Starting Over: How I Rebuilt My Practice After Moving Across the Country

Last year I left Seattle after living there for a near decade and drove cross country to be closer to my family. 

I started a cash practice in Seattle, right out of medical school.

Everyone usually advises you to take insurance when you first start off unless you:

a) Have a second job

b) Have a partner or family that supports you

c) Be financially well off / have a fair amount of savings

I was 0 for 3.

But I had this strong will to do whatever I needed to do to NOT take insurance. This is because I didn’t want to be confined to a system that would tell me how I had to practice.

I thought “how hard could it be” and got to work.

Well turns out- it was hard. But I loved being my own boss and having my own schedule and not worrying about whether or not insurance was going to reimburse me for the 90 minutes I spent with my patient.

I was not rich by any means at the end of year one, but I was successful “enough” that I could survive on my own in an expensive city, without support from a partner or family, feed myself yummy  organic food, and take one nice-ish trip a year (if you ever want advice on how to Ball on a Budget in Maui, hit me up). 

I also could not have done any of it without the help of my mentors, who believed in me and referred patients to me. But more on that topic later.

But then I decided to move across the country to be near family. Zero community. Zero professional connections. Which was quite a stark difference then the incredible community I built of healers, colleagues, mentors, and friends in Seattle. 

I wanted to offer a window into how I built my practice from scratch. I write this for the newer profession of naturopathic students who are graduating medical school and uncertain about their next steps that have been following me and asking to come shadow me throughout the last couple years. 

The truth is, if I can do it, so can you. But hopefully you can do it even more efficiently if you avoid these common pitfalls. 

In this blog I plan on sharing the system I created for myself to follow that allowed me to tap into the local community, find my smallest viable audience, provide value, and grow my practice.