New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

Question

We were in Denver for the CHEC conference recently and enjoyed your talks at the "mini-bootcamp".  I've had 19 years of experience as a family physician, with the last 11 in private practice. At this point in my life, I'm interested in doing something different and would love to work from home to have more time shepherding my family. I would like to start my own company and have my wife (a nurse) and four children, age 8-15, help me with the business.  I would appreciate any ideas you have or resources/mentors that might be available.

Answer

The first step I would recommend is to spend some time introspectively seeking God's guidance in terms of defining the evaluation criteria and context in which you would like to be a provider and leader for your family.  As described in the Building a Business from Start to Finish at the CHEC conference, I would suggest defining your Spiritual, Personal and Business evaluation criteria along these lines:

• Spiritual evaluation criteria:
  • God-honoring business concept
  • Does not cause anyone to stumble
  • Value-added product or service; promotes increase
• Personal evaluation criteria:
  • Your spiritual gifts
  • Your passion to serve others
  • Your abilities
  • Your personality
  • Your experiences
  • Your ideal context
  • Your resources
• Business evaluation criteria: (see the Analysis section for more on this)
  • Industry
  • Financial
  • Operational
  • Product/Service
  • Customer

Then I would suggest developing several ideas or scenarios in which you could build a business that meet all of your goals and criteria.

 

A few ideas pop to mind based upon your profile:

• Develop a pre-paid medical practice where you practice from home (or a small office on your property) and where your patients pay you a monthly retainer rather than paying insurance to a health insurance company.  You could both benefit by cutting out a lot of waste and red tape.  You would also want to add a catastrophic coverage plan that is part of the monthly amount.  Key question: do you have enough of a following in your practice or your local market that would step outside of the box and consider such a move?  Suggestion: do a quick survey once you've done some business planning and ask them at what price levels and service levels they would consider switching over.

• Same as above, only do a cash-only practice.  This may be less interesting for a number of reasons including the potentially "bumpy" cash flow that the prepaid scenario smoothes out.

• Develop a focused cash-based practice that you can manage from home.  One doctor I know and have been blessed by, is the doctor that performed my reversal (that led to a reversal baby - praise God).  His practice is a small cash-only specialty where he performs only reversals on specific days of the week and he works with his wife and one of his daughters.  He does not do any marketing, but has all the word-of-mouth referral business he can handle.  He is in full control of his schedule, he is contributing mightily to Kingdom purposes and he is a true blessing to many, many like-minded families.

• Create a home health care agency where you care for elderly patients on your homestead.  As opposed to a typical home health care agency with no medical staff onsite, you and your wife would form a potent team of expertise that you could use to differentiate and compete against other local home health care agencies.  In most cases you can charge $2,000 - $3,000 per month per patient with added fees for Doctor and Nursing services.

• Set up and manage a medical lab from home.  One doctor I know (a blood specialist) runs a blood diagnostics lab from his family homestead.  He has a small separate "office/lab" building on his property down the path from his house.  Because of your more general experience as a family physician, this may be a stretch to carve out enough of a niche, but it is a very interesting scenario that works well for him.