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Cardiologist Stanley Liu discusses his article, “5 steps to ride out a non-compete without uprooting your family.” He shares his personal experience of being bound by an 18-month, 20-mile non-compete clause after leaving an academic cardiology position and outlines the strategic steps he took to navigate this period without relocating his family. Key points include the critical importance of building a substantial worst-case scenario fund for financial security during negotiations or unemployment, defining clear personal and professional goals for the career transition to maintain focus, and exploring diverse income streams like locum tenens work or non-clinical roles that align with those goals. Stanley also emphasizes the necessity of creating contingency plans (Plan B and C) for potential setbacks and the importance of maintaining professional goodwill by managing the departure process gracefully. Actionable takeaways involve proactive financial planning, intentional career design focused on personal well-being, and strategic navigation of contractual limitations.
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Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Stanley Liu; he’s a cardiologist and today’s KevinMD article is “Five steps to ride out a non-compete without uprooting your family.” Stanley, welcome to the show.
Stanley Liu: Thanks very much for having me, Kevin.
Kevin Pho: All right, so just briefly share your story and then jump right into the KevinMD article that you shared with us today.
Stanley Liu: I am a cardiologist by training. I formerly was an academic cardiologist, and I ended up leaving and writing out a non-compete period, which is what the article is about, because I wanted to create a life that I couldn’t create through my full-time employment practice previously. Today I split my time doing part-time locums work. I work for a value-based care startup in my hometown of Baltimore. And I’m also a licensed financial planner for physicians. So I have three separate part-time careers, but most importantly, I’m also husband and father to two young children, and I’m very present in their lives much more than before.
Kevin Pho: Perfect. And a lot of people, of course, spend decades becoming a cardiologist like yourself. So what was your inspiration to wear some of these nonclinical hats?
Stanley Liu: Thanks for that question. You’re right; we all go through a lot of training. I always had interests in personal finance. I was actually teaching med students in an actual course about personal finance for medical students and physicians, and I often gave talks to residents and fellows and often to medical societies as well.
Honestly, it got to the point where I was being asked more to give talks on that topic than cardiology. I had mixed feelings about that as an academic cardiologist, but I realized it was something that I did pretty well and started seriously thinking about going professional before I left my full-time cardiology practice.
Kevin Pho: All right. So, what you say is absolutely right. I’ve been doing this podcast for years now, and the topic of anything financial—contracts, for instance—that is something that medical students and residents and early career physicians definitely need more education on. Now, one aspect of that, of course, is non-competes, and you’re going to talk about that in your KevinMD article. For those who get a chance to read it, just share what your article’s about.
Stanley Liu: The reason I wrote it, Kevin, was because I was making it up as I went. I didn’t do the traditional thing where I left with a job offer in hand. I had an 18-month, 20-mile non-compete on my contract. And so when I realized that my current job was untenable and I had to find something else, I had to think about what made sense for my family. I hadn’t even been actively job searching at the time.
This ended up being a calculated risk of what did I think I could manage during those 18 months? How well could my family and I handle the worst-case scenario? And were we willing to take that risk? Was my wife on board with that? And so it was both a financial, psychological, and real strategic decision that my wife and I ended up making. And we just came out on the other side in 2025. I know lots of people who are struggling with career decisions because of non-competes. So I decided to write down what it was that my wife and I thought about and the obstacles we overcame to get through it so that people can learn from our experience.
Kevin Pho: All right, so tell us a little bit about that calculus that you and your wife made. Tell us about all the factors that went into that decision-making process.
Stanley Liu: So the first thing was, we had to ensure it was financially possible; we couldn’t just dream. And so one of the things that we started doing, as soon as I realized that I started seriously considering leaving my job, was to build a worst-case scenario fund. In personal finance speak, we often talk about that as an emergency fund. And we often will say something like three to six months, that kind of thing, in case something bad happens. That’s typically recommended.
I was looking at a situation where, what if I couldn’t practice medicine for 18 months? And what we ended up doing was we decided to save up a 12-month fund. Given our household situation, our financial situation, the fact that my wife works, and the job market for cardiologists at the time, that was OK for us. That was enough for us to sleep at night. That might be different for others depending on their situation, their psychology. But first, we had to pick out an amount with which we could sleep at night in case of a worst-case scenario.
And the reason that is so important is because that sets the stage for everything else. When I started doing this, I was still potentially trying to save my job. And I wanted to negotiate favorable terms, or if I wanted to negotiate with other jobs, I wanted to be coming from a position of strength and never be in a situation where I had to either bluff or plead during a negotiation. That just does not work out well. And I did not have a job offer in hand. This was the next best thing.
Kevin Pho: So in terms of non-competes, you mentioned that you weren’t able to practice within a certain mile radius. Was your non-compete comparable to what other physicians face? Was it a typical non-compete, or was there anything special about your particular non-compete?
Stanley Liu: There is a lot of variability throughout the country. I’m actually the advocacy chair of the Maryland chapter of the ACC, and one of our biggest victories last year in 2024 was making non-competes for health care workers partially illegal. And that is already the case in many states, whereas other states, there are no restrictions on that.
And so I’ve seen non-competes range anywhere from a few miles to 50 miles in rural areas or things like that; it can really, really range. Now, how enforceable they are can also range because if a judge thinks that it is egregious or it hurts the patient population, that may not be enforceable. So it really varies.
Mine, I would say, for my area, is considered pretty restrictive. Twenty miles for 18 months is pretty up there in a smaller, more suburban or urban state. But there is a lot of variability out there.
Kevin Pho: And when we talk about the enforceability of non-competes, how stringent are they? Because I’ve heard cases that if hypothetically you were to find a new job, sometimes your new employer can negotiate with your old employer and maybe negotiate that non-compete out. So how ironclad was your particular case?
Stanley Liu: So in my particular case, I consulted with a contract attorney who told me that in the state of Maryland at the time, it was very enforceable. My personal experience was that I did end up being recruited by a local Baltimore health care facility that fell within the radius. And when they found out about the non-compete, they simply did not want to take on that risk. They didn’t want to; that was just too big of an unnecessary headache from their perspective.
So my answer to the question is, it depends on how badly the new job wants you, but recognize that even in a situation where a non-compete clause could be considered non-enforceable by a judge, your new job or practice may not even want to take on the headache of that risk. And because of that, the presence of a non-compete alone already does have some weight, even if it’s not, quote, ‘ironclad’ or enforceable.
Kevin Pho: So you were in this gray area of potentially up to 18 months, and you talked to your wife about creating up to a one-year emergency financial fund. So tell us what else you did during that time.
Stanley Liu: Well, the whole point of this for our family was I wanted to prioritize health, marriage, and family. As my kids were starting school, I wanted to be there when my kids got on the bus and coach their soccer teams, that kind of thing. But you can imagine how my wife might feel about this if I told her, “Hey, I have this great idea: I’m going to quit my job, and I’m not going to work as a doctor within 20 miles of where we live. Isn’t that a great idea?”
We wanted to make sure this was sustainable. So we came up with some very non-financial guidelines to set as a guiding compass here. And so I’ll tell you the ones that we actually wrote down. One of the decisions we made was that leaving this job had to be the best thing that ever happened to our marriage. And the net effect of this had to be more flexibility and agency for my wife’s interests and career, not less; she could not be more restricted in her personal and professional goals as a result. And I also decided I had to be making at least half of what I made in my old position within a year, or we would scrap this and I go back to a full-time job.
And that was our deciding factor. And having those principles and that future you want to build is really important because you’ll be tempted to go back to your old job or lose yourself. Especially for doctors, who we’ve spent years or decades following a regimented path, straying off the beaten path for doctors is really hard. It’s really disorienting. You get a lot of peer pressure, weird looks, like, “What are you doing? Are you having a midlife crisis?” That kind of thing. So having that clear future is really important. That’s one thing that we did.
Kevin Pho: So typical advice which you went against was you should never quit your job unless you have the next one in hand. So you talk about this period of 12 to 18 months, a little bit of uncertainty professionally. So clearly there are some nonclinical options that you leaned into because, according to your story, you do so many things outside of clinical medicine. Was this the time where you looked at nonclinical cardiology options to help sustain you financially?
Stanley Liu: Yes and no. This was a time where I was thinking about nonclinical options. But during my actual non-compete period, all of the income I made was clinical. I did that through part-time locum tenens work about two hours away from where I live.
And so it was a time where I did have to explore and choose new sources of income, and I looked at both clinical and nonclinical sources of income. Again, that’s why it’s really important to have that future that you’re trying to build instead of just trying to escape from something bad, because it will be really easy to just take the first thing that you can get to keep paying the bills. And I wanted to do it from a very calm and intentional point with the goal of improving our overall wellbeing.
Kevin Pho: So walk us a little bit through that process because, like you said, a lot of physicians are pigeonholed into clinical medicine because that’s what they’ve been doing and studying for literally decades. And a lot of doctors I talk to, they don’t know how to do anything else or don’t have any other interests outside of medicine. So walk through your process in terms of sustaining yourself financially when you couldn’t have that full-time clinical job.
Stanley Liu: And Kevin, I have the same conversation with a lot of people who say, “Look, I’ve spent a decade training to be a doctor. This is what I do. What else could I do?” And my counterargument is always: think about what you had to learn during each year of your training, the learning curve, what you were able to accomplish that you could not have even foreseen yourself doing five years previously.
If anyone is better able to pivot, learn something new, and adapt, it’s U.S. doctors. We did that with every rotation in medical school. We did that with every rotation in residency. And so part of this is mindset, of getting back that mindset of saying, “Hey, I am not a fixed person with unchanging skills. I am someone who has specialized in learning and adapting new skills and using them to help people.”
And if you can really believe that and regain that mentality, then I think that frees you into opening your eyes and seeing other options that are out there, clinical or nonclinical, in which you could not only generate revenue but really create value for the rest of the world.
Kevin Pho: Now, did you have any mentors? Did you go to any physician forums? Because sometimes this is the path that’s relatively less taken. Where did you look for guidance in terms of finding out what you wanted to do?
Stanley Liu: Kevin, there are very few people who are both practicing cardiologists and practicing, regulated, licensed financial planners out there. I did find people who had left medicine to go into financial planning. And I did talk to them. I talked to mentors of mine who I trusted within medicine, who knew me not just for my clinical skill, but also knew my values and that kind of thing, to bounce ideas off them.
And to people who are nonclinical, people who have known me since I was young, to really get a good sense of, am I thinking about this the right way? What are my blind spots? Because you’re right, this was hard. I did not have a mentor who has done what I’ve done. I’ve had to piece together life lessons learned from others that I respect and put them together and see how I could use their experiences to help guide my own journey.
Kevin Pho: Now, let’s say you had to replay this again. Is there anything that you would’ve done differently if you had to go through this a second time?
Stanley Liu: Well, launching the nonclinical business took far longer than I expected. The clinical work I did, I ended up making less than I expected because the nature of locums work is it can be canceled with 30 days’ notice on either side. And I did have an unexpected breach of contract from a hospital that I was contracted with, that I had to work around. So I sometimes went three months without income. That was a hard thing.
Would I have done anything differently? I’m glad we had that emergency fund because that’s what helped me sleep at night and find the next plan B or plan C. Maybe I would have been a little less optimistic about my nonclinical income projections. But in the end, it didn’t matter because we had enough reserve and we still got to where we wanted to be. We accomplished the goal of getting through it and building a life that’s much better.
Kevin Pho: Now, what can you tell other physicians who may be listening to you? Now, I talk to a lot of physicians who may be dissatisfied with their current job situation, but perhaps a non-compete is keeping them in an unsatisfactory condition. What advice or insight or wisdom can you share with these physicians who may be in an unhappy situation but have to stay there because of the threat of a potential non-compete?
Stanley Liu: The biggest thing is to take away the power of that non-compete. The whole point of the non-compete is to keep you trapped because the cost of extracting yourself from a suboptimal job is higher than the cost of staying there. The way you can do that includes traditional advice. You can have a job offer in hand from somewhere else. If you’re planning to move somewhere else, that’s fine; the non-compete is not an issue. But if you’re committed to your community and you don’t want to uproot yourself and your family, you have to put yourself in a situation where that non-compete does not have power over you.
Part of that is financial: making sure that you’re not dependent on every paycheck, that you can either get to a point where you’re working less, perhaps a little farther away, or you can stomach some period of in-betweenness until your next forever job. How you do that is up to you. But a big part of that is financial.
Equally important, though, is making sure you have a clear vision of what you are looking for. Otherwise, at the end of the day, you could end up in a job that is just as equally unsatisfying because all you did was try to escape toxicity rather than build something positive that you are moving toward.
Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Stanley Liu. He is a cardiologist and financial planner. Today’s KevinMD article is “Five steps to ride out a non-compete without uprooting your family.” Stanley, let’s end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.
Stanley Liu: Kevin, thank you so much for having me. The biggest takeaway I hope people have is that you don’t have to be trapped. Think about the power a non-compete has over you. It tends to be restrictive because of finances. With good financial planning, you can take away that power.
And with the right mindset, realizing that you have been selected as an elite physician who is able to evolve and adapt year after year, there is no question that you can create new options and new paths to explore that will make your life better. So take away the power of the non-compete financially and regain your power to create your own path as you did when you became a doctor.
Kevin Pho: Stanley, wise words. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight and thanks again for coming on the show.
Stanley Liu: Thanks so much for having me, Kevin. It was a pleasure.
