Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiffanny Blythe.
Hi Tiffanny, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have wanted to be a doctor as long as I can remember. I knew I would have to do things “differently” because I wasn’t impressed with the lack of humanity in a lot of the medical system. This first lead me to seek an Osteopathic medical education, which introduced not only knowledge of medications and treatments, but also the healing properties of Osteopathic Manipulative Treatments (OMT). After graduating, I struggled not to conform to the corporate paradigm of medicine while being employed by a large healthcare system. It was a demoralizing and fruitless experience. The more I realized the damage “fast-food medicine” was doing to patients, the more I struggled with the moral dilemma of being part of the broken system. This is when I opened my Direct Primary Care clinic, Blue Lotus Family Medicine in 2017. This membership-based model makes healthcare accessible to a wide variety of patients: those without insurance, those with insurance they can’t afford to use, those whose insurance isn’t accepted anywhere, or those who have accessible insurance but are just as disenfranchised with the system as I am.
When the clinic became full, I needed a way to offer our high-quality, low-cost services outside of the all-encompassing primary care membership. This birthed the concept of White Lotus Wellness. I have always practice medicine with a wellness focus. Opening White Lotus allows me to enhance and enrich people’s lives in tangible, enjoyable, and rewarding ways. While primary care is my passion and my calling, the mental load of that tremendous responsibility means that there are hard limits to how many people we can serve. There is almost an endless capacity to provide wellness services such as bio-identical hormone replacement, PRP injections for joints, muscles, tendons, hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and pelvic floor dysfunction, vitamin infusions, and aesthetics including Scarlet SRF radiofrequency microneedling Dysport injections, and skin care services.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Opening and running a business is not for the faint of heart. As a matter of fact, I usually try to talk people out of it. For the first 18 months of operation, I had no assistance of any kind. I not only saw patients and provided medical care, I also faxed every document, answered every call, took every vital sign, shopped for office supplies, and fixed every printer error. I was also still working as an employed physician with a different entity. Balancing a full-time job, a burgeoning clinic with its increasing complexity, being a mom of 5 active kids, while also being a human, was “too much” on many days. But when you are the primary income earner for your family, there is no option to stop.
I had to reinforce this principle for myself many times over such as when my patient panel became too large for me to handle everything on my own, but I still wasn’t making enough money to hire an assistant. Failure is not an option. You have to figure it out. I rededicated myself to this concept when I had turnover of every major staffing position twice in a span of 18 months. Losing staff, finding reliable replacements, and training them into each unique role took such a toll on daily operations, I contemplated closing the clinic. As a small business owner, losing and replacing any staff member effects service quality and consistency. Losing and replacing all of them twice is an almost insurmountable obstacle. But…failure is not an option. You have to figure it out.
This was pertinent again when service needs exceeded the physical capacity of our space. Again, I had to take a financial leap that I couldn’t afford in the moment in order to sow the seeds for growth. Putting every asset I’ve ever acquired up for collateral to build my beautiful dream wellness clinic was the scariest thing I’ve ever done; even scarier than quitting my employed position as the primary income earner with five children, to start my own business.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are a small LGBTQIA and woman-owned medical wellness clinic. I pride myself on slowing down the pace of services, taking time to get to know people, and caring more about how to help them or serve their needs than I do my own profit margin. I am routinely the most affordable option in a large radius. I do this on purpose. I believe that everyone deserves to feel better, care about their skin health, and invest in their wholistic wellness. So often wellness services are priced at elite-access-only prices. I want anyone who walks through our doors to feel welcomed and cared for.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
I grew up very poor in rural Alabama. I stuck out like a sore thumb because I cared about education and details. I was ridiculed by peers and family for excelling in school. But in contrast to the chaos and dysfunction of my home life, learning was magical and transformative. I felt powerful and privileged when I gained an understanding of something I didn’t know before. I could never get enough. I was always reading, studying, learning. It was the only thing that mattered to me. It was the only thing I was good at.
Pricing:
- Scarlet SRF Radiofrequency microneedling $800
- Dysport $4/unit
- Vitamin infusions $150
- PRP injections (musculoskeletal) $300
- PRP for erectile dysfunction $499
Contact Info:
- Website: https://whitelotuskc.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whitelotus_kc
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whitelotuswellnessclinic
