The Profit Loop With Alisa Conner

Why do your best people leave, even when you've given them a raise? This week, Alisa Conner sits down with Francee Preston, who spent about 10 years in consulting practices, earned her doctorate in business, and now researches and speaks on employee retention and engagement in healthcare. Francee explains why most practice owners misjudge the reasons people leave, what happens when you promote a g...

If you've spent $1,500, $3,000, or $5,000 a month on ads for your concierge or DPC practice and ended up with a few clicks and 5 or 6 form fills, you've probably also heard the agency say you just need to spend more or switch platforms. What if the problem started before the ad was ever created? In this episode, Alisa Conner explains why a membership is a harder decision than a single appointment,...

If you own a direct primary care or concierge practice, you may be the physician, the front desk, the marketer, the bookkeeper, and the person who orders supplies, and maybe you're still picking up shifts elsewhere while the practice grows. In this episode of The Profit Loop, Alisa Conner starts with a question she asks almost every practice she works with, which is what you're actually building,...

What does it really take to leave employed medicine and build your own practice? Dr. Brian Juan, MD, FAAFP, knows firsthand. A former touring musician who started medical school after his dueling piano gig was replaced by a mechanical bull, he spent 9 years in corporate medicine before opening Metronome Family Medicine, a direct primary care practice in Longmont, Colorado, on June 1, 2026. In this...

You left traditional medicine and opened your concierge or direct primary care practice, and now patients aren't joining as fast as you hoped. If you're lowering your price, adding perks, working longer hours, or asking everyone you know for referrals, you're not alone, and you may be rebuilding the very life you tried to escape. In this episode of The Profit Loop, Alisa Conner brings back the ide...

You did the hard part. You opened your direct primary care or concierge practice, bought the equipment, launched the website, and maybe did some marketing. A few friends and former coworkers joined, and then it got quiet. In this episode of The Profit Loop, Alisa Conner explains why opening the practice isn't the real work, filling it is. She covers the questions patients ask themselves before pay...

If you run a concierge or direct primary care practice, you've probably thought a lot about what to charge and what to include. What you may not have asked is what your patients are actually paying extra for. In this episode of The Profit Loop, Alisa Conner shares conversations with an endocrinologist who moved to a subscription model 3 years ago and a direct primary care owner who has run one for...

What happens when demand isn't the problem anymore? At a recent medical conference, Alisa Conner met practice after practice with more patients than they could handle: physicians who can't take vacations, teams staying late, authorizations piling up, and a practice running 4 EHR systems that don't talk to each other. In this episode, Alisa explains why the usual fixes, like hiring, adding a PA, ex...

If your calendar isn't full, the instinct is always to spend more on marketing. This week, Alisa Conner makes the case that the real problem for most independent ophthalmology practices isn't a shortage of leads, it's a patient journey full of unmanaged handoffs. She walks through where referrals fall apart, what most practices try that quietly fails, what larger competitors do differently, and th...

According to a March 2026 Veradigm survey, 3 out of 4 independent practice owners can't point to exactly where their revenue is leaking. In this episode, Alisa Conner explains why that's not a data problem; it's a visibility problem, walks through a real scheduling example most practices never catch, and lays out the 3-step plan to build the kind of dashboard visibility that private equity groups...

Most independent practices treat referral partnerships as relationships to maintain rather than processes to build. That gap is exactly what private equity organizations exploit. In this episode, Alisa Conner breaks down what keeps referred patients from becoming scheduled patients, runs the practice math across 3 specialties, and lays out a 3-step plan to start recovering that revenue without spe...

A 15-year patient, one warm referral away from leaving. Not because she was unhappy, but because her dentist retired and nobody worked to keep the relationship warm through the transition. In this episode, Alisa breaks down what happens to patients when a physician leaves the practice, the two communication mistakes almost every practice makes during a transition, and the practice math across four...

Nearly every practice Alisa talks to already suspects their technology doesn't talk to itself; they just assumed another subscription would fix it. In this episode, Alisa Conner breaks down why the technology leak is almost never a software problem, using a real example of a referral getting lost between two systems, the math behind why that gap can run over $1.1 million per physician, a 2024 phys...

If your longest-tenured front desk person, billing specialist, or medical assistant gave notice tomorrow, what would that do to your practice? In this episode, I break down what I call the knowledge gap, one of the most expensive and least-discussed leaks in specialty practices. It's not a hiring problem. It's what happens when the knowledge that runs your practice lives in one person's head rathe...

She loved her surgeon. She loved her results. She almost never came back anyway. In this episode, I tell the true story of a patient who nearly left a practice she loved, not because of anything the doctor did, but because nobody called her back to schedule her second procedure, she couldn't book online, and her medication refills required her husband to physically drive to the office every single...

There's a number most practices have never pulled a report on: how many people started the journey to become a patient and never finished it. In this episode, Alisa Conner walks through why an ad-first growth strategy keeps failing specialty practices, the seven transition points where patients actually disappear between referral and repeat visit, and the practice math behind what an unoptimized p...

If you called your own practice right now, pretending to be a new patient, would you get a busy signal? Sit on hold? Have to fill out ten fields online before landing on a real appointment time? In this episode, Alisa Conner walks through why an overwhelmed front desk is a process problem, not a staffing problem, and what that friction is actually costing specialty practices. She runs the math on...

A live scheduler or a chatbot can absolutely get more calls answered. But answering the phone and actually keeping a patient in your practice are 2 different systems, and most practices only ever fix the first one. In this episode, Alisa Conner walks through the research behind that gap, including a study showing that even a live staff phone reminder, the best-performing method tested, still leave...

As the United States marks 250 years of independence, this episode asks a different question: how independent are you inside your own practice? Typically, a physician owner is carrying roles they never applied for: CEO, accountant, marketing director, operations manager, compliance officer, technology shopper, and more. Each one adds decisions, and the constant switching between medicine and admin...

You spent 45 minutes building a treatment plan for your patient, and during the consultation, the patient nodded, agreed with everything, and said they wanted to think it over. But then they ghosted you and never booked the treatment. It is easy to call that price shopping. But if your plan was the best option, why didn't they just book? In this episode, Alisa Conner walks through why specialty co...

What is an empty chair in your waiting room actually costing you? In this episode of The Profit Loop, Alisa Conner digs into why specialty practices get hit harder by no-shows than almost anyone, what those missed appointments really cost, and why the standard advice to send another reminder keeps failing. You will hear the four reasons specialty practices see higher no-show rates, why a disengage...

Before a recent partnership call, Alisa did what everyone does: she Googled them. Eight reviews, three stars, and a website stuck in another decade. The most alarming part? They had no idea any of it was happening. The same blind spot exists in most specialty practices. In this episode, Alisa walks through the actual revenue math behind online reviews, including the Harvard Business School finding...

There's a call that happens at specialty practices more often than anyone wants to admit. A high-referring physician partner calls — not to send a new patient, but to ask what happened to the last one. Most practices have no answer. Not because their teams aren't doing their jobs. Because they have no system to track referrals before they enter the scheduling workflow. In this foundational episode...

If your OBGYN practice has solid referral volume but growth keeps stalling, this episode is going to reframe the entire problem. Most OBGYN practices don't have a marketing problem or a demand problem. They have a conversion problem — and it's playing out in the invisible space between when a referral is made and when a patient actually shows up on the schedule. In this episode, Alisa Conner walks...

If your functional medicine referral volume has softened recently — or if you've noticed that certain partners who used to send patients regularly have gone quiet — this episode is for you. Referral leakage in functional medicine doesn't announce itself. It builds slowly, driven by unanswered communications, confused patients, and referral partners who feel like they're sending patients into a bla...