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I love talking to entrepreneurs whose mission goes far beyond profits — they genuinely want to improve people’s lives. McCall McPherson, founder of Modern Thyroid Clinic, has done exactly that, redefining thyroid and metabolic health diagnosis and treatment through nationwide telemedicine. She built the business from a solo brick-and-mortar practice in Austin into a 16,000-patient network with 10 clinicians and three physicians in leadership — all self-funded and with zero marketing spend. Her team uses proprietary lab ranges and treatment protocols, with documented remission of Hashimoto’s disease. And because she speaks from lived experience (she was debilitated for a year) her story offers a lesson entrepreneurs can’t afford to ignore: when your customers’ pain is real, mission turns into strategy.
Dan Bova: Can you give us the elevator pitch for Modern Thyroid Clinic?
McCall McPherson: Modern Thyroid Clinic started as a brick-and-mortar medical practice in Austin, Texas. And the demand was so large that a few years ago we expanded nationwide. We serve women and men, but a lot of our patients are women who have complex thyroid disorders who are just not able to get the help and the care that they need in the traditional medical landscape, which for thyroid conditions is quite antiquated. Modern Thyroid Clinic serves those people so that they can actually not only get their lives back and thrive, but have improvement in long-term health outcomes and chronic disease prevention.
What inspired you to start it?
When I was 27, I was already practicing medicine as a PA. I had a long-time thyroid condition myself, and I was spending 16 hours a day in bed. I went to my doctor, he ran one panel and told me, “Your thyroid’s fine… eat less, exercise more. Also, here’s a cholesterol medication for you at the age of 27.” I was sent away and really grappled with the fact that I knew this was thyroid symptoms. Eventually I got on a wait list for a physician who dealt with thyroid issues more progressively. He ran a more in-depth thyroid panel. He didn’t just look at one of six markers, he looked at the entire picture and it was very clear what was going on. He put me on a completely different class of medication, the kind that less than 10% of Americans ever are offered in the thyroid world. He completely changed my life. And from that, Modern Thyroid Clinic was born.
Why is it so hard to get treatment in the first place?
Medicine looks at hypothyroidism in a very, very simplified way. In medicine, we’re trained to see people in about eight minutes. And it’s really hard to deal with complex medical issues that aren’t procedures in eight minutes. We’re trained to run one lab, glance at the sheet, and if it’s normal, tell them they’re fine. Or treat them with one class of medication that around 91% of people are offered. And we’ve sort of resigned ourselves to: if they don’t get better, it must be something else. But that particular treatment will never work for a huge percentage of people — just like cholesterol meds. If it doesn’t work, you need to change it. That’s the piece that’s missing.
How did you build a business model that solved the time problem?
Number one, we spend an hour with our patients. We’re not trying to herd them in and herd them out in a small amount of time. We’ve created enough time to inform, empower, educate these people, talk them through the whole process and do a thorough job, which is what people deserve. We don’t take insurance for that consult, but we accept insurance for everything else, for labs, for medication. It’s an exchange of time for dollars, and it’s worked really, really well.
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