How Fast Can I Grow?

Whether you're concerned about growing fast enough, or have had so much feedback you're concerned you can't handle the workload, let's take an honest look at how fast you can expect to grow your Direct Primary Care clinic.

In my experience, DPCs typically won't grow so fast in their first 6 months that they can't handle the workload. Unless you have some large employer groups, or you've done so much marketing and buildup prior to launch that you have hundreds of patients waiting to join, you probably don't have to worry about growing too fast.

However, let's not throw caution to the wind. One of the most important aspects of DPC is going to be customer experience and customer service. It's what keeps people coming back and telling others about your practice.

Ignoring the power of happy members — or even worse, having unhappy and vocal members — could be devastating. Check out Word of Mouth Marketing for tips on strengthening and encouraging word-of-mouth referrals.

Also, if you're looking for how to grow (hint: it has to do with quality marketing), a solid grounding in the basics of marketing will help you with that. Here, we'll mostly talk about expectations of growth and how to manage growth as a service-based business.

What kind of growth can I expect with great marketing?

If you're a relatively new DPC practice, a great goal to hit for the first couple months is 30 new members per month.

You'll learn a lot from onboarding those first 30–90 members, and as long as you're spending within your marketing budget, you should be starting to cover your monthly costs.

What should I target for healthy growth after the first couple of months?

As with most things in business — it depends.

• Do you have staff to assist you in onboarding members?
• Are you in sick season right now (typically the Winter months)?
• How important is a thorough establish-care visit to you, versus seeing people for urgent needs first with establish-care visits later?
• How many days are you in the office each week?

You get the picture — the number will depend on your specific season and how you'd like your practice to operate.

If you want a number: a good target of solid growth that should be manageable for a single practitioner operating at maximum efficiency is 50 members per month.

Could you manage more? Absolutely. Just make sure you're not forgetting the customer service portion. You want members to have an amazing experience, and sacrificing that for an extra 10 members per month isn't worth it in the long run.

My marketing is working a bit too well! Managing high-growth seasons

So what if you end up having more members to add than you feel comfortable with?

You do want to offer an amazing experience, and there's a point at which your growth will start to infringe upon the access or experience of current members.

Just as I'm managing expectations in this article right now, you can also manage the expectations of potential or future members by doing these things:

• Evaluate your current onboarding process for members. There are likely some inefficiencies or bloat in there somewhere. You might be duplicating a process, double-entering information, or simply capturing information that doesn't matter. Streamline onboarding as much as possible.
• If you're in a busy season, consider delaying membership onboarding to a specific day of the week. Let them know that you're making sure everybody has a great experience, and because it's a busy season, you're busy caring for members right now. It's a way to signal that once they become a member, they'll be valued.
• If you're already overwhelmed with current members and their appointments, start a waiting list. There's nothing wrong with creating a bit of demand and delaying onboarding until you have your feet under you. Of course, you can make exceptions for those who are a good member fit (see Choosing the Right Members for Your Practice) and also have urgent care needs.
• Consider allowing people to join immediately, but delay their establish-care visit for 3–4 weeks. Communicate that urgent care is still available in the meantime, but "we want to make sure to take the necessary time, and we don't want that appointment to feel rushed."
• Don't feel like you have to spend an hour with each patient. I once heard a physician brag that he spent time with each patient until he could tell they wanted to leave. That's not excellent customer service — that's making the exam more about himself than the patient.

I hope you have to deal with managing high growth. Don't worry — you'll get through it.

Just remember that the best thing you can do is give people a great membership experience. If you do whatever it takes to do that, you'll remain successful in DPC.