Amy Pearlman, MD, and Gia Ching on building a personal brand in urology

In this video, Amy M. Pearlman, MD, interviews Gia Ching of GCC Consulting regarding building a personal brand. Pearlman is a urologist and co-founder of the Prime Institute in Coral Gables, Florida.

Transcription:

Pearlman: What would you say for a doctor who's interested but is unsure, what would you say is one of those very first steps they should take toward starting their own practice?

Ching: I think the first thing you need to identify is, do you have a following, or do you have a niche that you know that you're not currently able to fill with your current role? So wherever you are, if you're a part of a larger practice, if you're a part of a hospital organization, or even in academics, do you foresee that the market you're trying to be in has a need, and what are you going to be bringing to the table? So that's aside from hiring us, but you would want to start at least identifying your own market and really being able to identify, Okay, if I were to go on my own, what would be the bulk of my practice? What would I be doing? Would I be operating? Would I be doing non surgical? Would I be doing second opinions? Because there's a niche for everything, but we just want to make sure that it's viable in your area.

Ching: From there, I would say you want to start working on your personal brand. Before you ever decide to open your practice, you at least want to have some type of digital presence as well as be active in associations and just be putting out the network. From there, obviously you can come to a consultant like myself or someone else and give them your ideal timeline, and they can go ahead and evaluate and give you a roadmap of everything that they would recommend you do from the time you're starting until the time where you're looking to actually open your practice. Most consultants are going to ask for a minimum of a 6- to 12-month runway, and that's being conservative. That's not factoring in a custom build-out. So you definitely want to make sure that your timeline aligns and you start working with the right team that can build you out on social media and digital platforms, so that when you're ready to open the door, you're not starting at ground zero, hoping patients walk by; you're already cultivating that initial layer, that it's going to come see you right when doors open.

Pearlman: I definitely echo those sentiments. I recently gave a talk at the Sexual Medicine Society of North America meeting. It was within the session of how to build a thriving men's health practice, and one of my colleagues spoke about how to do that in academics, and another colleague spoke about how to do that at the VA. I was speaking about how to do that in a concierge private practice. I finished that talk, and I had a couple people come up to me afterwards who are still in training, and they said, "I bring up a similar idea to a lot of my mentors, a lot of people that I speak with, and they all tell me it's a really dumb idea, and there's no way that that I should pursue this opportunity." And so they were like, "I'm so glad to hear this that you're doing it, because this really is my dream." And what I tell them is, obviously I'm very encouraging, because I've never been able to provide such personalized, compassionate care in all of my life, in what I'm doing, in my current practice, but I tell them, you have to start somewhere first, it's rare that for anyone, their first job out of training is their dream job. Number 1, you have to build your expertise and your reputation somewhere, because otherwise, how are you going to expect people to just knock on your door and expect to pay some of those concierge fees. They're paying for expertise. And so I encourage people, where do you want to spend the first 3 to 5 years of your career really learning how to be really good at what you do, and then think about what those next 5, 10 years are going to look like?

Ching: That's great advice, and that's exactly my philosophy as well. Start now, even if you're in residency, even if you're a fellow. Start now at some capacity. You're going be so much happier that you did it than starting at ground zero, 2 to 3 years into working in academics or working at a hospital, and then having to start from scratch. I think that if you have even a couple extra hours a week to put something on the internet, a YouTube video, a social post, it's really going to compound over time, and you're going to be set up for success.

This transcription was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.