you think? And we left there with validation and offers to write checks. And that's when we kind of knew.

Offers. You mean in terms of like, people are like ready to invest in what you guys are doing?

If you guys went ahead and did this, I'll be willing to write a check. And at that time, we were just trying to like beat the pavement to understand if this was a real business, that people shared our experiences and thought it was something that would, that would catch a fire in the market.

Give me the 32nd pitch that you gave. Well, what it sound like? Kind of.

Well, it sounded like what we already did. Hey, as you were moving from medical school to residency, did you have the pain point of having to borrow money for first, last month's rent broker fee? Did you swipe your credit card to pay for those moving expenses while in residency? Have you had to go borrow money from your parents or relatives? Or what if we had a solution that understood where you were that time in your life and didn't penalize you for the toll that it took to get to the point you were in your medical career, but having that financial kind of background. And folks were like, there's a lot of head nodding. A lot of folks felt comfortable saying, actually, Yeah, I had $40,000 in credit card debt and I still have it, you know, and we love the idea, let's go.

And then why were investors so excited about it?

Because it felt so. This is 2017 now. Lending Club was still in its heyday, and at conception, there was a thought, maybe we'll match investors to borrowers. And that kind of like community model was very appealing because of what was happening in the Fintech market at the time as well. I think also knowing that the default. I think the real crux here is default. Right. Like loans are priced the way they are because you're trying to hedge against defaults. Knowing that positions the student loan default rate. For instance, compared to lawyers and MBAs and other professionals, we're sub 1%. No one else is.

Right.

And the folks that default in debt in medicine don't actually match in a residency for the most part. So that we know something that the world didn't know about us. But what we also know is kind of how to look at a physician. A physician. And all the little data points that help them predict where they're going to be in the future are things that you and I naturally know, Peter. And as you talk to doctors, they're like, oh, yeah, duh, I know that too.

What kind of program they're in, what kind of. Where they got their job, what that job's gonna do. Yeah. I mean, you can probably figure that out pretty easily, right?

Correct. But the banks, the bankers don't. And even as we pitch to sophisticated investors and bankers now, there's a lot of hand holding, this huge information asymmetry that we revel in because we're educating folks on the parts that we wanna let them in on. Certainly no trade secrets, but. But there's a gap between what they know about doctors and our journey and what the reality actually is.

All right, so you had that idea, you tested, it seemed like some people are willing to pay you, write you some checks. All right, so what did you do with that idea? How did you kind of. Yeah. How did you actually start making loans and getting the financing, the funding? I'm just curious, like, how did that all come about and how long did that process take? Because I think a lot of people have ideas like this, and that's just kind of where it stops for most people. So what did it take to take that next little step? I mean, did you. Is this something that you feel like your MBA training helped you with? Is it. Did you read something? What resources were you using? I know it's a pretty loaded question, but how did you guys. I mean, that's really the tough part for most people, how they take that idea. And then how do you kind of get that ball in motion?

Yeah, you know, the. That, that, that. That was a. That was a major decision point.

Right.

Zwade told you that we came away from the ASA conference and feeling like we were validated that this was worthy of being a company, not Only did it satisfy a need that we were passionate about and had felt and wanted to smooth for the next generation. But the market for it felt like it was there. And so I'll tell you Peter, one of the biggest challenges for me through this entire process was the comfort level with accepting money from other people. I was comfortable assuming risk as long as the risk was my own. And it took time for me to be comfortable to accept investment in the company once we crossed certain hurdles. So Zwade and I decided that we would assume the risk ourselves to start. And so we self funded the foundation of DOC to doc. What that entailed really was the regulatory diligence. The financial technology industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country. So the legality of knowing that we could make loans legally was about a nine month process. We self funded the IT development. So we have software that allows us to kind of match the market research that we performed. That. What's important to doctors who are making loans is they want to be able to, they want to be able to dictate kind of as the terms how much they borrow. They want it to happen quickly. So it's a quick application process and they want to get the money as fast as possible and have really fast communication from the time that they click submit. And so we leverage technology and of course have the best interest rate. So that's we leverage technology to match our market research and that we self funded as well. It wasn't until we had the foundation and the regulatory steps in place that we, that we accepted investments. And so this was about a year after that ASA conference when people said we'd love to invest in your company. It took a year for us to be comfortable accepting those investments. And when we accepted those investments, it was with the understanding that the majority of that money would not be used for operational or infrastructure investment, that the money would be used primarily to make loans to doctors. And because of that there was some insulation to their investment. And so again, I think the decision to make the leap to your point, The big decision point for us, once we learned that the market was there and that the interest was there, was how would we handle the risk of an early failure? And we got over that hurdle by assuming the earliest risk ourselves.

Yeah. So fast forward today. Now you guys started there, you started getting funding. Looks like you started matching up people with loans. You carry the it. Let's just jump to the end. Where are you guys today? Now a couple years later, the growth has been amazing.

I think Covid Gave us an early stress in our model because you'll find that across the sector, personal loan companies have seen defaults kind of quadruple from where they usually would be. And in our space, we've seen no defaults, no late payments in terms of 30 day or 60 day delinquencies. And so there's something to our hypothesis that physicians perform better than their risk profile might predict, even under duress of COVID And you and I both know that doctors were having their hours cut, they were having pay cuts and benefit cuts during COVID as well. But the way we view our financial obligations as a collective, we view it as a black mark on our careers if we're defaulting on obligations. And so we've seen none of that. And what that has helped us to do is grow because we've seen that investors and sophisticated money likes the fact that our portfolio is steady. We've been able to get quite a bit more traction because the biggest marketing arm that we have are our current borrowers, that they share the story of borrowing from us with their peers. And that's the best compliment that we can have. Kenton and I speak to the vast majority of our borrowers directly on the phone, with a phone call to welcome them to the community, to tell them who we are, to tell them that we know where they are right now and we've been there ourselves. And it gets better. Just survive the next two years or three or four, you know, and as you go through it, call us back if you have a question about anything, about making the payment or about insurance or whatever it is. We were a community of peers and we should not feel like a bank that we'll take your call at 8:30pm because that's when you're out of the office and that's when we're out of the office too. We're actively working as we do this as well. And so there's so much that we can empathize with and affiliate with that people really, really like what we're doing. And we feel authentic because we are.

Now knowing what, you know, these last couple years, obviously the road must have not have been easy all the time, you know, let's say somebody else where, I don't know, trying to follow in your footsteps, not necessarily do a lending company, but start a business, you know, become entrepreneurs, do it while they're building their own practices as well. What's one or two tips that you give them that might save them, them a lot of trouble? Actually.

I'll, I'll, I'LL start. You know, I think that, I think the first, I think that the first piece of advice is to, is to be confident in yourself. Right? This is. Starting a company is an investment in yourself. And knowing your level of commitment and engagement to it is going to help guide whether that's a good investment. Right. I think it has to not just be a good idea, but something that you don't mind thinking about on the off hours. Because, because, because in order to succeed, a lot of times you will have to be thinking about it in the off hours. And if that's fun as opposed to a burden, then it could mean the difference between success and failure. The second piece would be be patient, they think, I think, you know, this, this, this has at many steps along the way taken longer than we had expected. That certainly I had expected. There's been times that we've had to go back to the drawing board and say, look, we believe in this concept, but these last three months just weren't the direction that we should have been going. I'll give you a quick example. When we first, first started out with this, we were trying to decide whether to build our own software de novo or buy kind of an off the shelf platform and spent a good amount of time interviewing companies to buy their software. About three months into that, we realized that we could do it a lot better and have it be budget neutral, if not cost less. But the investment that we had just spent in terms of time of going through diligence with so many groups was really hard to let go of. And so whereas it set it behind, ultimately it was the right decision. But there's a lot of times where it'd be really easy to make the wrong decision or to step away completely just because we weren't at the end point that we were trying to be at. So, so being patient and inflexible, particularly early on, is to be expected.

I think I'll add to that and I agree with both. I think confidence comes naturally to many doctors and I think that hubris gets us a bad rap a lot of times, and I say have a level of humility to the process because what made you successful in medicine is not the skill set that you'll likely need to do these other ventures. And so Kenton and I had to learn banking, learn about the 2nd Circuit Courts, who they are, what their rules are around interest rates and use relapse, and there's a plethora of other, like, new topics that we had to consume pretty quickly and understand them very, very well. But I can't tell you that we benefited from being doctors in getting that intelligence. There was a lot of levering our networks and this is maybe where the MBA helped a lot. We have a bench of advisors who've done exactly this at Fortune 50 companies and did a lot of strategic work. And so it helped us to see those blind spots that we couldn't see. Because I can place an epidural with my eyes closed maybe, but when it comes to like figuring out how to underwrite alone, that's not what I was trained to do. And so recognizing that you gotta lever the skill sets of folks that have done this before, their wisdom. And we were impressed by how giving people are in terms of their time and of their expertise. It almost feels to them like they're honored to be asked the question when you're really listening to them and taking their advice. And there's a whole host of folks that we've really benefited from over the course of the past three years because they were just generous with their time.

Well, I mean I love what you guys have put together. I mean I remember when I was finishing fellowship, my wife and I, we finished fellowship at the same time we. Her job I think didn't start right away and then mine started, but they said there was going to be a lag time before I got my first check. I remember several months down the line. I remember for those couple months that were in between, we're like, man, luckily we didn't have to move, but we're like, yeah, this is going to be a stressful time for the next couple months. And so we were able to kind of put a loan together through one of my practice. It was just not a fun, easy process. So I can imagine that there must be ton of people who are in that transition stage who could obviously benefit from what you guys have offered. And I also just love physician led businesses that serve other physicians. I mean that's just. I just think it's one of the coolest things and so awesome that you guys are doing what you're doing. I really appreciate what, you know, you put together where can find people find out more about you and your company.

Well, Peter, we have a website that has a lot about our philosophy that we described here. It's www.doc the number two doc lending.com so doc2doc lending.com on there because in addition to that information, there's at the bottom of the homepage a request for more information. And by filling that out, it'll give us your contact information. You'll receive a call from one of our physician members on our team. Also, obviously is the link to the loan application form for those folks who are interested in in applying for a Doc to Doc loan as well. That's right at the top of the homepage. Zwade and I are always available for conversations as well. I know I speak for both of us when I say that one of our favorite parts of all of this is getting to interact with the people who are interested in our company, whether it be as a borrower or as we told in those early days back at the asa, interacting with our investors as well.

Peter, thank you for having us. We think that the Passive Income MD platform has been enormously educational, instructive, meant to us personally and to many of our peers. Our entire team consumes your content and have for some time consumers and so, and it's been a pleasure talking to you now, but we've had dialogue offline and you really are a supporter of position, innovation, entrepreneurship and we really appreciate your voice in the sea of voices out there that speaks to this specific niche. So thank you. All right.

You're welcome. I'm sure people will enjoy the story. I'm sure they're going to find some inspiration, motivation. Maybe some people need your service and they can reach out to you. Either way, thanks. Thanks for what you keep doing and we'll check in from you guys time to time and see how you're doing. I'm sure it's going to be extremely I mean, you guys are successful already, but it's only going to continue to grow. So thanks for doing what you do. Take care guys.

Thanks a lot, Peter.

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