Episode 54 - From Starting a DPC Practice From Scratch to Taking Over an Existing One: Dr. Amber Price's Unconventional Journey
Dr. Amber Price is a pediatrician who built a Direct Primary Care practice out of her Chicago home before she finished residency, stepped away from it, and is now running a practice in West Palm Beach that came to her through a question she asked as a joke. In this conversation, she and Anne talk about overhead, organic growth, and what it takes to ask for what you need...
Dr. Amber Price has started a Direct Primary Care practice twice now. The first time she did it from a four-bedroom condo in Chicago while she was still a resident, with almost no overhead and not a dollar spent on marketing. What sustained that practice was the doulas, midwives, and chiropractors who said yes when she asked to meet, back when she thought she was just looking for feedback on a logo.
The second time started at 8:30 on a weeknight, unemployed, scrolling Facebook, two weeks after she half-jokingly texted a colleague a question she never expected him to take seriously.
"Sometimes you're pushed. You're at the cliff,
but you got a car coming, so you just
have to jump in the water because there
is really no other choice."
What Amber keeps coming back to is that doing the work herself is what made both practices possible. She never took a business class. She built her own website, ran her own marketing, and learned the operations by doing them, which means that years later, walking into a practice she did not build, it was like riding a bicycle. She grew slowly on purpose, because there was no manual in 2018 and she knew she had a lot to learn.
"Think outside the box. You never know who you're gonna run into, who you could
have a great collaboration with."
The rest of it came from asking plainly for what she needed and being willing to look outside the obvious places for help. That applies to the partnership that brought her back into DPC, and it applies to the smaller arrangements she is building now: shared office space with an RN doula and a lactation consultant, a pharmacy across the street handling vaccines and compounding. None of it came from a template.
"The worst thing that someone can say
is no. Who cares if they say no? But they
might say yes."
Why her colleague said yes is worth sitting with too. He told her he hated watching another physician struggle after everything it takes to get through med school and residency. Amber is the first to say the five and ten minute phone calls she gave people years ago are part of why she had someone to call when she needed one.
Listen now if you are pre-launch, rebuilding after a practice did not go the way you planned, or sitting on an ask you think is too big or too strange to make.
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