For the Independent Provider
Do Good Medicine and Own Your Business: Why Cerbo Mastery Beats Advice From Non-Experts
By Kevin Mackey · Founder, FxMedSupport
There is a particular kind of pitch making the rounds in our world right now, and if you run an integrative, functional, or root-cause practice, you have almost certainly heard a version of it. It comes wrapped in confidence. It comes with a price tag of three, five, sometimes ten thousand dollars a month. And it comes with a promise: sign up, follow our system, and we will build you the million-dollar practice of your dreams.
I want to be very direct with you, because I respect you too much to be anything else. You do not need it. And more than that — you should be deeply suspicious of anyone willing to promise you the world before they have spent even ten minutes understanding who you actually are.
Think about what that promise actually requires. Someone is telling you they know exactly what to do for your practice — your patients, your revenue, your future — before they have asked you a single meaningful question about your dreams, your needs, your wants, or the specific shape of the business you have built with your own hands. They are selling you the answer before they have heard the question.
This goes against everything you believe
Here is what makes this so frustrating to me. You chose integrative, functional, root-cause medicine for a reason. You chose it because you understand, at a bone-deep level, that the one-size-fits-all model does not work. You know that you cannot hand every patient the same protocol and expect healing. You know that real medicine starts with understanding the whole person — their history, their environment, their unique biochemistry, the root of the thing — and only then do you build the plan.
So ask yourself: why would you accept a model for your business that you would never accept for your patients?
You cannot do root-cause medicine and then buy root-cause coaching off the shelf. The two ideas cancel each other out.
When someone says, “I know what you need” before they know anything about you, that is not expertise. That is a script. And when that same person does not even have true mastery of the tools you use every single day — the platform your entire practice runs on — they fundamentally cannot help you. It is not a small gap. It is the whole thing. Advice about your practice from someone who has never mastered the engine your practice runs on is not advice. It is a guess with a price tag.
The extraction problem nobody names
Let me tell you what actually bothers me, and why I feel it so strongly.
The moment a business discovers it is talking to a medical practice, something changes. The pricing changes. The pitch changes. There is this idea — this lazy, damaging assumption — that medical money is hospital money. That there is some endless institutional budget behind every provider, and the job is simply to extract as much of it as possible, all while smiling and saying, “I’m here to help you.”
I need you to understand how wrong that is, because if your would-be advisor does not understand it, they have no business leading your practice into the future.
When a small practice loses money, it does not come out of some corporate margin. It comes out of the food bill. It comes out of the birthday fund.
Every discount a patient asks for. Every unnecessary subscription. Every “small” monthly fee for promises that never materialize. That is not abstract. That is real money leaving a real family’s life. And anyone who treats your practice like a vein to tap rather than a livelihood to protect has already told you everything you need to know about whether you should trust them.
Do the math on what that coaching costs
Let’s be concrete, because the numbers tell the truth better than I can.
Say a program costs you twenty-five hundred a month. Maybe five thousand. That is thirty, fifty, sixty thousand dollars a year leaving your practice in exchange for promises from someone who has never sat in your chair.
$30,000/year on coaching promises
— or —
$30,000/year redirected into your actual business:
A real team member. A virtual assistant — or two. Deep integration of the tools you already pay for. Operational muscle that does the work every single day, forever, instead of a slide deck and a monthly call.
Here is the part that should end the conversation: even one-third of that — a third of the coaching cost, redirected toward your actual dreams — will give you more than the pitch ever could. Put that money into your business. Put it into hiring a person who moves you forward. Put it into the operational efficiency, the integrations, the maximization of the tools you already own. Do not hand it to someone selling a dream they cannot deliver — because I promise you, the dream does not work if you have not mastered the tools you are using.
Ask for the one document
If you are still tempted — if you are still seriously considering signing the contract — then do not argue with the salesperson. Do not get into the back-and-forth. Just ask for one document, and watch what happens.
“Show me every client you have ever had. Show me the cash revenue per practice, against the money each of them paid you.”
That is it. One document. Then do the math yourself, because the math will tell you everything the pitch will not.
For each practice, line it up:
Cash revenue generated vs. dollars paid to the coach
Did the practices actually grow — and did they grow by more than what they handed over? Or did the coach get paid either way, while the results stayed flat?
This single ask answers the only two questions that matter. One: does the thing they are selling actually work? Not anecdotally, not “one client tripled” — across the whole roster, with the numbers in front of you. Two: is it designed for you, or is it the same box for everyone?
Because if every practice on that list got the exact same playbook, the exact same funnel, the exact same scripts — then you already know what you are buying. You are buying the box. And you, of all people, understand that the box cannot fix everyone. The single-method, one-size-fits-all model is the very thing you rejected when you chose root-cause medicine. It does not become true just because someone put a sales deck around it.
A real partner will not flinch at that request, because a real partner has the receipts and has done the work to understand each practice individually. The grifter’s pitch will dodge it, deflect it, or tell you it is “confidential.” That dodge is your answer.
The story that says it all
I did a software demo recently with a medical provider. Wonderful clinician. She told me she has more than fifty patients and not a single support staff member. She is doing all of it herself.
I asked her one question: “What’s your hourly wage?”
“Five hundred dollars,” she said.
So I made her an offer. “Great. Let me start opening all your faxes. I’ll do it for half your rate — two hundred fifty an hour.”
She took a step back. “What do you mean?”
Here is what I meant. When you, a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour provider, sit down to open a fax machine, you are doing that task at an operational cost of five hundred dollars an hour. That is what your time is worth. That is the real expense.
Provider opening faxes = $500/hour
Virtual assistant, 20 hrs/week = $200/week
Provider time freed = 20 hours every week
To cover that entire employee for the week, she has to see one additional patient. One.
Hire a virtual assistant at ten dollars an hour, ten or twenty hours a week, and suddenly every one of those low-value mouse clicks moves off the most expensive person in the building. The provider gets twenty hours of her week back. It costs her two hundred dollars. She covers the entire cost by seeing a single patient she now has the room to see.
That is not a sales gimmick. That is mastery of your skill and respect for your own value. Most providers simply do not understand their own value — and so they spend it opening faxes.
Buy the best person in the world, at the best price
This is the part people get wrong. You are not “hiring cheap labor.” You are geo-optimizing your medical practice for exactly what it needs to be.
Whether your support is in-person, USA-based virtual, or Latin-American-based virtual, you are buying the highest-quality person you can find at the best possible price point. You are building a global team aimed at one goal: making sure the right person presses each button. We can literally start measuring cost per mouse click — who should be doing this task, and what does it cost when the wrong person does it?
And here is the mission every single member of that team needs to share: always look up at what the person above you is doing, and have the courage to say, “You don’t need to do that. I can do it for you.”
If you have letters after your name, you should only be doing work that requires those letters. Everything else is space you are giving away — space for future appointments, future patients, future revenue.
The people with initials after their names are the ones who generate the practice’s revenue. So your in-person office manager needs to understand that the El Salvador-based virtual assistant doing the mouse clicks at the best price point is just as important to the practice — arguably more so — because that person is protecting the most expensive, most valuable time in the entire building. Everyone in support of that one truth, and the machine runs.
Your real first 90 days
If you are caught in one of these programs right now, here is the most honest advice I can give you. Cancel it. Today. Then do this instead.
First, be humble enough to map out your own practice — and most providers cannot, because they have never looked. Understand how many clicks it takes for a stranger to land on your website and become a patient. Understand every single form, every step, every trigger point it takes for that patient to register in Cerbo. Then understand every need, want, and step it takes for them to be truly ready for that first appointment. Most providers do not know their own map. Once you do, everything else gets easier.
Second, take the money you were spending on coaching and invest it in support — in-person, USA virtual, or Latin-American virtual. Let those people start driving the work that you and your in-person team were drowning in.
Third, become an operational machine. You and your team master the tool you already have. Download the manual. Learn it cold. Then connect with FxMedSupport and start to optimize, integrate, automate, and leverage everything you can — building the container of support that holds your patients, and the container of support that holds your admin.
Take off the doctor’s coat. Put on the business hat.
Here is the biggest mistake I see next, and it is not a strategy problem — it is a psychology problem.
Providers do not know how to take off the doctor’s coat and put on the business hat. They cannot build the structure that actually works, not because it is hard to understand, but because they will not step into it. It is not difficult. It just takes hard work and courage.
Think about what you do for your patients. You introduce limbic work, brain retraining, the psychology of getting out of their own way — because you know that so much of healing is the patient learning to stop sabotaging themselves. The exact same thing applies to you, because the medical provider and the business owner are the same person. You have to get out of your own way too.
So when your practice hits sixty percent saturation, raise your rates. Understand that you are a business. Most providers never do this. They martyr themselves, and the business suffers. It may not fail — it might just go on forever — but it never thrives. It never reaches the potential it could have reached if the owner had simply stepped in and owned what they were capable of building. That step takes courage. It is right there in front of you.
Before you spend a dollar on the dream
Before you pay someone who promises you a million-dollar business — before you hand money to anyone who promises you the world without knowing you, without intimately understanding the tools you use every day — do one thing first.
Spend one hour with FxMedSupport. One hour at a community connection, a personal conversation, or a demo. One hour with someone who has been inside Cerbo since early 2015 — who has consulted hundreds of practices on it, and who has built more than a hundred leverage points, optimizations, integrations, and tools on top of it, all aimed at one single objective: give the providers on Cerbo what they actually need. Not what sells. What they need.
Look at the list. Eighty-six public apps. We did not dream those up in a conference room. You did. Fellow providers came to us and said, “I wish Cerbo could do X” — and we made it happen. That is the entire model: you tell us the wish, we build the tool. And twice a week, every week, I teach a free resource class for the Cerbo community — because the goal was never to extract from you. The goal was to arm you.
I promise you this: you do not need the grifter’s sales gimmick. You do not need someone to tell you to do X, Y, and Z and you will magically make millions. You need to do two things, and do them right.
One: Do good medicine. Two: Build a technology stack that is truly optimized, integrated, and leveraged for your business.
Do those two things, and I promise you — you can travel the world while you work and still run a thriving practice. Your dreams, your wants, and your desires are one hundred percent within your grasp. No gimmick required. Just good medicine, and the mastery to support it.
Spend your money on your dreams — not on a sales pitch.
Kevin Mackey is the founder of FxMedSupport, the application, automation, and integration partner for practices running on Cerbo. Inside Cerbo since early 2015 and a former 9-1-1 firefighter paramedic, Kevin has consulted hundreds of practices and built more than a hundred optimizations, integrations, and tools on top of Cerbo — including 86 public apps, nearly all of them born from a provider saying “I wish Cerbo could do X.” He teaches a free resource class for the Cerbo community twice a week, and helps independent functional and integrative providers optimize, integrate, automate, and leverage their technology so they can do great medicine from anywhere in the world.