69. How to Stop Overcomplicating Your Private Practice

Is the “corporate medicine hangover” following you into private practice?

You left the bureaucracy behind, but the urgency, overcomplication, frustration, and constant sense that everything should somehow be harder than it is can be much more difficult to shake.

And before you know it, you’re building the clinic you wanted while bringing some of the same exhausting ways of thinking with you.

I see this all the time with physicians who have recently left large healthcare systems, especially academic or highly administrative environments. 

You’re excited about your work, passionate about your patients, and finally have the freedom to practice medicine differently. But when it comes to actually running the business, suddenly everything feels heavy.

Every decision feels complicated, every task feels urgent, and admin feels draining before you’ve even started it.

And sometimes, when something isn’t complicated, your brain goes looking for all the reasons it probably should be.

That’s the corporate medicine hangover.

Your New Clinic Is Not Your Old Institution

Here’s what I want you to remember: your business is fundamentally much simpler than the system you came from.

In corporate medicine, there are layers upon layers of complexity because, to some extent, those systems require them. There are contracts, reimbursement structures, administrators, insurance companies, departments, policies, approvals and endless moving pieces.

Your direct care clinic doesn’t have to work that way.

At its core, the model can be beautifully simple: somebody needs help, they come to you, they pay you, you take care of them.

That could look like fee-for-service visits, a package that bundles several services together, or a membership model where you work with patients over a longer period of time.

The details can vary, and yes, running any business comes with some complexity, but the fundamental model remains surprisingly simple: serve the patient well.

The problem is that you may have spent years being trained to expect the opposite.

You Left the System. Your Brain Might Still Be There.

When you’ve spent years working inside a complicated institution, your brain gets very good at operating in that environment.

You learn to anticipate problems. You learn that there’s always another hoop to jump through, another person who needs to approve something, another policy you didn’t know existed, another insurance issue waiting around the corner.

So it makes sense that when you start your own clinic, you might carry some of that energy with you.

I see a particular cocktail come up again and again:

• Everything feels more complicated than it needs to be.
• Everything feels urgent.
• Business tasks immediately trigger frustration.
• You worry you don’t know enough or aren’t doing things “right.”
• You focus so much on what isn’t working that you forget to notice what you’re actually building.

And that last one is important, because you can become so focused on optimizing, fixing and worrying that you completely miss the fact that you’re doing amazing work, helping people and creating the business you wanted.

What If Your Business Is Actually a Creative Act?

An artist doesn’t sit down on day one and immediately produce the final, perfect version of their work. Creating something worthwhile means learning as you go, studying other artists, experimenting with different techniques, borrowing what resonates, and letting go of what doesn’t. 

Over time, all of that exploration becomes a style, a perspective, a voice that feels distinctly your own.

Your business develops in much the same way.

The clinic you build at the beginning probably won’t look exactly like the one you’re running six months from now, and that isn’t evidence that you got it wrong. It’s evidence that you’re learning.

As you go, you’ll understand your patients more deeply, notice which services you genuinely enjoy offering, refine the processes that feel clunky, and become clearer about your boundaries, pricing, schedule, and how you actually want to spend your time.

Your business is allowed to evolve because building it is a creative act.

And when you start seeing it that way, you can replace some of that rigid, critical, optimization-focused energy with curiosity.

Instead of constantly asking, What am I doing wrong?, you get to ask, What do I want to create?

You’re Also Not Supposed to Do This Alone

There’s another reason this transition can feel so difficult.

When you decide to build a direct care clinic, you may suddenly find yourself surrounded by people who don’t understand what you’re doing.

People around you may still be thinking in the language of traditional healthcare, asking why you’re not in-network, how copays work, or where your clinic fits into the system they already understand.

Meanwhile, you’re thinking: Is this actually possible? Am I doing this right? Is anyone else building something like this?

This is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in bringing physician founders together.

There’s something that happens when you get into a room with other people who are also trying to create a different way of practicing medicine. You don’t just learn what’s possible from them… you start getting clearer about what you want to build.

That’s the idea behind the Female Founders Accelerator program I run with Dr. Matthea Rentea: creating a space where women building their own businesses can get out of the silo, see different possibilities and develop their own vision.

Meaningful change rarely happens because one smart person quietly decides to do something differently. It happens when people find each other.

You’re Building More Than a Clinic

I think those of you leaving corporate medicine to build direct care practices are revolutionaries.

Right now, running a profitable direct care clinic can still make you feel like the anomaly in the room. 

My hope is that eventually it doesn’t feel unusual at all.

That physicians practicing this way, with a direct relationship between clinician and patient and without insurance sitting in the middle of every clinical decision, becomes something people see as normal.

But changing a system starts with individual people deciding to create something different.

And if that’s what you’re doing, I don’t want you to build your new thing using all the habits that made the old thing miserable.

Ask Yourself These Three Questions

So the next time you notice yourself spiraling into complexity, urgency or frustration over your business, stop and ask:

• How can I make this easy?
• How can I make this fun?
• How can I make this simple?

These questions are simple on purpose. After years in a system where everything is layered, complicated, and overengineered, simplicity can feel almost suspicious.

Running your own clinic will still involve decisions, admin, and plenty of things you’d rather not deal with. The difference is that you don’t have to make them harder than they are.

You left corporate medicine to practice differently. Build differently, too.

Keep refining what works, strip out what doesn’t, and come back to one question whenever things start feeling unnecessarily complicated:

How could this be simpler?

Still finding yourself overcomplicating your clinic, or wondering why running it feels heavier than it should?

Book a free discovery call and let’s look at where things are getting unnecessarily complicated, what can be simplified, and how to build a business that actually works for you.

You’ll leave with more clarity, fewer moving parts, and a clearer sense of what to focus on next.