Starting an Urgent Care:
Develop Skills as an Entrepreneur
Mistake #2 - Confusing a good doctor with a good entrepreneur
You may be great at caring for patients, but that does not mean that you will inherently have the skills to strategize, lead and energize your staff in starting an urgent care center. You must become an intense student of urgent care entrepreneurship. Read books about starting businesses. Attend seminars, read books and articles and immerse yourself in the subject of entrepreneurship and network with several successful urgent care entrepreneurs. Develop the inner entrepreneur within yourself. They don't teach you this in medical school. If you don't have an iota of entrepreneur in you and if you have no desire or intention to develop these skills, then maybe starting an urgent care center is not the best place for you to invest your energies. You dream about financial independence, but you may come to financial ruin. You dream about not having an administrator tell you how to practice medicine, but you may end up with a banker who owns your entire urgent care center. If you build it, they will come, does not apply to an urgent care building; it applies to an urgent care business that you start, develop and nurture to success. Your startup urgent care is not simply a primary care medical practice with a "walk in" sign. A successful startup urgent care center is a business, requiring an entrepreneur with a vision of the future and a never-say-die drive to make a startup successful.
Most importantly, network with lots of professionals who have successfully started urgent care centers themselves. Then best way to do this is to attend the National Urgent Care Conference of the Urgent Care Association of America. Those who have attended in past years have found it to be a networking extravaganza, packed with people who are experienced in and excited about the topic of starting urgent care centers.