Essential tips for the physician-entrepreneur [PODCAST]

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“Being an entrepreneur can be a lonely road. Everyone dreams of life after a successful round of funds being raised, staff being hired, and plunging headfirst into the making and shipping of widgets. But there are many days which no one talks about, where a budding entrepreneur must find a way to get ideas from their brain to a whiteboard to a minimum viable product. In those times, progress can seem elusive, and sometimes even when the resources are at hand, we may not know if we are moving forward.”

Amelia L. Bueche is an osteopathic physician and founder, This Osteopathic Life. Akash Sharma is a nuclear radiologist and can be reached at Jeevun.

They share their stories and discuss their KevinMD article, “Accountability partnership: a secret ingredient for entrepreneurial success.”

This episode is sponsored by Elsevier Health. Looking to update your personal or professional medical library? Shop Elsevier Health’s Holiday Sale and save up to 35% on your purchase of medical books! Plus, you can take an extra 5% off your order with code KEVINMD at checkout. Take advantage of the biggest sale of the year from Elsevier, the world-leading provider of medical books and reference materials. Shop us.elsevierhealth.com now through December 31.

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have Akash Sharma and Amelia Bueche. Akash is a nuclear radiologist, and Amelia is an osteopathic physician. Together they co-wrote the article “Accountability partnership: a secret ingredient for entrepreneurial success.” Akash and Amelia, welcome to the show.

Akash Sharma: Thanks for having us.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your article in a little bit, but Akash, why don’t we start with you? Can you share your story and your journey to where you are today?

Akash Sharma: Sure. So my name is Akash Sharma. I’m a nuclear radiologist, and I’ve been doing it for 16 years. I’ve done both academic practice and private practice. Currently I’m in an academic practice in northern Florida. And basically, I have always been interested in business. I actually got an MBA about 10 years ago, and people always ask me, “What did you do with an MBA?” So I think it was more just for my own learning rather than anything else. It did help me look at life differently. So along the way, I also got to know people in the business world, entrepreneurship, and so forth.

Personally, from a financial point of view, I’ve always invested in stocks mostly, but this year, especially with COVID, and I’m sure we’ll get more into it, I’ve been looking more into other ways of being entrepreneurial, whether it’s real estate or life coaching, as Amelia is a life coach, and she’s currently my coach. So these are the things that interest me and where I’m headed, I think, in the future.

Kevin Pho: Wonderful. And Amelia, you’ve been on the show in the past. Welcome back. Now, for those who didn’t follow your last episode, can you just briefly share your story and your journey?

Amelia L. Bueche: Sure. So I’m an osteopathic physician, and my specialty is in neuromusculoskeletal medicine. I worked for about 10 years within a massive health care system, then took the launch into solo private practice, and then was in a group. And so, as I see it, that solo private practice is really my first stage of entrepreneurial work. Although, even when I was in the health care system, I helped rehab the office and create the architectural design. I was always looking for ways to be more innovative, even within the system.

And this year, like with most of us, it’s called me to more creativity. And so I’ve moved into the coaching realm full time and also looked at how I can expand these ideas I’ve had for medicine, perhaps beyond some of those confines of the system. An experience with a group called Leverage and Growth Accelerator, which we saw you first at the summit, is what brought me together with Akash toward the writing of this article and expanded my understanding of how it can be possible to be successful as a physician-entrepreneur.

Kevin Pho: Akash, on this podcast, we have so many physician-entrepreneurs, and also on Facebook and in various groups, I see so many physicians who are entering the business world. Now, why do you think that is? Why do you think so many physicians are interested in running or starting a business?

Akash Sharma: If we go with the short-term answer, it’s basically, I think, what happened with COVID, as a lot of people lost job security. It’s something that we’ve always known. Our parents told us, “Hey, if you become a physician, job security, 110 percent. It’s great.” Unfortunately, this time around, that wasn’t the case. So I think people are starting to question that aspect of what is important to us.

I always think in terms of professional, personal, financial balance is what makes your life. So the financial aspect of it suddenly is getting rocked. And then, personally, I’ve noticed a lot of people are feeling burned out. And it’s legitimate. Our health care system is very taxed. So if you already have one peg of your table that’s wobbly, and then the second one becomes wobbly, suddenly you’re thinking, “Hey, I can’t be here anymore.” And I think a lot of that has led to certain people starting to explore. Some people are probably just reinforcing what they have, and others are saying, “Hey, what else can I do?”

And I have also noticed, as a radiologist, a lot of people on the campus, not just radiologists, are very creative. We’re always looking for creative outlets. So if you can do something you always wanted to do. You ask a physician, “Hey, if you weren’t a doctor, what would you be?” “Hey, I want to be a painter. I want to be a rock star.” You take something you wanted to do, and then you have this external stimulus that’s forcing you to change, and you try to bring them together, and it seems a natural progression for many people to say, “I want to go do something on my own. I’m ready, or I’m being forced to, but either way, this is where I want to go.”

Kevin Pho: And Amelia, has being a physician helped you or hurt you in your entrepreneur ventures?

Amelia L. Bueche: I think a little bit of both, and we’ll go with the hurt first, and then we’ll warm it up to what’s been helpful. I think for physicians, we think we need a lot of external markers, validations, certificates, trainings in order to qualify to do something. And entrepreneurship really allows you freedom to explore, and there are no requirements. You know, many industries are unregulated. Coaching may be one of them, like we talked about last time. And so stepping beyond, right, “I don’t quite have that degree yet. I don’t have enough hours of expertise to say I can launch this new business,” I think that can really hold physicians back.

And what’s helpful is when you can get past that, to know that we have a lot of experience, and we’ve actually been vetted in a lot of the ways entrepreneurs might have struggles: engaging with people, building rapport, building trust, knowing how to interact with a wide variety of individuals. That can be beneficial. And so we can take those access points with us if we can get past a little bit of maybe the ego or the self-consciousness that we might not have the business acumen, but know that lots of skills we actually have learned through physician training can apply in the business world.

Kevin Pho: So let’s transition into the KevinMD article that both of you co-wrote, “Accountability partnership: a secret ingredient for entrepreneurial success.” Akash, for those who haven’t read that article, can you just walk my audience through it and maybe share the story of why you and Amelia decided to co-write it?

Akash Sharma: Sure, I’ll start with the story first. So basically, we’re both in the Leverage and Growth Accelerator program that Peter and Preena are running. And so we were put together as part of an accountability exercise. They were putting the course together, and Amelia and I were in the first cohort. So we met, virtually, and talked about things and what our goals were for ourselves and started working through them. We’re obviously coming from different backgrounds, and I’m just every day amazed by how accomplished Amelia is, and she’s sort of a great role model for me.

And as we were working through our own personal goals as partners, helping each other just as a soundboard, it just seemed like a good idea to take our experience and sort of codify it and say, “Oh, if you want to do this, this seems to be working. This might be something you want to try.” And the reason you want to try it is, and I’m a big fan of balance, entrepreneurs are sort of lonely people, just by what we do. But if you have a chance to balance that out with getting at least one person who’s also an entrepreneur who understands you, then they can help you perhaps get out of a rut or do other things. And that’s sort of the premise of the article as well.

And to briefly summarize the article, I would say that there are three main things we thought would help. One is that having a partner who’s trying to do something similar, not necessarily the same, gives you a chance to create a space where you can test your ideas in a safe space. And secondly, having a partner lets you sort of shake the cobwebs a little bit. So I’ve been thinking the same thing, I’m stuck, what do I do? But Amelia comes along and says, “Hey, why don’t you try this way?” Or, “This is what I’m doing. What do you think about that?” And suddenly, you’re looking at the same 3D puzzle differently.

And lastly, you want to have a finite time marker. Say, “OK, so we’ll do this for six weeks.” That’s what our program was for. And what that does is it allows you to focus for a period of time and not feel like you got lost or sidetracked. And a lot of people want to. Also, the pace might be different. So once you get to have a friend, you get to have a partner, you work at a certain pace. “OK, fine, this is great. I’m going to diverge a little bit and come back.” So if you saw our progress through the last few months, it’s clearly a very different track and a different pace, but we’re still working together and sort of keeping in touch with each other.

Kevin Pho: And Amelia, so if I’m a physician who wants to start a business or have some type of entrepreneurial venture, and I wanted to find an accountability partner, what kind of traits should I be looking for in that person? And even to take a step back, how do I even start finding one?

Amelia L. Bueche: Yes, so the groups can be helpful, and the Leverage and Growth group is a really natural way. It’s people of that like-minded entrepreneurship. And what I would like to say is, look beyond where you might expect. We often stay in our own specialty groups, in our own geographic region, and right now especially, we have access to the whole country and beyond. And so look beyond those borders. Think about people maybe even outside of medicine, stepping into the business world more fully, and see if there’s someone there that might be accessible to you. You know, Facebook, social media does grant us access to lots of these groups.

And I’d encourage you to look for someone with some common interest. So we filled out a few questions that said, “Do you want to talk about real estate or coaching or writing?” And so it helped hone that in. But I think it can also be helpful if you just know you come from that common space of wanting to be an entrepreneur. Even that can be enough of a common ground. And that can even be helpful to give you a totally different perspective on what you’re trying to do, especially if you’re trying to hone your message, which is a big part of being an entrepreneur. Saying it to someone who might not be familiar with what you’re doing gives you that feedback to know: Is it clear what I’m saying? Can you understand this? Because we know what our message is internally, but we might not always be saying it effectively.

So I’d encourage you to look at groups beyond what you might originally expect. Just look for that common thread of entrepreneurialism. And if it’s possible, you can hone in on some of those key common interest areas if there’s a certain subset of business, but generally speaking, be open to getting feedback and trusting. Again, we’ve been siloed a lot in medicine. We stay with our specialties, we stay in a hospital health care system, but it’s actually possible to really learn from people beyond our specialties, right?

Akash and I are a perfect example of that. We’re crossing genders, we’re crossing backgrounds, we’re crossing specialties. I’m a DO, he’s an MD, and yet we found a lot of common threads that brought us together on this project. And we’ve been able to extend that relationship beyond those acute six weeks, and I would say we’re not necessarily in an accountability partnership now, right? We’ve moved into more of a friendship and a collegiality, and it can grow from there, but that intensive six weeks helps us to really gain from the business perspective from one another.

Kevin Pho: And Amelia, in these entrepreneurial physician groups that you’re in, what are some examples of other businesses physicians are either starting up or being involved in?

Amelia L. Bueche: I’m so impressed with the wide variety. There are products. People are taking new innovations and inventions to market. There are some who are working on different programs. There’s a lot of CME and coaching that’s happening. There are programs to get a VA, right? So they’re addressing kind of the business issues of entrepreneurs, writing books, time management. There are all kinds of different programs that are out there.

And so I’d encourage anyone who has any idea that it probably can be a business, right? And it can be a labor of love, but it’s also OK for it to generate income, to be sustainable, to give you some more of that freedom that we thought we had, like Akash said, with the job security that may not be as secure.

Kevin Pho: And Akash, so let’s say I’m a physician, and I’m seeing patients five days a week, and I’ve just had enough of it, and I want to start a product, start a service, but I don’t know anything about business. Now, what’s your recommendation? What are some resources, and where can I start?

Akash Sharma: So obviously the low-hanging fruit is, if you are on social media, you find Facebook groups that are closed groups where you can find people like yourself, and obviously the group that we’re in. It’s a paid group. There are free groups. You can make choices there. Secondly, I would say, as a physician, I think we would all relate to this: You find some books to read, and there are many books about entrepreneurship, good books, out there, and I actually intend to put a lot of that on my website as I go.

The other thing is to be open and just listen. Find people like yourself. Find other entrepreneurs. There used to be, at least, meetup groups that are probably virtual now. And just start to look without having a lot of preconceived notions, to say, “I know what I don’t want to do. Let me go find out what I want to do.” It’s a very wide-open field. It’s sort of like how we advise our fellows, or residents: “What do you want to go into? What specialty?” So there’s a mechanism there, a method to that.

And I would say to take it easy and not get overwhelmed, because that’s natural. Even in our group, when people are doing 20 things, you come and say, “Oh, I want to do that. And I want to do that.” And suddenly you can’t do that. So the one thing that I have learned, or I’m still learning, is when you have a new idea that you want to exercise into reality, we’re used to doing mental work. So you’ve got the idea. It’s crucial to think of yourself as a company, to say, “I’ve got finite resources. I need to apply this. I need to allocate time on my calendar. This Friday, after dinner, instead of watching a movie, I’m going to sit down and do some reading, or I’m going to sit down and write out a plan.”

I think giving calendar time is the most important part when you’re starting out. Keeping it finite, and that also helps you not let it take over your life. So I think those are the starting points, and again, just finding people like yourselves. I mean, of course, people can reach out to us on our websites or reach out to you, and I’m sure they’ll get some advice. You know, it’s good to talk to other people.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Amelia Bueche and Akash Sharma. They co-wrote the KevinMD article “Accountability partnership: a secret ingredient for entrepreneurial success.” Amelia, in our groups on Facebook and on social media, I talked to a lot of doctors who are very comfortable with the business aspect of medicine or starting your own business. But if you step outside that world, some people say that detracts from our commitment to patients and we should just be focused on patients and patients alone. Now, what’s your response to that?

Amelia L. Bueche: It’s a great question and something that’s really come up for me a lot as I have stepped away from direct clinical care and fully into the coaching and business realm. And my thoughts around it are that we need to do things outside of the system, right? We can all probably agree that the system isn’t working well and we need creative answers. And I do believe that we need to have physicians who stay in the system and are doing direct clinical care, and support them, absolutely. And that’s a lot of the direct work that I do.

But we also need some creativity that steps outside of the bounds of how things have been done so we can get new answers. And that’s actually going to bring health to medicine in a more effective way and give us the solutions so we can provide better care, meaningful care, care that supports health and doesn’t just chase disease. And so I’d encourage physicians to know that whatever that business avenue is, taking that creative energy into that space, with the background of knowing your bottom line of care for patients, ultimately, it will come back full circle. We’re going to come back.

We’re seeing physicians being elected to office right now. You know, it’s the time of the election when we’re recording this, and that’s going to make a difference. So trust yourself, and trust that stepping away from direct patient care, I do believe, can actually bring us back to effective practice of medicine.

Kevin Pho: And my final question, I’m going to ask both of you the same one. Akash, what is your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Akash Sharma: The one thing I want to follow up on, from what Amelia said and your question, is I think we need, as physicians, to become comfortable with the idea that we can be more than one thing. I’m a physician, I’m a father, I’m a husband, and I’m an aspiring entrepreneur. The take-home message would be: Explore, be open, find a partner, somebody who’s going in the same direction with you, set goals for yourself, and also make sure you’re helping each other. And if you can do that, even if you want to be an entrepreneur who’s doing a solo journey, having people on the same road is just something that helps you a lot.

Kevin Pho: And Amelia, what is your take-home message?

Amelia L. Bueche: My take-home is to really look beyond those initial circles you might have thought were your network. And especially in this time, with the access that we have, trust that beyond your specialty, beyond your health care system, beyond your region, there are people who will see and know and hear what you’re doing and want to help and support you, and that we can all be better together. And so if you’re not finding it directly where you are, it’s not that it’s not there. It might not be directly there. It’s there in the world, and so just look outside and trust that you’ll find it.

Kevin Pho: Amelia and Akash, thank you so much for your time and insight, and thank you both for being on the show.

Amelia L. Bueche: Thank you for having us.

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