You are a doctor, but just as important you are an entrepreneur. If you are successful at only one you will do a disservice to yourself and your patients.

This guide is focused on providing you with a more scientific way to build your practice using the test before you invest approach. We will call this Hypothesis-driven practice building.

Hypothesis-driven practice building is a systematic approach for validating your business model, marketing efforts, operational processes and much more through staged experiments. When following this approach, you translate your business model and business functions into falsifiable hypotheses and then tests these hypotheses using a series of minimum viable experiments (MVEs). Each MVE represents the smallest set of resources and/or activities needed to confirm or disprove a business function hypothesis. MVE tests can also generate unanticipated insights about customer, vendor and partner requirements. Based on test feedback, you must then decide whether to persevere with your proposed business plan; try a revised model/process that changes some elements while retaining others; or simply perish, abandoning your dream. You repeat this process until all of the key business function hypotheses have been validated through MVE tests.

Hypothesis-driven practice building helps reduce the biggest risk facing entrepreneur practitioners: that they will waste resources on business models, initiatives and processes that don't work. Most practices fail because you waste resources building and marketing the practice before you have resolved business uncertainty or figured out what works. The primary objective of an early-stage practice is not to grow; it is to learn how to build a sustainable business. By bounding uncertainty before scaling, a practice optimizes its use of scarce resources.

Hypothesis-driven practice building isn't just for early-stage practices though. Ever new marketing initiative, expansion plan or process change can be validated by MVEs.

We call this "Lean Practice"

The following guide will take you through hypothesis driven practice building and the steps you need to take to run a Lean Practice