Thanks for tuning into the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom! Today, we’re sitting down with entrepreneurial power couple, Dr. Dallas Buchanan, and his wife, Michelle.
While they didn’t start out their professional careers with entrepreneurship in mind, it was clear that the best path forward for Dr. Buchanan and his wife allowed them to make the rules and call their own shots. Michelle, who also has a background in nursing, threw Dallas a proverbial life-raft to his practice and allowed them to open their options and eventually tag-team the process of opening a practice.
Just like any business, Michelle and Dallas had to consider the market where they wanted to open their practice. They had to look at competition, the people they’d serve, and every other factor that comes with starting a new location. But, in medical training, there’s no entrepreneur training and certainly no business management training. It is a daunting task—how often do you hear of a medical practice going under? But, as Michelle and Dallas both agree, eventually, you just have to take the plunge. If you have a product or service that you think that the community is going to receive well, and you’re passionate about what you do, there is room to grow. You just have to accept that you’re going to stumble, and you’re going to make some mistakes. And in the end, you’re going to come out and more positives than negatives, and you’ll continue to grow from there.
Having a supportive spouse as your partner in the process is a plus, but reaching out to friends and business leaders helps smooth out the logistics of starting a business on the backend. The truth is, people, want to see you succeed.
Delegation, as we’ve mentioned on the show before, is crucial when running a business. For Michelle and Dr. Buchanan, hiring an accountant, an attorney, and front-end folks to handle client contact was the first place to start. You’re going to find your strengths and weaknesses, whether you want to admit them or not, they say, so having support to manage all the moving parts is an essential lesson. Plus, watching the people you trust knock it out of the park is satisfying.
In the end, starting this practice was about the autonomy to do things in their style. when you don’t own the ship, Dallas says, you can’t choose the direction that the ship gets steered. The buck stops with you. There has got to be something you can tweak to make it your own.
Starting the practice didn’t come without surprises. Learning everything that was previously not on the radar is humbling. In addition, the amount of work it takes can come as quite the jump for some. After the patients go home, there is still work on the business side to do. Working so closely with your partner has pros and cons as well. It’s incredibly rewarding to watch something you built together grow, but you have to be very intentional about the boundary that separates professional from personal life.
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