Pillar 04 — Finance

This is the pillar that took me bankrupt the first time. It's the one Maverick will not let you get wrong.

Cash-pay models. Pricing built on value, not fear. Margins. Capital. Tax structure. The financial discipline that turns an independent practice into a profitable one — and the difference is everything.

The system framing

The system trained you to be financially passive.

Your salary was negotiated by an HR department. Your benefits were chosen for you. Your retirement was on autopilot. Your taxes were withheld and someone else figured out the rest. The closest most physicians ever came to financial sophistication was choosing a 401(k) allocation once a year and forgetting about it.

Then you opened a practice and discovered finance is the operating system of a business. Pricing isn’t a number you write on a website — it’s a strategic decision that determines who walks in your door and what they expect of you. Cash flow isn’t a quarterly chart — it’s the difference between making payroll and not.

Margins aren't an academic concept. They're whether you take a salary this month or you don't.

Why it sinks practices

This is the one that buried me. My first practice didn't fail because the medicine was bad.

It failed because I had no financial system, no pricing strategy, no cash flow discipline, no understanding of margins, and no concept of what it actually cost to deliver what I was selling.

I priced based on fear. I’d look at competitors and undercut them, thinking I needed to be cheaper to be chosen. The result: I attracted price-sensitive patients who undervalued me, my margins collapsed, my reputation never elevated, and I went bankrupt.

In cash-pay medicine, pricing is positioning. If you're cheap, you're not credible. Underpricing kills more independent practices than overpricing does — by an order of magnitude.

What Maverick teaches

How to price for value, not for fear — and build the financial systems to sustain it.

The membership tier architecture that turns a transactional practice into a recurring-revenue business.

Pricing

The psychology of cash-pay healthcare pricing and why the rules are different from insurance-based medicine.

Dashboard

The Monday morning metrics every physician-owner needs: revenue, cash position, AR aging, margin by service line, member retention, churn.

Membership

The psychology of cash-pay healthcare pricing and why the rules are different from insurance-based medicine.

Capital

When to self-fund, when to borrow, when to bring in equity — and when not to. The decisions that determine your long-term ownership.

Structure

Entity structure for tax efficiency, asset protection, and corporate practice of medicine compliance that varies wildly by state.

Exit Value

How to build a practice you could sell — even if you never plan to. The financial discipline that makes it possible.

The receipts

I've been bankrupt and I've been profitable. I know exactly what the gap is.

The gap isn’t talent. It isn’t medicine. It isn’t even effort. The gap is a financial system you can run a business on.

The bankruptcy ten — the ten most common financial mistakes physicians make in their first practice — is covered in the Masterclass. The rebuild ten — what I learned the second time — is the curriculum spine of the rest of Maverick. You will not graduate from Maverick without a financial system.

Cash-Pay Pricing

Membership Tiers

Monday Dashboard

Capital Strategy

Entity Structure

Exit Planning

Ready for your first step?

The first place we cover this in depth is the Masterclass.

The ten mistakes Dr. Mollie made building her first practice — and exactly how to avoid every one. $297. Instant access.

Instant access · No fluff, no filler