Small, on purpose
Why we are not adding a third site, and what we have decided to be instead.
By Dr. Sarah Mitchell
Patients ask, sometimes, when we are opening a Boston office. The answer, for now, is that we are not.
There is a particular pull in fertility care to grow into a network. The unit economics encourage it; the brand-building encourages it; the temptation of seeing more patients and helping more people encourages it. We understand the pull and we have decided against it.
We are not against scale in principle. We are against the specific thing that tends to happen when fertility clinics scale: the named physician becomes the brand-name physician, and the day-to-day care moves to whoever happens to be in the building. Patients tell us, quite clearly, that the value they came to BFC for is the named-physician part. Scaling without losing it is a harder problem than the industry usually admits.
If we crack it, we will. Until then, we are choosing to be small.