Un-Becoming Your DPC Brand
As many of us in Direct Primary Care know, when we first launch our practices, we are the brand. In the early stages, we are often running the show alone. We’re the physician, the front desk, the outreach team, the marketer, and the one shaking hands at community events. The identity of the practice is deeply intertwined with our own identity. Patients come because of us—our story, our philosophy, our presence.
But as the practice grows, something interesting and often emotionally challenging happens:
the brand begins to take on a life of its own.
We shift from being a solo physician to leading a team. Someone else may answer the phones. Someone else may handle social media. We may no longer be in every photo, every interaction, every touchpoint. The brand we nurtured—shaped by our time, sweat, risk, and resources—must now be shared. We have to let go of full ownership of what once felt like an extension of ourselves.
It’s very similar to raising children: you nurture them, shape them, and pour yourself into them, and then they grow into something beyond you. And at some point, you transition from being the face of the brand to being the founder of the brand.
And along the way, another thought emerges:
while your practice brand grows, you also need a personal brand.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed many DPC physicians beginning to develop their personal brand after their practice is already successful. And while it’s absolutely doable, it can feel like catching up to your own identity.
If I could give one piece of advice to newer DPC physicians, it would be this:
Build your personal brand and your practice brand simultaneously.
Your personal brand is the part of you that is constant—who you are as a physician, a thinker, a teacher, a leader, a storyteller. Though it is challenging to build two brands simultaneously.
Your practice brand is something you share—something that must grow beyond you in order to scale, support a team, and serve more people.
When patients eventually come not only for you, but for what your practice stands for—your model has succeeded. This allows you to take your brand into things beyond your practice as well.
Letting go of being the sole face of the brand isn’t losing identity—it’s witnessing the success of the idea you nurtured.
So as you grow, remember this:
Your practice brand may evolve and become something larger than you.
Your personal brand is yours to carry—always.
So build both together so you can have one to share, and one to always be your own.
I couldn’t agree more. I have noticed this shift in my own practice. Even though I started out with a “public figure” business before launching my practice, I found it very difficult in the beginning I found it difficult to separate the two. Now as time has gone on, I have been able to let go of my personal attachment to my DPC practice brand as an extension of me and leaned more into my “public figure” brand for that purpose. I didn’t anticipate any of these “feelings”, so but it has been an interesting and rewarding process.