Dr. Kyle Adams formed his LLC on his cell phone between urgent care patients, then opened Auburn Direct Primary Care with about ten people preenrolled and one patient at 9am on day one. He had already cleared $360,000 in student loans. He grew past 300 patients on a Facebook budget that never topped $200 a month, and he goes home at five.

Dr. Becky Lynn opened Evora Women's Health in February 2020, one month before the pandemic, and brought home nothing at all the first year. She priced the practice on the higher side, then gave one Tuesday a month away on a pay what you can basis so she would not have to abandon the patients who could not follow her.

In the same week, Dr. Delicia Haynes lost her biller to a hospital buyout and opened a letter cutting her reimbursement by 40 percent. She was eating ramen in her own clinic at 10pm. She talks about switching to Direct Primary Care while still depressed, taking the Beck Depression Inventory every Sunday, and sitting at her mother's hospital bedside for a year without her income changing.