Dr. Tea Nguyen (00:53.774)

Hey there, before I get into today's important topic about success in business without losing yourself, I wanted to give you a heads up. There is going to be a great virtual conference hosted by SoMeDocs, September 25th to the 27th, which is a private practice track. SoMeDocs is a healthcare, omni-media platform and talent agency that helps healthcare professionals like you build their personal brand. It also helps them enhance their digital presence and amplify their impact.

where doctors can connect with their peers and industry professionals. Three reasons to attend this virtual conference besides me being there also, but this is all about you. So the first thing is you will learn about the topics surrounding billing operations, staffing and leadership, legal risk, micro practice pitfalls, having a mobile direct care practice and authentically building your practice. Plus there will be a surgical direct care panel.

So you are going to leave knowing exactly what you need to do next to dive into private practice as a direct care owner. Number two, you will have easy access. If you are a member of SumiDocs, attending live is totally free. Even if you're not a member, it is affordably priced and you can upgrade to the VIP ticket so that you can watch it when it works on your schedule. CME credits are available as well. And lastly, number three, my favorite part is that you get to network

with others and that can lead to referrals and collaboration. So beyond the talks, there's going to be an interactive community space with Zoom speed networking where you can build your private practice and meet the peers who can help you get to where you want to be. So whether you're listening to this episode live or you're listening at another time, purchasing the VIP ticket will allow you to watch the conference at your convenience. So link will be down below. I hope to see you there.

Let's dive into today's topic, what it means to succeed in business ownership without all the stress, because a lot of people talk about how stressful business ownership is. And let me tell you, I was not interested in owning my practice. I was fearful about what it meant to own a medical practice because I thought it would take me away from taking care of patients. I spent eight years in training to know what I know to focus on the patient.

Dr. Tea Nguyen (03:19.16)

But I think you and I know that when you're in the healthcare landscape, things look a little bit different. When you work for insurance, you work for insurance. What does that mean? It means that when you wanna give your patient a recommendation, we have to ask permission for the insurance to pay for that service. So through those permission slips, we're talking about prior authorizations, peer-to-peer calls, having the right coding and so forth.

It ends up being a lot of administrative work, stuff that we did not sign up to do. And it wasn't until I was in it knee deep, realizing that this is not sustainable for a private practice, that I then had to look elsewhere and see, is there anything else possible? And the answer to that, as you'll see, is of course it is. Direct care is absolutely possible. So I want to share with you today about what it means to be a business owner, being successful,

without losing yourself because I know a lot of doctors right now. I hear it, I see it, I read about it. Many of us, if not most of us, are completely stressed out. We are running thin. But we've also normalized stress. We think that this is what practicing medicine this day and age consists of. And the reality is that running a practice does not have to stretch you out. It does not have to cause you to lose yourself.

so that you can take care of other people. This is not a give and give and give. You have to be able to create a balanced practice so that it's sustainable, so that it gives you joy and purpose to doing what you're doing. So yes, running a private practice has its set of challenges, but when you're in control in the decisions you make in regards to what life you wanna live and the type of care you deliver, you're gonna find a lot more fulfillment in that system

compared to the alternative. Now, some people think success is about never failing. And the truth is, those who are succeeding have failed the most. And it's because they persist, they just never give up. The ones who arrive faster aren't necessarily luckier. They just bounce back from setbacks a lot more quickly. So there's a necessary balance between the safe path and the calculated risk. Everything we do is about

Dr. Tea Nguyen (05:38.848)

ensuring safety and calculating the risk. It's like how we talk to our patients, the pros and the cons of a medical treatment. On a bigger scale, in our medical training, we were taught to choose the safest route because the wrong one, a wrong judgment call can cost a patient's life. And so we carry that mindset into our business, assuming that we always have to plan for the safest option and assuming that the safest one

is the right one for us. But in business, that's not always the case. Your business is not the operating room. Business is built on experimentation. And the lessons that you need to learn come from doing the work. In business, there are more variables and more flexibility to experiment, to refine, to become better with creating systems so that you eventually become a successful owner of a direct specialty care practice.

Now I know a lot of us out there love structure. I love predictability. Entrepreneurship can feel incredibly overwhelming until you reframe it. So I'm going to help you with four main concepts to help you in your business journey. The stuff that we don't really learn about in our medical training. So number one, it's okay to fail. In fact, it's encouraged because there are lessons in it. It's through the path that you have not carved out yet.

that gives you the opportunity to test out your hypothesis, such as, will this treatment package work? This is something that I loved so much about research. We were always asking questions that ended with what if, and then we sorted out the methodology with what we do know, and then we put it to the test. Now, once we gather the data, it can then be interpreted, but without the data, then it's just a random guessing game.

And a lot of people don't bother to start asking important questions because they've just had it in their mind that they can predict the future. Like, I don't think it's going to work and therefore I will not try. And what they're doing is they're playing it safe because they want predictability. They want to stay status quo, even if the status quo is uncomfortable because at least it's familiar. So here's a real life practical application of this concept. I've been toying around with selling an online course

Dr. Tea Nguyen (07:59.864)

for my clinical practice for some time and building it was no problem. It's easy for us as educators to put slides together, right? And talk about what's important. But selling it is a whole nother game. I found that there is a lot more complexity when it comes to selling your product and even selling your services. So I took this experience where I developed these courses, tried to sell them.

I learned from other people who have successfully sold online courses and realize I just still have a few more things to learn, a few more things to tweak. Some of the data needs to be reviewed and refined. So the questions I asked myself in this experience, even though I created a beautiful course, according to my eyes, of course, no pun intended, but it is pretty educational. It's very informative. It's important information. It's stuff that I already share in my clinical practice, even though I can do the stuff part, like putting it together, I have to ask myself, why is it not selling the way I want it to? Is it my expectation? Could it be my messaging? Is it because I don't have enough exposure? Like people just don't know about it? Is it a price point? Whatever it is, I just realized that I have to detach myself and just look at the data, be objective and separate the sweat equity that I put into it.

because that oftentimes is the higher perceived value of my effort because I struggle to make it. But I don't make that project define me as a person. So whether it succeeds or fails, it's completely different from my identity because I want to learn, I want to expand, I want to evolve, I want to reach the next step and that's what is required of me and it's going to be what's required of you to become.

the successful owner of a direct care practice. It's really okay to fail in business. And this is something I'll repeat over and over and over again because we don't get it enough in our medical training. Failure is okay. It's bouncing back, learning from them, and then moving on to the next thing you gotta do. All right, number two. I briefly mentioned it. Don't be attached. Don't be attached to the project.

Dr. Tea Nguyen (10:18.282)

letting it define you as a person, but instead just treat it like a canvas. You are experimenting, you are trying things out, you are painting a picture, maybe you gotta go back and erase a few things or cover up some things, right, to make that piece of art the way you want to make it. And if the project fails, then it fails. It's the project, it's not you. You just gotta keep going and try different things. A lot of us,

treat a project failure as a moral failure of our character, of our identity. This is black and white thinking. This is all or nothing behavior. So instead of thinking this one project has to succeed, otherwise I am a failure, I'm no good, I'm undeserving. I want you to reframe that and think about this. This is a learning process. This was step one. The next step, learn from it. And it might just be a little

tweak a little refinement that you have to do. You don't have to start over from scratch all the time when something doesn't work out. Change one variable and then troubleshoot and then look at each and every step as to what could be tweaked. Don't try to tweak everything all at once because that can just not give you enough data and confuse you and make you feel like it's all overwhelming. You're just going to quit and call it good and play it safe. Don't do that.

What you're doing is once you put something out there, tweak one variable. One thing can be changed so that everything else is steady and then you can prove to yourself whether or not it was that one variable that needed to change. What does that mean? So let's talk about selling a service package. I'll give you an example of something that I've been tweaking on a long time now since I started my direct care practice. I sell a preventive food care membership.

and it's a monthly fee where the patient pays me in full upfront to take advantage of the discounts. Otherwise, they'll be paying more per visit. And so I share that with the patient. So I have this all-inclusive membership fee model, and I'll tell you about my experience trying to create a membership for my podiatry practice. It's kind of weird. I mean, I've never seen it done before. I've seen other practices, other specialties do it, and I'm like, yeah, that makes sense for them, but does it make sense for me as a podiatrist? And so for me, this was all experimenting. There was nobody leading the way in podiatry for me to see what's possible. And in fact, when I spoke to other podiatrists in direct care, they said that the membership just didn't work for them. And I think that's okay, that's fine. So I wanted to experiment and see if this could work for me.

I'm here to tell you that it does, but this is the process I had to go through to prove to myself and to my community that this is a viable product. So at first, I presented the package as a discount option. I said exactly that. You can come see me every month. It will be this office visit price. But if you need more visits, you can get a discount by paying in full. Most people want a deal.

And so that membership started to make sense for me. What started at a $1,500 package is now $3,000. And I'm projecting that this package will then become a $5,000 membership option. And that's because I sold a lot of these. I told a lot of people about this option and this package worked for me because I didn't abandon it. I didn't go in and say, okay, I sold it to 10 people. Nine people said, no, I'm going to stop selling it.

What I did was I kept pressing on. I kept learning how to message my offering, adding value to the patient, making sure that I have the right avatar in front of me saying, okay, this person would actually really benefit from this. And I wasn't trying to sell it to everybody. It was a select few. And I wasn't attached if the patient said, no, I don't want this or no, that's not for me. I just kept going. And so that's what I mean. Don't be attached to what you create. That's not you. It's not a reflection on you when somebody says no.

It's them evaluating whether or not it's valuable enough for them. And if it's not for this time, maybe down in the future, it will be. Number three, don't compare your chapter one with another person's chapter 20 or even closing chapter. So often we're looking to people who have experience and they've had 20, 30, 40 years of experience doing what they've been doing. They've been experimenting, they've been refining.

Dr. Tea Nguyen (14:56.118)

And then in our first year, we want that success and we feel that if we're not where they are at, we have some sense of failure with it. And it was president Theodore Roosevelt that said, comparison is the thief of joy. It can also breed envy and adequacy, constantly chasing something else other than appreciating what you have and your own progress. So if you find yourself feeling some kind of way about somebody else's

business, like literally catching it and say good for them. I'm happy for myself too. We can both be happy. There isn't a limitation on how many people can have that happiness. How many people can have that dollar amount? How many people can have that time of freedom? Right? All of this is available to everybody. Don't get distracted by other people's situation. You really got to fight for that focus to stay in your lane.

You can use others as inspiration as to what you want to achieve as a benchmark, but don't compare yourself every step of the way because you will find yourself chasing something and once you get it, it will still never be enough. And I have to quickly apologize. I'm recording this as I normally do in my office and there's a weed whacker in the background. So I hope that you don't hear it. I'm totally hearing it. I'm getting distracted.

but we're gonna push through to number four here. Number four, tap into your higher purpose. As humans in this physical body, it's really easy to lose sight as to why we're here. Having these human experiences. So ask yourself, what is your higher purpose? Is it to play it safe? Is it to hide in the shelter of not being exposed? Or to show others what's possible and to show them what it takes to get their courage?

vulnerability, persistence, failures. Because your struggle story might someday become the lifeline for someone else. As the kids would say, do it for the plot. Because one day you will be telling your story to the eager ears of inspiring the next generation of doctors of what it takes to get there. And the rewards are proportional to the challenges you had to overcome. So the takeaway for today,

Dr. Tea Nguyen (17:16.543)

is to treat your business like a living research study. Form the hypothesis, run the small test, measure the real data, adjust the one variable, and then repeat. Detach from the outcome, stay anchored to your purpose, and let those lessons, not the fear, drive your next move. So success is not the absence of failure. It's how quickly you can recover from it.

so that you can continue to keep refining it. And that's how you have a successful business without losing yourself. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope to catch you on the conference this week. Take care for now.