Dr April Armstrong

Talk to April Armstrong for just sixty seconds and you’re immediately entranced by her unlimited entrepreneurship, enthusiasm and enterprise. When you learn she left school at fifteen, and later studied to become a doctor as a single mother, your levels of respect and admiration for this over-achiever from Western Australia go into overdrive.

The current chapter of her life has only just begun, and yet it’s already fascinating for its groundbreaking potential and industry-wide impact.

If you had a nine-year old who was destroying your garden by ripping the stems and branches off your plants and claiming it was for a roadside business she was starting, would you chastise her or praise her?

April Armstrong received a bit of both: “I was always in trouble. I’d take the cuttings, propagate them and sell the regenerated plants on the roadside.”

And that’s a perfect metaphor for so many parts of April’s story.

The family moved to central Perth from a farm after her mother’s car accident, so the bush mentality of creating something from nothing was etched in her thinking. The idea of making money by working for yourself was embedded early.

“I feel my childhood led me into ideas of wanting to achieve different business goals,” April reflects.

Doing business differently is the cornerstone of Business for Doctors, a project April started in 2015 because she saw a need to help other doctors run their businesses more successfully.

Having won the WA Telstra Business Woman of the Year for her Kalgoorlie practice, April spoke to colleagues from medical school about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), running a business and staffing issues and they had no idea what she was talking about. Her thought at that time was “how can I teach them?”

Those crucial aspects of running a business came naturally to April, because she had been through a myriad of life experiences before becoming a doctor. She didn’t begin studying to be a doctor until in her thirties, and to do that she had to go back to high school.

April then details her work history, which began “when I was twelve. I had a part-time job as a vet assistant and did that for three years. I then left home and went to work full-time on a farm. I was fifteen, working in the central wheat belt of Western Australia and was looking after myself.

“I couldn’t imagine any of my children leaving home at fifteen, but I enjoyed the farm life; I loved working with animals, and, being so far from a city, I was able to save some money. I used that money to pay my way through Agricultural College.”

Having completed college, April then worked for the Department of Agriculture in research for a short while, until she had her first child. When her child was three months old, April started working for Shell as a data entry operator, then six months later moved into retail sales.

That sales job quickly led to promotions into management and eighteen months later April moved back to Perth, which proved invaluable in gaining further insights into the workings of business. April still wasn’t settled, though, and the idea of debt collection seemed intriguing – that led to a stint working with a private investigator. After five years in the industry she decided to call it a day.

By this stage April was a single mother to three daughters, aged thirteen, ten and three, and the pressures of life were mounting. Given that “my eldest daughter wanted to be a pilot, I knew that would take a bit of work, not only on her part but also on mine. She needed a tutor and there was no way I could afford to pay for one, so my idea was to tutor her myself and that’s when I decided to go back to school.

“Fortunately, the thought of learning appealed to me,” April recalls, “so I decided to study physics and chemistry so I could help her achieve her goals. When I enrolled I was told I had to choose a pathway because otherwise I’d have no motivation to complete my studies.

“I grabbed a careers booklet and started thumbing through it. When I got to the letter D, I turned the page and there was doctor. I thought, ‘that would be really amazing, I’d love to be a doctor’.”

Given April had left school at fifteen, she was told that before studying to be a doctor she would have to complete years eleven and twelve; she was thirty-two!

April happily recalls that “it really was a wonderful time in my life; my daughters would go off to school and I would follow. We’d pack our lunches together, we would do our homework together; it was fun for me after working since I was fifteen. I was a much happier person.”

In 2002 April won a Subject Exhibition for one of her seven TEE subjects that not only secured her a place at University of WA in Medicine, but won her a scholarship, helping fund her next six years of full-time study.

After graduating, April moved to Adelaide and completed her GP training in rural South Australia. In 2013 she moved to Kalgoorlie and set-up her medical practice – however, there’s that curious side to her nature which refuses to allow her to relax. Her mind is continually ticking over with ideas and they attack her at any time and in any place.

As April describes it, “I can be on a plane, reading a newspaper, relaxing in the lounge room and it triggers an idea of ‘that’s a problem I have as a doctor, so if I have it, my colleagues must have the same problem and it hasn’t been addressed’.

“So if I identify as a health practitioner from the inside that it’s an issue, then I’ve got the opportunity to find a solution.”

One amazing example of that thinking sparked an idea to set up, of all things, a seafood business in Kalgoorlie.

April recalls “it was a Sunday morning and I had this urge for crayfish; ever tried to get crayfish in the goldfields on a whim? I can tell you it’s a tad difficult. So that night I decided I’m going to open a seafood market and I posted it on Facebook. I said, ‘this is not how you should start a business, but I’m going to set up a business in seven days’.”

Over the next week April created a business plan, a marketing plan, organised all the necessary licenses, found and equipped premises and ordered the seafood.

The following Sunday, “I was ready for business at the Boulder Market Day. It was amazing! My daughter’s a ten percent shareholder in the business, so she worked for free for the first few weeks.”

So not only was April’s need for crayfish satisfied, it was a valuable lesson for her daughter in the process of being in business and there was also an unexpected consequence.

The bonus was that “it gave us accessibility to be able to educate patients on healthy eating and the importance of adding seafood to your diet. As a doctor I could say it’s actually okay to include seafood. There’s not a high level of mercury or poison in Australian fish; we’ve got very good fish that pregnant women can eat.

“So I used the opportunity to engage the social media aspect of the business to educate patients on the health benefits of seafood.”

It was exactly the same process which launched Business for Doctors. Having spoken with her medical colleagues and realising there was a problem, April started a Facebook page and called it just what it was: a page to help doctors with their businesses.

Initially that “was a platform to share information with doctors about business and banking, about investing in the property market, about financial matters and how to run their business. I started with about thirty of my colleagues from university, and that has now grown to nearly twenty thousand doctors in just three years.”

The success of Business for Doctors is a classic example of a business filling a need in the marketplace. “As it was never set up with the intention of being a business, we actually went into start-up phase when the business had been running for two years. A start-up project requires full-time dedication which means I’ve had to put aside my medical career for the moment to run Business for Doctors as a business.

“But the need for information has far exceeded anything I imagined. There are so many changes in the health sector, for instance recent legislative changes which have had a massive impact on health practitioners in private practice or the impact of the Royal Commission on the banking sector; there’s always something to talk about or a new problem to be discussed and resolved.”

Given the endless supply of information “we as doctors need to keep up to date with, this platform is a way for us to discuss that with relevance to being a health practitioner.”

April has discovered the need for information within the medical fraternity teeters on being insatiable. “These days doctors are spending a huge amount of hours on social media and our engagement rate is one of the highest in the world per member of our group. We have ninety-seven percent engagement online, which means at any given time up to sixteen thousand people are engaging with the site over a twenty-four hour period.

“I believe that’s because the content is not only relevant, but interesting, and it’s often a topic that previously was taboo for medical practitioners, so it’s opening a door for them to discuss these topics in a safe environment.”

The need for information hasn’t been the only surprising result for April: she believes it’s also helping doctors become better doctors.

In a nutshell, “we have a belief that if we look after the money and understand the business, we actually deliver better patient care. As a practitioner, I believe in delivering premium care to patients and if I can assist doctors in feeling better about their money, their business, their banking, then they’re more satisfied in their jobs. They’ll have fewer problems and a healthier family life, which means they’re able to concentrate on delivering the best quality medical advice they can possibly deliver.

“In fact one of the discussion points has been the potential of setting up a specific month where doctors seek out a health check for themselves.”

It’s an area of Business for Doctors which April finds extremely exciting: helping doctors look after their own health.

When delivering workshops, April jokes about this – “how a doctor gets up in the morning, has a pee, goes to work, has a coffee or two, skips lunch and then rushes to the bathroom as soon as they get home in the evening.

“Through the site, we’re working on concepts such as getting doctors to dedicate some time in the middle of the day where they actually leave their surgery and go outside. Even the coffees they have during the day are usually brought to them, so getting outside and going for a walk is something we believe is an important way of looking after their own health and in turn improving their level of care.”

There’s no charge to join Business for Doctors and April believes that’s caused a bit of apprehension, especially when doctors are first approached about joining a network that is just for doctors.

Over and over April finds herself repeating “there’s no catch! I don’t know how many times I’ve said that, but there is no catch. I tell them I actually do this for free and there’s a degree of skepticism and I repeat, ‘there’s no catch!’

“As doctors get to know the page and engage with other doctors, they realise it’s a safe community where they can share their own experiences and they have the opportunity to mix with doctors from all walks of life, and from all specialities.”

With the success of the site and that inability to relax because of that continual flow of ideas running through her mind, April is now expanding Business for Doctors by borrowing aspects from other successful business models.

An example of this was that “one of the platform discussions raised the idea of getting product discounts because of the potential buying power of the twenty thousand doctors linked to our page. I looked into it and now we have some unique partnerships with major Australian companies.

“In the secure part of our website, doctors now have access to discounts through our association with companies like Virgin, the Accor Hotel Group, Medibank and financial institutions like ANZ, Macquarie and St George.”

Importantly, “we are completely transparent about the deals; what the doctors get, and what we get, which is, quite frequently, support in education and for our conferences.”

The idea to form partnerships came initially from a desire to offer more to doctors connected to her site, but tapping into other successful business models came from a deliberate understanding of how successful businesses operate. April was practising what she was preaching.

April has spoken at workshops about creating your business based on successful business models and, as she explains it, when you understand companies such as Google, Apple, McDonalds and the banking industry, there are actually four different models.

To quote April, “although Google has optimised their search engine, it’s their marketing and sales which make all their money, while Apple’s success is based on owning the consumer. McDonald’s isn’t about hamburgers, it’s about the property market; they own the buildings of every McDonald’s store while the banking model is basically a popularity contest.

“I like the Apple model of owning the consumer; I’ve always thought that was very clever.”

The next stage for Business for Doctors is to expand its impact, and April’s plan for that is to coach more doctors to become leaders within her business.

She is currently “working with about twelve doctors and our focus is the delivery of education services which will improve the business side of medicine for doctors. I’ve given up a year of my medical career to put my heart and soul into something that really interests me and I can see it having a long lasting impact, not only on the practitioners but many, many patients.

“As one doctor working in a practice I can reach maybe three or four thousand patients, but if I’m working on a level with multiples of twenty or thirty thousand, that has a far greater effect on health benefits for people and the longevity of the health system.”

ADVICE

There are two very clear pieces of advice from April Armstrong about starting out in business, and they are to know why you’re doing it and to have a vision.

She summarises: “you need to be able to close your eyes and imagine where you’d be sitting, what you’d be doing and what your practice looks like. Have a vision for who you would have around you; what sort of patients or clients you would be serving.

“If your vision is clear it’s much easier to write a business plan and then you can start work on your marketing plan and how you’re going to target your audience. Have the vision, believe you can achieve it and make sure you write it down. There’s something about writing it down that has a direct impact on your brain.”

April is also a believer in seeking a mentor. She’s had two distinct mentors, both of whom have come from outside her immediate business community.

One of those mentors runs the biggest trucking company in WA and another is a very successful lawyer, and for April “both have been very good sounding boards and have been through what I’m experiencing. I allow both to be completely honest with me, even if it means they might offend me. Their experience and their willingness to share it with me is crucial to my success.

“I’ve also read Richard Branson’s books, taking on board his successes and his failures. You can learn so much from what hasn’t worked; if nothing else, it makes you realise that not everything is going to work.”