She Had 5 Buyers for Her Practice in One Month

Most chiropractic practices never sell. Kris Arnold (Ep 49) takes those calls every month as a state association president. Not because nobody wants them. Because they're not a business, they're a person. "Dr. Courtney Chiropractic" isn't something Joe Schmo wants to buy. Courtney's words, not mine.

Dr. Courtney Gowin (she got married mid-recording and is now Dr. Courtney Busbee, which she reveals live on the episode) started in the basement of a building in Dallas with $6,000 to her name and a pile of student loans. Every time she got a new patient or had a decent month, she'd buy a rug. Two years in she took over all three floors of a 3,000 sq ft old Victorian. Thirteen years later she'd built The Nest: a maternal wellness practice with 10 providers running midwifery, pelvic floor PT, IV, ozone, and chiropractic, all vitalistic at the core.

Then she sold it. One post in a Facebook group of 10,000 women chiropractors got her five buyers in a month. The two who eventually bought it were students she'd mentored years earlier. Start to signed contract was about seven months.

Here's the part that matters if you ever want a real exit. About eighteen months before she had any intention of selling, she switched the whole practice to a membership model. Not because she was building to sell (this is the Stu Bernsen (Ep 31) thesis playing out by accident). Because she was traveling twice a month running retreats, and every time she left, revenue tanked. Patients would just wait for Courtney to come back. That's a personality practice, and personality practices are unsellable.

So she killed it. Average visit was $45 to $65, so $50 x 4 became the monthly membership. Four adjustments a month, add-ons prorated on top, family discount around $40 a head. Overhead dropped to near zero besides payroll. Revenue got predictable. And when she went to sell, she could hand a buyer three things nobody else in chiropractic can usually hand anybody: recurring revenue, a brand that isn't the owner's name, and clean profit margins (she says 30% is the healthy target).

The rest of the conversation is Courtney's second act, and it's a lot. She hosts WanderLearn retreats (47 international retreats in about three years), runs the She Adjusts mastermind for women chiropractors, launched an AI agency called The Well OS, went through Harvard's agentic AI program after the sale, and built a functioning practice brokerage in two hours using Base44 because every broker she talked to wanted her to print a form and mail it in. She's made six figures in three months monetizing AI builds for businesses. She runs WanderLearn with ten agentic AI employees. Her personal AI exec assistant texts her on WhatsApp at 6:30 every morning with her top priorities and her kids' school lunches.

She also gets honest about why she sold. A cohost at a retreat in Costa Rica asked her: "next year, if you're in the same place you are right now, where will you be?" Her instant, unfiltered answer was "dead." She asked for a sign, and three days later she broke her wrist chasing her dog across a limestone patio. Took three months off practice. First bone she'd ever broken. She laughed and took the hint.