Treat Your Business

133 Shiny Object Syndrome: The Hidden Cost of Distractions in Your Clinic

• Katie Bell • Season 1 • Episode 133

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Welcome to the Treat Your Business Podcast. This episode is all about shiny object syndrome and the hidden cost of distractions in your clinic. If you have ever thought about adding a new class, bringing in a new therapist, or launching another service to fix your revenue problem, this episode is for you.

đź“ť Episode Summary

As clinic owners, it is easy to chase new ideas, thinking they will solve our challenges. In this episode, I talk about why adding more services is not always the answer and what you should be focusing on instead. I share real examples from clinics who have tried to diversify too quickly, the impact it has on profit and team focus, and why less really is more. I explain how distractions and dilutions show up in your business, why they can hold you back from real growth, and how to avoid the common traps that keep you stuck.

I also discuss the visionary mindset, the temptation to copy competitors, and the pressure we feel from clients and staff to try new things. You will hear why it is essential to double down on your core offer, keep your business simple, and focus on the activities that actually move the needle. If you are juggling too many ideas, this episode will help you regain clarity and direction.

✨ Key Takeaways

  • Chasing new services and ideas is often an escape from the hard stuff—clarity, strategy, and financial planning
  • Adding new offers can create more work but not more profit
  • The real cost of distractions: months of effort, money, and energy that could be better spent elsewhere
  • Saying yes to something new means saying no to something else—focus on growing one strong tree first
  • Less is more: a simple business is a great business
  • Write down your ideas, but do not act on everything at once
  • Bringing in new services often causes a short-term drop in revenue and profit—be strategic and selective
  • FOCUS: Focus On One Course Until Successful
  • If you feel lost or stuck, reach out for help and get support

đź”— Resources and Links

Episode Sponsor
Sponsored by VBS Medical Ltd. Looking to set your clinic apart? VBS Medical is the exclusive distributor of K-Laser Therapy and Indiba Radiofrequency Therapy in the UK and Ireland. These non-invasive treatments help speed up recovery, improve clinical outcomes, and create new revenue streams for your practice. Visit www.vbsmedical.com to book your free trial today.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by new ideas or not sure where to focus next, take a moment to reflect after this episode. What is the one thing you need to stop or say no to this week? What is the one thing you need to go all in on? Thank you for listening and for being part of our community of cli

Treat Your Business podcast is proudly sponsored by MBST, the groundbreaking technology revolutionising recovery and rehabilitation. Offering a non-invasive, drug-free solution for musculoskeletal conditions and nerve injuries, MBST works at a cellular level to stimulate regeneration. Expand your services and deliver long-term patient improvements without increasing your workload.

Learn more at mbstmedical.co.uk. 

[00:00:00] Katie Bell: Have you ever thought about adding maybe a yoga class to your timetable or bringing on a sports massage therapist to do some massages in a clinic that doesn't currently have that service? Or perhaps you have thought about starting a walking club or a running club, basically another new service thinking.

[00:00:26] Katie Bell: That this might be an opportunity to fix your revenue [00:00:30] problem. I want to talk on this episode about why that's probably not the right answer and what you guys should be focusing on instead. So we're going to talk today about distractions and we're going to talk about dilutions. How they show up in your clinic and in your life, and how they stop us really from creating that real growth and that real impact that we are looking for.

[00:00:54] Katie Bell: So let's dive into this week's episode.

[00:00:57] Katie Bell: [00:01:00] Welcome to the Treat Your Business Podcast with Katie Bell. I'm Katie, and this is the place where clinic owners like you learn the strategies, tools, and mindset shifts needed to transform your clinic into a thriving business. One that gives you more time, more money, and more freedom. Born from a passion to challenge the idea that average is normal.

[00:01:20] Katie Bell: We empower clinic owners to create extraordinary businesses, incomes, and lives through our world class coaching programs. We help you step out of overwhelm and [00:01:30] into confidence, turning your clinic into a business that fuels your lifestyle. Not draining it. So are you ready? Let's dive in. Today's episode is sponsored by VBS Medical Limited.

[00:01:43] Katie Bell: It's the exclusive distributor of K laser therapy and indi a radio frequency therapy in the UK and Ireland. K laser and Indi A are non-invasive therapies that enhance and accelerate the healing process. Complementing standard of care, broadening therapeutic opportunities, [00:02:00]improving clinical outcomes, generating new profit, and distinguishing your clinic from the competition.

[00:02:06] Katie Bell: K Laser and Indi A. Have a medical device regulation approval, meaning they have scientific publications to validate their clinical applications in practice. To learn more, visit www.pbsmedical.com and book your free trial today.

[00:02:27] Katie Bell: So clinic owners love to chase new [00:02:30] things. Now, if you have come to any of my events in the past, you will know what colour you are. If you are one of our clients, you will know what colour you are. And for my fellow yellows listening to this or the typical visionaries listening to this, we. Don't have a lack of ideas.

[00:02:48] Katie Bell: We have so many ideas, but we can't possibly implement them all at once. However, I still like to think that I can and do them all yesterday and much to my team's frustration. But [00:03:00] it feels exciting, doesn't it, to come up with these ideas like we are getting some momentum and these are the things that give us that great feeling about how we run our business.

[00:03:08] Katie Bell: But it's often, when we are chasing new things or we are thinking about all the things we want to implement, it's often an escape from the hard stuff. The things that we really need to be focused on, and common reasons for chasing new things can be that we [00:03:30] aren't really clear about where we're going and what our strategy is, and our financial projections and plan is for the year.

[00:03:39] Katie Bell: And therefore we just flip from one thing to the next thing, and we come up with all these ideas and we think by implementing them all, we will ultimately grow in some form. But what often I see happening is we, end up just creating more work, but actually no more revenue and profit for ourselves.

[00:03:57] Katie Bell: Or we might create a bit more revenue, but we don't actually make any more [00:04:00] money as a result of it. Another reason is that we feel like we're stagnating. We fear if we're not implementing all these ideas, that our team might be like bored around us or we are not great business owners. We are not great visionaries if we're not constantly coming up with the ideas all the time.

[00:04:17] Katie Bell: Often is copying competitors. The whole scrolling on Instagram, seeing what everybody else is doing, and then thinking that's what you need to do in your clinic. Is it boredom? I'm not, I'm going to say probably not boredom because you are [00:04:30] all too busy to be bored. But it might be that you are feeling a bit unfulfilled or unsatisfied with your clinic as it is.

[00:04:36] Katie Bell: And it could be pressure from clients as well, or staff, like we desperately want, don't we as leaders for our staff to bring great and new ideas to us. But when we do, we then feel like we need to chase those and we need to implement all of them because they need to be heard. And that, that you want to be a boss that like, takes people's ideas on board.

[00:04:55] Katie Bell: And clients always come up with great ideas. And then you think, Sheila, have you got any [00:05:00] idea what it actually takes to run this business? Because if you did, the idea would not be something that you would want that, that you would put forwards. They mean in the best possible way, but often it's pressure from all of those sources that makes you think you need to chase the next new thing.

[00:05:16] Katie Bell: And I brought this to this episode because over recent weeks I've heard a lot about distractions and about dilution. And one of the things that. We work really hard on, in Thrive is [00:05:30] being able to call you out on a distraction or a dilution away from actually what the plan is because you are all so busy and you can implement basically one to 5% of all the things that you actually think you need to implement in your business.

[00:05:45] Katie Bell: You don't have to change a million things all at once to make some quite radical changes to your profit levels and to your numbers. But all of you, in my opinion, I've never met anybody that I think is nailing the less is [00:06:00] more analogy. I think you're all thinking that more is more and that sometimes in business, one of the hardest things that you have to learn is that, there will be things that definitely need fixing or are just like a fucking mess, or, there's a shit storm going on, but they're just going to have to stay like that for a little bit longer. You can't fix everything all at the same time. And I hear lots of conversations with [00:06:30] our clients, they get to reach out to us every every single week they have access to us.

[00:06:34] Katie Bell: And so I'm constantly hearing about things that they might be wanting to implement. So they might be wanting to take forwards. And some of the things that have come up recently made me think this would be a great episode to talk about. So one of the clinics that we work with wanted to add a yoga class to her her timetable because she currently rents that space out to a yoga instructor.

[00:06:59] Katie Bell: And this yoga [00:07:00] instructor like pays her a set amount of money to rent that room, but this client could make more money if she ran the class herself. And I was like, okay why not? Just so she already runs Pilates classes. I was like, so why would you not just run another Pilates class in that session?

[00:07:17] Katie Bell: She said, I thought, there's obviously a want for it 'cause people are already coming to the class, so why don't I just. Run the class and kick the person out who's who is renting space. And I said, okay, let's look at what we'd have to do here. [00:07:30] So do we have anybody trained in yoga?

[00:07:32] Katie Bell: No. Okay. So we'd have to find somebody that's got the qualifications and trained in yoga. So that could be somebody in-house, but that's a cost to them or to you. It could be somebody externally, which you are then having to bring them into your business for maybe one hour a week. It's not great to just deliver a session.

[00:07:51] Katie Bell: What happens if they're away? You've then got to find cover, and you don't have cover because nobody else is trained in yoga in the whole of the business. So that becomes a [00:08:00]problem. We've not got any kind of resilience there. We've also then got to think that the yoga type of client might be different to the person that does Pilates.

[00:08:09] Katie Bell: And we've seen this before in my clinic. We've tried to get yoga off the ground and it doesn't work. And it doesn't work for a few different reasons. It doesn't work because the ideal client that we are trying to attract into our clinic isn't necessarily the person that would do yoga. We are a rehab based pain [00:08:30] and injury facility.

[00:08:32] Katie Bell: That we are all trained in Pilates and we believe in Pilates. I am a trained Pilates instructor, so therefore, naturally my enthusiasm is for Pilates. So there's all those reasons why it just doesn't really work. We then have to think about if you add your client is different, you've got to have a whole different marketing campaign.

[00:08:53] Katie Bell: You might need to have a whole different package structure. And program that they come into. It might be a different pricing model. Who knows? [00:09:00] You might have to think about the churn rates in yoga compared to Pilates and is it a commodity versus a real kind of need? So we end up having a thing that on the surface looks like a great idea 'cause there's opportunity to make money. But actually when we delve into it is just a massive distraction. I was like, just double down on your Pilates marketing and just get that class filled with Pilates members and use that hour instead for your Pilates classes.

[00:09:29] Katie Bell: So [00:09:30] where are you chasing new things? Where are you suffering the real cost of distraction? Because building new services, bringing new team members in, putting new systems in place takes months of effort. It takes time. It takes money in terms of marketing spend, staff costs, training software, and it takes up energy.[00:10:00]

[00:10:00] Katie Bell: And when your spread is thin, your team and clients feel that, and your business really feels that. And I think I said on on a call yesterday with some of our clients, when you say yes to something, you are having to say no to something else. So you need to choose what you say yes to. And you need to really choose what you say no to, because if you think about you've got 10 plants at home that you want to grow into, like this amazing big [00:10:30] forest, and you can't possibly nurture and water all of these all the time and do everything that you need for every tree.

[00:10:38] Katie Bell: You've gotta focus on growing one strong tree first, and then the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one. So many of us are moving away from what feels simple and moving away from what feels strategic because we might feel a bit bored, a bit unfulfilled, or we're not moving quick [00:11:00] enough. Actually, what I've come to learn that a business that feels like when you set the strategy and you go, ah, is that it? Okay. We can definitely make that happen.

[00:11:13] Katie Bell: That's what we need to lean into. Like I set strategy in my clinic and in Thrive all the time and it, I never come away from those meetings going, oh my God, this sounds so complicated and so convoluted and so many things that I need to do. It's [00:11:30] quite simple to get to where we need to be, and a simple business is a great business.

[00:11:36] Katie Bell: So where are your distractions? Where are your dilutions? What are you focusing on that is not making a bean of difference to your bottom line? Another example of somebody, it was actually one of our integrators. Now, for those of you who dunno what an integrator is in our Ascend program, which is our top level program that works with clinic owners who are. [00:12:00] They're big enterprises. They're half a million plus a year. Most of them, they've all, they've been coached for a long time with us and there are a fabulous bunch of people. They usually have a practice manager or an integrator. We call them visionary and integrators. And are your integrators are the people that make shit happen.

[00:12:18] Katie Bell: Okay? You are the ideas person. You are the visionary, you are the CEO. You sit in that seat and then you have that. Integrator that sits underneath you, and one of the integrators came on a q and a call yesterday to ask a question that [00:12:30] my visionary has got all these ideas. And I was like, yes. That's what a visionary does.

[00:12:35] Katie Bell: The integrator's job is to discern which of those ideas. We strategically need to move forwards with that, align with the bigger profit goals and revenue goals of the clinic. And often for many of you listening to this, you are going to be in the integrator seat on the vision receipt. And I'm going to tell you now that most of you are not wired to be integrators.

[00:12:54] Katie Bell: Most of you are not wired for operations. 'cause it's probably not the reason that you've gone [00:13:00] to run your own business. It's 'cause you're a visionary. Anyway, that aside, if you do have an integrator, their job is to be able to say, okay, these are all great ideas, but all those, there are not going to happen this quarter or this half of the year or maybe this year at all.

[00:13:14] Katie Bell: 'cause they're not going to move us towards our revenue and profit goals. And our vision in the easiest, simplest way. So I was elevating her confidence in. Really looking at these ideas and not just saying yes to them all because the visionary and the boss has said, so it's about [00:13:30] discerning what we need to move forward with.

[00:13:31] Katie Bell: And she gave me two exam, three examples. She said, we are doing a walking club. A running club, and a Pilates class. I was setting up Pilates and I was like, wow, okay. There's three different services, three different types of clients, three different marketing campaigns, and we're trying to do them all at once.

[00:13:47] Katie Bell: That's very confused. Marketing. So choose one. Choose the one with the lowest hanging fruit that's going to make the biggest difference to your revenue and profit. What was that? It was Pilates. Okay. So we need to now [00:14:00] specifically build out a marketing plan and a business plan to add Pilates into your revenue projections, your profit projections, your staffing costs, your delivery costs.

[00:14:11] Katie Bell: What does that actually need to look like to get this off the ground? And actually when you think about the whole thing that. Comes around that is huge, can possibly then focus on running and walking club at the same time because that in itself is a totally different business model that is more about exposure.

[00:14:29] Katie Bell: That's a [00:14:30] long-term gain for that clinic. So your job as a business owner. Whether you are in the visionary seat and you have an integrator, or whether you have, you are both is, I say to lots of my clients, just have a list at the back of your journal, which is all the great ideas that I've had, but I'm not necessarily going to implement them all now list because your ideas will come to you at the most random times in the shower when you are on holiday, when you are on a plane, when you're driving somewhere, and you just need to [00:15:00] write all of your ideas down.

[00:15:02] Katie Bell: Business owners that try and just act on all of them and think that it's going to make a difference to the way their business runs. You are going to fall short every time there is some kind of, statistic is probably the right word around. when you. Bring in a new process, a new system, a new service, a new thing into your business.

[00:15:26] Katie Bell: What you will see in the short term is [00:15:30] a drop in revenue and profit, and I feel I want to say 20%, which is significant, isn't it? Because what happens is we've invested time, energy, money whatever, into bringing that thing in. So we've got, it's got, it's going to cost us money. It's going to cost us time.

[00:15:45] Katie Bell: Time. It's money. It's going to cost us energy. We've had to say no to something else and say yes to this. So we will see this drop. Now, if this thing is not going to make me a net gain of more than 20%, then I'm [00:16:00] losing out. So the clinics that are constantly adding services, constantly adding things into the mix, are the ones often that are just seeing that oh, I'm not seeing the profit come through.

[00:16:10] Katie Bell: Not seeing the profit come through. Oh, I'm just going to try this next idea. Hoping that's going to get them to where they want to be. So be really mindful of the cost of putting new things in place and being really clear about is this thing going to, does it align with our mission and our vision?

[00:16:28] Katie Bell: Do we have the capacity [00:16:30] to do it really well? Is our core offer performing 80% plus efficiency first? If your team are not converting at 85% plus and are not retaining at five plus visits on average, fix that shit first. Will this serve our best clients or will it just confuse them?

[00:16:54] Katie Bell: And are we choosing this from a place of strategy or scarcity? [00:17:00]Because I know most of you are choosing. And making decisions from a place of scarcity, and that is the wrong place to make decisions from in your business. Focus isn't limiting. Focus stands for focus on one course until successful. It's really powerful and sometimes we have to just go, I want to rip up all of these to-do lists that I've got that I've just built up over a period of weeks and months, and.

[00:17:27] Katie Bell: All the shit is still not getting done. It cannot be [00:17:30] that urgent. It cannot be that important. And what we often find is when we stay strategic and we stay really focused, our to-do list is less, but it's more powerful. So what is the one thing that you need to stop or say no to this week? And what's the one thing you need to go all in on?

[00:17:53] Katie Bell: Take a moment to really reflect on that after this episode, because listening is one thing, doing is another. Those [00:18:00] that do on the back of these episodes are the ones that take their clinics to the next level and their lives to the next level. And if you are not sure, or if you feel lost and you don't have a strategy.

[00:18:12] Katie Bell: Or you feel like you are just on a hamster wheel of doing the do from day to day, then you need to reach out and you need to ask for help because that is what a great coach does. They hold you accountable, they make you way more strategic. They stop [00:18:30] you chasing the things that are not going to make any difference in your business.

[00:18:32] Katie Bell: They help take out all of that learning phase of making all the mistakes. They just go, no, just do it this way. 'cause we've been there and done that. We know what works and we know what doesn't work. But it really helps you create more time, create more freedom, create more profit. 'cause that is what we are doing it for.

[00:18:51] Katie Bell: We are doing it to live a delicious life and have it all, whatever all means to you. If you're listening to this and you're [00:19:00] thinking, I've got so much on my list and I need permission to not do some of it, then I would really encourage you to reach out and get one of our clinic growth calls booked in where we will go through with you.

[00:19:13] Katie Bell: What this vision actually looks like. Where do you actually want to be in the next 12 months? What challenges are getting in your way and what you need to stay, what you need to stop and what you need to say no to, and how we can help you move forwards if we think we are the right in, not even the [00:19:30] right, the absolute perfect fit for you.

[00:19:32] Katie Bell: I hope you've enjoyed this quick, powerful, focused episode, and I look forward to chatting to you again next week.

[00:19:40]

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