Getting a practice off the ground and making it profitable can be difficult. Most nurse practitioners can start their own side hustle and generate an extra $3,000-$10,000 a month fairly easily, but generating real profits of $20,000, $40,000, or even $100,000 a month can be challenging. Once you have a truly profitable practice though, it usually can stay profitable with the same amount of effort going into it, but it will stagnate and plateau. Eventually you will just hit a specific revenue number and stay around that unless you are ready for the next step: GROWTH.

I have been able to grow my men’s health practices to a healthy revenue number of between $70,000-$80,000 a month. It happened in a step wise fashion: first we hit $20,000, then $30,000, and so forth (I talk about that in THIS article). Each step took a certain amount of work, planning, and strategy to get there. Now I am at a point of fairly slow growth and stagnation because I simply am not putting any additional effort into it, on purpose. I am content with where I am and have a few other irons in the fire to keep me busy (Elite NP, medical cannabis, property management, land development investing, equity investing). If I wasn’t doing those other things, then I would still be in growth mode for my men’s health practices and eventually get it to $150,000-$250,000 a month in revenue, but I digress. Instead, I am in growth mode for Elite NP and my investment businesses.

So, today I wanted to talk about how to grow your business. This will be brief and to the point as I will likely be coming out with a course this year on how to grow and scale your niche practice to the next level. Anyone interested? Now, lets get to it…

There are two primary ways to grow a practice:

1. Increase the lifetime value of your current customer by increasing the service and product offerings of your practice. Essentially, you are giving them more “stuff” to buy and ensuring they are a recurrent customer, not a onetime customer.
2. Increase the number of new customers coming through the door because you will always have patient turnover and MUST be marketing at all times to generate new leads.

Now, these two concepts are how you increase REVENUE, but are not the only steps on how to grow your practice. There are a few more considerations outside of revenue growth:

1. Offloading busy work to others. You MUST be okay with hiring employees to handle the “BS” busy work in your practice. You will NEVER grow if you are still scheduling patients, taking payments, and answering the phone. You need to be asking yourself $10,000 questions, not $100 questions.
2. Offloading income generating work to others. You MUST be okay with hiring other nurse practitioners/providers in your practice to see patients and generate income. I have other nurse practitioners that work at my men’s health practice. They are the ones that generate the majority of income, not me. I only work 4-6 hours a week on PURPOSE. My time is valuable and is dedicated to other ventures as well.
3. Advertising in other markets. Eventually you will have advertised as much as you can in a certain area or to a certain demographic, so you need to think outside the box and figure out where you can find more patients. Remember, you need MORE PATIENTS to generate income. It is one of the primary ways to grow your practice.
4. Provide a plethora of complementary services in your practice. If you are ONLY offering IV infusion services, then you are missing out on multiple UP SELL opportunities in your business on a daily basis. If you can answer this question and deliver, then you will increase your revenue: What additional services/products would my patients purchase from me? (Weight loss complements IV therapy. Weight loss complements men’s health. Functional medicine complements wellness practices. Etc…)
5. Expanding to other locations. Eventually, you are going to have the majority of market share in your particular area. If you want to grow, you need to consider opening up secondary offices in other locations. If you are operating a telemedicine practice, then you need to consider offering your service in other states and market. By expanding into other markets, you are increasing the number of new customers in your practice, which is the other primary way to grow your practice.

Obviously, this list is not inclusive. There are other considerations when growing a practice/business, but these are main ones to focus on in my opinion. Now, this might sound overwhelming to many of you, but listen: the above considerations are applicable for the practice that is wanting to GROW. You could pretty much skip the majority of the above if your goal is just a niche side hustle to bring in an extra $5,000 a month. I know many nurse practitioners that just have a weight loss or functional medicine side hustle that brings in an extra $7,500 a month while working, and that is FINE. It ultimately depends on what your goals are.

Are you content making $150,000-$250,000 a year and having more free time? Then just get your practice to that goal and enjoy your free time.

Or do you want to become a nurse practitioner millionaire? If so, you better be ready for the ride… It takes A LOT of work to build a business (or multiple businesses) that generate millions in revenue. It is not an easy task, and you MUST be okay sacrificing your time to get there. You must be implementing the above into your business on a daily basis to continue to grow its revenue and to delegate work to others…

You do NOT work for a million-dollar business. Your million-dollar business works for YOU.

You do NOT work in a million-dollar business. You are working ON your million-dollar business.

So, think about what your time is worth and how much work you are willing to put into your practice.

Do you want it to remain a niche side practice? (My medical cannabis will continue to be that for me.).

Do you want it to be a full-service niche practice open 5 days a week? (My men’s health practice will continue to be that for me.).

Or do you want to grow your business to unimaginable heights? (The combination of all my businesses will continue to be that for me. Not just one.).

That question is for you to answer. It ultimately comes down to what you want in life, but to grow your business you MUST be okay with:

1. Offering more services and products into your practice.
2. Marketing to acquire new customers.
3. Delegating work to others.

THAT is how you grow your business!