About
I said I would never do any of this.
Never work in health policy. Never go back into management. Never start a business. I have been wrong about myself enough times that I stopped treating “I could never” as information.
What limits are you placing on yourself?
The nevers
I started in healthcare as an EMT when I was eighteen, running calls with a volunteer fire and rescue company in Maryland. After working in an emergency department while in college and interning with an ambulance service, I was sure I knew where I was going.
Then I got a master’s in health services administration and went the other way entirely. Operations, strategy, finance. Then consulting for hospitals, nonprofits, and startups. Eventually government relations for a health data company working with state Medicaid programs. That was the first I will never. Health policy was too political for me, right up until it was my job.
Around forty I went back to the bedside. Nursing school, then the ICUs and emergency departments at a large university medical center. Even becoming a charge nurse during COVID. Then flight nursing. I love being a clinician and swore I was done with management. That was another never. I stepped back into management as a clinical supervisor during a time of rapid growth and change and started business coaching along the way.
People ask why I would leave a leadership career to start over. The honest answer is that I wanted to see the difference I was making instead of reading about it in a quarterly report. Being at the bedside was part of that. Coaching is another part of that.
What the nevers were actually about
Every one of them was fear wearing a costume.
Not preference, not principle. Fear of the unknown, and of what I would have to become to walk into it. There is a saying I keep coming back to: through your fear lies your freedom. The unknown is where everything good has been.
I bring that up because I think you already know where this is going.
“I’m not a numbers person.” “I could never read a P&L.” “I’ll figure out the money part later.” Those are not facts about you. They are the same costume. And on the other side of that particular unknown is the thing you actually want, which is knowing whether the business you are building can carry the life you want to live.
Why that matters to you
Clinicians are some of the smartest, most capable people I know, and almost none were taught a single thing about money. In healthcare it is practically taboo to talk about. So when a clinician starts a business, they are flying blind with everything that doesn’t involve patient care.
After spending several years helping entrepreneurs write business plans, build budgets and fine tune their businesses, I found what I do best is translate. I take the finance side and put it in accessible language.
Because you already know how to do this. You assess. You intervene. You reassess. That is the clinical process, and it works on a business exactly the way it works on a patient. We just have to learn which vital signs to check.
Why I do this
Repair the world.
Healing takes more forms than the medical one. Helping someone find their calling and build a business, that is healing too. It solves a problem they see and supports growth and independence.
Relationships are what’s real.
How I show up on a Tuesday call about your profit and loss statement changes how you feel about your business, and how you feel about your business determines what you are willing to try next. That is not a small thing. It is most of the job.
The business should fund the life, not consume it.
While money is important, so is life. I want to know what you are building it for, and then make the numbers serve that.
How I work
Knowing where you stand beats guessing.
A budget full of rough estimates is still better than no budget. You can refine a plan. You cannot refine a guess you never wrote down.
The decision is yours.
I do not do your numbers or make decisions for you. I help you understand them well enough to decide with confidence. The decision stays yours, and you are never making it alone.
Put all the cards on the table.
I have made mistakes and learned from them. Everyone has, so nothing you show me is going to shock me. We get everything out, then sort what is a priority from what is just noise.
What I’m not
I am not a CPA, a certified financial planner, or an attorney, and nothing here is individual financial, tax, or legal advice. Think of this as the fluency that helps you have better conversations with those professionals, and make more of your own decisions with confidence.
The short version
Jeremy Gorenstein, MHSA, CFRN, CEN, CCRN, NREMT-P
Flight nurse, clinical supervisor, master problem solver. I make ice cream, drink too much coffee, and throw mediocre pottery.
Let’s look at your numbers together.
A free 30-minute call. Bring whatever you have, even if it is a shoebox of receipts. We will figure out where you stand and what is worth doing first.