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How this Physician Wrote a Children’s Book to Encourage Financial Literacy with Michele Cho-Dorado, MD

We delve into the remarkable journey of Michele Cho-Durado, a pediatric gastroenterologist who transitioned from clinical practice to non-clinical endeavors while also authoring a book to enhance her child’s financial education and promote financial literacy. Join us as we explore Michele’s unique perspective as a healthcare professional and her passion for empowering children with essential financial knowledge. 

Through her book, titled Reach for the Stars,  Dr. Cho-Dorado skillfully combines medical expertise with finance, providing practical tools and invaluable insights to foster financial literacy among young readers. We discuss the importance of financial education for children, the impact it can have on their future, and the steps parents can take to instill these vital skills. Get ready for an engaging, friendly, and informative conversation that seamlessly combines healthcare, finance, entrepreneurship, and personal growth.

 

 

Dr. Michele Cho-Dorados’s website:

https://www.brightfuturesedg.com

Reach for the Stars

https://www.amazon.com/Reach-Stars-Michele-Cho-Dorado/dp/B0BXHN6CR1

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RAW TRANSCRIPT

Mike Woo-Ming MD:  Welcome to another edition of Bootstrap md. This is the podcast for physician and healthcare entrepreneurs, and here we have. On the show today is a physician entrepreneur. I got to meet her in our mastermind group and she’s been doing some amazing things. She is a pediatric gastroenterologist, but now works as a medical director.

She’s a children’s book author and founder of Bright Futures, e d G, and she came up with a book called Reach for the Stars. It’s a children’s book and it introduces basic financial concepts to young kids, BrightFuturesEDG.com was formed to be a platform. To share information on financial literacy while empowering kids to be bold and to think big.

So like to welcome to the program Michele Cho Dorado. Dr. Michele Cho Dorado. Michele, how are you doing?

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: I’m good. How are you, Mike?

Mike Woo-Ming MD: Good. Well, it’s always great chatting with you. I got to know you over the last few months as part of the mastermind that I’ve had with Peter Kim, and now with Vikram Raya and I wanna know, learn about your story cuz you’ve done some tremendous things in terms of a physician and have to take some pretty big leaps.

So share to the audience about what you’ve encountered.

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Yeah, so my background is that I’m a trained pediatric gastroenterologist and I was about eight years into practice as an attending physician when I made a bunch of realizations and made some big pivots in my life.

Up until that point I had just been taught mostly to work and save for retirement, and I thought I would work till maybe 60, 70. It’s basically all I knew. I had, gotten married and had two young kids, and again, about eight years in. I think I just started to realize that I really had not received much of a financial education.

I didn’t know how to really manage money. My husband Ken, who you’ve met started planting some seeds about you, like thoughts about retiring early or passive income and things like that. And I just hadn’t even thought about it. Around the same time I had. Gotten exposed to a community of physicians a lot of people that you know as well.

But you know, a group of physicians who were talking about finances openly. And I just realized that, I’m not the only doctor who felt this way. This was all actually before the pandemic. And again, having two young kids and just kind of trying to get my financial stuff in order. I started to read a little bit, but at that point didn’t have much knowledge still.

I’m gonna back up a little bit because you mentioned that I’m a medical director, so all of this kind of overlaps in terms of, what happened in that timeframe, but with the two young kids, I think I just realized also that I wanted to reprioritize my time a little bit more. I had some thoughts about transitioning out of practice with my first child, but you know, you spend so much time and energy.

To become a doctor. And I was still fairly early in my career and I wasn’t emotionally really ready to process, leaving practice at that time, but it was always kind of in the back of my mind. We had talked about moving geographically as well out of Chicago, which is where we were at the time.

And so, I. I had thought that if there ever were a time where we would move that maybe that might be a good time to transition. So fast forward when I had my second child and I would say there, there were a few like minor health scares that just kind of made me realize that I wasn’t prioritizing.

I. My family, my own health. Work always seemed to come first. And so, around that time is when we had decided, okay, we’re gonna move. I decided to transition outta practice. I took this new position as a medical director for healthcare company, which allowed me to work remotely and. I had to give actually a six month notice to my work before leaving.

And so in the timeframe that I gave my notice, and when I actually completed my time at the practice that’s when the pandemic hit. And so, six months of, everything being on lockdown I had come across Peter Kim’s community, passive income, MD around that time, and he had a virtual summit during the pandemic.

And I didn’t really know much about the community at that time or much about making passive income. And I happened to just catch two of the talks during that week. One of ’em happened to be late tea from late, and Kenji, who does the semi-retired md and then another one was another surgeon Corey Faucet, who’s a surgeon, real estate investor.

And it really. Resonated with me for some reason. Just hearing these other doctors talking about doing things outside of medicine, making passive income, working towards financial freedom, it was just something that I hadn’t really come across before or thought about much. And so something resonated with me at that time and I was talking to my husband and I said, Hey, this sounds like something that, maybe we can do and these other people are doing it and seeing other doctors that were living.

Life after they’ve already experienced what you can do. Making passive income and being in real estate really appealed to us. And so that led to us taking the Zero to Freedom Real Estate Course which just really changed my mindset. I think, again, we were with the community of other physicians who are all in the same boat and At that time a lot of the doctors were also really burnt out cuz in the, it was in the middle of the pandemic.

And so just hearing how the medical profession and jobs were not as stable as everyone had once thought I think it really kinda shed a light on living differently and maybe having different goals. And so we dove into real estate, we started educating ourselves and. I would say the biggest part was just the mindset work.

Honestly I read a ton about personal growth and mindset and real estate and taxes and just soaked in everything I could at that time. My husband and I just started making bigger goals for ourselves and then, as I became more educated on finances, and again, I’m still not, I’m still learning but at the time it was much more than I had ever.

Really been exposed to. Prior to that with the young kids, I just decided, I want our kids to learn this stuff early. And so I ended up writing the book that you mentioned. It’s called Reach for the Stars, and it took, it was a two year process. Honestly, I started the manuscript at that time and wasn’t even sure if, it would happen, but I just kind of stepped to my guns and said, Hey, why can’t I do this?

Again, just thinking bigger. And it took two years for the manuscript to eventually get published and illustrated, and it just, came out a couple months ago now. So that’s been exciting and I’ll pause cuz I saw that you were gonna ask me something.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: What a great story. A great story that, that, that come out.

So I’m gonna have, I’m gonna have you back up a bit cuz you went through your whole Yes. There’s a lot of steps from me and I know the listeners are going well. How did you get from here to there? So let’s talk about when you were in Illinois working as a zoom full-time pediatric gastroenterologist.

And then you were thinking about what else was out there, and you mentioned some circumstances that occurred in your life that made you think about it. Did you share that with your colleagues at all? Your other physicians that you worked with, or staff that you worked with? Did you share it with your family, what you were thinking at the time?

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: So you mean talking about leaving practice altogether? Yeah. Not really, because I wasn’t sure if it was really gonna happen. It was something that I just kind of kept in the back of my mind and I had kind of toyed with the idea. I mean, even from the first thought of having that. Idea to actually happening.

It took two years for me to even process that to become a reality. Again, just because emotionally I wasn’t ready to leave practice. And I, and actually after I left, I can tell you I went through what felt like a grieving process in itself. Yeah, it is. Yeah. But yeah, I mean initially I really didn’t, I think until I knew for sure that’s what I was gonna do, I didn’t wanna vocalize that because again, at any moment I could have changed my mind cuz I, I wasn’t so sure for those two years.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: Yeah. And it’s funny you had six months. I similarly had a similar story when I left medicine or left corporate medicine and. People think it’s just like two weeks. Yeah. And you’re putting your notice. It doesn’t work that way in my circumstances. I had to, I was a shareholder, so I know only wanna leave.

I had to pay to actually leave. And then it was supposed to be for three to four months. And then we, they wanted me to wait around because they wanted to help me train the new person, whoever was going to replace me and, Being a doctor, you still, well, okay, I want to be a team player and help him out, but it’s not easy.

So when you finally transitioned and you made the move to nonclinical medicine. And you can talk more about what you do. How big a jump was that for you?

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: It was very different. I mean, I don’t see patients anymore and I think so much of my identity was in being a pediatric gastroenterologist, and it’s something that I had, I.

Again, spent so many years working towards and I really felt like it was my calling to go into medicine and serve in this way. And so when I made that decision to leave, I think that’s part of what I struggled with was, how can something that I thought was my calling for so long, no longer be, and why am I making this decision and is it the right one?

And I mean all sorts of emotions. And. Obviously I have no regrets. I, it, I mean it’s been the biggest blessing for our family and it’s really changed our entire life actually. I mean, just in terms of not just location, but what we’ve focused our energies on and our time and things like that. But with that said, it was not an easy transition and I think at the time my husband’s not in medicine and it was hard for him to kinda understand.

Why my emotions were all over the place and I don’t think I even quite understood what I was experiencing until months later. But yeah it was not an easy transition, just more emotionally, I think, again, because of what I had put into getting to where I was. And then also, yeah, go ahead.

Well, I was gonna say, being Asian, the first thing I thought when I, gave my notice was that my parents were gonna be upset with me. And, I was scared to tell them. Luckily they both were very supportive. But yeah, it just, again, what I was thinking in my head, Yeah.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: I actually told my mother like a year later.

Yeah. And it, it took her like sounds right. She still doesn’t quantify it sometimes, and I’m sure you’ve got it similar, whether it’s with friends or maybe you’re meeting someone the first time. It’s like when you tell your someone you’re a doctor. Oh. Like, what kind of doctor are you what’s your practice like?

Right. Yeah. Telling them you don’t see patients. I mean, how do you address those questions when you get ’em? Because it comes up often.

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: Yeah. So I had a bit of an identity crisis cuz I was like, do I even say I’m a, am I still a pediatric gastroenterologist?

And you know what, how do I identify myself? I. But I still do because that’s my background and I’m still certified as a pediatric gastroenterologist. I still keep up my CMEs I still go to conferences and, I still go to c m E conferences through the work I’m doing now. And so that’s still where my specialty lies.

So I still call myself that, but, The first year, I really wasn’t sure I had, I felt like I had to explain myself. Every time someone asks me, what do you do? Oh, I’m, a doctor, but I don’t practice anymore, but this and that. And then I just realized, you know what? I don’t need to give a whole like paragraph long explanation every time someone asks me what I do.

Yeah.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: I mean, I had to do, I’ve had, I’ve struggled that for years and I think I did like give the explanation. Like at the time I was actually left medicine and there was like, I had friends who were like, disappointed in me. Like, like, you know what happened? Like, did something happen?

You’re not telling us. But yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. Just kind of keep it short and just kind of move on and I knew an OB, B G Y N, who just like wasn’t practicing and said, he just tells people he’s a delivery man. He’s what? He’s a delivery man. He doesn’t even tell people he’s a doctor.

Michele Cho-Dorado MD:  Yeah. That’s funny.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: So let’s talk about your so do you feel that, it sounds like what you’re telling me, that community that you found was really the impetus to, to get you started. Like, is it true? Is it possible that you might not have been this way if you didn’t find a group of like-minded physicians?

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: That’s definitely true. The timing of everything was such that I had already decided to leave practice and transition to not nonclinical before I found the community. But with that said, it was during that period where I started learning about real estate. I started learning about passive income. I started learning that there’s different things I could do.

I think if I hadn’t found that community, I. Would have just kept working and just focused on working and saving and working towards retirement just the same way I had before. It would’ve been with a different job, but my mindset would not have changed. I definitely would not have written a book. I would not be doing a lot of the entrepreneurial stuff that I am doing now if I had not found that community.

So to answer your question, yes, finding the community has really changed. The direction of where my energy is, where my focus is, and basically my whole journey actually. Yeah.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: So let’s talk about your decision to write a book. I mean, we talked about a little bit, but may, maybe we can go more in depth.

What, was there actually one circumstance or maybe a discussion with your kids or your husband that said, you know what, I’m gonna write a children’s book about financial literacy.

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: So it was more based on my own personal background where I felt I was 40, and I, until then, I really felt financially illiterate.

I hadn’t learned about basic investment strategies. I mean, I was just reading about the stock market and like mutual funds and, basic things that I just had really no knowledge of. And so I think it surprised me that two things, one that I had spent so much time in school and training and had not really received any formal financial education.

And two, that there were so many doctors that felt the same way. And I realized that I was not in the only one in that boat. And that was very clear. And so that surprised me. And so then with our little kids, I felt I wanted to prepare them and expose them to these things earlier on. And they, at the time, they were one in three, so very little.

It’s not like they’re gonna understand these concepts, but my thinking was, If I had something or resource or something where they could at least hear these words be exposed to them, then over time, just hearing things, I think eventually it will sink in or at least they’re familiar with it and so maybe they’re more open to learning about an idea if they’ve heard it before.

And so that was kind of our thought in wanting to introduce this stuff to our kids early. There just wasn’t really a lot of resources for the younger age group. Again, there are, like for teenagers and things like that, they’re a little bit more, but for the little kids, I thought that maybe a picture book would be helpful just to read through like a fun story.

And again, just during that time, I was learning to get past certain limiting beliefs, beliefs of myself that I wasn’t good with money, that I never knew how to handle business. These are all things that I believed because I just wasn’t exposed to it and I wasn’t taught to think any differently.

And so, my husband and I started being more intentional about the way we wanted to live and making specific goals for ourselves. And so that was one of my goals that I set. I just kind of threw out. Initially, I was like, you know what, there’s not like anything like this for kids. I’m gonna do it.

I’m gonna write a book. And it was something that I just wrote on paper. And there’s something about putting something down, saying it out loud and writing it down that keeps you accountable. And that’s kind of how it started. We just started thinking bigger. We k kept ourselves accountable to, making goals and making them happen.

And doctors are focused, motivated people. And so when you kinda set your mind to something Then you make it happen. And that’s kind of what happened with the book.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: And we’ll leave a link here, Amazon link to the book. We can go and check it out. Read for the stars. Lots of great reviews already on there.

It’s been a big hit, but can you give us the story? Story about reach for the Stars. Tell us the story.

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: Yeah, so it’s a little girl who wants to buy something that she really wants. The mom says it’s too expensive. She gets creative, she starts a business. And finds a way to earn money herself to purchase this gift that she wants.

And along the way it just introduces the different concepts of financial literacy. So, she learns to invest money. She learns to open a savings account. She learns to employ her brother and grow her business and be creative in ways to expand the business. And then eventually she also learns to give.

So that’s a big part of it as well at the end, is that, Everyone wants to earn money and spend money, but I think a lot of kids are just naturally very selfish. And so just reminding them that, charitable giving is important and part of even teaching financial literacy, I think, beyond just managing money is that.

It, it can really, if you’re learning, if you’re teaching the budget, if you’re teaching to give, it can develop a sense of social responsibility and charitable giving and build confidence and empower kids to think big. And that’s kind of part of it as well. It’s not just about the money portion, but just equipping kids with vital life skills that will help them to be more confident leaders as they grow up.

So that’s a big part of it as well.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: Yeah and I love it. My kids are now adults now, but when they were, my oldest was around 10 or 11, and I asked them, What is your plan for the future? His answer was, well, I’m going to Joey’s birthday party in a couple weeks. That was his idea of planning for the future.

And I actually encouraged him to one summer and I say encourage, I basically made it mandatory, was to make book reports on some of the, like the classics, like, think and Grow Rich and the As Man Thinketh and I think. He begrudgingly did it back then when he was a pre-teen.

But I think, it stuck with him and now he, he has a 401k and building. Yeah. That’s awesome. Future. Future. So what’s the future for this little girl Is the sequel, is she going into multi-family Airbnb? What’s the

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: Yeah, so I do actually have a couple manuscripts pending.

That’s out with the illustrators. So I do have a couple more books coming out and I really want to. Kind of drill down each concept specifically and then develop a series. And I have a whole bunch of different ideas of what I wanna do. So, it’s just a matter of making that happen. But I mean, I hope that will become a reality.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: Awesome. Well, it is, once you put your mind to it, Michelle, you know it’s gonna and make it happen. And what I love about you is you just, you went out there and just decided to make the book when you know, some of us, just. Just will look like, think about it. And then Book Never Happens.

My first book my second book actually took me like 10 years to actually write, so, more power to you. And so what’s the future for you, Michelle, in terms of what you wanna do with this? With Reach for the Stars and  BrightFuturesEDG tell us about, yeah, tell us about your company.

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: So the platform I developed, After I published the book, because I felt like there was more to share than just the book, and I felt that there were a lot of parents in my same shoes. Now, I’m not any, I’m not a financial expert, but I have young kids. I’m going through it just like every other parent wanting to equip our children to, Funny, smart, and equip them with these life skills that I think financial literacy brings.

And so my hope was to provide resources for other parents as well, and make it easy for them to share these things with ki their kids. So that their kids can learn and it’s all about exposing the kids early. Again, I think, waiting till high school, college is too late. Obviously in my case, waiting till your 40 is too late.

I think the earliest, the earlier the better and as early as possible. And so that’s kind of my. Thought process. So, yeah, I developed the platform really to be able to share the book, share other resources. I have some activity sheets on there to make it more fun, to make it more age appropriate for the little kids.

And I hope to develop it more. I’m, working on building content and just trying to better understand, how I can best serve the, this audience. So yeah, I’m excited to see where it will go. You’ve been a big help as well, so I appreciate that. I appre I

Mike Woo-Ming MD: appreciate that. So if someone wanted to reach out to you, maybe someone, a budding author or maybe looking for help with their kids on and helping them introduce these concepts on financial education, what’s the best place to reach out to you?

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: So the website is www.brightfuturesedg.com. You can contact me on there. The book is on there as well as some other related items. And then the book is also on Amazon. So you can go to Amazon and look for the book for Reach for the Stars.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: All right, well Michelle, thank you so much for the interview. Any last minute thoughts before we end our call today?

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: I just wanna encourage everybody to really be able to think outside the box, to think big. And just like myself, I had limiting beliefs that really kept me back and I felt held me back for many years. So, for anyone that you know has an idea that they think is not possible, I would just say go for it.

Mike Woo-Ming MD: Awesome, awesome. And again, thank you Michelle for joining us today. And I echo her thoughts. If you’ve got something, maybe you have a book inside of you that you wanted to be the great American author and you never thought possibly was be possible, just starts probably just writing your first paragraph, right?

Or even our first few sentences. Do something every single day to keep your culture to your goals and keep moving forward. Thanks again, Michelle.

Michele Cho-Dorado MD: Thank you for having me.

Filed Under: Articles, Entrepreneurship, NonClinical Jobs

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How This Doctor Co-Founded a Company to Help Financially Empower His Colleagues with Kenton Allen MD, MBA

Dr. Kenton Allen, an anesthesiologist and the Co-Founder of Doc2Doc Lending, is on a mission to financially empower physicians. Frustrated with his own roadblocks at acquiring loans,  his entrepreneurial passion led him to help create Doc2Doc Lending,  which offers a variety of financial solutions tailored to the unique needs of doctors, both in training and in practice. Their programs include personal loans for medical practitioners and trainees, as well as a special “Bridge Loan” for those transitioning from training to practice.  By understanding the unique financial pressures of doctors, Doc2Doc provides a service not typically considered by traditional financial institutions. 

Doc 2 Doc Lending

https://www.bootstrapmd.com/doc2doc

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Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Today we’re gonna be talking about loans. Now, I know as physicians, loans tend to follow us wherever we want, but if you’re looking to start a new venture, maybe you’re looking for. Consolidating some credit cards or maybe you’re just needing a personal loan, maybe getting through some tough times.

You’re starting off as a new doctor and maybe just need some help. Well, there are some options and here to let us know more about loans and actually why he as an entrepreneur started his own company. We’ve got an anesthesiologist. He is the director of Anesthesia and Wentworth Surgery Center.

Also the vp. Vice President of the New Hampshire Medical Society after completing some medical expense school at Dartmouth, you finished his residency at Harvard. Began his career in New Hampshire, stirring a family. But when he found out was that when he was looking for sources of capital to help him out, that a lot of times these institutions were not too.

Excited about working with doctors, especially when they’re looking at the loans that we are already coming in increasing debt to income ratio. And he felt that they were ignoring the unique situation that many of us doctors starting out have. So he went out and he created a co-founded his own lending company called DOC to Doc Lending.

He’s gonna tell us all about it today. Please welcome to this show, Dr. Kenton Allen Kenton, how are you doing?

Dr. Kenton Allen: I’m well, Mike, thanks so much for the warm welcome and for for hosting me here today. I’m excited to be here and joining you and your community.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Well, awesome. So anytime you know, doctors talk about loans, we kind of feel uneasy about the talk, but you know, we can turn, certainly take you where you need to be.

Especially in my audience, we’ve got entrepreneurs, they’re looking to start a business. We do talk about bootstrapping quite a bit, but there are times that bootstrapping isn’t enough and maybe we won’t need some help. To get this started. So let’s just talk about your beginning and maybe at the beginning in terms of like medicine.

What actually, got you into to medicine and why did you decide to go that route? I.

Dr. Kenton Allen: Yeah. So my, my, my kind of journey to that point of deciding to go into medicine was was started based on what I liked in, in, in college, I guess, I liked mathematics and biology and I wasn’t sure if that was gonna bring me to benchtop research or to clinical medicine.

And so my first year graduating undergraduate college I. Institute of Health and had a position that allowed me to have a foot in, in, in both worlds essentially. So I worked at the experimental transplantation and immunology branch of the n i H for a year. And in that role we had active clinical trials for patients who had failed all the FDA approved treatment for.

Uncommon cancers and those patients would physically be in Bethesda and we would round on them every day and take blood samples and bone marrow samples. And then we would take those samples and work on ’em in the lab. And and for me, of those two realms, it was the direct patient interaction that that really.

And so, so from there I went on to medical school.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So you ended up going into anesthesia and you talk about, and in your bio I mentioned that, you’re starting your own practice. Tell us about that and what led you to actually looking to get loans to help you further

Dr. Kenton Allen: your career. Sure, yeah.

So, the, my experience that led to the founding of Doc 2 Doc Lending was in my residency. And I. In residency in Boston, I came out of medical school with $225,000 worth of student loan debt. And we lived in Jamaica Plain in Boston, which if anyone was familiar with Boston at least 10 years ago, Jamaica Plain wasn’t the nicest part of Boston.

And still, my, my, my rent was north of $2,000 a month on a $54,000 a year salary. I. A family with two young daughters, under the age of four at that time. And my wife had some ambitions of her own. She supported me as a nurse through medical school and wanted to advance her career and go back and get an additional degree.

And when we did the math together, my salary wasn’t gonna, wasn’t gonna support all of those objectives. And when we looked to supplement my salary, It was really disheartening to see that I was viewed. As a high risk borrower, primarily because of my debt to income ratio. And it seemed really shortsighted because, from the first year of residency we had job opportunities and in some instances, job offers on the table that were lucrative.

And and and again, it seemed as though I was being mis. In the market with respect to what my true risk was. And yeah, I ended up supplementing a lot with with credit cards and, in, in my early thirties asking family members for for support, which was humbling, especially at that kind of stage in my life.

And and so we founded Doc 2 Doc on the business premise that doctors. Uniquely credit worthy and that this niche population should be treated differently. And and that’s what we offer. We offer our flagship product is a personal loan from five to a hundred thousand dollars.

We look at that risk differently. And it allows us to offer most competitive rates and have doctors qualify for our program that in many instances aren’t eligible for programs with with the other options that are out there. So

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: why do you think and I had similar situations when, looking for loans to start my business at the time and I was already an established doctor.

I was already making a good salary. But then when we looked at the time to actually give me the loan it was very small in terms of what I actually could do. What do you think the financial institutions don’t? Don’t see that. Is it just because our debt to income ratio is so high or are there other factors?

Dr. Kenton Allen: That’s one of the factor, but it’s one of the major factors cuz that’s a, that’s so central to the underwriting of of loans in general. And when and there’s really strong data to, to support the reasons why banks underwrite things the way they do the. The piece of this that’s unique is that you need physicians have a very unique career arc.

It doesn’t follow, it doesn’t follow the arc of other professions. And in addition to debt to income ratio, for example we tend to have more immature FICO scores later in life. Look you look at my example, I was in my. My early to mid thirties I was still in training and again, having a relatively depressed salary and carrying a lot of debt.

When you compared that to my peers who I was in college with, who went into finance or management or marketing or consulting, they were about a decade ahead of me. In terms of maturing their credit profile. And so even though there were no black marks against me there were no, or even late payments.

It was just immature. And so when you take that kind of conglomeration of what the typical path is for a doctor it’s it. Impairs us when we apply for these products. And so, and so again we have a company that loans exclusively to doctors. We carve out this niche population, like we understand it better than any other bank, certainly and underwrite the risk appropriately.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Now one of the things that I ki I kind of harp on and it’s still, I still see it today, is that, as physicians we get hardly any financial education whatsoever. I mean, even in my own experience when I was graduating residency, I had a quote, financial planner who happened to be associated with one of the faculty, and it seemed he was more interested in.

His objective rather than my personal financial objective. For someone who started a lending company, what type of financial education did you have?

Dr. Kenton Allen: Yeah, that’s that’s a great question, Mike. The, my my background when I was in medical school, I was kind of fortunate enough to be.

Entering medical school right at the time that Dartmouth was trying to promote their dual degree MD m MBA program. And at the time it was a difficult sell to the medical students and it was difficult because there was a split in the faculty, not just at our medical school, but a, across the country that anyone who was going into or had an interest in business Sure about whether they were serious about a career in medicine and and so a lot of the medical students were weary about about applying and kinda matriculating into that program.

And because the school really wanted to promote it as a way to create leadership physician leadership in medical industry they established a scholarship program. And and it was through that, that I completed that m MBA degree and it opened my eyes a lot to how the world works and how money flows and how.

Businesses, not just within medicine, but in general. Businesses are incentivized by money and and it gave me that background to understand the industry. But more than anything, Mike, it gave me the confidence to To to start something when the opportunity arose. And I certainly didn’t have a background in, in banking.

I co-founded the company with a co-resident of mine, also an anesthesiologist who practices interventional pain medi medicine in between the two of us. We both had that experience of having an MD m MBA background. But again, we didn’t have, we didn’t have a banking background. But what we did have was the.

It’s that that we could start a company and that we could supplement the gaps in our knowledge with really smart people who shared our vision or excited about what we were building. And that’s been the case for the last six years now. So, at

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: the time of this recording, obviously there’s a lot been of financial upheaval, of late, we know about banks.

Are going, some banks are, and getting out in trouble like the Silicon Valley Bank. Can we talk about your loan? So who funds your loans? Is that something we can we can discuss?

Dr. Kenton Allen: Absolutely. Yeah. When I’ll give you, I’ll expand on the answer a little bit cuz it’s changed over time.

When we started and founded this company we made our loans through a pilot program. Purely through fundraising. 2 million only started the company and we used that 2 million to make loans to doctors. And the purpose of that was to prove that our business supposition that.

That doctors are uniquely credit worthy that could be proven out over time. And it was accelerated through the covid pandemic Mike. So at the peak of the pandemic, there’s about a 14% impairment rate in the personal loan industry being that defaults, delinquencies payments. Which is very high.

That’s a high number of impairments and it’s kinda under understandably now compared to our portfolio which at that time had grown well beyond 2 million. Across the entire portfolio we had zero defaults zero delinquencies, and we had zero 30 day late payments.

Wow. Which is because a lot of the medical practices the business owners that we lent to were impacted by the pandemic. And yet and yet everybody was maintaining their. Maintaining their their loan with us and making those payments despite that. And so it really kind of gained the attention of the industry.

And since then, since about the beginning of 2019, we’ve had what’s called a debt facility whereby we pull money from a fund supplement cents on the dollar. With our own fundraising to fund those loans. So we have a few partners that that supply that, that funding and believe in our mission and allow us to, to keep our product as, as competitive as it is so,

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Great.

So let’s talk about, we mentioned, the different types of loan you offer. You mentioned your most popular one is the personal loan. Can we talk more about that?

Dr. Kenton Allen: Yeah, so, the personal loan was where we felt the the industry was the mismatch between the true risk and the.

Kinda calculated risk had the biggest discrepancy. And so that was our, that was the product that, that we really founded the company with. And the benefit of the personal loan is it can be used for any reason. We’re underwriting an individual and not a business entity. And so it’s right in line with our supposition that doctors are uniquely credit worthy.

That product, as I mentioned earlier, is between five and a hundred thousand dollars. We have fixed terms. We have no prepayment penalties, and the process is extremely easy to go through. It’s about three computer screens can be done in about five minutes. Funds arrive in in the applicant’s bank account in between five and 10 business days.

You mentioned earlier that there’s a, there’s a cringe when we speak about loans in the, in, in the doctor world because we’re because we tend to use them and have to use them to go on this career arc and. We share that, that sentiment, we we want everybody to get to get the right product to fit the need.

And at times a personal loan isn’t the right product for what someone’s trying to achieve. And to try to act against using the wrong product for a certain cause. We, our team of doctors speaks with every applicant, or at least makes ourself available to every applicant.

Not everybody wants to speak with us and certainly doesn’t have to, but but there’s a team of six doctors on our team and we reach out to every applicant who applies and offer offers to speak with them and just offer our kind of thoughts and advice. What the terms, the loan mean, what they’re trying to use it for, and again make sure that it’s the best option available

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming:And what did you generally the terms of the loan? Of a personal loan?

Dr. Kenton Allen:  Yeah. So, they’re all fixed products between fixed terms of five years. The interest rates range between eight percentiles up to 16 percentiles. That’s risen over time. You’ve mentioned the kind of current industry we’re in now.

Over the course of the last two years, we’ve had to raise our interest rates twice. And for those who think, eight, eight to 60% certainly sounds high. It is. And it’s particularly when you compare to products like student loans or mortgages, which is, which are what people are most used to.

Borrowing for. The reason why personal loan interest rates in general are higher is because there’s no asset to back those. So, so we don’t use at home as a collateral. In the case of student loans, those are backed by the federal government. These are really loans for any purposes purpose.

And they’re and they’re there’s no collateral associated with them. And so as a product in general, Those rates tend to be a little higher. And, I’d encourage people who think it might be a appropriate product for what they’re to do to see what’s out there and compare rates and and confident that you find ours are are as competitive as they come.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: And you said you could get it done within in five minutes. There’s some confusion that we hear between soft pulls and hard pulls. What do you usually assess when you’re looking at someone for a personal loan?

Dr. Kenton Allen: Yeah. So, so amount, A lot of those factors that I mentioned earlier for example, we do not use.

FICO score in the underwriting of our loan, what we do is we pull out the threats of the FICO score that we feel are relevant and we weave out those that we feel don’t apply or or negatively impact doctors disproportionately. Now in addition out some of those factors that the traditional banks look at, We include some doctor specific factors in the underwriting and we have we very generally we have some experience through student loan performance data sets to suggest that the very few number of doctors that do default on, on on loans, Are those that, that tend to drop out for one reason or another.

So, so based upon that, we have some predictors of success in careers, in medicine, for example. And we include those in our underwriting to help benefit the ultimate rate that’s offered to each individual. And so, as a, as kind a 10,000 foot view, Mike we kind of, we tailor this to the niche community by including factors that typically aren’t included.

Moving factors that traditional underwriting that we feel aren’t relevant.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: You mentioned you offer some other loans. Can we talk, discuss those?

Dr. Kenton Allen: Yeah. So, so in addition to the personal loan, we’ve also within the last couple years rolled out new products. And these are products that that we know are, there’s a demand for within our community.

And the most those are practice, medical, dental practice, or a s c buy-in loans. So these are loans that. For someone who is joining a practice from an employee to a private practice position, or someone whose practice is building out or has the opportunity to buy into an associated ambulatory surgery center or procedural center.

It allows them to do that at day one. And for a lot of folks, the alternative to that, Is to have kind of a deferred compensation model for a series of couple years generally until they obtain that full equity partnership. And by, by being able to fund the purchase of that equity at day zero, it allows them to, to recognize the growth and value that they bring to the practice.

And so that equity two years from now the price that, that, that’s worth. They’re able to, they’re able to realize that value as opposed to as opposed to buying in two years from now when when you’ve, they’ve already recognized what they’ve brought to the practice. And so, that’s a very popular product of ours.

We also have a business line of credit particularly for not just medical and dental practices, but entrepreneurial businesses that are, that have since for for two years. And this allows a lot of pressure to be taken off of businesses, particularly with practices that have longer accounts receivable or or certain.

Calendar year variation with how those receivables are paid. And it allows the cost of the practice. Some of that can be pulled from the business line of credit when there’s a, when there’s a capital crunch. And again, these are products that. That our community members were coming to us asking for and initially we didn’t have a way to, to serve that need.

But but again, through the partnerships we’ve built we do now. And so, so again the personal loan continues to be kind of our primary primary product. But as, and as we learn more about what the needs are, we’ve rolled out new products, and those are, two of them we’re popular.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Now as a doctor, and I know it’s just not me, but we’re always getting, I always seem getting more, loan offers in the mail and email, and I’m sure you do too, even though you have a lending company. Putting yourself back to when you were starting out and looking for different loans.

What should doctors be looking at when they’re assessing a loan company?

Dr. Kenton Allen: Yeah, good question. And it’s true, we kind of go from being the ugly duckling to being the swan that, that that every, that everybody wants. The, there’s a couple, there’s a couple of key pieces to look at. When you look at comparing alone to make it apples to apples comparison, the first is understanding the difference between an APR and an interest rate APR being annual per.

Rate and the difference between the a p R and the interest rate is that the APR is inclusive of all the fees associated with that loan. And companies that make loans are allowed to market what their interest rate is, which is not inclusive of all the fees. And some common fees are.

Origination processing fees prepayment fees and so you’ll see some advertisements of very low interest rates apply and then when you get the final terms after your application, they’ll report the a p r first percentage rate inclusive of all the fees. And that’ll be higher than than the interest rate.

And so as you’re looking through your options what you wanna see is really the a p r and that allows you to make it apples to apples comparison. The second is the the loan term. So in general the longer the term of the loan, the higher the interest rate will be. The fit of a longer term is that from a cash flow pers perspective, the monthly payment will be lower.

And the benefit of a lower monthly payment is obviously that it’s less strain on a month-to-month basis. But again, the longer that term, the downside is the more interest you pay over the full life of that of that loan. And so, again, as you’re making decisions about what’s the best product for you, You wanna look at the length of the term, look at it from two perspectives.

One, what the monthly payment is to ensure that’s a monthly payment that’s feasible. And then secondly, what’s the total interest you’ll pay over the loan. And again in conjunction with. What’s affordable on a monthly basis, choose the term that allows you to pay the least amount of interest over the entire term.

And lastly, Mike a really important point is the prepayment penalties. Particularly in the, in, in our career, our income levels can have very significant jumps and can have and can have periods when we transition from one practice to another. Of depressions and and being able to plan for the potential that you can pay off those loans earlier is really important.

And so asking about free payment penalties is paramount. The the prepayment penalties are oftentimes kind of buried in the language of these products. And people don’t realize that that if they wanna get outta debt early, which is a really good thing they may only be able to by, by paying extra.

And it’s something that, we proudly don’t have any prepayment penalty. And and again, unless you ask the question or look are looking for it specifically, you may be surprised.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, I mean, on, on a personal note, I had a business loan and was able to pay it early.

I didn’t wanted to pay it early, and it almost seemed like a, I was getting the runaround now that you weren’t as interested in talking with me as much and it. And finally did, it took about a week before I finally got an answer and I was surprised that what the amount was cuz it certainly was, hidden, I think when I initially signed up for the loan.

But yeah. Great. Three things to to think about Kenton. This has been great. I do want to let you know as a disclosure that Doc 2 Doc Loans is an affiliate partner sponsor for us at Bootstrap md. I. Got into to meet your staff. And I like what we’ve seen and I’m always supporting other physician owned entities that can help other physicians.

So, we’ll have a link if you are someone who’s in a situation where you’re looking to help alone to keep. To kind of make things a little bit easier for you we’ve got a link here. It’s called BootstrapMD.com/doc2doc  And Kenton and  his team will take care of you.

Again, I want to thank you for your time and joining with us today. Any last minute thoughts before we end the call today?

Dr. Kenton Allen: Well, Mike thank you for having me. I I kind of echo your sentiment that what has made this really rewarding on multiple levels is working with what really is our shared community here and and being able to feel.

We have smoothed the path in some ways for the folks walking behind us. I can tell you in my career thus far as a physician, some of the most stressful times have been financial stress, not so much clinical stress. And and and to the extent that we can relieve some of that burden for folks who are in position similar to ours.

It really it really makes makes it worthwhile, is my favorite part of what we do here. So I appreciate you you, you speaking to me and letting us share that story and we look forward to the chance to speak with anybody who who may be interested.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: All right. Again, that’s Dr.

Ken Allen, co-founder of Doc to Doc Lending. Guys, thanks again for listening. If you are in a situation, maybe you need a loan to keep you going, maybe help you out and starting a new venture, maybe some personal issues that, that you need to take care of, reach out to them. Again no cost or no obligation correct Ken, if just looking in terms of a loan, correct?

Dr. Kenton Allen: Yeah absolutely.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming:  Go out and contact them, check out the link that we have for you, and as always, guys, keep moving forward.

 

Filed Under: Articles, Entrepreneurship, Investing

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Why Starting a Side Business May Be the Key to Physician Fulfillment with Sujin Lee, MD

In this eye opening interview, Dr. Sujin Lee is a neuro rehab physician and physician coach who practices medicine part-time while pursuing her interests in research, teaching, consulting, and coaching. She believes that physicians have many skill sets beyond clinical practice that can be utilized in various fields through a side business.  She helps other physicians reach their full potential to create a satisfying life and is presenting a webinar for physicians who are interested in entrepreneurship.  Listen and learn!

Dr. Sujin Lee’s Website:
https://sujin-lee.mykajabi.com/

Dr. Sujin’s Physician Coaches Profile:
https://www.physiciancoaches.com/coaching-category/sujin-lee-md-physician-coaching

Webinar: Achieving Work-Life Balance  through Part-Time Practice with a Purposeful Side Business:
https://sujin-lee.mykajabi.com/achieving-work-life-balance-2023?

Transcript: 

Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD. Today we have a good friend of mine. She’s actually part of my mastermind physician mastermind, and I’ve got to know her over the last few months. I’m very talented and. I feel also very inspirational. She’s a neuro rehab physician.

She’s a single mom of two children. She’s actually a physician coach as well. She’d been practicing medicine part-time to pursue her interest in research, teaching, consulting and coaching while spending time with her kids. Since she’s finished up her fellowship she always been working a lot with women physicians, getting to know them a lot better, and she realized in her part-time practice, she can create the environment for herself to practice medicine on her own terms.

When she helps other physicians to reach their full potential to create a satisfying life, and she’s coming up with a webinar for physicians who are interested in entrepreneurship, which I love to talk about. Welcome to the program, Dr. Sugen Lee Sugen. How are you doing?

Sujin Lee MD: Oh my goodness. I’m doing great. Thank you so much. Your introductory is “I’m like, oh my God, who are you talking about? Is that me?” Thank you so much.

Mike Woo-Ming: And it’s been a long time since we saw each other. I think we just saw each other. Listen, just last week at a little mastermind that we had. With Peter Kim up in Southern California.

But I wanted to talk about you and I’m really excited to, to have you onto the program because I think you’re, I think don’t think you’re doing your story justice because I do think it’s in, it’s inspiring and I think it’d be inspiring to our listeners. So let’s talk about your journey.

Just before the show, you told me, you came to this country, not necessarily to practice medicine, but were interested in music. Tell me more about that.

Sujin Lee MD: It’s an interesting story I never thought about. It’s interesting because that’s part of my story. I put that one as my past, but it’s part of me all the time.

It never goes away. But I’m thinking back, you know what, first time the idea about becoming doctor came from my mom. I was a fifth grade. I was already playing piano for maybe another five years or whatnot. I guess I was pretty good. So a lot of people pushing me to go into music and my mom suggested why don’t you wanna become a doctor at the time?

And I said, because my mom says so. I said no. So I said, I’m gonna go to continue music education. So I ended up going to our school for my junior high in high school in Korea. And I went to college to study music and in college the education program is once you are in certain area, it’s really hard to change any major at the time.

So in college I didn’t like music that much, but I guess I was good enough. But I just continued and I talked to my professor asking, I wanted to do something different, what should I do? And my professor asked me, do you know what you want to do? I said, not really. And she said, just continue what you do and it may lead to something.

So I kept her words to my mind. And then I continue study music. And by the time, around the time that graduating college I wanted to come to the United States. It’s very interesting. I don’t know what happened, but what happened is my mom she’s actually second oldest child with a seven siblings, and she grew up in a countryside in Korea.

She was in charge of taking care of the rest of the sibling. So when she was in high school, her parents, because they lived in countryside, they wanted to send the son to the big city to go to college. And then they asked my mom to be the parent role. So my mom’s regret or something that she always wanted to do was going to college and get the older education and having the career or life that she wanted to do.

I think that’s something that she would want me to do. When I got into the college, she said, you should go visit the United States and see what’s out there. It might be something that you might be interested in the future. So actually she sent me and my friend, and there’s like a package tour thing, so she sent me, She shipped me over there to the United States and that was 1991.

It’s a totally different word. It just opened up my mind and there’s so much opportunity and back in, in Korea as a female there’s a limiting things what you can do. And once you’re in certain way, there’s not much different options you can do. So when I was here as a freshman in college, I saw the opportunity.

Something that I could explore. And I didn’t like the homogeneous culture of the Korea there. It’s a one ethnic background, even back then. It’s worse than, it’s more homogeneous back then than now. So I didn’t like that culture that everyone follows the same thing. If somebody buys one thing, everything, everyone buys that I think it’s known in our culture in Korean-American or Asian-American culture too. I didn’t like that culture. I was looking for something different and it opened up in my mind that I want to go to the United States. I just didn’t know how, and I figured it out, what might be the easiest way to do it, and I realized, okay, I can go to grad school, so let me get into the grad school with the music, because that’s what I was good at and that’s what I was able to do.

So I applied. Doctors are, “We’re so notorious about doing the hardest thing or the most challenging thing that you want to do.” I wanted to go to grad school has the most challenging program. So I applied a couple schools and I was really fortunate to get into one of the top program in the United States.

So I went to New York for two years to go to grad school. That’s how I came to the United States. But towards the end of my college, I knew I didn’t want to continue music. I enjoyed teaching, but I really didn’t enjoy the performance part of it. So I started looking into different options. I was interested in psychology, I was interested in medicine.

So when I was in New York auditioning my program, I went to NYU listening to a seminar or session about how to get into medical school. So back then I was inter international student. I didn’t have any green card. I didn’t have anything. So I asked a question, how hard is it to get into medical school?

And the dean said it’s almost impossible. So I was like, “Okay, let me just get into grad school.” Let me do that first, and then if it happens, then maybe I will have an opportunity later on. So I put it in my back pocket. And then I moved to the United States to study grad study music.

So I was dating at the time. So after graduating we decided to get married and then I moved to San Diego and we had two kids. And around the time my thoughts about going to medicine became more realistic. I wanted to do something different. In California, culture is very different. Korea, my original plan was study music, get doctors in music and go back to Korea and teach in college.

That was my plan, but since I decided to live in the United States, I looked, started looking into different options, and I think I had this desire of helping others or teaching others. I think we all have it as a physician. Maybe that’s why I continued music. My goal was become a professor and teacher, and I guess that’s related too in medicine.

I always enjoyed helping other people and teaching others, so I looked into option in medicine. And interestingly, I was pretty good at math and science even. I was a music major, so I went to community college try out a couple different classes, and I did pretty well. So with the two kids, I made a decision to apply for medical school.

My dad said, you’re crazy. But you’ve been always crazy, so I’m gonna support you, whatever you to do. Yes. I was in San Diego at the time. I think I spent maybe three years to take all the prerequisite courses and do volunteers and research, and I got into UCSD. So that’s how my medical journey started.

Mike Woo-Ming: I love it and I love that you didn’t really take no for an answer when in New York, they said that the dean said, no, it’s almost impossible. And you didn’t accept that. And I really, I didn’t know that. Many doctors have the, the typical, a bachelor’s degree.

MCAT go into medical school, go into music and then community college. Oh, yes. And taking all the three, the prerequisites for a few years. That’s certainly remarkable. You went to you went to medical school you went to residency. Yes. And then you became a doctor in treating patients.

When did you start thinking maybe there were other ways that I could help other people besides clinical medicine?

Sujin Lee MD: I think a lot of physicians, they usually go straight into medical school or take a couple years between, but there’s not that many women physicians who goes to medical school and medical training with the children.

But my circumstance, I already had a kids and I decide to go to medical school. So medical training medical school and residency was a full-time clinical work and I felt I was missing out the time with my children. And I always had a interest in research. I’m a kind of heavy academic kind of personality, a little bit nerdy.

I was interested in research. I wanted to do research. So when I was in resident, I reached out some of the research faculty in the school u c Irvine. I got trained. They’re very well known for the researchers for spinal cord injury. Yeah, I talked to professor and then I volunteered to work at their lab and actually they had opportunity for research grant during my residency.

So I got the research grant. So actually fourth year my resident, I took half six month off to do the research. That’s when I started noticing that, Practicing medicine full-time is not the only option to be a physician. There are many other different things that you can do as a physician.

Actually, it gives you a lot of credit, and the training that we go through has a lot more skill sets than most of the physicians think. When I talk to other physicians, they say, “I don’t know what else to do. I only see the patient.” But if you think about it, seeing a patient, running a team, medical team or rehab team, I’m a rehab physician.

Has a lot more skill than just seeing the patient. Even just seeing the patient is not just seeing the patient. There’s a lot of critical thinking, process, communication, writing, presentation, and dealing with the team, leading the team as a leader. There’s many different skill sets that that we don’t see a lot of times.

So as a researcher we call it “physician scientist”, I. Because I had a research background in spinal cord injury in animal, I decided to go into fellowship and I continued to have the research grant throughout the fellowship. And at the end of the clinical fellowship I did a clinical research fellowship for two years.

So that’s when that I practiced maybe medicine about 50% of the time. And then I had this research about 50% of the time. And so probably that’s why I started seeing the possibility that physicians don’t have to practice medicine all the time. There are many things that we can do. We just need to open up for the opportunity and see what resonates our values and what we are passionate about.

So when I was finishing my fellowship, I had opportunity to, at the university being a full-time clinical faculty. Or I had the option of working part-time clinically. But I had opportunity doing the consulting work medi with a medical device company that spinned off from the research project I did.

And interestingly, I also had opportunity to do some expert witness work. It started with a deposition that I took care of during my residency and I was deposed as a fellow. It was very scary experience. Yeah. But that opens up the whole other area, that there is other work that can be utilized or use our skillset, who needs our care, who needs our expertise.

I was able to see that opportunity. So when I was finishing my fellowship I had a choice: Either going into a hundred percent clinical work in the university or stay in a private practice and piecemeal together clinical work and research and other administration side of work. I decided to do that because that was more aligned of my value, that I don’t wanna miss out more time with my children, which I already did during my medical school and training.

So that’s how I got started with my career. So I never actually fully practiced a hundred percent clinical practice. I guess probably I went through that burnout during my training. And I knew that I didn’t wanna continue to do that as attending. So that’s like already what, seven years ago in, that’s the time that I saw all different opportunities.

Mike Woo-Ming: I like it. And you mentioned the burnout, it also comes with, finding that it sounds like a drive was your children, and that’s what it was it for me. Many people decide to start up a career. They think, A lot of people think it’s, oh, just for the money or am I gonna make a million dollars?

But really what it comes down to, for me it was more time with my family. Yes. My kids were young, one who was autistic. I wanted to spend more time with them. Yes. What also sounds like what also drove you to is your curiosity over other things that you could be doing besides medicine. Is that what led you into coaching?

Sujin Lee MD: Actually coaching came to me. I was looking for something more, so I was already doing part-time clinical work, and then I had opportunity to become a associate program director for the program during the covid. And towards the end of the covid. During Covid, actually, I felt a lot of stress.

Everybody experienced extreme stress during Covid as a physician that we feel that impact the most. And most of the stress was from protecting my residents because they were getting pulled over to ICUs, even their rehab of residents because the hospital was short of a staff. So we ended up spending a lot of time to protecting them and then those transition and towards the end I felt there must be something else.

You practice medicine the first couple years as attending, you master for your skill. Of course, there’s more things to learn in. I’m in the academic setting because I work with the residents all the time. You can always learn more, but we all agree about 80, 90% of the time it’s a bread and butter.

You can actually treat them without thinking too much of it. And I think maybe I have a little bit of a curiosity and maybe some desire to helping others. And I take care of all the people with the neurogenic deficits like stroke, spinal cord injury like that. So I was doing that, but I felt something is limiting me.

I wanted to go into more research or doing some more in-depth work. I didn’t know what it was. And also I got separated at the time, so I was looking into financial mean, how to grow my asset and wealth and actually being retired. Because I started my career late and I immigrated later on.

I didn’t know anything about the retirement. But my mom actually had some of the properties in Korea, that’s one of the her side business, what she did as a stay-home mom. So I felt okay, I wanna buy another property. So I found Peter Kim’s conference in LA. So I went there 2019, right before Covid, and then I realized there’s a whole different physicians doing entrepreneurship.

So I met physician coaches and other people in the different entrepreneurship. I got introduced to the coaching area physician coaching idea. And during the covid that really ramped up. Like it really helped me managing my mind, managing my resident’s situation and dealing with all the stress and trauma we go through.

So I realized this is something that I want to do and also coaching helped me to grow more. I used to go to therapy on and off 10 years with a relationship and my experience as a physician and different challenges. But when I went to therapy, the therapist said, you’re doing fine. There’s nothing wrong with you.

Why do you wanna keep continuing therapy? But I was looking for where do I go from now? I’m already successful, but I want something more. I initially thought, what’s wrong with me? I have everything. I have healthy kids, I have a great career, I have everything, but I wanted something more.

And what helped me to find that? What’s that more and why do we want to create more? I found it through the coaching, so that helped me. Yes. So once I know that area I wanted to. I realized actually I was already doing it for my residents and colleagues and medical students guiding them as a mentorship.

And there’s a lot of the coaching part of it, and I realized there are many people who became, who becomes attending after that. We feel like we’re lost up to become an attending. There’s a map. Once you graduate undergrad? Some people say you gotta be bio major or what? A science major? I don’t believe that.

After undergrad, you go to medical school and you go to internship and residency and you get a job, then you’re done. But the reality is the life actually starts when you become attending. You started having a family, you have a responsibility in finance and as an adult or as a parent, there’s a lot of challenging comes.

And as we get older, I think the things in what happens in life, the illness or death of family, the things that we were sheltered when we’re younger, it becomes more relevant to us. Maybe because I’m in the rehab space. But there’s a lot of things going on and there’s the challenges. A lot of times there’s no mentor or there’s no guidance.

During medical school we have a faculty during the residency, yes, we have attending, but once you become a attending, you, unless somebody finds it actively, it’s not there. They’re not given to you. Yeah, and I think the coaching is the one that gives you guideline, but the difference is up to that attending somebody gives you what you’re supposed to do.

There’s a map, but once you become attending, you can create your own map. But the problem is we were never learned how to create our map.

Mike Woo-Ming: For those who’ve never attended a conference… Like the one that you had mentioned when you were with like-minded physicians. How big an of an impact was it?

But to go into that conference, it sounds like it, it was something that you probably wouldn’t got if you just stayed home and maybe got the recordings.

Sujin Lee MD: I think the biggest benefit or impact is seeing there are other people who are thinking similar. And there are people who already walked through the path that I am about to walk through.

And I truly believe even the destination is, might be same. I wanna have a hundred units, I wanna become a successful coach. The destination might be there, but the way, how you get there, I think everybody’s different because everybody is unique. And we don’t see that when we are in medical school.

Even that’s not true. Even becoming a doctor, everyone has their own unique pathway. Some people ace everything. Some people struggle a little bit, some people don’t match. They go to second match. There’s all different things, but we don’t talk about those things and we try to hide. And once you become attending, when you go to the next destination, and there’s a little bit of a stigma about.

Why do you wanna do something else when you’re a successful physician? There’s a lot of judge feel that culture needs to be changed, especially current healthcare system, how we were told what to do. And I think the mission or the passion of a physician is most of a physicians who go into medicine.

Our drive is to help others. What I see in current healthcare system is it provides the platform, but it really takes a lot of effort from us and maybe we’re not compensated enough. I’m not just talking about how much money we get paid and we’re talking about the emotional, psychological support and being able to have a life as a human, not instead of working 70 hours straight or 30 hours straight, look at the trauma attendings. There’s no limitation. Some trauma attendings are 30 hours. There’s another level one trauma come in. You go to trauma bay, take care of the patients, save the lives. But who saves those people who are working hard? We don’t have that protection.

To me, I think both things need to be changed. The system needs to change, but sometimes the systemic change comes later or doesn’t come until the people in there brings the issues to them. And my role, or what I, the reason why I advocating part-time, one part is as a full-time physician, we’re already working double of the time that most of the people work.

When we stay full-time, it’s 32 hours. Or 40 hours. I believe average patient works 60 hours if you’re working full-time. Wow. So the concept of a part-time for us could be still full-time, but that’s our mode, right? I need to work 60 hours. That’s my full-time. Maybe that’s not how it’s supposed to be.

Maybe that’s not healthy. So I learned that during my residency and I understood what matters to. me, my children and my time. Self-care… I wanna share that with other people, normalizing. Even I say it’s a part-time, maybe it’s a full-time for other, careers. And I guess what we trained or we developed that character in order to go through the medical training.

You gotta be really dedicated. Medicine is not something that you can do it as a hobby. There’s many professions that you have to dedicate it to be very successful. And being a physician is extreme success because human life depends on it. But if you look at everybody who’s successful in business, successful in entertainment industry, they work really hard.

But we carry that in our personal life too. So a lot of perfectionism, we have to work hard and we get burned out. Here we go the other way, burned out over there. We need to unlearn those things. And my mean, my tool is showing part-time medicine is fine and it’s okay to do something outside of medicine.

If you like your reason. If you wanna make money, yeah. Go ahead and make money If you wanna do your painting, yes. Go ahead and do painting. If you wanna volunteer. Yes, go ahead. I volunteer. And a lot of, there’s a fear about what if I lose my income? What if people think about, I’m not half of a doctor because I only practice halftime.

I just wanna share that’s not really true.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, I did a a survey to my list on, “would you rather make $500,000 a year working five days a week, or would, or a hundred thousand dollars a year working one day a week?” You can guess what most of them chose was the a hundred thousand. Let’s talk about your coaching and what you do to help other doctors.

Sujin Lee MD: Okay. So when I became a coach, I, we all have a niche drama.

A lot of coaches have a niche drama. Of course, I had a niche drama. So I actually run a single female physician on finance group with other couple other single female physician. Those are all moms. And I thought about, oh, maybe I can do money coach. There’s many great money coaches out there. I tried that one and then I’m like, oh, that’s not what I want to do. And what actually attracted, when I say I’m coaching, I attract people who wants to make a transition, who work full-time, especially one physician who work full-time, who wants to either transition out of a medicine or starting some side business as their passion or wants to cutting down their time, but they don’t want to lose income or… There’s a more potential actually. You can be more successful financially if you have a good business. If you have a successful business, probably you will make a more money than being a full-time physician. So what I notice is, depending on how I show up, it attracts certain clients. So I started coaching everybody and I noticed a physician entrepreneur in the early stage.

They come to me. So about a year ago, year and a half ago, we had a little summit, the Leveraging Growth Summit, and about 10 physicians in early career came to me and asked, “can you coach us so that we can start our business?” So that’s how I started about coaching entrepreneurs. So in my group, I had somebody who wants to start a YouTube channel. She’s still very successful. I had two people who started a podcast. I had one person who became a certified life coach in starting business, and I started attracting those people who wants to make a transition from employed full-time position to something else. So I don’t attract the people who wants to go to pharma because that’s not the space that I am in.

So I usually attract the people who wants to go either part-time and doing side business, or who wants to transitioning from employed physician to become a practice owner, starting their own practice or trying to figure out how they can create more autonomy and flexibility and how they can create time, what matters to them.

Most of them just had babies. So I have a client who just had a baby. She will come to your class. Yeah. Those are my typical best clients. Those are the best clients because I know I have two children. I went through that phase, so I know what it feels like to creating the time is the most valuable thing than any money or anything else.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. 100%. And there are, we don’t have a lot of time left. I know you’re busy. Let’s talk about the webinar that’s coming up. What what’s it all about? What would we learn if we register?

Sujin Lee MD: Okay after all that, I was communicating a lot of people in Facebook. I’m pretty active on Facebook.

A lot of people ask like, how do you get started? Like, where do I start? I can’t do this anymore. I’m miserable. I am a full-time practicing in a big healthcare system. I have to work full-time to make money or maintain my financial for my family. I hate my job. I don’t know what to do. So I ended up answering those questions in the Facebook comments and I realized it’s a very common question in many physicians.

So on previous webinar, it’s gonna be May 24th 5:00 PM. In Pacific Time, the title is Achieving Work-Life Balance Through Part-Time Practice with a Side Business. So this is exactly what I do and what my clients want to do. It doesn’t have to be this way, but this is a great place to start. So it’s gonna be I’m gonna talk about three things, three key points, how to make that transition.

The first thing is know where we are and what we are not happy about and what really matters to us. And I would like to. The second point is I wanna share the resources that I learned throughout the past seven years trying different real estate investment. I do expert witness work and do medical consulting.

Now I’m a coach, so I’m pretty familiar with many different types of outside business. So I wanna sh want to share that resources. The last point is I want everyone and everyone to come into, I want everyone have a, some solid next step. The downside of a going to conference in the webinar is we absorb all this information, but we don’t take action, right?

So we learn something, but we don’t make a progress. So I want to have a little bit of a conversation and actually help my audience to come up with a tangible plan so that they can take an action so that they can feel or they can move one step closer to creating the life, literally work-life balance.

And more filling life, you don’t feel like I’m burning out. You don’t feel like I hate medicine because it is possible to having this type of a life.

Mike Woo-Ming: Sujin, this is great. Lot of great information, great inspiration. Thank you for so much for joining us on the podcast. Any last minute thoughts before we end the call today?

Sujin Lee MD: You know what that’s an interesting question because I’m so grateful for everyone who helped me for me to be here, like my peer, one of my mentor and coach in our mastermind, and I’m very grateful for my clients. They find me that they come work with me so that I can help, I can share what I have.

It makes me feel like I’m going to the right direction. And actually we’re changing the culture of medicine one person at a time. I think that’s really necessary or very needed to have save our healthcare system, the physicians stay in the healthcare so that when we get older, we can get a good care from a good doctors.

Mike Woo-Ming: Well said. Thank you, Sujin. Thank you for joining us. The webinar is coming up May 24th. Is that correct? Yes. Yes. May 24th. Go ahead. We’ll have the links where you can register, how you can set up your business while working part-time as a physician. Thanks again, Sujin, and for everybody listening.

Again, if you’re have an idea, you’re stuck or maybe you’re in a career right now and you don’t know where to go, there’s always people who can help. I prefer other physicians who’ve been there and done that, like Sugen. Go out and reach. Reach out to them. Find out there is a path for you and keep moving forward.

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Physician in Transition – Why You Need to Consider a Career Coach with Dr. Mat Daniel

A physician career coach can be a valuable partner in your career transition. They can help you identify opportunities for improvement in your personal and professional life, which could lead to greater satisfaction overall. Gaining an outside perspective is a useful way to learn about yourself and your goals.

Here to learn more on this important topic, is Dr. Mat Daniel is a pediatric otorhinolaryngologist, educator, and coach who specializes in career development and leadership for doctors.  He has a Masters degree in Coaching and Mentoring and is one of few coaches to have studied coaching at such an advanced level. He is also a licensed career coach and accredited with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council.  If you feel you are at a point in your career that you are feeling unfulfilled, hiring a career coach might be an ideal solution.

Dr. Mat Daniel’s website:
https://matdaniel.net/

Dr. Mat Daniel’s Physician Coaches Profile:
https://www.physiciancoaches.com/coaching-category/mat-daniel-mmed-ma-coaching-phd

Transcript:

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD. From time to time, I love to spotlight coaches who work with physicians to help them achieve the solutions that they’re looking for, and I was really impressed why. My next guest in terms of what he’s done and how he’s helped other doctors achieve what they achieve, their successes.

He has over 30 years experience in healthcare working as a consulted pediatric Otorhinolaryngologist. He has a PhD in Master’s in Coaching and mentoring, a master’s in medical education. These are leadership roles at university, regional and national level. He’s appraiser and a consult. Peer mentor and he’s passionate about diversity and he feels that coaching is a natural extension of his work as a doctor.

And he’s driven by wish to help others. Underpinned by his core values, curiosity, love of learning, honesty, fairness and kindness. And he really think he has based, just based upon his experience in the years of doing this and having a accredited degree in coaching, I really. Feel that he’s someone, if you’re looking in the areas of, especially in career, maybe you’re struggling in a career and you’re looking for help, you can explain why coaching is probably the most important thing that you can do.

So I’d like to welcome to the program Mat, Daniel. Mat, how are you my friend?

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: Fine. Thank you Mike. And thank you very much for that introduction and thank you very much for having me on your amazing podcast.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Now as I get older and listening to a lot of music over the years, my hearing isn’t as great as it could be, but I do detect that you do not have an American accent as most of my guests are Americans. Where are you? Where are you from and where are you calling in from today?

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: I have an accent that very few people get. So I actually live in Nottingham, England, but I was born in Belgium and I grew up in Slovenia. My mom was Slovenian, I’m a bit Austrian, a bit Italian. My dad was Scottish and I, and that, all of that happened via Australia as well so it’s one of those accents that’s well travelled.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. And where are you calling in from today?

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: Nottingham, England.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: In England. Okay. If you’re gonna say Kansas City, I’d be like, totally blown, blown away. So let’s talk about this. You’re one of the few guests that I know has had a long career in coaching and been in involved with this. So tell me about how this journey is, because it certainly doesn’t sound like you started in.

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: No, I started on a fairly standard clinical career. Always knew that I was interested in making a difference to other people and ended up in surgery, in otolaryngology with that. But fairly early on during my training, I realized that one of the things that really mattered to me was also.

Developing others and developing people around me and teamwork. And even as a trainee, I got involved in undergraduate medical education and attached myself to the university person who became my mentor and still is a really influential person. My career followed them around, started writing multiple choice questions.

And then, naturally progressed from their onwards into having much more of an education role, both in the undergraduate world as well as the postgraduate world. Although at the moment I mostly focus my education undergraduate world. And I think coaching really came along with that cuz it’s another way that I can help people.

I have patients that come in and, maybe I take the tonsils out. I have undergraduate students, they come and I teach them otolaryngology. And I have colleagues that need help with their career and I use coaching to help them with that. And some of that will be through one-to-one discussions.

But a lot of what coaching does for me, to be honest, for me become a way of leading and it’s become a way of being. With people around me and the coaching training that I’ve done, the way that I’ve developed myself as the skills and attitudes that I’ve acquired during my journey of learning to be a coach and, and it is still an ongoing journey.

A lot of that has actually been super useful in terms of how I interact with the team around me and… The theater team, for example, in the operating theater would be a really good example about how I tend to use my coaching skills as a way of leading to bring the team together to foster teamwork.

And when I first started doing things, coaches coaching type stuff, they all thought, has he gone mad? But years later I think they, they all embrace it and they all know. What it’s for. At least that’s what they tell me, Mike, maybe they talk behind my back, something else, who knows? But I think they enjoy it.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So almost every coach that I have interviewed or been in contact with have had their own coach. And it sounds like you, you yourself benefited from that by having that mentor. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about how, maybe personally, how it affected your coach.

Maybe what problems you, you had and how did the coach assist you in helping you get to that.

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: Yeah so actually you’re right. I got into coaching by having coaching and it made a massive difference to me personally. And that really sparked my interest in saying actually, you know, this is incredibly powerful.

I had coaching a number of years ago. I had significant health problems at the time and… that caused me to pause and reevaluate where my life and where my career is going. And as yourself or any of your listeners, if you have a big life event, it happens. You do pause and you do reconsider.

And our medical careers, they’re a bit like treadmills. You hop on when you are. And you run and you run from one role to the next. And and sometimes you pause and think and other times you just keep running and keep running. And I had to an event which paused me to step off the treadmill and reevaluate and think, where am I going?

And I work with the coach to. To decide what do I want from my life going forward? What kind of difference do I want to make? What kind of a person do I want to be? And and that those were the kind of questions really that influenced me and what came out of that discussion. Was for me specifically, this interest in developing others and, that’s always been there.

But probably not quite so crystal clear, but through working with my own coach it helped me really focus on that and say, actually, what I, what do I want my life to be about? And I want my life to be about developing others. And then, That, that’s become a really big thing for me and that for the years since I first got coaching, that’s something that’s permeated and that’s guided what I’ve done and how I worked and what kind of a person I’ve been.

Yeah, really transformational for me personally. As I’m sure a lot of your other interviewees have also said,

So being a doctor, so why in particular do you like working with doctors? Or maybe you don’t? I’m not You, you, on your website, you are a physician coach and you’re also featured in our, on our website, physician coaches.com.

What maybe some unique experiences that physicians have or any healthcare professional have that maybe someone who’s a non-physician may not know or experience.

Okay. I think it worldwide. I think there is a disconnect between what people go into healthcare for and what then happens. And I think that’s problematic and as shown up by the way, that so many of our healthcare systems are struggling.

So the thing is that, At the age of 16, 18, we’re taking enthusiastic people who want to change the world, who are altruistic, who want to make a difference to other and somewhere along the line they join a system that doesn’t necessarily look after them particularly well. That tries to pigeonhole them into specific category, that denies them flexibility of careers that makes it very difficult to work flexibly at least as a trainee.

And I like the people that are in healthcare. I’m sure there are similar people in other organizations, right? I like the people in healthcare because I think fundamentally we are a nice bunch of people who wants to help others, who wants to make a difference in the world. And fundamentally, when I coach people, you know that’s how I see, I coach people who want to make a difference to others.

And I think that for me, makes me think, okay, this kind of person… I want to spend some of my time helping them. And the problem is that sort of when it comes to the world of careers it’s often difficult for people to progress their careers in the direction that they want to progress.

Whether that’s around choosing specialties. Passing exams, how do you get the job? Do you choose leadership positions? What kind of life balance do you have? How you lead the team, what kind of relationships you have, how do you use emotional intelligence to have high quality relationships with the people around you?

And those kinds of things are really difficult. So I think on the one hand we have. Altruistic people who want to make a difference to other, but we have them working in a system that is really challenging, that isn’t necessarily designed in a way that, that makes it easy for people to thrive and for people to succeed.

And I think that really That’s why I like coaching in that space. Yeah. Because fundamentally I think it’s full of nice people who want to make a difference. And if I can support somebody to progress their career, so that’s ultimately that they’re making a difference to others, then through that person, I too am making a difference to the other person, to, to the other person’s patience.

And the thing about careers is that. I think career success for us as physicians comes with seniority or certainly it’s a lot easier to have career success as seniority. But that’s often quite difficult to get there. When you are a trainee it’s difficult to make decisions.

It’s difficult to balance, other priorities with your career. And e even when you do. Fully qualified. There’s still a whole load of challenges that become about how one works. And if I can help people do that, if I can help people have successful careers then that means that person has a successful, meaningful career, which makes a difference to their patients and I guess through them, then I make a difference to their patients also.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Now, I know you talked about one of your focuses is on in coaching is career coaching, and I think there’s maybe some confusion about what exactly is a career coach. Maybe you can help dispel some of those myths for us. What is a career coach and what exactly how do you help them and what exactly do you do to help them?

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: Yeah it’s a great question and I wish that question got asked more often. And I think probably different people will define it differently. So I can give you my definition and how I work, but I know that other people might work differently. So I think.

The way that I would work as a career coach would be about asking questions to help the person decide where they want to take their career and how they want to get there. So it’s about what decisions do they want to make and it’s about how they get there. Now, the problem that I often hear and this often arises with people that are looking to leave clinical careers and people often will say for whatever reason they’re unhappy in the clinical career.

And they want to do something else but they don’t know what to do. And there’s an expectation that, that somebody will give you a series of tests and analyze you and tell you, and the ideal career for you is X and the reality is that, that just doesn’t exist.

Yeah. The way that I would, I would label that. Career Guidance. Yeah. If you imagine of when you’re at school, you go to see, to career guidance or career counselor, you have a series of tests done and then, you get a list of 10 ideal careers. The problem with that approach is that when it comes to working with grownups, people probably already know.

An awful lot of that for themselves and it just isn’t simple to reduce careers down to a list of 7, 8, 9, or 10, not list of which is that the careers that exist today, they might not exist in 10 years anymore, or those careers that might be suitable for somebody today, they’re gonna be completely different in 10 years time.

And actually, one of the things that I often see in my career, coaching is a lot of anxiety cuz, people are worried about making the wrong decisions and usually if that’s the case, we then have a discussion about, okay how do you make a decision, number one and number two, is there such a thing as a wrong decision?

And number three. We’re making decisions today with limited information because, who knows what it’s, what’s it gonna be like to be an orthopedic surgeon in 10 years time, or 20 years time, or 30 years time? So when it comes to co to, so career’s guidance, career counseling, that would be somebody doing a series of tests and then getting a printout that tells you can do X, Y, and Z and that in, in the world of groans up is just far too simplistic.

Yeah. So career coaching would be around, me asking questions to help people figure out and the typical way that I would work in careers coaching with somebody who’s trying to make a decision whether they, whatever they wanna do within healthcare or within medicine or outside, or whether they take leadership roles or which specialty.

So the starting point would be around, what matters to them? What makes them come alive? What are the values? What are the peak moments? So some of that will be paying attention to what they really enjoy, and then looking back at their careers as to what’s been really successful.

What made them thrive? What were the peak achievements that they’ve had? Perhaps focusing on what are they good at and asking the people around them, what am I good at? And outta that, you produce a list of things that, that you want. So this is what I want in my future career.

And you might end up with, maybe seven to 10, not seven to 10 careers, but seven to 10 things that you would want in your future career. Yeah. And, and that might be working with the team or it might. Life balance, or it might be a rural environment, or it might be working from home, or it might be doing procedures, or it might be, doing something that’s really an intellectual challenge, different for everybody, but you end up with, 7, 8, 9, 10 things that I would want in my career.

And then once you have that list, then the next step then is saying, okay, what kind of career? Potentially would meet these needs in me. And then me as the coach together with the coachee and their friends and family and people around them. We brainstorm and they go away and think about it and ask people around them about, this is what I want in my career, what kind of careers would meet their needs.

Yeah. And then typically you find there’s that, that there’s. Usually 20, 30, 40 different careers that would all meet that kind of needs. And then the next stage then follows the process of deciding actually okay. There. There’s lots and lots of opportunities out there and people are usually surprised when they see that and they think, oh my God, there’s so much out there that potentially I could do that all would be a really good career.

And then of course that then comes some decision making about what they actually want to focus on. And that sort of often induces a bit of anxiety because people are afraid of closing doors because, if you go down in one route, that means you’re closing another avenue. So that introduces a little bit anxiety.

And sometimes one way that that one can overcome that would be, rather than making massive jumps into their unknown, you say, okay, now what small step can you take to find out more of what small step can you take to move you in that direction? So you then, get it down to, there’s maybe two or three that I want to explore.

And then the final step of the career coaching is the coach then goes out there and says, okay, these are two or three things that I’m interested in. I’m gonna go out and I’m going to find out more to see what it actually takes to get there. So that kind of would be a typical process, but the content largely comes from what the person wants and what they’re interested in and what drives them and what the values are and what they’re good at rather than diagnosing them and giving them a list. Yeah, and I’m glad you asked me because often people expect that, that I’ll plug them into a program and, and I’ll give them a spreadsheet what they need to do.

And, life is just not that simple.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, I have a friend who is also in this discipline, and she was like, they come in and sometimes they think that I’m gonna give them a list of all these jobs that they can do right now, and here’s all the different employers.

That’s not what it’s all about. It’s about identifying, like you said, what they enjoy and then decide where they want to go. It’s not surprising to me that they feel like they made the wrong decision. Or they’re worried about making a wrong decision because oftentimes it sounds like they come in feeling they made the wrong decision many years ago and spent all this time and money in this case be becoming a doctor. How do you help over overcome that?

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: I mean it’s interesting isn’t it, that people talk about that, that they’ve made the wrong decision because n normally the way I would start a conversation by how they make a decision and what is the wrong decision.

And like they’ve made the decision it was the right decision at the time. It might not be the right decision now, at the time it was the right decision. So usually. If they come with something like that I would probably. Probably just have a little bit of a philosophical check about, is there such a thing as a wrong decision?

There are just decisions, aren’t they? Yeah. Ma made with good reasons. Yeah. So that would be the first thing. The second thing, I think when it comes to healthcare careers and, my own personal disclaimer is I enjoy my healthcare career. I think healthcare is a very rewarding career.

It’s a tough career. Yes. But I do enjoy my healthcare career. So that usually I bring that to any coaching conversations and anybody that claims on my website will hopefully see very clearly that that I do happen to think that Healthcare careers are rewarding.

I do have a portfolio career as do you. And there are lots of us out there, the sort of, that are interesting portfolio careers and entrepreneurship and, that adds extra things to my career and that gives me satisfaction that I don’t get. But fundamentally, I do enjoy healthcare and I do believe that healthcare is a good career.

So if somebody, Worried that they’ve made the wrong decision, then at the beginning I would probably try to understand what’s behind that. And, and that really serves two purposes. So the first pur purpose would be to, to unpick, whe whether we can really say that this was a wrong decision because, maybe they come say in the field, this is the wrong decision.

But it turns out that they are being bullied by a line manager, for example. They’ve been bullied by the head of department and they say, they hate their job because they’ve been bullied by the head of department. And if that person then has the courage to go and change and work in a different department.

The problems resolved, so the medicine wasn’t the wrong decision. The wrong decision was working in that particular department. Or people will come and say they felt they made the wrong decision. But people are not good at putting up boundaries between their work life and other aspects of their life and, and the professional life over spills into every single aspect of the private life. And then actually what we then need to work on is boundaries to do that. So if people come feeling that they’ve made the wrong decision in medicine and they want to leave, understanding why they say that is important because, maybe they haven’t made their own decision at all and, and if it does turn out that actually truly is the wrong decision, then understanding what’s made it the wrong decision is super helpful.

When it comes to creating a career somewhere else, because if somebody says that they’ve made the wrong decision because they don’t like the pressures of having to make life and death decisions, or they don’t like the pressure of having to make really significant decisions, then when it comes to a career change, That’s really useful because you then know that they want a career that does not involve life in their decisions.

Or if somebody says that, they don’t like healthcare because they’re responsible for a hundred patients all at the same time and they really struggle to pay attention to a hundred things, which, most of us as physicians all of the time, we are juggling so many different things. So if somebody says they can’t deal with that, then we know when we’re looking for a career change, we’re looking for something that means that they sit down and they focus just on the one thing.

Yeah. And that’s just a different way of being. Of course, in healthcare, you can also have a career. The focus is just on the one thing. But understanding what makes somebody say that it was their own decision. If it really is the wrong decision, which often it’s not then you can at least understand what it is they’re looking for.

And then instead of doing a away move, so instead of saying, I’m running away from medicine because I don’t like the pressure, or I’m running away from medicine. Because I don’t like having to spin so many different plates. Instead of that, you’re making them towards me. So I’m making a move towards a career that allows me to just focus on one thing at once, or I’m moving towards the kind of career where I can make decisions that influence, quality of life, for example or money or finances rather than lives.

Yeah. And that sort of moving, doing towards moves rather than the way he moves that from is a really important career concept.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: That’s really powerful. In my own experience, as a primary care physician, I didn’t particularly like working in the hospital. It just, I was not my thing to do.

So why would I be born to become a hospitalist? I realized I can start my own practice and in wellness and weight loss. And I enjoyed that. And I enjoyed that population. But for the most part, you can leverage what you already have if you are a physician.

I don’t know how often you come across it, but I don’t think you’ve had many people say, you know what? I just don’t want to take care of humans. Now I wanna take care of animals. I’m gonna go to a veterinarian. Probably unlikely. There are probably. As you say, there are activities that you can do in medicine that let’s say you want to be more involved in public health, or maybe you want to be speakers maybe you wanna be, be involved in public relations or be of a hospital or.

Another avenue that you can go to that really focuses on the sprints, on the things that you like to do, and having that credibility as a physician will open doors more often or not. Would you agree?

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I share your personal opinion and as a coach, I make that very clear that, that is what I believe in.

So that there are so many careers in healthcare and, as a fully qualified physician, Undoubtedly it opens doors for you. If I think of my own career, I have three different aspects. I’ve got my coaching career, I’ve got my medical education, and I’ve got my clinical career.

And the fact that I am successfully in my clinical career has very much opened the other two doors for me. And, yes, it is a question of finding out where your place in medicine is. Medicine is such a wide area that there really is. For everybody. And we talked about whether you like hospitals or you like sort to work with lots of people or just with one people.

All of that is possible in healthcare. And a lot of the things that people struggle in healthcare, people say, oh I don’t like responsibility, or, I don’t like the pressure, or I struggle with work-life balance. Newsflash those things are there in all the other career also. You find a career that’s that’s gonna give you a six figure income with no stress that’s that, you can do for a couple of hours a day, from a beach.

I think we’re probably all gonna go there, aren’t we? They don’t exist. Yeah, they don’t exist. Those kinds of careers, where wherever you go if you want a career that’s making a difference, you’re gonna be having responsibility. If you want a career that gives you good income, you’re gonna be having to work hard, easy careers that, that with no responsibility and big income.

Like there, there’s no such thing. And sometimes what people need is. Is sometimes people need a bit of a reality check and to realize that actually as physicians we are actually quite well paid and we are well respected and, and if you leave being a physician, you’re probably gonna find of, there’s a really tough world out, they’re far tougher than healthcare, number one.

And what people need is a set of skills that enable them. To have a rich, successful, meaningful career. And those skills are needed in healthcare. Those skills are needed in business. They’re needed in an industry, and anywhere else that you go, you need to have the skills. That means that yes, you can be successful.

And yes, you can switch off and yes, where you draw the boundaries. And yes, you can make decisions about how much you want to work or not, they’re not healthcare specific skills. They’re skills that you need. Whatever sector you are in.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. Yeah. That’s very interesting that you say that they’re looking for this no responsibility and just sit on the beach and like you said, in society money.

What is money? Money is given. If you can provide value right to whatever you’re doing I’ll, because you’re in Europe, I’ll give you… Messi right in, in football, right? So they pay him millions and millions of dollars cuz he’s very valuable to that team. If he couldn’t if he couldn’t hit the ball into the net.

He wouldn’t be getting all of this and all of these endorsements. He’s very valuable. So what that’s part of being a career is how much value that you’re going to give to whatever who’s ever paying you, for that. And that does involve responsibility. And that is how we are it, money’s not the only way that we determine our self worth, but in the society, that’s how it goes.

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: The other thing also that’s relevant to hear is that the people that I talk to often, they are people that want to make a difference. Yeah. Yeah. There’re people that have entered healthcare because they wanted to make a difference to the lives of others, and they still want to make a difference to the lives of others.

Yeah. They just they want to do it in a way that’s sustainable, they want to be successful at it. They don’t want to burn out, but they still want to make a difference to the lives of others. And, sitting on the beach. You’re probably not making a difference to the lives of others, and they might be occupations where you can sit in a beach and do nothing and earn a nice salary.

I’m sure they exist, but you’re not making a difference to others. If you are wanting to be making a difference to others, that, that means there’s gonna be some work that’s going to be involved. And if you sit on the beach and then lots of. I dunno. Would that be a meaningful career?

I’m not sure that it would, it would be income, yes. And you might be fabulously wealthy, but would that give you a meaningful career? I’m not sure that it would, but, the people that come to me, and most of the people that I see in healthcare, they’re there because they want a meaningful career.

And that does mean that’s, there’s gonna be work involved.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, I always like to say, leaving a legacy, you know what and this might sound a little bit morbid, what’s it gonna say on your your gravestone, right? What did you do, what it’s gonna say in your obituary?

When my dad passed away a couple years ago, it was like, wow, he had a really meaningful career. And we didn’t even realize it at the time when he was a pediatrician and, all the things that he had did not only just in medicine, but outside of medicine. And that at the end, is what do you wanna leave?

And I think legacy is that’s why, I’m trying to see as help as many people as I can because I wanna build that legacy for me and my.

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And that, that idea really permeates the coaching discussions that I have with people is because, we are, we’re all here because we want to make a difference.

That’s why we’re in healthcare. Vast majority of us at least, even though perhaps we’ve forgotten. 16 years ago, there was a little boy that wanted to make a difference and, and you need to find that little boy again and and resurrect him and say, okay, you’re doing this cuz you want to make a difference.

Go or and, it’s rediscovering that and rediscovering that passion and you know that, that. Creates a meaningful career and yeah. Question about what do you want your legacy to be? That’s one of my stock questions in my first stage of my coaching discussion.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Little boys and little girls too as well.

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: Yeah. Boys, as in I’m a little boy or was, so that that’s why it’s gendered. Yeah.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: This has been a very fascinating discussion. Where can people go if they’re looking and looking for help in this area? I know you not only work with career coaching, leadership coaching as well.

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: Where can they go to get more information about you and potentially working with you?

So the, probably the best thing is to look up my website, which is www.matdaniel.net, so m a t d a n i e l dot net. And there’s information there about me. And usually if somebody’s interested in coaching I would arrange a chemistry session, and I do that as a one hour free coaching session.

And I think that’s really important because if somebody wants to work with me, it’s key that they know what I have to offer them and that they can work with me. And equally it’s key that I need to know that I have what it takes to offer that person. So very much two-way discussion to make sure that we can work together.

And that’s how my coaching starts.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Dr. Daniel, this has been really I said very insightful and fascinating. Any last minute thoughts before we end our call today?

Mat Daniel MMEd MA(Coaching) PhD: Thank you very much for having me on your brilliant podcast. And I’m, I was looking through the episodes. I can’t believe how many episodes you’ve done, Mike, so thank you very much for having me.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you. I think it really shined the light on the importance of coaching and especially for those maybe who are struggling in your career. Coaching is the number one thing that you can do to help you define the the solutions to the whatever you need and help you determine what your legacy or whatever you want to achieve is.

So thank you Mat. Thank you for the time. And as always guys, if you’re struggling out there and you’re not sure where to go or what to do there’s always someone who’s probably been there and done that. They can help point the way, show you the way, maybe give you some other options that are out there.

As always, don’t just sit on it and think about it. Find real solutions to these problems and keep moving forward.

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From Idea to Reality: How Grants Can Fund Your Physician Business with Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH

How would you like to fund your medical business but not have to use your own money or take out high interest loans? Then you need to take advantage of GRANTS! Today we break down and discuss the grant process that is available for physicians to fund their business ventures.

Here to help, is the founder of Melanin & Medicine and physician consultant Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH who is an expert of the entire grant application process and shares tips for successfully obtaining grants to grow your medical business. . This episode is an informative resource for physicians looking to fund their business ventures through grants.

And, who doesn’t love free money?

Dr. Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo’s Resources

https://linktr.ee/dr.omolara

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD. We’ve been recently talking about starting up your own practice and medical practices, and obviously one subject that you can’t ignore is money.

I talk about how you bootstrap your way to doing it, but there are other ways that you can fund your clinic, fund your fund, your business. And of course you can borrow money and we all know about loans and we’ve had talked about getting loans from the federal government, from friends and family, but there’s also another way that you can get revenue for your business, and that’s through grants.

And I’m excited that on the program right now is we have an expert and who also happens to be a physician, which I love that! She’s a community health equity advocate, a physician and the co-founder of Strong Children Wellness, which is an award-winning, multi-practice healthcare company that partners with community organizations to deliver integrated healthcare to under-resourced communities and secure it over 1 million. That’s “M” 1 million in grants and contracts in less than two years. She’s the founder of Melanin and Medicine, which is a coaching and consulting firm to help mission-driven healthcare practices and organizations serving communities of color scale to ultimately create greater health. Justice, and we’ve just been talking on the program and I know you’re gonna enjoy this.

She’s gonna give us lots of information. Wanda, welcome to the program, Dr. Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo! Omolara, how are

you?

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: I am well. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I’m super excited to talk about Money!

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, and I know doctors speak can be weirded out with money. I think when it comes time to building your business, building your practice, I would much rather have other people’s money or other businesses, or other communities, money to help fund my dream.

So let’s talk about it. First, I wanna a little bit know more about your background, how you got started. Believe you st you, you’re a pediatrician by, by, by trade, right? Then how did you get, go from a pediatrician? To talking about securing money and grants for all of your all of your businesses and dreams that you built.

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: Yeah, so I’m a pediatrician by training and I wanted to be a pediatrician since I was five, so that happened and ultimately I ended up, one of the things that’s really important in my work has been health equity. And so a lot of times when I was working in different spaces, the places I worked at, they were very… hospitals that were focused on, under-resourced communities, but also very underfunded . And I think one of the issues as well was, I would realize there’s a gap here. And the, the administrators would say we don’t have money to fill that. And so me being the resourceful person, I am both from my background working not only in America, but also working in Africa and in Asia.

As a global health pediatrician, I was always really interested in how could we actually create the thing that we want rather than succumb to this is not possible. And that led me to develop building up my research chops, which that, which meant that. Basically I was able to do operational research, which said I could get funding for programs by just evaluating whether or not they actually work for the people that I’m interested in helping.

And so in academia I got a really good track record of I wanna do this. Let me see what places potentially are wanting to fund this, and let’s start developing relationships with those funders. And so ultimately over time within probably seven years or so, I pretty much was just continuing to get grants with my team members and it totalled to almost 2 million dollars by the time that I left academia.

But the real important thing was that all of the programs that we started were able to scale. And now one of the, one of the big places, the largest health system in New York actually scaled one of our programs that started with, a small grant. And so that’s the exciting thing. But I was also burnt out.

I was an MPH professor, a public health professor, seeing patients in Queens, which is the most diverse county in this in this country. Also, of course, running a global health program and teaching residents, and then in addition, running two large research programs and actually burn out. And in 2019, in May, I actually lost the ability to walk and developed multiple sclerosis.

I found out it was multiple sclerosis, so I had to take a leave. And unfortunately when I finished that four month leave, I came back and I had to reposition my job to not be so stressful. And unfortunately the organization, the workplace that I was at, was not able to accommodate some of the supports and things I needed.

So now I was in a place where I was like, okay, you have to figure out can you stay in a workplace or do you need to create the place that you would want to work at? And that. When I started thinking about strong children wellness, which is the practice, and thinking about what would a practice that I wanted to work at look like?

Like what would be the things that I would put in it? And ultimately one of the community partners that I had worked with for a while, I shared the idea of this is what I think we can do. We can actually, how about we take physical healthcare and we actually bring it into your organization rather than the other way around.

And see how that happens. And we, they love the idea of course. And we said, okay, but we have no capital or money. And they said, we don’t either. so luckily I was used to that. And we actually decided to write it up and we got 125,000 from a funder to basically pilot the project and using that funding partnership model.

Allow me to see, oh, this is something that’s repeatable. And so ultimately we were able to find different nonprofits, different organizations that we could partner with, get access to grant funding, and do some, use some model called fiscal sponsorship to basically have them subcontract us to deliver services not only to their clients, but to the community at large.

And that’s how we’ve built it! I’ll talk a little bit about the steps on how we do that, but that’s the story. And then once I started doing that, other people were like, “how are you doing that again?” And I transitioned to a company called Melanin Medicine and Motherhood, which was really born out of the fact as a black woman and the weathering that I had about like, how do you manage work life integration?

And ultimately the way I did it was through entrepreneurship. And so then those who were coming along that I was coaching were yeah, but we need money. And so then they wanted to learn how I did that. And so that’s how Melanin and Medicine really morphed to really just supporting the funding part of developing your practice.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: This is a subject where it’s really difficult, that I see… To find out really good information. I’ve had a little bit of experience with grants, my wife, who was a special needs teacher, and it was an aside, Hey, we need to get grants and you need to figure this out.

And she remembers, just. The teachers are all like sighing, like I don’t even know where to begin. And they go to, grants.gov and they start looking at all of these different grants and they can’t figure it out. And then by the end it’s just give it up. Let’s just try to get a loan somewhere.

I know that kind of rings true but I know that’s. That rings true with, a lot of people who are listening. So what are some like misnomers or mistakes that you see when people actually start this process? I never got taught any of this, I wasn’t in academia. Perhaps you’ve got better experience than I have. Where do how did you get through all of this?

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: I think the biggest mistake that I would say people do is… Not utilizing their network and not looking at who’s around them. So a lot of, I think the first thing that we had to do was to recognize the fact that yes, the majority of grants that are available don’t go to for-profits.

They go to non-for-profits. And we were, and we were like, oh okay, that excludes us. But then. We through this model, we actually, I think it came up through conversation where we talked with this nonprofit. They were like “how about we just bring you guys in?” And so we thought this was a really novel concept. Look, it actually, when you look at it, there’s a process called fiscal sponsorship that was built for that purpose. It was built to actually support small nonprofits or individuals who were waiting to get their nonprofit status and to fall under an established large nonprofits to still get access to grant funds.

However, when you look at it, most people use it for nonprofits, but you can actually use it for-profits too. And that was a game changer. There’s like a whole directory of fiscal sponsors, of actual organizations that’s all they do for-profit and non and small nonprofits. So once I think the myth of “Hey, we cant actually access these dollars” left. Then all bets were off. We started to identify, okay, who’s a nonprofit who I think is more established because both of you can’t be on the struggle bus, right? So one person, you can’t go to a nonprofit. Also I don’t know, I want grant funding too.

You need to, of course, find an established nonprofit that actually has, gravitas has a funding track record. And that really is aligned. This is the most important thing. We’re not just using nonprofits to, get money, but they actually have to be aligned. And what we do is we support are they aligned in terms of their target population?

Are they aligned in terms of the mission of what they’re doing, and is it complimentary? And once we’re doing that allows for these to be easy connections. I think the hard part for people is the time and is like trying to understand how do I, who do I find out? How do I find out who these people are?

And that’s, Actually what our company does, because we did realize it took a long time to figure that out. But they’re actually databases where you can find out foundations, you can find out grant opportunities outside of grants.gov that are more from private foundations. And I love private foundations just because it’s faster to get the money and there’s less red tape around it.

And the nice thing about it is that your nonprofit partner is actually going to write the proposal and do the work. You just have to do your work. And so it’s a really nice connection and the nonprofit’s extremely excited because now they have a new service that their board will be extremely excited about, and we’ll garner even more funding for them.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So one of the ways, at least I know my wife was frustrated, is like when we sees all of these different grants, and then you just” okay, this is what they want.” And then you’re I think we could do that. Even though it’s it almost feels like you’re now changing your business, right?

Because you’re trying to like, “wow they’re giving away a lot of money, but if we integrate, this. protocol to it.” Do you ever experience that? Is that something that comes up often where it feels like you’re almost like having to change your business to, to meet what they’re asking for?

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: Yeah, so this is really important cuz that’s the first part of our like six P process. But it’s positioning your practice. And what I try to say is the goal is not to change your business, but to find the niches inside of your business. And what I mean by that is to say, I’m a pediatrician, right? But what social problem, what group is having health inequities that is actually within my population.

For example, asthmatics, one of our clients was a pediatric pulmonologist, right? And they take care of all sorts of kids. But the asthmatics were a really, especially those that were very severe. And what she was finding was she could do a lot of the treatment, but what they needed was follow up in the home, but she can’t do that. And so we actually connected with her nonprofit that has community health workers and who couldn’t take care of kids that were that severe because they didn’t have the pulmonologist, like being able to support it. So it’s about find, finding out what’s the mission that sits inside of your practice.

If I’m an oncologist, we have people from all over. We have a dermatologist and she’s focusing on alopecia and health inequity. Like you can find what that group is, and then what is the unique model of care. So I talk about the mission. Then what is the model of care that. Helps you solve this problem differently from the competition.

So how are you doing it differently? Are you more responsive, like because of cultural diversity? Are you more robust? Are you more in depth and rigorous? And then the next part is not thinking so huge, but say, “okay, in the next 12 months, what could I achieve for this population?” So we call. A minimum viable practice, the M VP , but what is the minimum viable practice?

And being clear on the leanest version of the team, the tools and the tech that you need. And then our money plan. So it’s mission, model of care and minimum viable PR practice. And then your money plan, which just basically is how much do we need to actually do this, and how much can your nonprofit put in?

So a lot of times nonprofits actually help with space. So they, so we did that in the beginning where we had space, we had a space issue, we didn’t have space. And they were like how about you provide the services inside of our space? And that was a great thing that took off a lot, a lot of money for us.

And then we were able to do that. And the last thing is messaging, which is how do you make sure. that you are able in the writing process, sharing what the value is for the nonprofit that you’re partnering with, and then what is the value and the impact for the population that both of you are serving.

And that’s your value proposition and then the results. So when you have all five of those things, you’re able to position it. Now as not just the regular practice, but now a social enterprise that really can get some funding. And then the process is now looking for who wants to fund that. And trust me, there are over 130,000 foundations.

No matter how small you think your problem is, there is a foundation that is that’s exactly what we do. And and that’s the work of us trying to uncover where those people. Excuse me, where those people are and what their, and what they, what their funding priorities are.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: At the time we’re recording this, we’re still uneasy in the economy. They say we’re in inflation. We are in an inflation. But, I’ve heard the, this, the statistic that, there’s a lot of these grants that, that. Never get filled. Is that true Or is it, is money still tight or is there money still plentiful and we just have to go out and find it?

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: Yeah. Money is still plentiful, actually, I will say, right? The people who donate to foundations during the pandemic got a lot richer and , we see that, and ultimately we see that endowed economies, actually the people who are the usual suspects to fund and provide philanthropic dollars actually end up having even more disposable income.

What I will say is that during 2021 and 2022, the amount of money that was dispersed was even higher than it had been for three years before that, and the amount that was focused on health was higher! And you can imagine that was due to covid and now racial inequities and other inequities.

So there’s this moment, I’m not sure how long it’s gonna last, but health is very much a hot place, and a hot button for us. So while that is an issue, what we found is that for us, that hasn’t been an issue as long as you, you’re developing relationships and not. Looking for what’s available right now.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, I have a little bit of experience on grants. My practice was, as many other practice were, was affected during the pandemic. And I just found. A grant for Asian Pacific owners and go” I’m Asian. I’ll figure out I’ll apply.” And I found it on YouTube and I got a $25,000 grant, which was really excited about, it didn’t take much work at all, but then when it came down to okay, how can I get more of this, I was stuck. I didn’t know, really know where to go. There are people who are listening to this who maybe have their own practice. Maybe they wanna have to start up their own practice and they’re looking for funding. Maybe you could walk us through a process of how to even get started with something like this.

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: Yeah. So the first thing I talked about was position, and that’s more of your inner work, right? Of what you have to do and think about, okay, what is my, what do I want my practice to do? What’s the potential social mission that my practice can solve? So not shifting your whole business, but identifying that piece in it.

The next thing that we have to do is package it. And that’s the problem that I think a lot of people don’t do, and that’s why they’re like, oh, I gotta… Now do all of this to apply, instead of it being oh, we can apply here now we can apply here and now we can apply here. And what it is creating reusable assets.

And so we help people to create a master grant proposal basically. And we have both a done for you service or if you want help doing it. But then that allows for now us to have everything in there, your statement of need, what the problem is, what the value proposition is, and literally we just, I just submitted something last week for 280,000 and it was not a, it was just like, oh, this is available. Okay. And that’s the problem cuz most times we find grants, it’s like the deadline is next week and people are like, oh, always happens. always. But if your packaged, then it’s not an issue.

And you need to have an executive summary. You need to have those kind of things. And a elevator pitch, which I’ll share why that’s important. That’s about pipeline development. So what you wanna do is also start having somebody, and we’ll talk about that, but it can be you or your EA or VA… start to go to the doing just research on foundations in your state.

So you can just look up California Foundation’s Health, right? Just Google that. You’ll start to see what foundations come up. And what you wanna do is you wanna look at which ones are your ideal funding organizations, and then you wanna look at who’s on their portfolio, who have they funded, because. When you look at that tells you the nonprofits who are doing well, cuz they’re getting funding from them and also the nonprofits that they’re likely to fund.

Again, because the, it’s less risky to fund a funded organization that you’ve funded before. And then you can go on certain grant sites. There’s Grant Watch, which is not grants.gov. It’s what is it? An open source and you can start looking for it. Those have, those are much cheaper. The databases that we use are more robust, but they also cost a lot per month.

And you can find those funding opportunities or your VA can do. We have people who have their VAs do it so that they have that list and they can run through it. So we talked about position, we talked about packaging and developing a pipeline of resources and then presenting the opportunity.

That’s where people, I don’t know why. As physicians we get, we like, I don’t know what it is. We minimize our impact. We’re like ” I don’t know if I should reach out.” And it’s like it’s, you have this amazing service. You are a physician. They will really enjoy the fact that you’ve reached out to them.

And we help people develop an elevator pitch so they can connect. Then we help them with giving them our guide to doing a discovery call with that organization to collect information and then they can use that master proposal and tweak it to basically curate what it is that you know now for this organization, how they could curate what they’re doing.

The last thing, the easy stuff, pretty much compared to that is partnering, which means you guys have to talk, okay, what are the terms of agreement? Are we gonna, are you gonna hire that person? Am I gonna hire, are you gonna do space? So we talk through that. You get your lawyers, create the templates and stuff, which we have templates of that and then get people. Once you get that, then you just want people, like interns, we use a lot of interns and they help us with our community outreach, community engagement interns. And they’re basically helping source schedule more meetings with funders or with or organizations. And that way you can just show up and share your model.

And that’s how we’ve been able to get these grants. And then also contracts because. A lot of times the organizations who are really robust are like, we don’t even wanna wait for the grant. We actually wanna subcontract you and we can look for the grant in the meantime. So we’ve gotten contracts by way of looking for grants.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: That’s wonderful. How many grants, proposals do you think you’ve or your team have written in the last few years?

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: Gosh, that is… I should know that question. , I would say in the last few years, or since inception, we’ve probably done maybe 12. Yeah, it’s not bad. But the reason is that we don’t need a lot of quantity because we focus on a hundred thousand dollars or more.

Grants usually 50 sometimes, but they’re usually average is 150. Our largest one that we got was 250,000 and at one time. But then they just once you can reuse and repackage, then that’s how come it’s been so many that we were able, so much money that we’re able to accrue in such a short time.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Sounds like you have it down to a science. Yeah. This has been amazing. Oh. Where can they go to get more information and tell us about your your firm.

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: Yeah, so Melanin and Medicine is a healthcare funding consultancy and we’ve worked with both healthcare prof I should say for-profit healthcare practices that are mission-driven, I like to say, and nonprofits as well, and that are focused on, both focused on health equity.

And so our work primarily, we’ve initially started with women of color, but we’ve had men, we’ve had other people who are like, please help. And so we’re able to provide v i p services. We have both a Mastermind and done for you services that we provide and you can find out more about us. We don’t like show, we don’t send our investment guide or anything, but we have people apply and we can do intakes.

And then we also have classes and webinars. So you can go to https://bit.ly/melaninandmedicine you can also find us on Instagram or LinkedIn. And actually at the end of the month I posted this, that we have a workshop that I’m a high introvert Mike. I don’t like doing live anything, but we have, I’m doing a live workshop just for Women’s History Month.

You can actually apply if you text us and like I’m interested in a workshop we will send you the application and then we’re inviting people to that three hour workshop where we’re gonna go through the, these processes. But yeah, and I’m, and you can go to Bitly Forward slash Melanoma Medicine and you can see everything.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Awesome, awesome. This is obviously, we’re just kind, scratching the surface and your knowledge and what you have on there. But any last minute thoughts or advice that you have for someone who is thinking about getting to the process or maybe we’re in the middle of the process right now and of feeling stuck?

What advice can you give them?

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: I think. Don’t put it all on yourself. I think that was the best thing that we did, which was identifying like, who else can help you? And I think a lot of us have these ideas of an intern or a family member or somebody connected who says, Hey, can this person work at your practice or do something in your practice?

And that is such an opportunity. So I think a lot of times this gets overwhelming when we think that we’re doing it all by ourselves, but literally, , you can go through this process and you can have someone doing that research for you so that we can start and just think about one, like what is, what one grant would do for you, right?

How it would help you. And then we, then we can think about pipelines, but just focusing on one and looking around, looking at your network and. Who else would I love to work with that is serving the population that I really wanna make a dent in and those I think are really helpful.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you Omolara again. Her site is Melanin and Medicine. We’ll have the link in the show notes where you can go find out more information. Like you said, money is everywhere, so who better to have it than you and your organization. If you have a dream and you wanna get that accomplished, money can allow you to do this.

Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, MD, MPH: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Mike. I’m glad to be able to, And

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you for listening. And as always guys, if you get stuck in your business, there’s always people out there knowledgeable who can help. There’s always a way out. Don’t always remember. You can always keep moving forward.

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