Nobody Tells You About the Campaign When You Are Building a Business

Nobody Tells You About the Campaign When You Are Building a Business

📝 This Week's Real-Life Lesson

There's a version of building a medical practice that looks clean from the outside. You form the entity, build the website, maybe run some social ads, and patients show up. I've seen that version described in blog posts and pitch decks.

Then there's what actually happens.

When I started building ChatRx — my AI-assisted on-demand urgent care business — I knew the clinical model was right. I knew the technology worked. I knew the market was real. What I was not fully prepared for was everything that comes before the first patient uses the platform. The part that doesn't scale yet. The part that is entirely personal, entirely manual, and entirely unglamorous.

I call it the campaign. Because that's what it is. Not a marketing strategy. Not a growth funnel. A campaign — in the political sense of the word. You go to people. You knock on doors. You shake hands. You have the same conversation forty-seven times and you listen differently each time because each person is telling you something slightly different about what they actually need. You collect all of that, and you build around what you heard.

Nobody in medical school told me this was coming. Nobody in residency warned me that if I ever tried to build something of my own, I would spend months doing work that felt less like medicine and more like running for city council, gradually building credibility in towns where nobody knows your name yet.

But here's what I've learned: the campaign is not a detour from building your practice. It is the foundation of it. And the physicians who are willing to do it — the ones in DPC, private practice, concierge medicine, telemedicine, and urgent care who actually go out and meet their market — those are the ones who build practices that last. That’s because they are building their trust network.

What the Campaign Actually Looks Like

With ChatRx, the campaign started long before we had a finished product. I was meeting with pharmacists, physicians, employer HR directors, benefits managers, community health workers, hospital discharge coordinators, and — maybe most importantly — regular people. Not in their professional capacity. At community events. At church. At the gym. In parking lots after youth sports games.

I was listening for one thing: how do people actually describe the problem we're trying to solve? Not how I would describe it as a physician. How they describe it when they're frustrated, when they're exhausted, when they've sat in an urgent care waiting room for two hours for a strep test, or when they couldn't get a same-day appointment and ended up in a packed ER that cost them $1000 or more.

What I heard was not primarily about AI or technology or clinical quality. It was about time. And money. And the feeling of being dismissed by a system that wasn't designed with them in mind. Every single conversation was a data point. Not formally collected, not in a spreadsheet — just absorbed, remembered, and fed back into the decisions we were making about the product, the price, the messaging, the channels.

That is business intelligence. And you cannot buy it. You cannot survey your way to it. You go get it, in person, one conversation at a time. It is slow. It is sometimes awkward. It is deeply, personally yours — because it's your business, and those are your potential patients and partners, and the relationship starts the moment you show up willing to listen.

The Three Constituencies Every Physician-Entrepreneur Has to Enlist

1. Friends and advocates — your first believers

Every campaign starts with the people who already trust you. Your former colleagues. Your patients who have followed your career. Your community connections. Your neighbors. These people are not your customers yet — they're your early advocates. They're the ones who will tell someone else about what you're doing before you've earned a single stranger's attention.

Don't be too proud to ask them for help. Tell them what you're building. Tell them why. Ask them if they know anyone who might benefit. Ask them to share it. The physician who thinks their work should speak for itself and skips this step loses six months they can't get back. Nobody discovers you. You have to be introduced.

2. Business partners and referral sources — your distribution network

For ChatRx, this meant independent pharmacies, employers offering it as a benefit, school nurses who were overwhelmed with triaging sick kids whose parents couldn’t access or afford care , and rural health systems with access gaps. For a private practice or a DPC, this means hospital discharge teams, specialists who need a primary care home for their patients, employers looking for a better primary care benefit, and community organizations whose members have nowhere else to go.

These relationships require the same thing any B2B sales relationship requires: showing up, explaining the value proposition clearly, following up more times than feels comfortable, and being patient. More than 7,200 employers now offer DPC benefits, and over half of DPC memberships are employer-sponsored. That didn't happen because DPC physicians posted on LinkedIn. It happened because individual physicians walked into HR offices and made the case in person, repeatedly, until someone said yes.

The door-knocking is real. I have done it. It is not beneath you. It is your job.

3. The patients themselves — your market intelligence source

This is the one most physicians undervalue. Before you build your DPC membership structure, before you set your concierge fee, before you design your urgent care offering — talk to the people who are going to pay for it. Not in a focus group. In real life.

What do they complain about? What have they stopped trying to get from the healthcare system because the friction was too high? What would they pay monthly for guaranteed same-day access to a doctor they trust? What do they think "telemedicine" means, and does their definition match yours?

The answers will surprise you and correct you. They corrected me more than once during the ChatRx build. A pricing assumption I was certain about turned out to be wrong. A feature I thought was essential turned out to be irrelevant. A channel I wasn't planning to use turned out to be where our target patients actually lived. None of that intelligence came from a market research report. It came from conversations I had when I stopped talking long enough to actually listen.

Why It Has to Be Personal

Here's the thing about the campaign that nobody who hasn't done it quite understands: it only works because it's you.

Not a flyer. Not an ad. Not a hire. You.

The physician who shows up at a community health fair, who sits down with the HR director at the mid-size manufacturer in their town, who calls the discharge coordinator at the regional hospital and asks for fifteen minutes — that physician is doing something no marketing agency can replicate. They're transferring trust. Medical authority. Personal credibility. The implicit message of every one of those interactions is: I care enough about this to be here myself. I'm not sending a representative. I'm the one building this, and I want to know if it serves you.

That message lands differently than any ad. It builds the kind of early loyalty that keeps a practice alive through the hard first year when the numbers aren't there yet.

DPC and concierge practice sites surged 83% between 2018 and now, and clinician participation grew 78%. That's an extraordinary number. But behind every one of those practices is a physician who, at some point early on, did the unglamorous work of going out and finding their first fifty patients the hard way. One conversation at a time. One referral at a time. One door at a time.

It is hard work. It takes longer than you think. And it is one of the most clarifying experiences of your professional life — because it forces you to get clear, very quickly, on exactly what you're offering, exactly who you're offering it to, and exactly why they should trust you with their health.

Monday Case Study: Dr. MR Knocks on Every Door in Town

Dr. MR is a family physician who left a health system after nine years to open a direct primary care practice in a mid-size Midwestern town. She had a solid clinical reputation and almost no marketing experience. What she had was a willingness to work the campaign.

For the first three months before she opened, she did nothing but listen and show up. She met with the owners of the three largest employers in her county. She introduced herself to every specialist she'd referred patients to over the previous decade and explained what she was building. She attended two community events per week — not to pitch, just to be present and answer questions when people asked what she was doing. She sat down with the discharge team at the regional hospital and explained how her practice could serve their patients who had no primary care home.

She opened with 63 enrolled patients — well above the typical DPC launch average — before she'd spent a single dollar on advertising. By month eight she had 280 members. By month eighteen she was at capacity and had a waitlist.

When I asked her what the secret was, she didn't hesitate. "I just showed up everywhere. People wanted to know if I was real. The only way to prove you're real is to be there."

Read more about building a practice on your terms: Embracing Independence and Autonomy in a Practice Without Walls and The E-Myth for Doctors: Don't Build Another Job — Build a System.

Is This Deductible?

Scenario: I spent $340 last week on campaign-style marketing activities for my new DPC practice — $80 on printed materials I handed out at a community event, $120 on a dinner where I hosted four potential employer partners, and $140 on a local chamber of commerce membership I joined specifically for networking. All through my micro-corporation. Deductible?

Printed materials: Yes — 100% deductible as an advertising and marketing expense. Flyers, brochures, business cards — all ordinary and necessary business expenses for a medical practice.

The employer dinner: 50% deductible as a business meal. Document who attended, the business purpose discussed, and keep the receipt. The IRS requires the business context to be clear — "discussed DPC partnership opportunity with [company] HR director" is the kind of note you need in your records.

Chamber of commerce membership: 100% deductible as a business dues expense. Professional memberships, networking organizations, and trade associations are fully deductible when the primary purpose is business development.

The big picture: The entire campaign — every event, every meeting, every meal, every printed piece — is a deductible business expense when run through a properly structured micro-corporation. The W2 physician doing the same networking for a hospital gets none of it. Structure changes everything.

→ Free Download: Tax Deduction Guide for Micro-Business Owners

→ Free Download: The Ultimate List of Business Deductions for Professional Micro-Corporations

Join the Movement

"The best marketing a physician can do is show up, listen, and care enough to build something around what they heard. Nobody can replicate that. It is yours." — Dr. Tod Stillson

DPC, private practice, concierge medicine, urgent care — the model matters less than the willingness to do the work that fills it. The campaign is hard. It is personal. And it is what separates the practices that grow from the ones that stall.

If you're building something right now — or thinking about it — you don't have to figure it all out alone. PEA exists for exactly this. The community, the tools, the one-on-one support to help you build the structure and work the campaign.

→ Join PEA Explorer Membership — build with physicians who are already making this move

→ Book a Micro-Business Strategy Consultation — let's map your specific path

→ Free Download: The Physician's Guide to Entrepreneurship

→ Free Download: The Physician Enterprise Roadmap

→ Free Download: Job Options for Independent Physicians — Breaking Free from Corporate Medicine

→ Free Download: Every Doctor Is A Brand — Distinguishing Yourself as an Independent Doctor

→ Enroll: My top selling course: Creating a Practice Without Walls

The campaign is not the part anyone talks about. But it is the part that determines whether everything else works. Show up. Listen. Build around what you heard. That's the job.