Treat Your Business

149 Beyond the Treatment Room – Defining Success

• Katie Bell • Season 1 • Episode 149

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Welcome back to the Treat Your Business podcast. It’s just me, Katie Bell, with you for the next three weeks as I kick off a little solo series I’m calling “Beyond the Treatment Room.” I’ll be honest, I was tempted to record a full episode reflecting on the first six weeks of being a mum, but I realised I’m still very much in the trenches. So, I’m parking the parenting wisdom for now and focusing on something that’s really hit home for me lately, defining what success really means.

If you’ve been running a clinic for any amount of time, you’ll know how easy it is to get swept up in someone else’s version of success. Instagram will have you believing you’re not even a business owner unless you’re hitting seven figures. But let’s get real - success looks different for everyone. Whether your goal is to work three days a week and pick the kids up from nursery, or you want to smash through to seven figures and travel the world, your version of success is yours alone.

In this episode, I’m sharing my own journey of redefining what success means, especially now I’m a mum. I’ll talk about the trap of chasing borrowed success, how easy it is to get caught up in the hustle, and the real truth behind those shiny Instagram numbers. Spoiler alert: more revenue doesn’t always mean more happiness.

We’ll dig into three big questions:

  1. What do you want your life to look like right now, in this season?
  2. How do you want to feel in your business?
  3. What impact do you want your clinic to have on your clients, your team, and your community?

I’ll also share some honest stories from my own business and maternity leave, including the reality of “maternity pay” as a business owner (spoiler: it’s basically nothing), and why I’ve had to make my business work for my life, not the other way round.

So, grab a cuppa, take 15 minutes this week to think about your own success statements, and let’s start building a business that actually works for you.

Key Takeaways:

  • Your definition of success is unique to you - don’t get caught chasing someone else’s dream.
  • Revenue is only one piece of the puzzle. Focus on profit, time, and how your business supports your life.
  • Ask yourself what you want your life and business to look like, how you want to feel, and what impact you want to make.
  • Build your business around your own version of success, not Instagram’s.

Episode Sponsor:  Jane.app

Clinic management software and EMR that simplifies bookings, forms, and reminders so you can reclaim your evenings. Book a

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. 

Treat Your Business EP149

[00:00:00] Katie Bell: Welcome back to the Treat Your Business podcast. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Katie Bell and today's episode, it's gonna be part of a little series that I'm gonna call Beyond the Treatment Room, and you've got me solo for the next three weeks. And so i've decided to focus on something that's really relevant to me right now, and I was gonna come on here and record a podcast. All about a reflection of, , the first six weeks having a newborn and being a parent, and being a mum now. And and then I was like, Katie, you actually don't know anything yet.

[00:00:33] You're six weeks in, you are in the trenches. This podcast episode is not gonna be useful to those parents who. I've got four year olds and five year olds and 10 year olds and got multiple children. Stay in your lane. Kb you don't know anything, but I was gonna reflect on how you prepare business for being away from it for a period of time.

[00:00:54] And I'd recorded all my podcast episodes up until, until the end of September and I was feeling super ahead of the game. And then he was late. So here we are. I've got three episodes to record with a six week hold, and he's currently in his pram outside my office. In the sunshine, not in the direct sun, please.

[00:01:14] Nobody needs to send me a message about that. Having sleep, having a snooze. So I'm gonna call it beyond the treatment room and I'm gonna save my. Advice and my reflections on becoming a mumm and what I needed to do in my business to prepare for being away from it for a little bit further down the line when I possibly have a little bit more sleep and can think.

[00:01:35] But what I am gonna do is talk about defining success in this episode. We're going to build on that over the next three weeks. So I really hope you stay around and I really hope you join me. So if you've been running a clinic for any length of time. Literally any length of time, you are gonna know how easy it is to get sucked into someone else's definition of success.

[00:01:58] It's like the hustle culture definition. I 100% was bought into this at the beginning, and I would say only in the last few years have I really had to. Define what success looks like for me and lean into that more and more. And this is an ongoing thing that I'm still navigating and working on now, and then becoming a mummy.

[00:02:21] Wow, everything's changed. Throw everything up in the air and see where it's gonna land. But the Instagram definition is that basically, if you're not hitting seven figures, if are you even a business owner if you're not at seven figures? But the truth is, success looks 

[00:02:37] really different for all of you.

[00:02:39] Whether you are a dad running a clinic 

[00:02:44] that's gotta work three days a week. And make £5k a month because your wife has also got a job who, and she has to work three days a week. And you have childcare in between all of that. And you have to navigate being very busy parents. And for you, it's about being able to have two solid days away from the clinic where you can pick your kids up from nursery and you can be at sports day and you can do all of those those things.

[00:03:09] For some of you, it might be that. You know you wanna go for seven figures because seven figures allows you to do certain things with your life, travel, have more freedom, send your kids on certain things that are really important to you. So success for every single listener of this podcast is going to look different.

[00:03:29] If I line you all up in a room and ask you to define what success looks like for you, all of you are gonna have a different answer. But here's the thing, if you don't stop to define what it means for you. Then you kind of risk building a clinic that's busy. I was gonna say profitable, but I'm gonna not say that because actually a lot of clinic owners that we work with, which is why they need to work with us, have busy clinics, busy lives, no time, but really crap income at the same time because they're not profitable enough.

[00:03:59] Maybe people admire it from the outside. Actually, it's not giving you the life that you want. You are burnt out. You are absolutely exhausted. But everybody around you might be like, oh, you run a really successful physio clinic in Sheffield. And to the world, everything is great. But behind the scenes, that might be a lot different.

[00:04:16] So today we're gonna dig into, this is the longest intro ever, isn't it? I'm so sorry. This is what happens when you're sleep deprived. We are gonna dig into what success really means for you guys. How to create your own definition of it, and then let's start working on how to design your business to fit your version of success.

[00:04:36] Welcome to the Treat Your Business podcast with Katie Bell. I'm Katie, and this is the place to learn the strategies, tactics, tools and mindset needed to build your clinical studio into a business that gives you the time, money, energy, and fulfillment you want and deserve. My team and I work every day with overwhelmed and exhausted clinic owners like you to shift them from a business.

[00:04:57] There is a huge time and energy drain and is not giving them the income they want to confident clinic owners that are making money, saving money, and getting time back in their lives. So if this sounds like something you want, let's dive in.

[00:05:13] Speaker 2: Today's episode is sponsored by Jane, a clinic management software and EMR. The Jane team knows that when your workday is spent providing care to your patients or your clients, it can feel like there aren't enough hours in the day for the rest of your admin tasks. This can mean scheduling appointments become.

[00:05:32] The hours tasks turning what should be restful evenings into extra long work days. That's why Jane has designed user-friendly online bookings. You can give your patients freedom to book their appointments at their own convenience. Patients can also manage their appointments, fill out intake forms, and enable SMS and email reminders.

[00:05:50] From their secure online portal, which saves you from having to do it manually to see how Jane can help you reclaim your evenings and weekends. Head to the link in the show notes to book a personalized demo. Or if you're ready to get started, you can use the code Thrive one mo at the time of sign up for a one month grace period.

[00:06:07] Apply to your new account.

[00:06:11] Katie Bell: So let's talk about the trap of borrowed success. Let's start with what I see many of you fall into, which is chasing, borrowed success change, chasing somebody else's. So you scroll on social media, see another clinic expanding into a second location. You see someone boasting about a six figure a month.

[00:06:30] You see somebody talking about a 10 K take home and you think, oh my God, that must be the goal. That's what I need to do. But let me tell you this, I've coached so many clinic owners who, so many, who have literally doubled their turnover, but were miserable with it because. They were exhausted. They were stressed.

[00:06:54] They had no time for their kids, and they hated going into work. Success is way more than just revenue and any revenue is a really important goal in your clinic, but revenue is a. Only a, it's like a secondary goal for me. It's a goal that I then set based on what profit I need to make, what take home I want, and what I want my life to look like.

[00:07:15] And therefore I figure out all of that and go okay, that means I need to make that much money then. So we are not chasing the revenue as I wanna be a seven figure clinic owner. It because believe me, when you get there, it just feels like whenever you set, I think number goals. You probably just get to them and be like, okay, I've made it.

[00:07:40] Like what's next? I've still got no money because I've elevated my life to meet that. And I'm not managing my money well enough. 'cause I've not actually, I don't, I've not actually rewired my thinking. I've not actually elevated my mindset and how I deal with m money and handle money. So what we really focus on with our clinic owners is what does your life need to look like and how do we make that business work for you?

[00:08:05] How do we make that business make your life it's more about having Fridays off, it's more about being able to do the school run. It's more about having a team that you trust so you can step away without panicking. It's about being able to treat your team to certain things in a certain way. We are going in January to a fabulous hotel in the Cotswolds, uh, and bringing all my team there.

[00:08:32] And I get to treat them all. I get to pay for it. I get to take 'em away for 24 hours to do some big picture thinking, to drink some champagne. Obviously, if any of you know me, it always has to involve some champagne and, a lot of fun, a lot of laughs if any of you guys have worked with us, before.

[00:08:50] Lots of our members will agree with this. We have a lot of fun in Thrive and we don't take ourselves too seriously. And we have a lot of banter. So that to me, my business has to be able to do that. I have to be able to treat my team in a certain way. I need. To be able to travel. I wanna go on lots of holidays.

[00:09:08] I want my house in a certain way. I like to drive a certain car. I like to be able to say yes to everything. And I am in the thick of this right now because I am off officially on maternity leave here. I am in the office. Don't tell anyone just for a quick half an hour because he was overdue and therefore I haven't got enough podcasts to last, but we'll about, another where was I? This is where my brain is, guys. I'm not firing on all cylinders, but I am here for it and I hope you all give me a little bit of sympathy. Your business has got to create and do the things that you want it to do for you. 'cause business has gotta be fun along the way. So being in the thick of maternity leave, everybody was like, okay, you are gonna be on maternity pay.

[00:09:55] What have you figured? Do you know what maternity pay is as a business owner? It's zero. You get out, I can get some SM statutory map pay or something. Oh, it's about a hundred and. Basically, it doesn't pay my water bill. So that's great. No, I just, no, that's not a thing. Like I can't, my life cannot exist on maternity pay.

[00:10:15] So I created a goal, I defined what success needed to look like for me on maternity leave, and then we made the business make it work. So if you've been measuring yourself against other people's goals, Instagram feeds, Instagram reels. Please stop because their definition of success is not yours. And that is okay.

[00:10:40] It doesn't have to be big. Your success doesn't have to be like, I wanna make seven figures and I wanna. Travel the world. I wanna have 25 weeks off a year. I wanna do X, Y, z. It doesn't have to be any of those things. It can simply be, I wanna be able to put the kids up three days of the week.

[00:11:00] Now, some of us, when we work on ourselves and in Thrive, what we see is people upleveling all the time. So we may start with a goal that feels big. And I will always be putting you on the Thrive stretcher and saying, okay, is that all we really want from your life? Because you can have it all, whatever all means to you and what all, whatever all looks like to you.

[00:11:24] So we need to stop looking at everybody else. We need to define what success looks look like for us, but we also need to look at success through the eyes of me being on your shoulder going is that really it? Because many of us. Define our success from a lens that is currently satisfying and suiting our life.

[00:11:48] So some of your goals are too small. Some of your goals, I'm like, really? Is that all that you think that you can do? Because I know you can achieve so much more, you are capable of so much more much. So let's figure out what success really means for you guys. So I'd like to ask you three questions. What do you want your life to look like?

[00:12:10] And for me, when people go, where do you wanna be in 10 years? I'm like hold on a minute. I'm just focused on what I want my life to look like in the next one to three, maybe five years. Some of you can project really far ahead. I have never been able to do that. I'm a very much here and now person.

[00:12:30] I'm a very much let's make shit happen now and then I'll just keep moving and changing and doing so. What do you want your life to look like in a timeframe that is suitable for you right now? That and in the season of your life that you are in right now, I'm in the season of 

[00:12:46] my life, baby. Sick of feeling a bit like a cow pumping.

[00:12:54] Feeding 

[00:12:55] milk machine and having sick on my shoulder, which I realized I had just right before I got on this podcast. So here we go, here for it. But what do you want your life to look like in the season that you are in right now? Not just your business, your life. How many days do you wanna work? What time do you want to finish?

[00:13:14] What holidays do you want to take? Where do you want to go? How do you wanna spend your mornings? What do you want to eat? What do you wanna spend your weekends doing? How much time do you want doing your your hobbies, like going to the gym, keeping fit, doing all the crazy stuff you guys do. CrossFit all your marathons, your Ironmans, all those unbelievable things.

[00:13:36] What. Brings joy to you and what, where, what do you wanna focus on? How can you lean into that right now for where you are right now in your life? So that was your first question. What do you want your life to look like right now in the season that you are in? How do you want to feel in your business?

[00:13:57] Energized, proud, calm, excited. Or are you here for feeling frazzled, burnout and completely resentful? The feeling tells you a lot about whether you are building success or you are just building stress. Like when you think about doing something in your business, you need to go with your like intuition as well as data and metrics and all those positive things that I've talked about lots before.

[00:14:22] But you also need to be like, does this feel good? And there's lots of like energy techniques that you can do around making decisions like that. But, and we teach you a lot of those in Thrive, but you really need to like, lean into, I can come up with some ideas. Sometimes I'm an ideas person. And then I'll look back and then think, huh, that feels really off.

[00:14:42] Or it's a great idea, but it doesn't feel good. It feels like it's just gonna be stressful. I'm not energized by it, but sometimes we can get wrapped up in what we think everybody else thinks we should be doing with our business. So my second question 

[00:14:59] is, how do you wanna feel in your business?

[00:15:02] I want to feel really excited. I want to feel proud of what I've created creating, but what my team are creating, I want to feel. 

[00:15:18] Calm and not stressed about finance or money. That's really important to me. I just like to be able to look and be like yeah, everything's good. I don't wanna feel like I'm doing too many things and not able to really lean into the things that I'm great at.

[00:15:34] Trust me, having a baby going on mat leave absolutely makes you do that. Number three, what impact do you want your clinic to have, your business to have? On your clients, on your team, on your community. 'cause sometimes success isn't just measured in revenue. It's measured in the lives that you change.

[00:15:53] It's the people that you empower. Like one of our things that we talk about in our clinics that we wanna help a thousand people a week. 

[00:16:03] And that feels like a weird kind of metric to focus on, but it came from a whole backstory, and I won't go into it on this podcast, but if I was like helping a thousand families, a thousand homes move better, feel better, and live better, the ripple effect of that absolutely phenomenal.

[00:16:24] And we have our own version of that in Thrive as well, because I can measure. Success based on the impact that I'm having. Like your legacy, that you're gonna leave, that people will remember you for something. And also that the people that I've empowered not just clinic owners like you, but families, patients, clients, whatever you wanna call them, to live better, to feel better, to move better, to not put up with pain clinic owners, to not put up with a business that doesn't.

[00:16:56] Give them the life that they deserve and that they're capable of having is just been pushed down. So it's not about being the biggest clinic infield, it's not about. Being seven figures, it's about creating a business that actually allows me to be present as a mom, as a friend, as a wife, as a dog mom as a what else am I, a godmother as a, all of those roles that I play in my life whilst also knowing we're helping thousands of people move better and feel better whilst also knowing that me.

[00:17:31] Doing what I'm doing is making a massive impact on Thrive's community. We have a coaches catch up every month, and I haven't been on it for the last two months because have I mentioned I've got a six week old baby and, it feels really weird for me because one of the things that I really have to have is connection.

[00:17:50] So when I'm not connected with my clients and I don't have to see you to be connected to you, I just have to know certain things. And there is no getting away from me knowing all of your stuff and you come on live days, even if I have not directly coached you that month, I still know. 'cause I have the power to remember an awful lot of information like that.

[00:18:09] So we have our coaches catch up, but. In our coaches catch up. I get to hear like the incredible stuff all of our clinic owners are doing and the increase in profits, the time, the things that they're achieving outside of their business, the things they're achieving inside their business.

[00:18:29] And for each one of those clinic owners, their version of success is different. And so we have to bear that in mind when we coach, when we advise, when we guide them into what they need to do in their business and what they need to create and do next. So once you've really thought about those three questions and you've defined what success looks like for you, here's the key.

[00:18:53] You've then got to go and design your business around that, because otherwise it's gonna stay a really nice idea in your head. It's gonna really, it stay a really nice idea written in your notebook. Whilst your clinic carries on running you. So if your success statement says, I wanna work four days a week, then you need to hire, train, and delegate.

[00:19:13] So that becomes possible. If your success statement says, I wanna make a hundred K profit, not just revenue, then you need to look at your pricing. You need to look at your retention, your efficiency, not just chasing more and more patients. If your success statement says, I wanna feel calm, I wanna feel in control, then maybe the work is in creating systems, building a leadership team, investing in mentorship.

[00:19:37] I had a client recently who realized her version of success was like, I just wanna be home by 3:00 PM three days a week. If I get to that, Katie, that's incredible. That was it. That's what we focused on for three months. So we restructured her diary, we adjusted her team responsibilities. What else did we do?

[00:19:56] We like, we worked a lot on her mindset because there was a whole thing about do I deserve to be home at 3:00 PM Like, will people think I'm lazy? I've still got, there's so much stuff to do. I can't possibly finish at 3:00 PM every day or three days a week, and within three months. She was living it and she was happier than she'd been in absolute years.

[00:20:18] Is it a big thing for some of you, it's just gonna be like I'm already doing that. Great. Then up level, what? What's the next level that you can go to? So ask yourself this. Does your current clinic model, your current business model actually support your definition of success? Or is it 

[00:20:33] working against it?

[00:20:35] And if it's working against it, what's stopping you? From really leaning into making, the next 

[00:20:46] four months that we've got left of this year, making next year. The year that you really lean into your business working for you. And if there's a little voice in there that's that's all right.

[00:20:59] You saying that, Katie I am a living, breathing proof of this. So are all of our Thrive members, so are many people out there right now. The only thing that's holding you back is your mindset, your belief, and your confidence that you can actually make this stuff happen. So success isn't one size fits all.

[00:21:17] It's not just turnover, revenue, followers, square footage of a clinic locations. I don't really care about any of that. Success is what you define it to be. So today we've talked about the trap of borrowed success. Or Instagram's version of it. We've talked about how to define your own success, and we've talked about how to start designing your business around that definition.

[00:21:39] And if you are someone that is really new into running a clinic, then lean into this and really think about what this business needs to look like now. 'cause it's much easier to do it when you're small than it is when you are big and you've got to strip everything back and really change a whole lot of stuff.

[00:21:53] Or if you are that person that's got a bigger clinic and it's not serving you, or it's serving you in some parts, not in all parts up level what can you do? One level more, one point more that's gonna really give you the life that you deserve and that you want. 

[00:22:10] So your action step, take 15 minutes this week, voice note while you're driving.

[00:22:19] Do it when you are running. Think about what your success statements are. Keep it simple. Keep it really clear. Look at your business honestly, and ask yourself, is this me moving towards this right now? Or am I just moving away from it? Am I doing a whole lot of busy? Not a lot of stuff that is actually serving me because the truth is you didn't start your clinic just to have another stressful job.

[00:22:42] You can go back to the NHS and have that and be really unfulfilled. This is nothing against the NHS or NHS workers, and I'm really happy if you are really fulfilled in your job. But many clinic coaches that we talk to have left the NHS because they're very unfulfilled. So you started it. This business to create a better life for you, your family, your clients, and your community.

[00:23:01] So stop chasing somebody else's version of success. Start building your own. Oh, I feel like I got into that. I feel like I got into my flow. Feel we can still all function on basically no sleep, but here we are. Thank you for joining me today. On this episode of the Treat Your Business podcast, I'm back the next two weeks solo episodes from me.

[00:23:21] Then we've got loads of guests coming up for this quarter. If this episode gave you maybe a new perspective, share it with another clinic owner who might need this reminder. Share the love. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. See you next week! 

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Katie Bell

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