[Expert Guest] Dr. Danielle Trego Finden: Building From Your Vision

It's an honor to have Dr. Danielle Trego Finden on the show today. She has done so many incredible things and came highly recommended by many to have her speak and share her journey.  

Dr. Finden: Shortly after I graduated from chiropractic school, I found myself in an associate position right out of school, and I thought that was going to be a great stepping stone to someday owning my own practice. It turned out to be a much shorter path to owning my own practice than I thought it would be, and I wound up starting a practice just a couple of months after I took an associate position that wound up, just not being a good fit for all parties involved.

I started my own practice by sharing space with another chiropractor and I would do practice relief, which is sort of like being a substitute teacher. So whether they were going on vacation or they were going on maternity leave or what I was, that's what I thought that all of this practice relief would be for.

I found that a lot of the practice relief gigs that I was getting hired for were actually for docs that got injured on the job and that was super eye-opening for me to be new into practice and thinking I want to be in this career for a really long time.

I don't want something that I do when I'm treating my patients to cause injury to my body, that leaves me unable to practice. And so what can I do to protect myself from that happening and then really realizing that changing some of the techniques that I was using in trying to help my patients so that I wasn't hurting or harming my own body. I started taking on interns from the local school that was teaching chiropractors to be chiropractors.

They would do a clinical-based internship and the school knew that if we have a petite framed female, who's an intern, maybe we should send them to Dr. Finden who knows how to adjust, and they'll learn the skills from her. That maybe they are missing from their training in school because they just weren't the techniques, just weren't tailored to that. They're teaching you how to do all the other basic things.

I had an intern and one day she said, "No one ever taught us how to do it like this. You should write a book." And I thought that was hilarious because not an author. I'm a doctor, I had just had a baby. I don't have time to write a book and long and short of it is, I wrote a book, and that book wound up coming out right before my second child was born and right as I was flipping a practice to sell it for profit.

So I had done a lot of practice relief for a doc that had injured herself so many times that it was turning into a situation where she was no longer able to practice; so she needed to sell her practice and she really wanted me to buy the practice because the patient already knew and trusted me. She wanted to make sure that she was leaving all of her patients in good hands, but the practice was quite a distance from where I live and where I otherwise work.

I didn't really want to buy the practice so I found a friend and said, let's do this together. Let's write up an agreement ahead of time, what it's going to look like. So we bought the practice together, flipped it, and then I sold my shares to her, she continues to own that practice. Then I had my second baby and then things just ballooned from there; I opened additional satellite offices, hired on two Associates and now we're building out a perinatal Wellness Center that will be 3,400 square feet that will open in September 2021.

To listen in to the rest of Dr. Finden's journey and how she continues to build from her vision.

Don't forget to register for the upcoming workshop: What Infrastructure Scaling Practices Have + Where Growing Practices Should Start