Stop Playing Business Whack-a-Mole: Why I Built Doc Poppins

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't show up on a resume. It's the exhaustion of being brilliant at one thing and spending 90% of your week doing eleven other things badly.

I know it because I've lived it. And because I've spent two decades in a therapy chair watching other high-functioning, deeply competent people live it too — usually while insisting they're "fine," because what's the alternative? Admitting that the thing you built to be free is the thing that owns you now?

Baking the bread vs. buying the bread

There's an idea I picked up from a business book that has never left me: most founders start out wanting to bake the bread. The craft. The thing they trained for, dreamed about, got good at. But somewhere along the way, the job quietly turns into something else entirely — buying the flour, pricing the loaves, hiring people to knead, retaining the people you hired to knead, managing the culture around the kneading, fielding a one-star review because a customer thought the crust was too dark.

You didn't sign up to run a bakery. You signed up to bake.

This is especially true for doctors, therapists, and other clinicians. You spent a decade — sometimes two — training in a highly specific body of knowledge. And then you open a practice, and suddenly you're an HR department, a biller, a marketer, a Yelp-review manager, and an IT help desk, and the actual clinical work — the reason you did any of this — becomes the smallest slice of your day. I've watched brilliant clinicians describe their own practice as "a monster I feed instead of a craft I love." That's not a personal failing. That's what an unsupported founder's path does to almost anyone.

What isolation at the top actually looks like

People love to say it's lonely at the top, and they say it so often it's become a cliché — which means most people stop actually hearing it. But it's a cliché for a reason.

Here's what almost nobody tells you before you own a business: there's no clock-out. Friends assume you have total freedom — "you're your own boss, you can work whenever!" — without understanding that "whenever" quietly becomes "always." Sixteen, eighteen-hour days aren't the exception; they're the unspoken norm for a huge number of founders, and there's rarely anyone in your life who actually gets it, because the people around you either don't own a business, or own one and are too underwater themselves to compare notes.

The data backs this up. In SCORE's national Megaphone of Main Street survey, nearly 9 in 10 small business owners said hiring the right people was "somewhat or very difficult" — and that's before you even get to retention, culture, or the quieter costs of doing it all yourself. Hiring and people-management consistently top the list of what actually keeps founders up at night, more than cash flow, more than competition. It's not that owners don't know what they need. It's that finding, developing, and keeping the right humans is a skill set almost nobody trains for — and almost every founder is expected to just figure it out.

Where I come in — and where Doc Poppins comes in

I built my own practice from literally nothing. No investors, no safety net, no playbook — just a license, a folding table's worth of willpower, and a refusal to quit. In 2025, I sold that practice for a seven-figure exit. I'm proud of that. I'm also honest about what it cost to get there, because I think that honesty is more useful to you than the highlight reel.

Somewhere in the middle of building and selling that practice, I realized my actual passion had quietly shifted. I still love clinical work. But what lights me up now is sitting across from other founders and clinicians — the ones drowning in the parts of the job nobody warned them about — and helping them get their lives back, not just their to-do lists managed.

That's Doc Poppins.

It has two prongs:

For doctors and clinicians who opened a practice to practice medicine or therapy, and instead find themselves playing business whack-a-mole — one fire down, three more popping up — Doc Poppins helps you identify exactly where you're bleeding time on work that isn't yours to do, and builds a curated system to hand it off.

For founders and business owners more broadly — especially here in Orange County and across Southern California, where the entrepreneurial density is high and the support network for owners is thin — Doc Poppins does the same diagnostic work for whatever "the bread" is in your business.

Why this isn't another AI prescription app

Here's where I'll be blunt: the market is flooded with AI tools that promise to "diagnose" your business bottlenecks and auto-generate a fix. Most of them are a chatbot wearing a lab coat.

Doc Poppins is built differently, on purpose. Every "Rx" — every recommendation for what to automate, delegate, or hire out — is reviewed by an actual expert in human behavior. Me. Twenty-plus years of forensic and clinical assessment doesn't just teach you how to write a report; it teaches you how to actually see a person's operating system — their strengths, their blind spots, where their wiring is fighting their workflow. That's not something an algorithm can curate on its own, and I don't think it should pretend to.

The process starts with real diagnostic testing — the same rigor I've used in thousands of evaluations — to understand your unique profile: where your strengths are, where you're misaligned with the work you're currently doing, and what should honestly be hired out rather than white-knuckled. From there, the recommendations are curated, not generated. Human-reviewed. Yours.

To be clear about what this is not: this isn't traditional therapy, and I'm not running standard sessions anymore. This is consulting — for founders, by a founder, backed by a clinician's eye for what actually makes people (and the businesses they run) work.

If any of this sounds familiar

If you're a clinician quietly drowning in the business side of your own practice, or a founder anywhere in SoCal who built something real and is now buried under the parts of it you never wanted to run — I'd love to talk. Doc Poppins is opening its beta soon, and I'm also taking on a small number of consulting clients directly.

You didn't build this to carry it alone.