136 - Physicians: Forget Social Media—These 3 Marketing Strategies Will Actually Grow Your DPC Practice

Thinking about starting a DPC practice—or already in one—but not sure how to actually market yourself and attract patients?

This is the second episode in my DPC series, and we're diving into the real marketing moves every physician needs to master before they can grow a successful DPC practice. You don’t need fancy tools, a business degree, or a huge budget—you just need clarity, confidence, and a strategy rooted in connection and care.

Inside this episode, I’ll walk you through:

• The #1 habit that immediately sets you apart as a trusted DPC physician
• How to present yourself in a way that earns patient loyalty and referrals
• What to focus on in your first year to lay the foundation for long-term growth

If you’re ready to build a DPC practice that actually grows and sustains you—not burns you out—press play and let’s get into it.

Discover how medical graduates, junior doctors, and young physicians can navigate residency training programs, surgical residency, and locum tenens to increase income, enjoy independent practice, decrease stress, achieve financial freedom, and retire early, while maintaining patient satisfaction and exploring physician side gigs to tackle medical school loans.

Transcript

Coach JPMD (00:00.268)
By the end of this episode, you're going to learn three strategies that I think are the key to marketing yourself as a physician in the DPC practice. Welcome back to another episode where I help younger physicians decrease stress and increase income by transitioning from corporate to independent practices, even without any business experience. Thank you for listening to the independent physicians blueprint with your host coach, JPMD. That's me. And so this week,

As I promised, we're going to continue the series on direct primary care. And this week we're going to talk about strategies for marketing. I was going to include growth and marketing in this episode, but I think just three things that I think are key to helping, at least three things that are key to helping you grow your practice as a direct primary care doctor. There are physicians looking for jobs now and third year residents, fellows that are going to be applying for jobs and

you know, I've heard that you want to know how to market yourself and how to market and grow your your practice. So one of the things that I have come come up with was the fact that I think we need to show how we love and respect our patients. And it's not falling in love with patients. No, that's what I'm saying. But we really need to love and respect our patients by showing them that we we care. And how does that how does that translate in practice?

Well, that means that you should remember the name of your patients. One of the strategies that I do or that I've been practicing for many years now is even if I don't remember the name of the patient, I try to remember something related to the patient and it's memory by association. And that helps me remember names of patients that I may ask about their family members. So you really need to understand how you can connect with your patients.

respecting your patients is important as well. So if you go to the office and you're not dressed in clean attire or your shirt's disheveled or you're not smelling good, patients will notice that.

Coach JPMD (02:12.11)
And coming from a French culture, I grew up in a French culture in Haiti. And, you know, that was one thing where, you know, when you go out, you have to actually look like, you know, you ironed your clothes, that you took a shower, that you combed your hair, that you got a haircut, right? We talked about in previous episodes that I think it's key for at least men to cut their hair regularly. It helps build your self-esteem. So love and respect.

many ways to do it but one of the ways is to actually remember your patients names because I think that will show that you care and that you're willing to take the time to remember them. I you remember the Krebs cycle, you remember all the crazy things that we had to remember in school so now you can replace some of that memory with patient names and even team members names so I think that's something that I feel is important and that has suited me well.

over the past couple of years. The second thing is show that you enjoy caring for them. So how do you show that you enjoy caring for your patients? Well, you show up on time. At least you try to show up on time. I know it's difficult sometimes with emergencies and some patients take longer than others. But if you know you're going to be late,

Sometimes I'll pop in a room, the room of the patient that I'm going to see next and say, Hey, I'm running a little behind. I'll be right with you. That shows that you care and that you, that you're showing some respect to them and their, and their time, because their time is valuable as well. So another way to show that you enjoy caring for them is to maybe come up with a, a customized treatment plan.

And one of things that I do in every patient that I see now is write a note, a personalized note detailing the recommendations that I give them. And this may take a little bit more time and you may have to take some time to write so that other patients, so that the patients can understand your handwriting. But what I do is I have a notepad in every room and I write down

Coach JPMD (04:22.926)
what I want them to do, stop a medication, walk 30 minutes, 10 minutes of dark sunlight, any vitamins or supplements that I recommend, any tests that I want them to have. Now, most of this will be in an EMR, and you may not want to do that, but what I find is patients will take that sheet and come back with it and kind of show me, this is what I've done.

previously. it's a personalized message, not a printed message, not something that's generated by a computer or generated by AI. But it's something it's a it's a caring touch that shows that you care about their care. Right. So and the third thing that I would say to help improve your marketing and improve marketing yourself, and as present yourself in the best light that you can.

What I mean by that. The best version of yourself is what you need to show. Not only in your office, how you dress, how you comb your hair, how you smell, how you look, but also online. Because everything is online now, obviously. And so I say get a good picture of yourself. And if you are lacking confidence in speaking and you're more on the shy side,

take a course if possible, go online and find a course that can help you in some of the weaknesses that you might have. Another thing I did, and I'm not sure if residents are doing this now, but I used to moonlight. I moonlighted, moonlighted within three months of my residency in urgent care, Jackson Memorial Hospital. And what that did was it built my confidence really, really high. I was able to

treat patients in the urgent care and have the backup of other attendings in the hospital that could help me treat patients that I wasn't sure about. So that was something that helped build my confidence. I also did a side gig of drawing blood for insurance companies. So I used to go and draw blood and do EKGs at clients' houses.

Coach JPMD (06:43.118)
And that enabled me to gain some extra money, but I was also really good at getting blood. So again, that's another confidence booster. Listen to a podcast, listen to this podcast, right? Listen to previous episodes where we talk about marketing and marketing strategies. The business of medicine is what I love to focus on and help physicians understand, get some exercise, get in shape.

Sleep, sleep as much as you can. Don't do drugs, alcohol, minimize that and get feedback from others. So those are things that will help you present yourself in the best light because that is what patients are going to see first when they go online. They see your name. They want to know who you are. They want to know that what you've done and

So I encourage you, even if you're just coming out of residency and you are not sure what you want to do, you can still build an online presence. And even if you're seeing patients in the hospital and you have good experiences in the hospital, hey, start building up a reviews on health grades on Google. Because if you decide to go into a dark primary care practice later on, or if you decide to go into private practice, you have that online presence that

that can highlight you as a great physician. So those are my three suggestions for for marketing yourself, because I think that's the first thing you need to do before you can say, hey, let's grow a practice. You gotta you gotta start at the basics and you started you gotta start with yourself. So love and respect your patients. Show that you enjoy caring for them. Remember their names. That's important. Really important, I think.

Present yourself in the best light that you can and those strategies will help you grow your practice tremendously, even if you're not starting immediately, but it can help build a base and it can help you start the base in marketing yourself and help propel you to growth. So next week, we're going to be talking about

Coach JPMD (08:45.486)
growth strategies and direct primary care. There's some websites, resources that I'll share with you. I've shared in the past, but I'm trying to kind of condense this, this these episodes so that you have a way or a resource to really bring things together in this space in this dark primary care space. So if you haven't had a chance to listen to the previous episode of 134 on Derek primary care and where things I think with I think things are going in the future, take a listen to that episode. Come back on Thursday

for a did you know episode, which I find fun because it's a quick episode that helps you find out things that you might not have known before. And, and of course next week and every Monday we'll have episodes dropping that will help you decrease your stress and generate wealth in this crazy world we're living in. See you next week. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you'd like to hear more, subscribe, follow your favorite podcast app so you'll never miss an episode.