True financial freedom as a nurse practitioner is within reach. With many nurse practitioners overworked, underpaid, and saddled with student debt, taking charge of your career through self employment is imperative. Here, Elite NP founder Justin Allan shares how he found success and independence in a few easy steps.

Justin’s road to self-employment

After three years of continuous hustle, I am proud to announce that I am completely self-employed. This means that I and I alone will be responsible for putting food on the table and a roof over my family’s head. Does this scare me? Not in the slightest. Why? Because I feel more secure now than I ever did as an employed nurse practitioner.

No one’s job is secure, and during the COVID pandemic in 2020, thousands of nurse practitioners lost their jobs. Factor in the ongoing market saturation of our profession and I don’t need to explain any further why your job may be unstable. I am going to tell you how I now make three times what I did as an employed nurse practitioner, and how I became completely self-employed in just three years.

A dead-end job sparked change

It all started when I had the epiphany that I reached a ceiling as an employed nurse practitioner. I was working a busy emergency room shift and I looked around at all the physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants and realized that there is just nothing more. This was it. There was no upward mobility. I had to accept the fact that it was going to be the same old same old, shift after shift, and with small incremental raises from time to time for the next 25 years. I will be honest with you, it made me depressed. I have always strived to be the best I could be, and I felt like I had reached the pinnacle of my career after just four years out of school. I was at a dead end in my early 30s.

After realizing the reality of my employed nurse practitioner situation, I decided it was time to make a change. First, I found a job in an unrestricted state and left the restricted hell hole I was in. I knew one of the biggest factors that was preventing me from reaching my full potential was the requirement of a supervising physician. I could never start my own practice without employing a physician looming over my head and micromanaging my day-to-day operations. This did not settle well with me. So, I took the chance and moved across the country to a full practice authority state.

Just FYI, finding a collaborator has never been easier. Check out the Elite NP Physician Collaboration Network if you need one.

Pushing past self doubt

Many of you are thinking “well, I can’t do that”, and that might be true. Everyone has varying family and life obligations. But let me tell you something about the magic of telemedicine: you can practice in independent states from a restricted state. All you need is a license in that state. Also, it can be useful to consider health coaching. You can “coach” people about various health needs in any state free from regulatory burden. The trick here is to not utilize your license. More on that is discussed in the coaching and consulting course.

Within three months of moving to an independent state, I started my first practice while working at an urgent care. I started an opioid addiction practice. I did not know much about treating opioid addicts, but if physicians could do it from just an eight-hour online course, then I could too!

So, I took on the challenge and started a “Suboxone” practice. It was not a great success. Not from the clinical standpoint (that was easy), but because I was a total rookie when it came to starting a business. But guess what? You live and learn. Sometimes you must fail to succeed. The lessons I learned from starting a practice that ended up failing outweigh what you could learn in an MBA program any day. I was only out $5,000, so it wasn’t the end of the world.

Learning from mistakes

After that, I put my work books back on and started my medical cannabis clinic. I told myself that I was not going to deal with the headaches of accepting insurance, so I wanted to start a cash-only practice. This was a success! Within six months I went from $0 in revenue to almost $10,000 each month in revenue. Within 18 months, I was making $20,000 to $25,000 per month. It was great. The best part was that I only spent eight hours a week seeing patients. This is when I had another life changing epiphany: I could make a lot of money with a part-time practice. Therefore, I needed to create multiple part-time businesses so I could break free from the rat race and reach my full potential.

Within eight months of starting my medical cannabis clinic, I decided to establish my men’s health clinic. I invested all the money I was making from my medical cannabis clinic into my men’s health practice. I learned a lot from the mistakes I made with my opioid addiction clinic and from what I did right with my medical cannabis clinic that when I started my men’s health practice, it was a pretty smooth ride.

A new self-employment business model

I again decided to only accept cash. When you accept cash, you won’t need to navigate the red tape of insurance accreditation. Within five months I was generating over $10,000 per month in revenue part-time. I spent approximately 6 to 12 hours a week on my men’s health clinic, and after two years we were generating over $30,000/month in revenue. I am now in year three and we are consistently hitting $50,000/month while only seeing patients eight hours each week. Because of this, I decided to open a second location last year, and it has slowly climbed to over $10,000 per month in revenue.

In addition to all of this, I have invested large portions of the money I have made in the last three years into rental real estate. I am now bringing in a steady passive income of over $2,000 each month from my rentals.

I did all this while still working. I worked full-time at an urgent care during the initial stages of my entrepreneurial journey and transitioned to part-time about a year and a half into it. I did this because maintaining a job while building part-time practices allows you to be massively financially secure. I was able to live off the income from my job while the profits from the businesses supplemented my monthly expenses. If the businesses had failed, then I would have still been okay because I had the income from my job to fall back on.

Was it a lot of work to maintain a job and start a business? YES! I felt like I did nothing but work for two years. I did not have much of a life for a solid year. It was tough, but it was worth it in the end to reach full self employment. Sometimes it is about what you didn’t do to succeed, remember that.

Another critical aspect to my success was that I avoided business debt. I funded all of this from my own money at first, and then reinvested business income into growing the businesses. I never spent more than $7,500 starting any of my practices. I spent less than $10,000 to start a practice that now generates $50,000 a month in revenue in less than three years.

Side note: Investing in your job will NEVER pay you back like investing in your business can. Plus, the tax incentives of a business are too numerous to list here. Having a business is the last tax haven left in this country. Ask any accountant.

Knocking out debt through self employment

To top it all off, I have paid off all my debt over the past three years. I would have NEVER been able to do this as fast as I did by just being an employed nurse practitioner. Being debt free = FREEDOM. Being debt free = not having to rely on income from a job to be able to survive. I have no debt obligations now outside of good debt on rental properties. I have a very low cost of living because I am self-employed and debt-free.

Just over the last few months, I have decided to finally leave my urgent care job outside of the occasional PRN shift. I don’t need it anymore and frankly; I am sick of following the rules of healthcare administrators and government bureaucrats who have no clue what they are doing. I just want to practice freely, help patients, and make a solid living.

I have created an income through entrepreneurship and common sense business strategy. My practices and rental properties provide me more than enough and I work on my terms. I have a surplus every month which I am aggressively investing so I can eventually be totally free from working in the next 5 years if I choose to. I won’t, because I love my men’s health patients and love helping my nurse practitioner sisters and brothers.

You too can become self-employed

Many of you are thinking that it’s not possible for you to become self employed. I definitely took a bit of risk here. I maintained my job to live off and started a niche side practice that could be done eight hours per week. I never invested more than $10,000 of my personal income into these businesses. I never took out business debt. I am debt free and plan to stay that way (outside of mortgages on rental properties).

This wasn’t hard folks. I followed a basic model and was very disciplined on how I spent my money. Could I have bought a $150,000 sports car? Sure, but that isn’t important to me. Freedom is what is important to me. I value living life over materialistic nonsense. The best way to live life is by being financially secure and independent. Owning multiple income-generating businesses is the best way for a nurse practitioner to get there.

I developed The Elite Nurse Practitioner Model to help you succeed. This is based off my experiences and what I did to become financially independent. Follow the principles, it will pay off.

I have developed multiple courses to walk you through the process step-by-step on how to get to where I am. The courses teach you how to open a niche side practice to become self-employed. The financial independence course teaches you how to manage your money so you can be free.

If I can do this, anyone can do this. If the thousands of nurse practitioners that have followed my advice can do this, so can you! I receive emails on a daily basis from nurse practitioners who have started their own practice and changed the trajectory of their life.

Your job will never set you free. Following the standard model of how you should live (full-time job, lots of debt, living beyond your means, a 401k, etc.) will only bog you down further. There is a way out for the nurse practitioner, and it is not as hard as you think. All it takes is a little bit of courage, $5,000 to $10,000 to invest in a business, and an idea.

So, the decision is yours:

Stay employed full-time and be a cog in the machine that doesn’t care about you. A system that treats you as a disposable asset. A system where you are secondary to the administrative pencil pushers and physician collaborators.

OR

Venture out on your own and build multiple income streams that will put you on the path to freedom. Build a life where you live on your terms. Practice how you WANT to practice, not how an insurance protocol tells you to. Essentially, be a wolf amongst the herds of sheep. You can become one of the ELITE nurse practitioners, and I am here to help you along that journey!