Hi there, wellness entrepreneur. Welcome back!
Today we’re going to talk about How To Organize Your Wellness Business. And this seems like a good thought, “I’m going to organize my wellness business. I’m going to block off time or today, I’m going to really focus on getting organized. I’ll get all my ducks in a row.” And it seems like you’ll be helping your business, but in some ways, this thought that you need to block off separate time, days, sometimes weeks to get all organized, can really hold you back.
And today, we’re going to talk about the art of getting your wellness business organized as well as leaving room for flow and room for things to get messy and why you want that.
There are some items in your wellness business that you do want to get organized, like any legal papers or contracts. You do want to decide your business entity, whether you’re a solopreneur or when you want to incorporate and become an LLC. You do want to have your insurance, where you’ll work with people. You want to have a concept of your ideal schedule in mind so you can withhold boundaries on that schedule and still have time to embody your own wellness practices and replenish and spend time with family and just have fun and live your life.
But a lot of the times, people get stuck here when they are constantly trying to fix their schedule. Or you might be newer in starting your business or maybe you have a business like a physical therapy clinic and you’re looking to pivot to add more wellness or coaching services and you get stuck and waste a lot of time and weeks in the legality sides of things or insurance sides of things.
Truth Bomb #1: It Just Comes Down To Decision Making
And really, here’s truth bomb number one. It just comes down to decision making. A lot of these detailed decisions, whether it be to start off as a solopreneur, or to incorporate, or what insurance to use, they can be made. You can have your business set up and get the necessary contracts and get the necessary business licenses and insurance. Really, it all can be done in a day or two. Sometimes you need to mail things out and wait for certain contracts and licenses to come back in the mail. So maybe a few weeks, but you can decide in one day. You can have it all planned out and ready to go in a day or two.
What often is the time suck or the energy suck, which holds you back from actually working with people and bringing revenue into your business, is you get stuck on making the decisions. And decision making is just a skill. The quicker you can decide and make decisions, the quicker you can continue taking steps forward. So I’ll have a future blog on this, all about making decisions and a decision making metric that I use.
Often though, the reason why you might be indecisive, meaning spinning in not committing to a decision one way or another, is because you’re afraid of getting it wrong or you’re afraid of things getting messy.
Truth Bomb #2: Things Will Get Messy While Organizing Your Business
And here’s truth bomb number two. When it comes to organizing your business, things will get messy. It’s just the nature of things. You will get it wrong sometimes and obviously you’re going to try to aim to get it right more times than wrong. But often there is so much growth when you’re just vulnerable enough to go after it a hundred percent to decide to commit and go after it. Trust yourself to have your own back if it doesn’t work out.
So I’ll give you a couple examples on how fast, and the art of having your own back. So when I first started my business, I pretty much got it going from the ground up in one week. So I was let go of my physical therapy job at the time I was working for my mentor, I was an employee full-time and I was let go of and I told my husband that I was going to take one week to kind of decide what to do, whether to look for another job or whether to do my own thing because I was getting old patients and I had some clients I did work with on the side reach out to me to schedule.
So I decided in that week that I was going to open my own business and I literally started treating patients the following week and I just set up all the legalities, my business license, all the things as I was working with people. Of course in that one week I, I made sure that I was insured, I switched my insurance over. It was just one phone call. I got my business license here for Encinitas, but as soon as, I paid a lawyer for the contracts with my people and have the right HIPAA forms.
But literally all of that were decided just in a couple days. And I just got to work. And of course I made a few mistakes. It wasn’t ideal. I worked out of my home. I had to figure out how to speak with mutual yoga studios that both my mentor and I worked with. I had to figure out some contracts where I was teaching anatomy for yoga studios or yoga classes for yoga studios. And I essentially had to just take it step by step and figure it out my own and realize, “Oh, okay, well that didn’t work. What can I do instead? Or that didn’t go as smoothly as I like. What can I learn from that?” And just by doing these simple evaluations step by step by step, I started making money right away.
In fact, my CPA and my husband and I have a financial advisor, they were both blown away on how I was profitable in my first year of business. And it was just because I was vulnerable enough to just get out there and try and get it right sometimes and get it wrong other times. And I had a continuous thought in the background looping, “I’ll just figure it out. I will just figure it out. I trust myself.” And I was able to let go of the noise of what other people might think, “Who am I to run my own business? Doesn’t matter. I’m going to do it anyways.”
A Structure And A System Is Still Needed for Your Wellness Business
Now there is an art to planning and execution and especially there are some key areas in your wellness business where you do want to have some structure and system to help with efficiency and knowing your own boundaries. And so then you also know where to find flow in your business.
So some areas where I do organize and I have systems and structure is scheduling. So how do I schedule and work with my schedule? I do have systems and structures. In fact, I teach my own clients on this for their own businesses – where to focus and prioritize the time. I have systems for that. Systems for knowing where to schedule my one-to-one people and when to bring in on-demand programs and such. I have systems for onboarding and caring for my current people. The people who are paying me, they’re high on my priority list. I want to make sure that they’re served, they’re supported, they’re getting the results that they desire.
So I do have systems and structures for those. I have systems for marketing systems, for selling systems, for the contractors and VAs I work with, and starting to plant the seeds in my own mind for employees I will hire in the future as well as systems for my own finances.
Read more on how to Create Your Ideal Schedule Here: https://igniteurwellness.com/burnout-prevention/
These Wellness Business Systems Don’t Develop Overnight
So I know what’s coming in, what’s going out. But all these systems I’ve developed over time. I’ve never sat down in the beginning stages of my business or even now, let’s see, how many years am I? Started my business in 2016 and it’s pivoted. So about six years in, I’ve never sat down even with a pivot, even when starting my business and said, “I’m going to take weeks to plan out all the organization and all the systems in my business.” How the systems developed in my wellness business is just by me getting my hands dirty and doing some things right and saying to myself, “Okay, I’m going to do more of that. That worked.” Or I learned from coaches and my mastermind and I implemented some of their systems along the way as I learned.
Because here’s the thing, if you take weeks in the beginning phases of your business or if you’re looking to pivot in some directions in your business and if you just stop and pause your business to try to plan out and organize the future so it goes perfectly, you’re going to waste time because you can’t possibly know what your business is going to need in a year from now or two years from now in terms of organization.
You Get To Decide How Much Time You Allocate In These Areas
So there is flow between planning and high level execution. So your people are supported, especially if you have online programs and you’re launching, you do need to plan. So things do go smoothly. However, to mark off time, to organize and to set up every system in your business, you need to decide how much time is warranted and then how much time is just indulgent and is actually causing your business to slow. You decide.
So today we’re going to examine your thoughts of organization. So first it’s getting to know you. Are you a big picture thinker or are you a detailed thinker? Because if you are detailed, it’s important to know this because you want to know how many details you’re going to plan now and how many details you’re going to allow. Things allow to unfold as things just naturally progress along.
Or if you’re a big picture thinker, maybe you can see way out into the future and you can feel that in your body and you have a sense of direction that your business is going to go, but you never plan the details because it’s very hard and painstaking. Then you might want to actually carve out some time to plan some details, but you don’t have to plan everything to be successful.
So ask yourself, what decisions are you sitting on right now? What decisions are you spinning in indecisiveness and why could it be that you’re avoiding things getting messy or failure? Or are you avoiding the possibility that you could get it wrong? And here’s the thing, the deeper level question, what would you make that mean? If you got something wrong or something was messy and didn’t turn out quite as well as you would hope, what would you make that mean?
So for example, there was a time in my business several years ago, I switched. I was pivoting in my business and I made a whole bunch of big changes all at one time, and it was because of what was going on with my health and I didn’t think I had the capacity to do one-to-one anymore because of my health.
So I made these decisions in a way running from one-to-one even though I loved it. So I, all at the same time, I switched to group, I switched my niche, I even moved my physical location from a brick and mortar physical therapy to working out of my she shed here at home. And it was a lot of big changes and I thought I tried to plan it out, but, however, it ended up being very messy with a lot of fails.
And at first I started making it mean that something was wrong with me, that people didn’t want to work with me. That I wasn’t a good CEO of my business. I wasn’t a good entrepreneur who makes that many big changes all at one time and doesn’t really even realize it or makes emotional decisions in their business. Me, I do. I’m a human. That’s what I did. I thought I was helping myself. But through coaching and working with my own practitioners, I got my energy back, I got my schedule back, my health shifted, and I realized if I were to leave and stop doing one-to-one, then I need to do this from a neutral place, not from a place of thinking that I can’t handle it. And that was my growth edge.
And now I do one-to-one. I don’t do any group programs right now, and I have a plan to keep one-to-one on for a while, even as I bring on certain group and on-demand programs from, again, from a neutral place. I might decide that it might not work anymore for my business or I might decide to always keep it.
Here’s the thing, there’s no one right way. And what organization looks like now for your business might not look like organization that you want for your future business. And that’s okay. You have to have the ability to create the structures and systems and also find flow. And because I had these realizations, “Oh, I’m making it mean something about my practitioner skills, I’m making it mean something about my business skills,” these were all areas I could work on. Developing confidence in myself as a practitioner, developing confidence in myself as a business owner, trusting myself. And because I did this work, that’s what allowed last year in 2022 to have so much success with so much ease.
Learn how to prevent burnout here: https://igniteurwellness.com/how-to-prevent-burnout-as-a-wellness-entrepreneur/
Learning To Enjoy The Process While Organizing Your Wellness Business
So sometimes the work that we do where we are making decisions, and it looks messy and it feels like we’re always failing, can allow future years to have that much more ease and grace. But during that process, your job is also to find sustainability, to find contentment, Santosha, as they would call it in the yoga world and what you’re doing day-to-day, so you’re not rushing for perfection, you’re not waiting to enjoy your business or life when things are perfect and organized. It’s learning how to find that even if your business doesn’t feel completely organized and structured.
And the second part about allowing me to get it wrong and just making these decisions and it not going as well as I thought originally was as I worked through this myself and developed all the confidence in those areas and trust in myself, now I’m actually able to coach my people better on this. If they’re looking to pivot in their own business in certain ways, or make subtle shifts and changes to their offers or big changes in their business, I can help them navigate it through. They can learn from my mistakes so they can get through it faster and with more ease.
So all those messiness, all those failures now make me a better coach because I see the big picture. I see where things can go wrong. They have the benefit of learning from my experience.
Reduce Your Stress With This Blog: https://igniteurwellness.com/entrepreneur-stress-reduction/
Be Where You Are Right Now
So if we come back to what organization means for you and key areas that you do want to have some structures and systems in your business, like schedule, onboarding people, caring for your current people, your marketing systems, selling your systems for hiring finances, being able to keep track of revenue, what comes in your business and out.
For example, if we look at the finances as if you’re starting your business, it could be as simple as just using QuickBooks and Excel. That’s what I do. I manage my own QuickBooks and I do input some metrics and KPIs in an Excel document. But truthfully, both of these don’t take me very long. I learned how to do it once and I’ve just been repeating the process over and over and over again now for several years. I have a CPA who I check in with and she does my taxes and she looks over my QuickBooks to make sure I’m, you know, following the laws. And down the road, there could potentially be a bookkeeper and a CFO. But here’s the thing, when you’re developing the systems for your schedule, marketing, finances, et cetera, you don’t need it all right now.
Often the mistake I see with wellness entrepreneurs that slows them down and stops revenue coming into their business is that you try to get it all organized right now. You’re planning for your business in five or even 10 years right now and trying to make a one year business be a five year business, it’s just not possible. You need to be where you are right now.
So what do you really need right now? Maybe you just need an Excel document to keep track of some things and how can you organize yourself in the simplest manner possible?
So for me, I learned from one mastermind several years ago a way to organize the KPI and metrics. They called it the cockpit or the dashboard. And when I first tried to implement that in my own business, I found it very confusing and time sucking and it just didn’t fit me. But the principles, the philosophy is what I needed. I did need to know what numbers to track so I can measure progress. And I also needed to realize how often do I check this. Some people do it weekly, some people do it monthly. For me, I do it twice a month. So I have my finger on the dial of what’s happening in my business and what’s happening with my finances, but I’m not in there every day where it’s going to consume my time and maybe trigger anxiety or worry.
And the other part was this, I had to simplify that dashboard. So I took the key metrics that I knew were important for my business to monitor, and I made my own dashboard. So for you, you might be thinking, “Well, I don’t even know what numbers to monitor. How do I know what numbers to monitor? Well, ask yourself, what are some key indicators that you would want to know?
or me, I like to know how many potential clients or leads I have that are coming into my world. Are people opting in for my freebies and for my workshops? Are people converting to consults? Are people converting into my program from the consult? Simple things like that. If you do paid advertising, you definitely want to have metrics there. You can go back and read the Facebook ads blog:
https://igniteurwellness.com/how-to-know-if-you-are-ready-to-run-fb-ads/
to help you decide if paid advertising is the right route for you or not.
Knowing What Is The Simplest And Easiest For Your Wellness Business
In terms of organization for your wellness business, what could be simplest and easy? So you actually repeat it and do it. Not someone else’s system or something that you think you should do or feel forced to do that necessarily won’t work. And it could backfire because then you spend a lot of time thinking you need to organize your business and you feel disorganized and you keep trying to force a system that doesn’t work, that leads to you feeling more disorganized and you don’t do it at all.
And so essentially you freeze. So then you can just focus on the simplicity of bringing new clients into your world, converting them into paying customers, and then delivering on their results within the schedule that you desire to work with.
The key metrics to know, have your hand on the dial of your business and your finances. That’s it. If you write down those three components of marketing, selling, delivery, your schedule, finances, hiring, when that’s appropriate for you, how can you keep track of these key areas simply, that’s all you need, then you can spend the rest of the time fine tuning your message instead of feeling that you don’t have time to market on social media or that you don’t have time to write e-mails or that people aren’t responding to your e-mails or liking your e-mails because that’s just a marketing problem. It just might mean that for whatever reason, your message isn’t resonating right now. But it does not mean that anything’s wrong with your practitioner’s skills.
Conclusion
When you have the time and the brain space to see that, then you have the energy to spend time in your copy and figuring it out. Instead of hiring a marketing assistant too early before either you have the revenue to support it or before you spend enough time knowing how to write copy to train the marketing assistant in your business.
So there you have it. Some ways to organize your business and some perspectives that might help you release the grip on the thought and feeling that you’re unorganized and you need to organize because maybe you don’t. Maybe your business is perfect just the way it is right now with a degree of messiness that just comes along with being an entrepreneur and the ability to fail, learn from it, and add that learning into your systems to go forward. That is the path of the entrepreneur.
Okay, I’m wishing you a happy week and happy organizing. I’ll see you next week. Bye for now!
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