You're a Doctor. But You're Also the CEO.

There is a strange expectation placed on physicians who decide to own a business.

You spend years learning medicine. You become exceptionally skilled at diagnosing problems, evaluating risk and making complex decisions.

Then you open a practice — and suddenly you're expected to understand finance, hiring, marketing, operations, pricing, leadership, technology, customer experience and strategy.

Usually without ever having been taught any of it.

That's one of the reasons we created FoundHER MD.

Owning a practice requires a different skill set

Being an exceptional physician and being an exceptional business owner are two different jobs.

Neither is more important than the other.

But if you own the practice, the health of the business eventually affects your ability to practice medicine the way you want.

As the owner, you're making decisions about questions like:

What should we invest in?
When should we hire?
Which services should we grow?
Are we charging appropriately?
Is our marketing actually working?
Why are we so busy but don't seem to have enough money?
Should we add another location?
What should I delegate?
What should I stop doing?

Those aren't clinical questions.

They're CEO questions.

“You don’t need to know everything. You need enough visibility to know what questions to ask.”

CEOs don't have to know everything

One misconception about leadership is that the CEO should have all the answers.

Great leaders don't.

What they do have is enough understanding to ask better questions.

You don't have to become an accountant to understand your financials.

You don't have to become a marketer to understand whether your marketing is producing results.

You don't have to become an HR expert to build a strong team.

And you certainly don't have to do everything yourself.

But you do need enough visibility into your business to know what's working, what's not and where you need help.

Start looking at your practice differently

One simple exercise I recommend to business owners is to occasionally step outside their day-to-day role and look at their company as if they had just been hired to run it.

Ask yourself:

If I became CEO of this company today, what would concern me?

What would I investigate?

What would I stop doing?

Where would I invest?

What doesn't make sense?

What problem has everyone simply learned to live with?

This is something corporations do constantly.

They examine performance, identify priorities and make changes.

Small businesses often don't — because the owner is too busy working inside the business to step outside of it.

Your time is one of the company's most valuable resources

Physician owners have an additional challenge: their time generates revenue.

That means every hour you spend solving a scheduling problem, chasing a vendor, fixing a staff issue or figuring out an administrative process has an opportunity cost.

Sometimes the highest-value decision you can make as CEO isn't doing more.

It's deciding what only you should be doing — and building a business that doesn't require you to personally solve everything else.

Give yourself permission to learn the business

You didn't walk into medical school knowing how to practice medicine.

You learned it.

Business is no different.

You don't need an MBA.

You need curiosity, the willingness to understand the fundamentals and people around you who can help fill the gaps.

And once you begin looking at your practice not only as a place where you care for patients but as a business that needs to be intentionally led, something changes.

You stop simply reacting to the business.

You start running it.

FoundHER MD exists to help women physicians build that skill set — together.

The Physician CEO Mindset