5 Truths About Owning A Ketamine Clinic

Want to know the real deal about starting, running, and owning a ketamine infusion clinic from the perspective of a physician who’s done this? Well you’ve come to the right blog. Perhaps you see ketamine clinic doctors rolling in the money drinking Mai Tai’s on the beach, or maybe you think it’s a super relaxing, put-your-feet-up medical job that anyone can do. In fact, you’re probably thinking that it’s less demanding than your current hospital job! In this post we’re going to share 5 truths about opening and running a ketamine infusion clinic. 

There is no doubt a need and demand for ketamine infusions, but getting patients will still take time.

Truth #1: It takes time to get busy

Yes, we are in the psychedelic renaissance, and yes, you probably are reading more and more about ketamine infusion clinics online. Or perhaps a person you went to med school with is opening a clinic on the other side of the US. Yes, there is a need, interest, and demand for ketamine infusions BUT and the big BUT is that it still takes time to get busy. After you have done all the heavy lifting of actually getting the ketamine clinic up and running, you still need to market and let people know (both colleagues who can refer to you and patients themselves) that you are open and ready to treat. Now of course you can be actively marketing and networking before you even open your clinic doors. Factors such as where you are located and how open-minded the medical community is in the city can affect how busy you are starting out. For us, when we opened, we were in a pretty open-minded liberal city, with a decent size population of individuals with disposable income. Even then, it took us about 6 months before we started seeing a consistent number of patients. Perhaps if we had known then what we know now about marketing and referrals for ketamine infusions, and were starting out now where ketamine is more common knowledge, things would be different.

When you start your ketamine clinic, it will be like your baby where you think and talk about it all the time.

Truth #2: You will think and talk about your ketamine clinic all the time

Your clinic will be your “baby.” If you have kids, you can relate to this, and even if you don’t, you can still relate to this! Think about all your friends who have kids and now can only talk about them! Your clinic will be like a child, and when starting out, it needs a lot of attention just like a newborn. Honestly though, it won’t take you much to keep your attention on it because you will likely be consumed by it anyways. We sure were. All we did was talk and talk about our clinic. Do we like the colors of the walls in the clinic? Where should wee advertise for MA positions? Did we reply to the Instagram comments? How can we make the patient’s experience more pleasant? There isn’t really a way around this, unless you are a silent partner and are not involved at all with the day to day running of the clinic. We’re just warning you, so be prepared and plan accordingly. 

You will be wearing many hats when you start your ketamine clinic. This will take up a lot of your time, but you will learn your business inside and out.

Truth #3: You will be doing EVERYTHING when you start out

When you start out, you are actually creating a job for yourself, especially if you are doing this alone and not partnering up with someone. Even when we decided to partner together to start our ketamine clinic, we both ended up doing more than we realized we would be doing. This is due in part of neither one of us finding any resources online geared towards showing physicians how to start their own ketamine clinic. Going back to the “your clinic is your baby” analogy, you have to do everything for your baby and at first you end up doing everything for your clinic. And that is especially true if you want to keep things lean. That means you’ll be (and we are speaking from personal experience) answering phone calls, cleaning the infusion room, installing a new key pad, etc. While annoying and frustrating as it may be, we learned to appreciate this experience. This was because when we started to outsource many of these tasks to our staff, we knew exactly how we wanted things done and were able to train them well!

If you want to read all about our journey when we started our ketamine clinic, head over HERE.

As doctors, we were never taught how to properly hire for a team. That will change when you open your own ketamine clinic.

Truth #4: Finding and hiring staff is harder than you think

As you may hear from other physicians who own private practices, one of the things they will complain about is finding and keeping amazing staff. While we don’t believe in complaining, we have to agree the finding and hiring process can be a challenge. Working in traditional hospital systems, both of us had little to no experience of hiring. We never had the opportunity of being part of the hiring process for techs, nurses, nor MA’s. Plus we thought it was going to be so easy because we had so many people we worked with reach out to want to work with us! But unfortunately those individuals never worked out. Eventually we learned from trial-and-error and a lot of self-study (books, podcasts, etc.) on how to hire and now we are blessed with a great staff and finding and hiring process. 

You will eventually need to let go of some responsibilities in the clinic as your business grows. This may be difficult, especially if you are used to being in control.

Truth #5: To “get your life back,” you need to learn to let go

Eventually, your clinic will gain traction or you’ll get into a good rhythm. You’ll have your steady flow of patients and have a good grasp of what to expect both clinically and business wise. And that is when you’ll begin to entertain the idea of letting someone take over some, if not a lot, of what you do day-to-day with your clinic. Unfortunately, what got you to this point will also be what will make it difficult for you to let go of some of the responsibility. What got you here was a high level of control of all aspects of your business and clinic. Related to #3, you did everything and had influence over everything in the way you wanted. Although doing all the work was tiring you out, you were in control and that sense of control (which we would argue is an illusion at some level) can be addictive. But the way for you to go from creating another job for yourself to becoming a ketamine clinic owner is that you need to accept that you need to let go of some control and be open to growing your team.

Running a ketamine clinic will indeed be a challenge, but the more willing you are to face these difficulties head on, the more prepared you will be.

The Truth Will Set You Free

We’re writing this blog post not to discourage you from starting a ketamine clinic, but to let you know the realities. But despite all these seemingly difficult challenges, we promise you that running a ketamine clinic is so gratifying! We have full trust, as physicians ourselves, that you can take up the challenge and start the clinic of your dreams!

So what are you waiting for? Join our email list and be notified about the next free webinar and open registration for Ketamine StartUp.

If you’re planning on starting a ketamine clinic, you may be thinking that it’ll be much easier than your traditional hospital job. In this blog, we’ll talk about the realities that we had to face as ketamine clinic owners!

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