Who Has Your People? 16 Lessons from Dr. Una on Building a Practice That Patients Can Actually Find
Who Has Your People? 16 Lessons from Dr. Una on Building a Practice That Patients Can Actually Find
By Yoon Hang Kim, MD, MPH
September 2026
There's a question that keeps rearranging how I think about growing a practice — and it isn't mine. It belongs to Dr. Una.
The question is: Who has my people?
Not "where should I advertise" or "what platform should I be on" — but who already has a trusted relationship with the exact patients you want to serve? That reframe, simple as it sounds, changed the game for me when I first watched her teach it on YouTube.
Dr. Nneka Unachukwu (Dr. Una), the founder of EntreMD, laid out sixteen lessons for physician-entrepreneurs in a YouTube lecture — and that question was at the center of the whole thing. What struck me most was how practical and unglamorous the advice was. No hacks. No shortcuts. Just a physician who built multiple businesses telling other physicians exactly what she learned along the way.
Here are all sixteen lessons as Dr. Una teaches them, and why they matter if you're building something of your own.
1. A Physician-Owner Must Learn Two Disciplines
Dr. Una says that being an excellent clinician doesn't automatically make someone an effective business owner. She's direct about this: clinical medicine and business are separate skill sets, and owning a practice means you owe it to yourself and your patients to learn both.
This one hit me personally. I spent years assuming that if I just practiced good medicine, the business side would sort itself out. It doesn't. Dr. Una says if you own the practice, business education is part of your professional responsibility — not an optional hobby.
2. Learn to Do, Not Merely to Know
Dr. Una says the goal isn't to collect courses, certifications, and knowledge for their own sake. The goal is to learn enough to take the next action, observe what happens, and improve from there. She is relentless on this point.
I've been guilty of the "one more course" trap — feeling like I needed to study more before I was ready to act. Dr. Una's counter is simple: knowledge without implementation doesn't move the practice forward. After every lesson, identify one action you can complete this week.
3. Simple Strategies Can Produce Substantial Results
Dr. Una says that simple strategy plus significant action equals growth. This is a recurring EntreMD idea, and one I've found consistently true. Complexity is not automatically sophistication.
Dr. Una argues that powerful business principles can often be reduced to relatively simple actions — as long as those actions are executed consistently. The temptation is to make a strategy complicated just to make it feel more legitimate. She says resist that.
4. Do Not Wait for Perfection
Dr. Una uses the iPhone analogy, and it's a good one: even highly successful companies release improved versions rather than waiting to create a theoretically perfect product. There is no final version. There's only the current version and the next one.
Dr. Una says to start with a reasonable version. Execute it. Evaluate it. Improve it. Repeat. That cycle is the whole strategy.
5. Know Exactly How Many Patients You Need
Before jumping into marketing tactics, Dr. Una asks a very concrete question: how many patients do you actually need to reach your practice goal?
Dr. Una says this changes marketing from a vague activity into a measurable business objective. Instead of "I need more patients," the question becomes: what specific number of additional appropriate patients would achieve your goal? The precision matters. It turns anxiety into arithmetic.
6. Ask: "Who Has My People?"
This is, in my opinion, the single strongest teaching concept in the entire YouTube lecture.
Dr. Una says your potential patients already exist. They already belong to communities. They already interact with physicians, therapists, gyms, schools, churches, professional groups, businesses, and other organizations. She says the question is not "where can I advertise?" The question is: who already has relationships with the people you want to serve?
When I started thinking this way — the way Dr. Una teaches it — I stopped chasing strangers on the internet and started looking at the ecosystems that already surrounded my ideal patients. That shift was worth more than any ad spend I'd ever considered.
7. A Referral Source Is Not Necessarily Another Physician
Most of us were trained to think of referrals as a physician-to-physician pipeline. Dr. Una expands that dramatically. She says potential referral relationships can include therapists and counselors, personal trainers, hospitals, urgent-care centers, schools, daycares, churches, community organizations, med spas, professional groups, and relevant online communities.
Dr. Una's broader point is to think in terms of ecosystems, not isolated referral sources. The people your patients trust already form a web — your job is to find the nodes.
8. Approach Referral Relationships as a Problem Solver
Physicians often feel uncomfortable asking for referrals because it feels like asking for a favor. Dr. Una reframes this completely: she says a referral source may already be looking for a trustworthy clinician to send appropriate patients to. A good referral relationship solves a problem for both parties.
Dr. Una says don't approach the conversation thinking "please send me patients." Think: "Is there a problem I can help this professional solve?" That shift in posture changes everything about how the conversation feels — for both of you.
9. Networking Is a Skill, Not a Personality Type
One of the better teaching points: Dr. Una says introversion does not make someone inherently bad at networking. She says networking can be learned and practiced, just like any clinical skill.
Dr. Una suggests simple, repeatable questions: Is this your first time at this event? What are you hoping to get out of it? What do you do? What would be a good referral for you? She argues that good networking is less about being entertaining and more about being genuinely curious. As a fellow introvert, I found this deeply reassuring.
10. People Need to Know, Like, and Trust You
Dr. Una says referral relationships require repeated exposure. She describes three major approaches: one-on-one relationships, networking, and your online brand. People are more likely to refer to you when they've had enough interaction to understand who you are and what you do.
Dr. Una teaches that visibility precedes trust, and trust precedes most referrals. There's no shortcut around that sequence.
11. Your Online Brand Will Exist Whether You Manage It or Not
Dr. Una says that after someone hears about you, one of the first things they'll do is search for you online. She distinguishes between an accidental online presence and an intentionally curated professional brand.
Dr. Una says your online presence should quickly communicate three things: who are you, what do you do, and who do you help. She specifically emphasizes the Google Business Profile, reviews, a professional biography, and a basic social-media presence. Dr. Una says you don't need to become a social-media entertainer — but you should be professionally discoverable.
12. Never Depend on One Source of Patients
Dr. Una uses several examples that hit close to home: a pandemic disrupts normal referral patterns. A hospital opens a competing clinic. A major referral source gets acquired by another health system and starts referring internally. She says if one source produces a large percentage of your patients, the practice is vulnerable.
Dr. Una says developing multiple independent patient-acquisition channels isn't just marketing. It's business risk management. This lesson alone is worth taping to the wall above your desk.
13. Persistence Matters
Dr. Una shares the story of one physician who reportedly pursued a potential referral relationship for approximately eleven months before the organization agreed to meet with her. That relationship subsequently generated substantial referrals.
Dr. Una says a "no" doesn't necessarily mean the relationship has no future. Sometimes it just means "not yet." Patience paired with consistent follow-up is its own kind of strategy.
14. Your Environment Influences Your Expectations
Dr. Una argues that physicians surrounded exclusively by negative narratives about private practice may begin assuming those outcomes are inevitable. This connects to her broader concept of "commonwealth" — she says the people and environment around you shape what you believe is possible and how fast you move.
Dr. Una says to choose professional communities that expose you to people actively solving the problems you're trying to solve, not just commiserating about them.
15. Protect Time for Working on the Business
Dr. Una says practice improvement should never depend on "finding extra time." If business development matters, it goes on the calendar — not as a nice-to-have, but as a non-negotiable block.
This is one of those lessons that sounds obvious but is brutally hard to implement when you're also seeing patients, managing staff, and running a household. Dr. Una doesn't pretend it's easy. She just insists it's necessary.
16. A "Stop-Doing List" May Be as Important as a To-Do List
Dr. Una says business owners often continue doing everything they did before owning a business and simply add business responsibilities on top. She says that eventually becomes unsustainable.
Dr. Una says the questions worth asking regularly are: What can I stop doing? What can I delegate? What can I automate? What no longer deserves my time? I've found that the stop-doing list is actually harder to write than the to-do list — but it's often more valuable.
The 5-Question Framework
If I had to distill Dr. Una's entire YouTube lecture into something you could carry in your pocket, it would be these five questions she teaches:
One: How many patients do I need? Define the actual goal.
Two: Who has my people? Identify the professionals, organizations, and communities already connected to those patients.
Three: How can I connect with them? One-on-one outreach, calls, email, office visits, networking, or warm introductions.
Four: Where do they gather? Professional meetings, conferences, community events, organizations, and online groups.
Five: What is my next concrete step? Not ten steps. Not "improve marketing." One executable action. Update your Google Business Profile. Identify twenty potential referral sources. Contact three physicians you already know. Attend one relevant professional event. Rewrite your professional bio.
Dr. Una's five-question framework could become the backbone of a very strong growth plan for any physician practice.
A Word of Thanks and Disclosure
I want to say a genuine thank-you to Dr. Una for consistently putting this kind of teaching into the world — freely, publicly, and specifically for physicians who were never taught any of it in medical school.
Full disclosure: I'm a graduate of her Profitable Private Practice Movement (PPPM) program, and I'm currently saving to join EntreMD Business School. That program shaped how I think about running my own practice as a business, not just a clinical service. But I'd be writing about her work whether or not I'd gone through the program, because the ideas are that good.
If you're a physician building something of your own, I'd encourage you to explore her work directly:
EntreMD website: https://entremd.com
EntreMD Podcast: https://entremd.com/category/podcast/
Dr. Una on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZtlNk4lpEJ9vBer2PqaHXQ
The Visibility Formula Workshop: https://services.entremd.com/visibility
Profitable Private Practice Movement: https://services.entremd.com/offer
The full YouTube lecture that inspired this article is well worth your time — I'll include the link below when it's available.
About Dr. Kim
Yoon Hang "John" Kim, MD, MPH is board-certified in Preventive Medicine and practices integrative & functional medicine. He completed a University of Arizona Osher Fellowship under Dr. Andrew Weil and holds a UCLA medical acupuncture certification. He is the author of eight books — including MCAS: Epidemic in Plain Sight and the LDN Primer — and the founder of the LDN Support Group.
Professional: www.yoonhangkim.com
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