The pre-launch timeline
Month -24 to -12: publish under your own name, on your own handles, with no mention of a future clinic. Education only. This is the phase that builds the audience and it cannot be compressed. Month -12 to -6: deepen into the procedures your clinic will lead with, and start the written layer that will rank by opening.
Month -6 to -3: the practicalities — name, licence, location, the page. Month -3 to 0: announce, take pre-bookings, and open the calendar. If the first two phases were done properly, this last one is short and easy.
Selling products or courses alongside the clinic?
Shopify is the quickest way to put a store behind your name — try it free.
Doing it without breaching your current contract
Read the employment terms first — outside activity, media, non-compete, and whether you may name your employer. Then build only what is clearly permitted: public health education under your own name, no clinic named, no competing services advertised, nothing that uses your employer's patients or data.
That is usually enough to build a substantial audience, because the audience follows the person rather than the address. What you cannot do is take the patient list, and you should not want to — it is the one thing that turns a clean exit into litigation.
What opening day looks like when it works
The announcement is a formality rather than an introduction, because the audience already knows who you are and what you treat. Pre-bookings fill part of the first month before the doors open, and the marketing spend in month one goes to amplification rather than to explaining who you are.
The alternative — opening first and building an audience afterwards — costs twelve to eighteen months of rent while you do the same work under far more pressure. The work is identical; only the timing and the stress differ.