I Got Fed Up, Quit the ER, and Opened a Clinic I Had No Idea How to Run

I didn't open my clinic because I had a brilliant business plan.

I opened it because I had enough.

I was working in an environment where I increasingly felt business decisions were colliding with what I believed was best for patients. At the same time, my ER career looked successful from the outside—but I was rarely home, deeply unfulfilled, and beginning to question whether this was how I wanted to practice medicine for the rest of my life.

So I made a decision that did not make sense to everybody around me.

I walked away from stability and opened my own clinic.

There was just one problem:

I had absolutely no idea how to run a business.

In Part 1 of this three-part series, I'm telling the real origin story—the frustration that pushed me out, my family's reaction, the fear behind leaving a secure physician career, the early mistakes, and the realization that sometimes you don't leave because you know exactly where you're going.

Sometimes you leave because you finally know you cannot stay where you are.

And Part 2 gets even more uncomfortable.

Ready to identify the root causes behind your symptoms so you can finally heal? schedule a root cause consultation today by clicking the link below:

https://www.wellnesscornernj.com/

Have questions? email us at info@drjjeanty.com

Call to schedule your appointment: 973-957-0871

Transcript

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Welcome to Health, Life and What's Next. with Dr. Jennifer Ginty. This is the podcast where we explore what it really means to live well through honest conversations about health, life, business, and everything in between. Because remember, healing is about more than medicine. I'm so glad you are here. Let's get into today's conversation today's podcast gonna give you some insight on how, why I opened my clinic. How my clinic actually started, because I think people assume there was a plan. There was not a plan. There was no five years business strategies. There was no business plan. There was no investor deck. There's no Dr. Gentille has decided to become an entrepreneur. I didn't wake up one morning feeling brave, inspired, and ready to build my dream clinic. I woke up one day fed up, and sometimes I think anger get a bad reputation because anger can make you reckless. Absolutely, I agree. But sometimes anger is the emotion that finally tells you, you have tolerated something long enough, and that is basically how my business begun, what you know today as The Wellness Corner NJ. At the time, I was working with a chiropractor in a chiropractic clinic, and there were moments when I started feeling uncomfortable with the direction things were going. There were recommendations being pushed that, in my opinion, as the doctor involved, were not always about what I believe was in the best interest of the patients. I felt like money was becoming too much of the conversation, and that bothered me a lot because I can tolerate a lot of things, but when I felt like the business decision and the patient decision are starting to become the same decision, I had a problem. And eventually, I got to the point where internally I was saying, I cannot keep doing this." I wasn't saying this is, annoying or maybe someday I'll leave. No, I was just saying I was done, and something in me snap into clarity one day. I remember having this realization, If I am going to be responsible for the medicine, then I needed to be responsible for the environment in which I am practicing it." And that was it. I did not want somebody else's business priorities deciding how I practice medicine. And once I knew that, I couldn't un-know it. Now, here's where the story gets ridiculous because any reasonable person probably would have said, "Okay, Dr. J, let's make a business plan. Let's research. Let's save money. Let's find a mentor. Let's study the market. Let's understand operation, firing, hiring, understand marketing, build system." Maybe know literally anything about running a medical practice. That would have been sensible. I basically said, "Nope, I'm opening my own clinic." And then discovered 12 minutes after that decision that being a doctor and running a medical business are two completely different professions. Nobody tells you that. I knew how to take care of patients. I can diagnose, I can treat, I can prescribe, I can identify the root causes, but I did not know how to run a clinic, a company, a business. Those are not transferable skills just because both involved a clipboard. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I don't mean that in the cute entrepreneurial way people are saying, "Oh, none of us really know what we were doing." We hear this online, right? Like people telling you, "I just opened my business. I had no idea." No, literally, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I knew medicine, yes. Business, completely different language. Suddenly, I had to think about things I had never gone to medical school to learn, like people. I had to think about operation, systems, money, marketing, who does what happens when somebody doesn't do what they're supposed to do. How do people find you? How do you keep the doors open? What does something actually cost? How do you come up with the price? Profit, revenue, how to look at your numbers, P&L. How many patients do you need to make a revenue to keep your doors open? How do you build a team? How do you lead people when nobody taught you how to lead? And the biggest surprise, being the smartest person in the medical room does not make you the smartest person in the business room, and that humbled me very quickly because medicine trained me to be competent, to be great, to be brilliant, to be smart. Business introduced me to being a beginner again, and I don't like being a beginner. I'm used to knowing, but business kept saying, "Oh, that's cute. Here's another thing you don't understand." But the clinic wasn't born only because I was angry. That was just the trigger. The deeper reason had been building for years. I was very unhappy, and I don't think I fully understood how unhappy I was at that time. I was working in the ER, great job, respectable job, reliable income, the kind of career people congratulate you for having. And from the outside, there wasn't necessarily a reason to blow it up But internally, I felt empty. I would go to work, see patients after patients, treat the immediate problem, prescribe the medication, stabilize them, discharge them. Next. That's emergency medicine, and emergency medicine is incredibly important. There are brilliant doctors, physicians, practitioners doing life-saving work every day. But eventually had to admit it wasn't enough for me anymore. I wanted to know people. I wanted to understand why they kept coming back. I wanted to know what happened before the emergency, what happened after they left, what was happening the rest of their lives. I wanted the part of medicine that there simply wasn't time for in that setting, and I was also never home. There comes a point when success start asking you a question nobody prepared you for, and the question is this: Is the life this career gives me still worth what the career is taking away from me? And that's different from do I like my job? I didn't wake up hating medicine. I love medicine. I started realizing I didn't like the way I was living medicine, so that's a huge difference. And I think that's where people get stuck in many things in life. We think we're only allowed to leave when something is terrible. The job has to be toxic, the relationship has to be awful, the business has to fail, somebody needs to betray you, there needs to be like a villain. Sometimes there isn't one, and sometimes the truth is simply this worked for me until it didn't. That's much harder to explain to people, especially family. Because when something looks good from the outside, people don't understand why you would risk it, and my family absolutely had question, because think about what I was saying. I'm giving up emergency medicine, a stable job, to open a business that I have never run before, to practice the medicine that most people are not looking for or most people understand. So with no guarantee it is going to work. Sounds fantastic when you say it out slowly. Of course, people thought, "What are you doing? Why would you leave stability? Why take on all this risk? You worked so hard to become a doctor. Why not just keep the job?" And logically, they weren't wrong. That's what made it so hard. Sometimes the people who love you give you advice that makes complete sense. For a life, they are not the ones living. That doesn't make them bad. They are looking at risk. You are living the cost of staying. These are two completely different calculations, and I think that's the part people don't understand about big decisions. Everyone sees the risk of leaving. Very few people can see the risk of staying somewhere that is slowly draining you. There's no spreadsheet for that. What is the financial value of being fulfilled? What is the cost of never being home? What is the cost of knowing something isn't right and continu- continuing it because it's secure? What does 10 more years of that cost? Nobody had that number. Neither did I. I just knew I could not keep pretending the safe option felt safe anymore, so I opened the clinic, and I wish I could tell you this is the part where inspirational music starts playing. Dr. Jenti follows her purpose, doors open, patients arrive Right? Everybody claps. No. This is where the universe said, "Oh, you wanted to be an entrepreneur? Excellent. Now let's begin the curriculum." And the curriculum was aggressive because suddenly every weakness you have get exposed. If you avoid a difficult conversation, business finds one for you. If you don't understand money, business makes that very expensive. If you're bad at delegating, congratulations, you now have 12 jobs. If you hire the wrong person, you will feel it. If you don't build system, everything lives in your head. If marketing doesn't work, nobody shows up simply because you're a good doctor, right? Being clinical excellent does not automatically make the phone ring. I had to learn all of that. And there were moments when I thought, What the hell did I do?" Of course, there were. That's the part success stories leave out. They tell you the origin backwards, right? Once something works, we make the beginning sounds like easy. Oh, she always knew. No, I knew I couldn't stay where I was. That's not the same as knowing exactly where I was going. That's a difference. I didn't have certainty. I had conviction, and sometimes conviction is all you get. I also learned something else very quickly. Freedom and responsibility arrive in the same package. I wanted freedom, AKA my own clinic, my own decisions, my own approach to medicine. Great. But guess who is now responsible when something goes wrong? Me. When you employed, there are problems you can hand over to somebody else. When you own the thing, eventually the problem gets to your desk Staff issues is yours. Financial issues, you got it. Patient experience, all yours. Marketing not working, that's your problem. Entrepreneurship gave me more control over my life and introduced me to a level of responsibility I had never experienced before. Both things were true, and I think this is where social media has completely distorted entrepreneurship. You see the title on a video, be your own boss. Let me tell you something. When you own a business, you may discover you now have more bosses than you had before. Patients, employees, payroll, bills, the market, your calendar, Google Everybody has an opinion. You escaped the nine to five, and now you're thinking about the business in the morning. But even with all of that, I knew I was where I was supposed to be, and that is something that is very difficult to explain One of the strangest things about opening that clinic was realizing I had finally created the freedom I wanted, and then immediately had to grown into the person capable of handling it, and that's something nobody told me. Sometimes your dream arrives before your identity catches up. I had wanted autonomy. Now I had it. But autonomy requires decision-making. I wanted leadership. Leadership requires uncomfortable conversations. I wanted a team. A team requires management. I wanted impact. Impact requires structure. I wanted to practice medicine differently. Now I had to prove that the business supporting that medicine could survive. You don't just get the dream, you get the assignment attached to it. And there were days, and there were days I missed the simplicity of being an employee, right? You finish your shift, you go home. The hospital still exists tomorrow, whether you think about it or not. When it's your own clinic, you can physically leave, but part of your brain is still in the building. I had to learn boundaries at the beginning. What boundaries? The clinic and I were basically in a toxic, codependent relationship. It needed everything. I gave everything, and somehow we both survived. But when I look back now, I don't think the greatest thing the clinic gave me was a business. It gave me a completely different relationship with myself. Before that, I had followed an established path, right? School, medicine, career, work hard, perform, progress. There are rules. Entrepreneurship took me away from those rules. Nobody was coming to tell me, "Dr. Jay, here's exactly what happen next." I had to decide, and sometimes I was wrong. A lot of times I was wrong. That may have been one of the most important things that ever happened to me. Because when you spent your life succeeding academically and professionally, being wrong can feel almost dangerous. Business cured me of that very quickly. Wrong hire, wrong idea, wrong strategies, wrong assumptions. Okay, what did we learn? So that's what entrepreneurship gives you. And here's something else I had to learn. You cannot build a business based entirely on being a good person. That one took me a while because I thought, "No, take care of people. Treat employees well. Give people chances. Be ge- generous. Work hard. Do the right thing. Everything should work." Absolutely not. Business also requires standards, accountabilities, numbers, decision, saying no, letting people go sometimes, changing roles, having conversations you rather avoid, stopping things that aren't working. You can have a huge heart and still run a terrible business. That's very uncomfortable, but also very true. And I had to learn that being kind and being an effective leader were not always going to look the same. Sometimes leadership was going to require me to disappoint somebody That's difficult when you are someone who wants people to feel good. Business does not care. Business says, "Is this working or isn't?" That's it. That's the question. Is this working? If it's not, then you gotta eliminate. And I think that is why I'm telling you this story now because people see the clinic now, they see me as the doctor, the business owner. I create programs, I manage team, I have a podcast, I have a life. They see the finished rooms. They don't see the version of me standing at the beginning thinking, "I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing." And I need you to understand that woman was not fearless. She was not unusually confident. She was not sitting on some secret entrepreneur gene. She had simply reached the point where staying the same hurt more than trying something unknown, and that's it. Sometimes that is where courage actually starts. Not, "I know this is going to work," but, "I know I can't keep doing this." Those are very different sentences, and maybe you're somewhere like that right now, not necessarily with the business. Maybe it's in your... it's your career. Maybe something in your marriage, your relationship, maybe the way you are living life, maybe the role everyone expect you to keep playing. And sometimes maybe something looks completely fine from the outside and you know internally, "I'm done." I'm not telling you to blow up your life tomorrow. Please don't email me, "Oh, Dr. Jente told me to quit my job." Please don't do that. All I'm saying is Pay attention when you keep feeling empty inside, something everyone else keeps calling successful, and that's information. It doesn't always mean leave, but it deserve investigation. I think the question that eventually changed my life was not can I successfully open and run a clinic, 'cause I didn't know how to do that. But the real question was, If I keep living exactly like this for another five years, how would I feel about the person I become? That question scared me more because the risk wasn't only opening a business, the risk was not opening one. The risk was never finding out. The risk was staying comfortable enough to remain miserable, and that was no longer a risk I wanted to take. So yes, I got angry, I got fed up, I decided to open a clinic. I had no idea how to run it. My family had questions. I gave up security. I made mistakes. I learned everything the painful way. And the funniest part, I thought opening the business would give me freedom. It did, eventually. But first, it introduced me to myself, and some of what I met I did not like. Some of the mistakes, expensive. Some of the lessons, painful. Some seasons, there were days I wondered whether success was worth what it was asking from me. And that is where part two of this series answer that question. Because the clinic people see today is not the clinic I started with, and the life people see now they did not see what it cost to build it. They didn't see the night, the fear, the money, the mistakes, the people problem, the moments I seriously questioned whether I should keep going. They saw the doctor, the business owner, the nice office, the lifestyle, the travels. They did not see what was happening behind the door. And in the next episode, which is part two, I am going to tell you, because if I'm going to talk about business on this podcast, I'm not giving you the Instagram version, right? We're not gonna sugarcoat it. I'm giving you the part people usually wait until they are successful to pretend never happened. And maybe that's the biggest lesson from how this entire thing started. Sometimes the decision that looks reckless to everybody else is the first honest decision you've made in years. So stay tuned for part two That is fantastic. You completed another episode. So thank you for spending this time with me. If today's conversation gave you a new perspective, I hope you carry it with you into the rest of your week. If someone you love needs to hear this today, share this episode with them. Until next time, take good care of yourself. I'll meet you back here for our next conversation.