A passionate practitioner of hands-on care and effective practice management, this Queensland GP is determined to pass on his hard-earned business acumen.

Dr Gaurav Singh loves the business side of operating multiple medical practices just as much as he does the patient care side.

The Brisbane-based GP is co-owner – together with wife Shruti Deshwal – of 16 medical practices in Queensland and co-manager of a further four in Tasmania with local partners. On top of that, Dr Singh offers fellow practitioners pathways to partner with his medical management business, Cordium. And if that’s not enough, he’s been a keen supplier of business advice and mentoring services to the industry.

Even with these demands, Dr Singh and Shruti are passionate about making time for patient care in a busy life that includes being parents to four children under the age of four – including recently arrived twins.

With such extensive experience as both GP and medical practice manager, Dr Singh brings a knowledgeable perspective to why many GP-owned medical practices in Australia struggle to achieve consistent profitability.

“Doctors pay a lot of respect to clinical knowledge, but perhaps not enough to learning how to run a business, and to take time out for running the business,” he says. “It’s a very different set of skills.

“When you’re going through GP training, you never get taught how to run a practice, or even how to run a basic business.”

Of course, Dr Singh wasn’t always a ‘practice whisperer’. Early in his medical career, while looking for new challenges, he talked to his brother-in-law, a pharmacist who was keen to tackle medical practice ownership. “It turns out you never say yes to my brother-in-law, because the next second he had two leases signed and another two on the way,” Dr Singh laughs.

“He knew how to do payroll and business accounting. He taught me how to look at profit-and-loss statements, at balance sheets, to understand what they mean.”

Not that it has all been smooth sailing. Their first two practices lost about $500,000, which Dr Singh labels “the most expensive MBA degree ever”.

But the entrepreneurial pair had a vision for success and continued to educate themselves, adding practices, building cash flow and learning from each successive acquisition. “We wanted to run the practices at scale, to provide the efficiencies in the background, but also we didn’t want to make every single practice the same,” Dr Singh says.

He points to the example of two Cordium-owned practices in Brisbane located only a few hundred metres apart yet providing completely different patient experiences. “The way they operate, the way the doctors are, the way the staff are, the way the patients come to it, it’s just different, and hence they attract different types of patients. So our philosophy is really to maintain the unique individuality of every practice.”

In 2020, the business evolved, with Dr Singh kicking off a relationship with NAB Health that enabled he and Shruti to assume full ownership of the business, formerly known as Infinity Medical Group, under the new trading name of Cordium.

Working with NAB’s Senior Health Banking Manager in Brisbane, Scott Rossiter, the deal was done with minimal fuss, even against the backdrop of the developing COVID-19 pandemic.

“We could talk to Scott quite openly and tell him, ‘We have this coming up in the pipeline and we need to make it happen’, and he just does it,” says Shruti.

Dr Singh says he most appreciates the transparency that has underpinned his relationship with NAB Health, recounting the frustration of dealing with the disconnect between the banker and the person making credit decisions in previous banking relationships. “We don’t have that issue with NAB,” he says.

NAB Health’s Business Health Executive for Queensland, Kris Jones, describes Dr Singh as “an incredibly astute businessman” who is “very giving”.

“The fact he’s been so successful, a lot of GPs would keep that intel to themselves. But Dr Singh shares his best practice,” she says.

“He has a really great curiosity about what can be done to help support him in business. The fact he doesn’t mind letting you in on how he runs his business has allowed us to be able to see the ways we can genuinely help him.”