Step One: Get Honest with yourself.
What problem are you trying to solve?
What service do you want to bring forth?
What is your WHY?
Can you charge for the service(s) you want to offer?

Step Two: Research
What services are similar businesses in your area offering?
What are they NOT offering?
What gaps exist in services that are available to your patients?

Remember, services can be expansive in medicine, not just things you ‘do’ to people.

Examples of “services”:

• Extended visit time
• Family visits
• Same day visits
• After hours visits/access to care on weekends
• Texting service
• Walk-in visits
• In house dispensing (pharmacy)
• On site lab draws
• On site point of care testing (UPT, strep, rapid flu and more)
• EKG’s
• Cash pricing on labs, medications, imaging
• Group classes
• Home visits
• School visits

Step Three: Make Lists
What do you like doing?
What do you NOT like doing?
What is essential (as in a MUST do) in your industry?
What would unequivocally build brand recognition or bring in customers (a slam dunk) as an offering?
What can you do *right now* with the skills and supplies you already have?

Step Four: Does it Pencil Out?
Does offering this service either 1) bring you GREAT joy or 2) make sense financially?
If the answer to BOTH of these questions is no, cross the service off the list as an offering.

“Making sense financially”, in broad strokes, means that the cost of all the goods to do the service PLUS your time to do all the work involved in the service commoditized at market value times a factor of at least 2 is a viable price for the service. So, for example: a knee injection costs $10 for kenalog and $2 for supplies. Say you commoditize your time at $150/hour. The entire encounter takes you ½ hour (including note etc). So $12 (supplies) + $75 (½*$150) = $87. Minimum charge for knee injection would/could/should be $87 unless, of course, your model has a different form of compensation for these things and it amortizes out (such as also having a membership fee for this and similar services).

Step Five: What are Your Strengths?
Does what you want to offer play to what you know you are already good at?
Can you deliver better and faster than most in surrounding competitive businesses?

Step Six: People Pay for What They Want, Not What They Need
Check on your own values related to service, medicine and money. People don’t pay more because something is important scientifically. They pay more for things they want. They pay more for things that happen to them. They pay more for things they can hold in their hands (material objects). They pay for access. For problems to be solved on their schedule. People often don’t pay for ‘talking’.

Ask yourself at each juncture, “what problem does this service solve?” Is that a problem you want people to have solved or that you believe people will pay you to solve? Know the difference.

Step Seven: Remove Yourself From Other People’s Financial Decisions
How people spend money is a unique value system. YOU are not responsible for people’s financial decisions any more than you are responsible for whether or not they brush their teeth.

To that end, it is your responsibility as an entrepreneur to assure your business can remain functional and thriving. Without this you cannot serve anyone.

Your pricing and service offerings must make sense for your business. They must work on paper and assure you can pay your bills, your staff, yourself and GROW your business. This is VALUE NUMBER 1. 

If you do not have money, you cannot have a business.

Step Eight: Do YOU want to do this?
Entrepreneurship and starting your own business is like getting married, having a child, buying a house. It is a BIG, life altering commitment. It can be amazingly rewarding but, before you dive in, because you can, really ask yourself, do I want TWO jobs? Do I want to build something amazing then set it free? What is my ultimate intention with the business I create? 

There are 3 ultimate intentions with business ownership: 

• Building it to sell it to create future financial opportunities in excess of what you can create as an employee
• Building it to provide a service not otherwise provided while also serving yourself as the businesses ‘employee’ and ALSO with intention to pass on/sell to benefit from the ongoing service your business provides your community AND to benefit financially in your future from what you created
• Building it to create generational wealth and opportunity to pass on to your children/family as they grow up.

Building it for yourself, right now, so you can have a better job and do what you do is a short minded/short term plan for business. You must start with the end in mind. If this business was going to serve you, what would that look like? 

How do you create your business to ultimately serve you?

Ready to get started? 

Use Hint’s step-by step guide to starting, managing and growing your Direct Care Practice. Turn your dream practice into a reality with the DPC Playbook.

Looking for more support? Join Hint's exclusive DPC Accelerator™ program, a free training and coaching program for Hint customers. You’ll learn what it takes to design, launch, and grow a thriving Direct Primary Care practice—and you’ll get help putting it all together to realize your vision.. 

Dr. Julie Gunther is a Board Certified family physician and Harvard graduate who started sparkMD, a direct primary care practice, in Boise, Idaho in 2014. She has served extensively as a mentor, leader, speaker and author within the direct primary care community including as President of the Direct Primary Care Alliance (21-22) and author of "Sparks Start Fires: A Guide for Dreamers who are Also Doctors"- a quick step by step guide for getting your start in DPC. She is the 'mastermind' behind the first DPCA Masterminds and has spoken on behalf of Hint and DPC a number of times since 2016. In October 2023, Dr. Julie sold sparkMD to another DPC physician. She is now working part time providing medical aesthetics and procedural care. Dr. Julie spends her "free" time teaching as an adjunct professor at the local medical school, helping friends with wallpaper, watching her nephews and mentoring physicians about independent practice ownership, business start up, aesthetic medicine and outpatient procedural medicine. Dr. Julie offers customized private on-site trainings at her new venture, "wildfire aesthetics". (Cause, you know, sparks start fires). If you would like to work with Dr. Julie for business mentorship, aesthetics, or procedural training she can be reached at drjulie@wildfireaesthetics.com.