272. Scaling Your Business

Balancing Business and Travel:

I’m actually traveling on the date of publication of this one, so I’m recording this one in advance, but as you know, I have been on a journey.

So what I wanted to talk to you today about was scaling and the reason that that has come to me, you know, here I am, I’m traveling, I’ve talked to you about collaboration, maximizing your online presence, diversifying and thriving within your business.

When we think about scaling, we think of all sorts of things, all sorts of things come to mind. When we trained, we had a vision of what we wanted to do, the people we wanted to work with, where we wanted to be.

Might have been that we wanted to work in a multi-modality clinic, and then you got pregnant, had babies, and now you’ve ended up with one hour a week working from home.

Visualization and Planning:

When we think about scaling, we have to think about where am I now in my business and what is my capacity now? What is my capacity in six months, one year, three years, five years, and 10 years time?

When we look at scaling our business, we have to look at how we can scale it within our capacity. Because the last thing we want to do is burn out, right?

We need to know where we’re going. We need to know what our niche is to be able to take that next step forward to scale and increase what we’re doing, the capacity that we have.

So you’ve been mind mapping up until now, I hope. You might just be mind mapping in your mind without writing anything down because you’re listening to me.

Looking to the Future:

But what we need to think about with scaling is how, where, and why. So how am I going to scale my business? Now, scaling takes many forms.

It might be that you want your own practice, your own multi-modality practice, and that’s how you’re going to scale. It might be that you just want to see more clients.

It might be that once you work child and childcare, you can see more clients, but at the same time, you have a program on the side. When we’re scaling. We have to think about the long-term implications of that scale and where it’s leading to.

So number one is that visualization that we’ve had in the past that is in, I think, Strictly Education and Support, and is certainly in the Academy for Academy members.

So we need to think to the future. What is it that we’re heading towards and how do we scale towards that? What is my capacity now? I just said, what is my capacity now?

And what I mean by that is I am able, I have a newborn baby, my capacity is one person a week because I have a newborn baby.

And so I’m feeding every couple of hours because I’m doing demand feeding. I have a toddler. My toddler is in childcare or in kindergarten or whatever it is, three mornings a week.

But I don’t have that capacity then because I’m with the friends. So I only have Monday. And so far, I’m spending that time with my mother and my child, except for shopping.

So you’re going to have to sit down with whoever the other carer is and go, can I have this X amount of time carved out so that I can see clients? And they’re going to say, yes, they’ve got your child.

They’re going to say yes. So when we think about scaling, we have to think about. Time, commitments, and where that time is going to come from.

Adapting to Family Dynamics:

As your children get older, you get more and more time, and then you go through a period where there’s no time at all because you’re doing the running around, they’ve joined all the sports teams, and you have to get them there and do all the things.

So, when my son turned 14, so my daughter was 11, yes, I could leave them at home alone. They were totally capable of looking after themselves, they were totally capable of not cooking dinner.

I’d shown them how to cook pasta, and then they boiled the kettle, they put the water in the pot and they put the pasta in, but they didn’t turn the gas on.

So they had hard pasta. They were like, mom, we got this really hard pasta. And like the sauce was cooked and everything. I was like, yeah, you need to turn the burner on.* 

So that was their first foray into cooking their own dinner when they were 14 and 11, when they should have been totally capable of doing so. Hilarious.

Adapting to Changing Schedules:

But anyway, so when we think about our capacity, when he was 14, he’d started rowing. And so I had a lot of driving to do, so the school took them to and from rowing when they were juniors, but then he’d missed the school bus home, so I had to get him home from school.

So I still had to go and get him at 4:30 instead of at 3:30. My daughter was 11. And she was a bit too far to walk by herself, so she was on the school bus home, which she couldn’t always get because some nights she’d have tennis or whatever it was, so I would still have to go and get her.

So although my day increased a little bit by an hour, because suddenly there was 4:30 pickups, there were still 4:35 o’clock pickups during rush hour, so they hadn’t really extended my client capacity.

However, I had a late night from the moment I started in naturopathy and my late night was always full. So my capacity beyond that to scale and increase my business became. I was only in school hours for the rest of the week.

Now, how am I going to scale? How am I going to increase my capacity? How am I going to scale to change and to bring in more money?

Well, we’ve got more time, so we can see more one-to-one clients. We’ve got groups. Perhaps we can put people in two groups. We could work with somebody else. We certainly could learn another modality if we wanted to.

But that might just be throwing more money at something when, in actual fact, what we need to do is work where we have the qualification now.

Building a Team:

So when we’re scaling, we need to look at how can I do more, and scaling often involves hiring ATMs. seminar, symposium that’s coming up in November, and I’m going to be talking about hiring VAs and hiring people to help you out.

So when we scale, we take on more people, but we, and we take on more capacity, we’ll take on more things.

And when I say things, I mean, I, I pay Podia to hold my site. www.geraldinehedley.com where all of my content is, so I pay for that.

I pay to host, um, videos in Vimeo because I bought that when YouTube went through a bit of a stage of saying people couldn’t have private videos, so now they’ve gone back to it’s fine you can have private videos, but, so I had to purchase Vimeo.

So I’ve got all these things I’m paying for, so as we scale our business, we end up paying out for other things. We end up paying for other people because we want to be actually earning the money.

And I’ve got a bookkeeper. I have to pay the bookkeeper, but that takes a lot of time. I don’t have to, as far as I’m concerned, waste on invoices and doing this, it’s something I hate doing.

So when we look at what we dislike, those are the things we hand off to other people so that we can scale and work more productively.

Collaboration and Support:

So that we can, if we’re doing well, we can pay someone else to organize our advertising. to promote our business to post for us in social media, because then we’re not spending that time.

If it’s something we don’t enjoy, what we want to be doing is the things we enjoy. And to scale our business means handing off some portions of our business.

What are you going to hand off? How are you going to Increase business within your capacity and to promote your business so that you’ve got clients coming in so that they’re purchasing on a regular basis so that you’ve got other things to sell them.

It might be that you open your own, it might have been your dream to open a multimodality clinic and now you’ve got that opportunity to do so because you’ve got a regular income so you can apply for a loan and they’re going to give you a loan to open up your small business.

It might be that you can not only apply for a loan, but there’s also small business grants from your local government. Check them out. Make sure you’re looking at business grants as well because they want you in a shop front.

They don’t want you working from home. They want the community vibrant. The more people are in the shops, the more vibrant the community, the more happening the community, the safer the community. So they want you out there.

They don’t want you sitting at home. Working behind a computer screen, like I do.

Reflecting on Scaling Considerations:

So when we’re thinking about scaling, what is your capacity? So how are you going to do it? Where are you going to do it? Can you scale from home? Can you scale from your… Lounge, or your basement, or your garage, can you scale from there with what you do?

So where and what, what are you going to scale? Are you going to be scaling your one-to-one appointments? Are you going to be adding in other products that you sell and you can scale from there?

So how, what, when is the next one? When are you gonna do this? Do you have the capacity to do it now? Or, now while your children are little, is this your planning stage?

Have you got time because you’re pregnant and so you’re nesting, but you actually have time as well to plan and create that program for the future? Something that you could sell while you’ve got that baby on board.

We’ve got the what’s, the when’s, the why’s, the how’s, and the who. Who are you going to scale it with or is it just going to be you?

So we’ve got lots to think about, and I’d like you to have a good think about where your business is going in the longer term. Who you’re going to need to help you scale and take your business to the next level, to the next summit, to the next place that you need it to be within your business. Who’s going to help you do that? How are you going to do it?

Who is going to support you, that part of those who’s who is going to support you to do this? Who is going to be your advocate, your cheerleader, and who’s going to be the cheer squad?

Is there a cheer squad? If there isn’t, because your partner cannot concept what you do, cannot understand what you do because they do something totally different.

They work for somebody else in a totally different environment doing absolutely, you know, they’re an architect working for an architecture firm. They’re not going to have the understanding of what you do.

You love them because of who they are. But they might be really, really risk-averse, whereas that’s why you get on so well because you have a lot of risk-taking behaviors, they’re risk averse, and so you get on really, really well.

Recognizing Diverse Strengths:

I don’t know why I picked architecture. Who knows? I don’t even know an architect. Yes, I do. I do know one. It’s my husband’s dot one.

But we’ve, it’s probably because I’ve been in Europe. All the architecture is amazing, but we’ve got to think, who is our support team as well on top of all these other who’s?

Who’s going to be there with me? Who’s going to be there following me? Who’s going to come and see me? Who am I promoting to? Who am I sharing with? We’ve got lots of who’s when we think about scaling, we’ve got lots of wheres and is our why.

Why do we want to scale? Is it just for the money? Money in the bank? We need to pay the mortgage. We need to pay off our degree. If that is your only why, then you’re gonna struggle with that because we need to have that why in there of wanting to help people, wanting to scale to help more people wanting to.

So that more people know about natural therapies and how we collaborate and how we are there as complementary to the allopathic medicine and why we’re here and what we do.

We all went into this, we’ve paid, you know, you’ve all paid lots of money for your education. And so. We’ve got to scale. We have to pay that back, but we have to have the reason why we’re doing that.

So have we got the reason why in our pocket, and are we working towards that why? And if you need my help, um, book a focus call.

Conclusion:

So the link is on the website, www.geraldineheadley.com, and of course, it’s in the show notes, to book that focus call with me. If you’ve made it to the end, please, first hour review.

I’d love one. And you know that to scale your business, you’re going to have to ask for reviews from your clients as well.

So I look forward to hearing from you. Please do email me. I love it. I always reply to every email that I get. Not necessarily instantaneously, but I always reply.

So do make sure that you ask your questions. Lots of questions become podcast episodes. They certainly become my lives in Strictly Education and Support, the Facebook group.

So I look forward to hearing from you. Really soon. Have a good one. Thanks so much for joining me today. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast for the weekly episodes.

If you’d like even more support and learning, then the Academy is for you. Here you’ll find part two of the herbal discussions, more clinical learning, and case studies to support your clients in practice. Bye for now.