Don’t keep doing this in 2025 if you want to grow your clinic

Katie Bell: [00:00:00] Welcome to this week’s episode of the Treat Your Business podcast. My name is Katie Bell, and if you’re new here, because we’ve had lots of new listeners in the last few weeks it was a delight to meet you all at Therapy Expo last week, so thank you for tuning in. And a huge welcome to you. I’m so glad that you have taken this time out of your busy schedule to Maybe you’re in the car on your way to the clinic juggling lots of things, or maybe you’re just grabbing a rare quiet moment for yourself and have chosen to spend the next 15 or 20 minutes listening to my voice.

So I thank you. Now this week’s episode. He’s going to kick off a few weeks of like a series of strategic planning for your 2025. Because so many of us screech the end of the year, we’ve not even had a minute to reflect on. I was so It’s on, you know, [00:01:00] scrolling on Instagram the other day and people were putting their reflections of, you know, what an amazing November they’ve had and they can’t wait to bring in December and a part of me was thinking, Oh, just because I haven’t even got a minute to.

be able to look back at what November has done. We have been so busy in Thrive and in my clinic that I haven’t even got a minute to sit down and reflect on that. And so part of me was triggered by this, but a part of me was like, but this is, you know, what I teach other people to do, Katie, so maybe you should.

Do it for yourself and take a moment to stop and smell the roses and see what you have achieved in November. However, we’re all busy people, aren’t we? We’ve all got December ahead of us. We’re coming to the end of 2024 and it’s about looking at the new year before we get to the new year. It’s a critical time for you as clinic owners to pause, to reflect and to plan.

[00:02:00] So I’m going to endeavor this week, next week. And the week after, oh my goodness, that’s not very long till Christmas. To give you some really great short episodes, it’s going to allow you to get your strategy in place for 2025, your marketing strategy and your sales strategy in place. So many of us sprint to the end of the year, don’t we?

Consumed by the Christmas carnage. We sometimes neglect our business in the process because You’ve got to go to a, you know, kids nativity play because your child is playing a snake or something ridiculous like that. And you’ve, you know, got a million and one things to do and this year is not over yet.

So I’m here to guide you through. Strategic planning for 2025, and I’m going to shift your focus beyond the day to day. I’m going to help you design a roadmap for your business and your life that [00:03:00] truly serves you in 2025, because if it’s not going to serve you, we are not going to do it. So thanks for joining me for this episode.

Let’s dive in.

So let’s do a little time travel. I asked this question when we get on calls with lots of fabulous clinic owners, and I say, let’s imagine that it’s this time next year. And you’re looking back on 2025. What are you going to be celebrating? What will you be proud of? And then I want you to flip that and think what will you regret not having changed?

So the truth is unless you intend intentionally reflect and plan, it’s easy to repeat the same patterns year after year and many clinic owners that we work with When we first work with them, describe a feeling of being overwhelmed, or they feel like they’re stuck on [00:04:00] a hamster wheel, or they are spread too thin and they’re often juggling way too many patient appointments or classes.

And as a result, they feel like they’re just average at everything or even below average because they are struggling to be it all to everybody. So if this resonates with you, here’s the first big takeaway. You cannot grow your business between client appointments. I will say it again. You cannot grow your business between client appointments.

I met so many of you at therapy expo last week, and it was such a pleasure, but there was so many of you that was stuck in the day to day grind and. Your challenge, the things that you wanted to help with us, help from us with was growing your business. And I said, Oh, how are you going to do that when you’re seeing 60 patients a week?

Because life, there is more to life than just working. So if you’re constantly firefighting, spinning plates. [00:05:00] You, what you’re not doing is stepping into your zone of genius and growth requires space. It requires space to think, it requires space to plan, and it requires space to act strategically.

And one of the biggest reflections that I often have is when you are so busy as clinic owners, you actually don’t have any thinking space. So a lot of us listening to this are high achievers and we think we need to just fill our diaries to the max. To be successful, to be productive, to have a sense of achievement, but actually that stops a lot of the creative thoughts and the creative plans that we might have.

So we just get stuck in this day to day grind. So the first thing to really think about is Often it’s easy to say what we don’t want rather than what we do want straight away, because that’s how our brains are often wired. So [00:06:00] it’s taking a moment, I mean, you know, over a glass of something nice, of course, cause it’s Christmas time to write down your list of reflect your list of reflections and your list of tolerances for 2024.

What have you put up with? What are you not happy to still be doing this time next year? What is it that you think you have to do because that’s just what you’ve always done, but actually it doesn’t fill you with joy in any stretch of the imagination. So first of all, think about that very thing. Like what am I putting up with?

What, and it doesn’t have to just be in the business. It can be in your personal life as well. You can often feel like, you know, you’re the only person organizing things, or if it’s, if it doesn’t, if it. If you don’t make it happen, then it doesn’t happen. It might be that your children are not helping around the [00:07:00] house.

It could be that you are not feeling heard. It might be that you are tolerating being the one that has to make it all happen at home. I don’t know. I’m just making suggestions as to what might be going on. What we hear as well on, on calls. And I am here to tell you that 2025 is all about creating. A life that truly serves you.

But to do that, we first have to make a decision of what we are not prepared to tolerate anymore. You don’t need to know the how here. And all of you that, that need to know the how before you move forwards, I’m telling you, you don’t need to know the how. Because if you knew the how, you wouldn’t be tolerating it and you wouldn’t be putting up with it.

And it would, it, that would not even be a thing. There is a part of your brain that resists this change. And even if we are living in a state of not really being fully fulfilled or [00:08:00] enjoying it, or, you know, in a state of joy or gratitude, the brain still resist the change. This is the ego. The ego wants to keep you in your comfort zone, even if that comfort zone isn’t comfortable at all.

And. When you consider stepping back from your client appointments, or maybe reducing your workload or You know bringing somebody else in or whatever is the ego may scream out what if we lose money? What if they’re just a cost of the business? What if people think I’m lazy because I’m seeing less patients What if my patients go elsewhere because we’re going to put our prices up?

What if I’m not good enough to do this? These fears can feel very real, but they are just that They are fears, and unless you challenge them, then they’ll keep you stuck in a cycle of mediocrity, and you are not here to live a mediocre life.

So often [00:09:00] when we write down our list of tolerances and we we have all these fares come up because we make a decision that actually next year, I’m going to go from seeing 60 patients a week to 30 patients a week, and I’m going to introduce a premium program where people can work with us for 52 weeks of the year.

And I’m going to bring in a new employed member of staff, or I’m going to move my self employed 50, 60 percent commission. Onto a flat rate, or I’m going to take them from self employed to employed. Your ego, your fears are, they’re going to show up. And here’s the thing. You can stay where you are and you can continue to live in, you know, not the way that you are, you know, you didn’t set out to run a business because it wasn’t serving you, or you can face those fears and you can put your big girl pants on and you can find a way of overcoming them.

So my first challenge to [00:10:00] you is to write down what have you been tolerating in 2024? And another great way of doing this is when you’re driving, cause I know lots of you will commute to your clinics or you’re in the cars lots on your home visits and stuff. Just like talk to Siri or, you know, talk to a, talk to your phone, get it to dictate your notes, like just speak at it.

And then you can stick that in chat GPT and you can tell her, can you put this into a list, a bullet point list of all of my tolerances for 2024 make it make sense, please. And you can then start thinking about what are like the five things on there that I am. It is hard. No, that I am going to keep doing this by this time next year.

So let’s come back to our strategic planning, because this is like. Creating a roadmap for your business. It’s not just about setting goals, you know, smart goals and all of that stuff. It’s about designing a life in a business that aligns with your values and your vision. So we [00:11:00] have in Thrive our year runs January to.

January to January, essentially. So we have already mapped all of this out for the entire of 2025. We are very clear on our measurables. We are very clear on our goals and our revenue profit targets. We have all of our dates of delivery planned for the whole of 2025. Like I know where I need to be in the third week of November next year.

It’s all done because we have a strategic plan. Mapped out that aligns with our values, aligns with our vision and because of that strategic plan, we know when we’re going to need hire, we know when we’re going to need. Additional things within the business, maybe additional services or different types of programs, or we’re going to bring in a brand new Ascend program in January.

Like that’s been in the planning for months and months. So we’re not racing every week to just Try and hit where we need to be. We’ve got this mapped out in [00:12:00] my clinic tomorrow, in fact, when this podcast goes live. I will be having a quarter four. So we run April to March in KB. So we have a slightly different kind of way of doing it.

In Q4 we have a same page meeting and me and my ops manager, and we will map out what this final quarter of the year looks like. In relation to our overall strategic plan from this year, just check that we’re still on track. Is there anything that needs to be adjusted? Changed? What are the key rocks, the key focus for the last quarter of the year?

And then in January, late January, early February, we will map out our 2025, 2026 strategic plan for my clinic because it starts in April and that’s exactly the same. We will have revenue goals, profit goals, and then from there we can come up with. What key things need to happen to move us closer towards that goal?

So if you want 2025 to look different, you’ve [00:13:00] gonna have to approach it differently because Albert Einstein, in fact, actually it was Rita May Brown said, insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. So you’ve got to take the time. We call it in Thrive, like a Thrive Clarity Day.

And we have like a list of 10 questions that we got our members to ask themselves. And it allows them to just refocus and really think, are they on track or off track to achieving what they set out to achieve? And if you haven’t, I asked this question at Therapy Expo in the presentation. I said, who here knows exactly what revenue and profit targets they’re going for in 2025?

And there was five people of probably about. A hundred that were stood listening to me at the Therapy Expo. Five of a hundred. 5 percent of people know where they’re going, 5 percent of people have set their sat nav, 95 percent of people are just flying by the seat of their pants and that creates [00:14:00] chaos and carnage and distraction and lack of focus and trying to do too many things at once and trying to please everybody but actually never pleasing yourself and.

So take the time when you’ve written your list of tolerances down. And you’re like, I am not going to put up with these key five things anymore. Then that then starts to bring into, okay, so how does my business need to look next year? How does my life need to look next year? So that I am not tolerating those things any more.

Some of your tolerances. Might be working with insurance companies that undervalue your worth. Mentioning their names. F ing get rid of them. Allowing clients to overstep boundaries. Being the last person that gets paid in your business or being the person that gets paid what’s left in your business.

Maybe it’s that you’re struggling to find time for the gym or for self care or you’re drinking cold tea because you’re always too busy. Go for big things and go for small things. Include [00:15:00] business and include personal tolerances because they’re all interconnected. And then ask yourself, what’s been on this list the longest?

What surprises me? What are the themes? And The choice becomes yours. You are the leader of your business and your life. You get to decide what you tolerate, how you work, and how you live. You get to choose what 2025 looks like for you. Here’s the catch, because there’s always a catch. You can’t out strategy a faulty mindset, just like you can’t out train a bad diet.

The best business plan in the world won’t work if your self confidence, your self worth, and self belief are not in the right place. You have to surround yourself. With people who lift you up, who inspire you, who push you forwards, and who are kind of like the ying to your yang, if you know what I mean.

You’re gonna have people in your life that when [00:16:00] you need To push forwards and you need to take that risk. There are people that you’re going to turn to for that. There are going to be people that you need to stabilise. And to have a level of discernment and risk aversion and risk calculation in your life.

But when you try and run your clinic from your own mindset. This is what is creating what you have got today. Like have a look around at your environment, the house that you live in, the car that you drive, the food that you eat, the places that you go to, the people that you socialize with the clothes that you wear, the holidays that you go on, the clinic that you have, the boundaries that you have, the income that you have is a direct result of your thoughts and your beliefs because They then create your actions.

So as we are on our quest for 2025 to be different, it might [00:17:00] be for it to be a slower year for you. It might be for you to prioritize yourself more than you have been able to in the past. Whatever that looks like for you, there is no judgment, but to have that, we need to start behaving and thinking in different ways because you can’t have do be, you have to be do.

So what does your 2025 need to look like? What has got to change? What are you not prepared to tolerate any longer? And that becomes the basis of your strategic plan for next year, because we then look back at what’s really important to you, and we align that strategic plan to those things, rather than just create a plan in the business.

And then try and reverse engineer it and fit your life into it. You must take your life and make sure that the business works for you and that.

Now in 2025, I have got [00:18:00] something very exciting to share with you. I’ve been seeding it, excuse the pun for a few weeks now and that is I will be publishing a book. I cannot believe I’m even saying this, who even am I? January the 14th is the date that you need to get into your diary. It’s going to be going live at 11 in the morning and we are going to be announcing very soon.

I wish I could tell you when, but you know me, I’m pretty low detail, so somebody will tell me when this is going to happen. But we are going to have a priority list. Some of you who came to the TherapyXO are already on it. Our members, I know you are already on it because you are all so desperate for your copies, aren’t you?

Yes, you are. Just indulge me and I agree. On January the 14th, I’m gonna be releasing a book called Thriving. It is the simple and honest guide to growing your clinic. It is it is like the podcast on heat. It is real. It is honest. It is not [00:19:00] full of all the bullshit that you read in other places.

And, It’s laid out with the clinic tree success framework. Hence why I’ve been seeding it. Because it lays out the roots, the trunk, and then all the branches. In order of things that you need to do in your business to enable you to grow and scale your clinic in the way that aligns with you, with what you want , and not forgetting all of the vital parts.

I mean, it’s bright pink because there are no pink books on a bookshelf. There’s certainly no pink books on my bookshelf. So I thought, Hey, I’m going to go for it. And, I am really proud of it. It has been quite, quite the journey over the last four, four months, five months to do this as well as everything else.

But I’m really excited for you all to get your hands on it. Now when you get on the priority list, you get 50 percent off your book. And when it goes live on Amazon, you’re going to [00:20:00] have a very special code. You’re going to access to it first. And you also are going to get a book in action workshop with me, which is when I’m literally going to take stuff from the book and help you implement it.

It’s very exciting. And for all of you who consume the podcast and just obviously love hearing my voice week on week in your cars, I’m recording an audible version for you guys. That is happening. In December. So there will be an audible version that releases. I think it has to release two weeks after the main book releases.

There’s some fancy reason for that. I have no idea, but that’s what they tell me. So you’re going to get the audible access as well. That’s all from me. I’m very excited about 2025 and all that is going to happen. We have lots and lots to bring to you in Thrive. So stay with us. Keep tuning in week after week to find out about the new things that we have coming and how that can impact you and influence you in growing and scaling your clinic in the simple, easiest possible.

[00:21:00] Thanks for joining me and see you again next week.