Secrets of building a practice that works for you
Things I've learned building my dream practice
This post is obviously for practitioners, but I would encourage everyone to read it, because it will help you to better identify the right practitioner for you. If you're a practitioner looking to create your dream practice and life, let's talk. Fill out this form to get in touch with me. I want to help you help people. Let's find out how.
I've spent the last five years building up my practice and can safely say that I've created the practice of my dreams. Learn more about that here:
Believe it or not, I could retire right now. I am not interested in retiring. I have grand visions for the future. I want to change the world for the better. But if I wanted to, I could work only a few hours each week and live indefinitely on residual income of what I've built.
I am only 36. This article will outline how I accomplished this after just ten years of clinical practice and twenty years in the field of integrative medicine.
I saw mentor after mentor, employer after employer, and colleague after colleague build practices that looked more like prisons. I have watched one mentor after another close their practice, with no buyer and no retirement plan to save them, and, more importantly, no one to succeed them in caring for their patients. As Warren Buffet said, "if you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die."
The key to a sustainable practice - one that you love working in and never want to leave - is, in a word, trust. You aren't building a business, you are taking care of a community.
"Trust trust as your best strategy."
- Richard Brooke
When you adopt this mindset, your whole attitude toward your practice should shift. Then, your actions should shift.
"The greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it."
- Hippocrates
If this is the greatest medicine of all, and we have unprecedented access to information and the ability to easily reach people via text, video, and audio, then the first duty of the practitioner in 2025 is to teach people via multi-media.
Your first and foremost intention must be to serve others with the information you know will serve them best. This establishes their trust in you, and is the first step toward them seeking out your services.
What does this look like?
Social media is the first place you need to be. It is the new public square. You need to make a daily habit of spending time on social media platforms that provide value to you. If you don't get value from a social media platform, you probably won't enjoy providing value to others on that platform.
For example, I use Instagram and X every day. These are, coincidentally, the two platforms I promote my work on the most. I love writing (X), and what I write can easily be adapted to photos (Instagram).
It is no coincidence that my largest followings are on these two platforms.
I do not recommend dedicating your time to only one social media platform. You need to be in at least two. Why? If you are only on one platform, you are vulnerable to changes in the algorithm of that platform. Instagram used to be a place for images only. Then reels took over, and now it's a place for video content creators. Overnight, people had to change their content strategy, or lose massive amounts of attention.
You should also spend time networking locally. Find who you can collaborate with. Find people whose skills and talents complement yours. No one can do it all, so we all need people to refer to. Always be building your local network.
This leads me to the next vital element of your daily routine. You need to bring people off of social media platforms and onto YOUR platform. Likewise, you need to find a convenient way to keep in touch with people online who you meet in the real world.
What does that look like?
This depends upon who you are and how you're wired. I'll give you two real-world examples. My friend Jim Laird doesn't like writing. He loves talking to people. He loves commenting back and forth with people on forums. So he created Skool communities where that is the focus of what he does. It's not a blog - it's a community.
I feel overwhelmed by forums, but I love writing. It is almost the first thing I do every single day. I have been writing newsletters and blog posts for years now. I started a Substack. Jim can charge money for membership in his Skool community. I can charge money for membership in my Substack.
This is the first way of making money as a practitioner. First, you teach for free on social media. Then, you get people to join your community. Then, you get people to join some kind of online space where you can interact with them for free or for money.
There are wars going on between all of these platforms for attention and, by extension, money. For example, X shadow-bans content that leads people off-platform to, say, Substack. This is because these two platforms are in direct competition. X has just launched an "articles" feature to compete with Substack. Substack just launched chat and notes features to compete with X.
This is why, to me, the most valuable thing I have is an email address or a phone number. This is why, beyond your online community, you need a way to collect personal contact information.
I collect emails via Substack. My practice uses an electronic medical record called Practice Better, which collects emails and phone numbers. I backup these lists of contacts on a regular basis.
Why? I am paranoid (rightly so) of being de-platformed by people for speaking the truth.
This is why depending upon social media for your business is a short-sighted and dangerous strategy. In a moment, their algorithms can dump you from the top to the bottom. It's not a good feeling - trust me.
Email and phone are the two most intimate ways of communicating with people, but here you have to be careful. You've built up trust with people over time, and the more access they give you, the more open they are to your suggestions.
You may suggest at any point that they buy something from you.
There are two things people can buy from you - goods and services.
Services include group coaching programs and one-on-one consulting (call it practicing medicine, coaching, consulting, or whatever you want - it's advising people one-on-one).
Goods include supplements, medications, lab testing, medical imaging, equipment, and more.
I wrote an article on building a membership-based practice that I strongly recommend you read if you're building a health and wellness practice:
I promote my practice and my favorite products via my newsletter (this Substack). We receive a steady stream of referrals to the practice as a result, and a steady stream of purchases through affiliate links.
You have to create offers (see my practice blueprint post) and pick goods you're going to affiliate with, then offer them to your community, explaining to them how to use them and why they might be right for them.
The sequence of events is as follows:
People find you on social media
They follow you to your newsletter, blog, or community platform
They purchase goods or services from you
You now have a business, but this is only the beginning.
The real challenge isn't doing this or making it grow, the real challenge is making it grow exponentially.
What creates exponential growth for this kind of business?
Two things are required for exponential growth - great results and great service.
I judge our success by 1) our patient satisfaction and 2) how engaged people are with what I write. If either goes down, I know I have a problem. I am asking for too much, without providing enough in exchange.
It's as simple as that.
Why is this so important?
When you don't provide great results and great service, you wind up "churning" through subscribers, clients, patients, and customers.
"Churn" is a symptom of mediocrity.
Most businesses don't care about excellence, they care about profitability. They take short-term profits over long-term impact every single time.
Building a business based on exceptional service and results is much harder than building a business that just dumps money into advertising, sells people aggressively, and then just turns around and spends more money to get more leads. These businesses operate on a linear growth model. As in, you put in $10 and pull out $100.
Putting in $10 and pulling out $100 sounds good, but it is a linear growth function.
Linear growth is pathetic compared to exponential growth.
How do you access exponential growth?
You provide service and results that are so good that people send you their friends and family for free. One patient sends you ten patients, ten patients send you one hundred patients, one hundred patients send you one thousand patients, and so on.
That's the key to genuine success. That's the key to building a practice that works for you.
Most practitioners make some combination of mistakes that I explain the remedies to in my post on membership-based practices.
This all starts with the mindset that you are not creating a business, you are caring for a community.
A community does not have walls. It does not have boundaries or borders. It does not exist in time and space. It is a series of experiences stored in the minds of those you have touched. That's what your community is. You are in the "business" of creating these opportunities.
This is how I built what I've built. This is why I can retire at 36-years-old. It started with a ruthless dedication to quality. We don't take money we don't think we can earn. We don't write checks we can't cash. In this way, we create massive goodwill with our patients, which turns into endless referral and repeat business.
If you're a practitioner looking to escape whatever prison you're trapped in, whether it's your own practice or someone else's, let's talk. Fill out this form, and let’s talk. I want to help you help people. Let's find out how.
Until next time, be well,
Dr. Stillman
Thank you for sharing this article, Dr. Stillman. It is informative and also motivating. I can feel the energy behind it driving me to get out of mediocrity that I feel like I fight against daily. It was also a great reminder to me of how I got into my field of pelvic therapy and that is to help women overcome the limits that the mainstream world places on them, like there is nothing we can do about pelvic floor dysfunction after having a baby (prolapse, incontinence, bowel dysfunction, etc.). This was the fire that got me into this specialty and this is the fire I seek again. I look forward to reading more of your articles.