62. From Burnout to Booked Out: Building a Thriving Clinic in One Year, with Dr. Patil-Sisodia

Have you ever imagined opening your own clinic… only for your brain to immediately start writing a disaster movie starring guilt, financial ruin, and the loss of your "safe" paycheck?

But what if the path that looks safest may be the one costing you your health, creativity, and love for medicine?

I recently sat down with Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia, an endocrinologist and founder of Eastside Menopause & Metabolism, for an honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a practice of your own. 

A Career That Looked Successful From the Outside

Komal spent 12 years at the same hospital system, working her way up through leadership: medical director of endocrinology, then executive medical director over all specialties, then quality officer. She was the person who asked "why," who pushed for change, who cared deeply about the patients and community she served.

But underneath the titles, something wasn't working. 

When the pandemic hit, she got certified in obesity medicine and started noticing how badly the system was failing women in perimenopause and midlife (an area she was becoming personally and professionally passionate about). 

She tried to build that care into her existing role and realized it was never going to fit. Around the same time, financial and operational decisions outside her control put years of work she'd built at risk, and she hit what she describes as an identity crisis: what was the point of all that effort if she didn't actually have control over the outcome?

The Stories That Almost Stopped Her

Once the idea of starting her own practice took shape, the fear showed up fast and loud, and it came from a few different directions:

• Guilt about leaving an organization embedded in her community — the same hospital that had treated her family and, in her words, saved her mother's life
• Financial fear, tied back to childhood experiences around money and a deep need for security
• Fear of instability, sharpened by the fact that her husband had a near-fatal heart attack years earlier, leaving her acutely aware of what it would mean to lose a steady income and have to navigate life as a single parent

She describes herself as someone with an "overactive imagination", constantly generating worst-case scenarios that hadn't happened and likely weren't going to. 

Learning to notice that pattern, instead of letting it run the show, became a turning point.

Redefining Safety From the Inside Out

Komal’s first patient appointment gave her something no business plan could: proof that what she was building actually mattered. Her website wasn't finished and billing was still messy, but she could sit with someone, really listen, and help them leave with a plan. That was the moment she started to believe this could work.

At the same time, she was doing quieter, harder work internally. After her husband's heart attack, she'd gotten used to numbing herself just to get through each day. She was clocking out emotionally so she could keep the family running. 

Over time, she realized that suppressing hard feelings had also cut her off from joy. Learning to sit with discomfort, rather than push through it, became part of how she rebuilt her sense of safety. Not from a job title or a paycheck, but from trusting herself.

Finding the Right Kind of Support

Komal started out working with me one-on-one, which she found invaluable, but she eventually joined my immersive group program, Female Founders Accelerator, specifically to find community. She'd tried other local entrepreneur groups and kept hitting the same wall: rooms full of impressive women, but no one who understood the particular bind of being a physician trying to charge for her value outside the insurance system.

One moment from the program stood out in particular, which she calls "the intervention." My colleague Matthea and I noticed, based on her stress and wellness scores, that she was neglecting her health, her family, and her own wellbeing in favor of pushing the business forward. So we stopped her and made her deal with it head-on, before burnout could catch up with her.

Building Eastside Menopause & Metabolism

Komal's practice is shaped directly by her family's history. Her mother had a hysterectomy in her 30s and, as a result, went through an undiagnosed early menopause, which no one flagged for her at the time. Years later, she developed serious heart disease. Komal believes that gap in care is exactly what she's now positioned to prevent for other women.

Her clinical model reflects that mission:

• Deep, unhurried first visits covering personal history, family history, and metabolic risk factors
• One focus area addressed at a time, rather than trying to solve everything at once
• Structured follow-ups every 8–12 weeks to track what's actually working before moving to the next priority

The approach has paid off. Seeing patients just one day a week, she's on track to roughly double her prior year's revenue within her first six months of this year.

What She'd Tell Herself a Year Ago

Asked what she wishes she'd known sooner, Komal points to one thing: the path is not linear. Growth in business, she says, mirrors what she already knew to be true about health: progress comes in ups and downs, not a straight line. Knowing that in advance would have made the hard stretches easier to sit with.

Creativity, Rediscovered

One of the more surprising outcomes of Komal's journey has been how much creative space it opened up. She rebranded her podcast, now called Clearly Hormonal, after working through her own complicated relationship with the word "hormones" being co-opted by the wellness industry. 

She's also developing a clinical assessment tool, the Midlife Health Compass, aimed at helping both patients and clinicians catch metabolic and hormonal issues earlier. And for the first time in over a decade, she picked up sewing again — a hobby she'd dropped once medical training took over her life.

None of that was part of the original plan. It became possible once she stopped operating from fear and started trusting what she'd built.

Ready to build a practice that feels like yours?

If Komal's story hit close to home, if you're burned out, questioning your next step, or dreaming about what else might be possible in your career, you don't have to figure it out alone. Book a free discovery call to work through some of the key questions that come up when you're starting or scaling your own clinic.

More about Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia 

Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia is triple board-certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology, and Obesity Medicine, with 17 years of clinical experience and a Menopause Society Certified Practitioner credential. 

A physician executive since 2015, she runs Eastside Menopause & Metabolism, her direct-pay practice in Redmond, WA, and founded KPS Health, LLC, which owns the Midlife Health Compass™ clinical assessment platform. She's also the host of the Clearly Hormonal podcast, where she brings her expertise in metabolic and hormonal health to a wider audience.