Well it’s been a hectic month! In September, I went on a retreat in called the Healthy Practice Retreat with Amy Geach from The Connection. It was pitched at allied health business owners, with the idea to be taking a step away from day to day business work, and to look at reviewing your business and planning the next steps in the journey. For me, it was really about wanting to get clear on my OT business and my mentoring/supervision work as well as education and consulting work; all the things! Having my own business wasn’t necessarily always a clear plan for me and for a long time I’ve probably run things more like a side hustle without always a lot of focus or intention. I feel like I have great ideas about things I’ve wanted to do and develop but wasn’t sure which to focus on (see December’s post about things that were coming up in 2023… but never happened!).
So the idea to go to this retreat really came about as a way that I could try and get clear and focussed on what I’m doing and where I’m going. And it definitely delivered that! But in some ways I wasn’t really expecting, namely that I realised I’ve been carrying with me a lot of unhelpful business mindsets for a while, which I think/wonder, whether these are specific to me or whether other women and/or other health professionals might also be challenged with? In any case, if you’re reading along, feel free to reach out and let me know if you feel the same about any of these points.
Unhelpful business belief #1: Business is about making money. Making money is bad… therefore, having a business is bad… or at least not as “good” and worthy as public service or working for a not for profit.
I am not sure where this mindset has come from but I guess when I think of business, I tend to think of money hungry, profit driven, employees last type business. And obviously I don’t want to be that so at least half the time, I’ve had my head in the sand about finances and the other half the time I’ve cringed or actively avoided referring to EncourageOT as any sort of business or myself as being any sort of business person or being “in business”. I’d refer to my client work as a side hustle or myself as a sole trader, anything to not be “a business” as I considered business to be heartless, cold and all about money. Which I didn’t identify with and desperately didn’t/don’t want to become.
Unhelpful business belief #2. I’m not business minded or not good at business or “business stuff”.
This one comes partly from not wanting to be good at business given previous thoughts about the morality of business! But also from some of my time working for private companies which were obviously businesses. Often in the roles I had in these companies, the parts of the role I disliked the most were those that I associated with being a business. I saw myself as a clinician first and foremost and I wasn’t really interested in the business side of things, that was just a vehicle for me to do my clinical work as an OT. So when I had to do “business” things like schmooze with potential referrers or follow up my team’s billing targets, I almost diassociated… these were things I had to do but they weren’t things I really believed in.
[As an aside, I will say in my experience, that billing targets are a real challenge for many OTs to embrace. OTs aren’t generally motivated by money and just want to see clients, so the idea of charging money for our work often doesn’t sit comfortably. Additionally, working for a company and how some companies handle billing targets makes many OTs feels like they are being imposed upon individually for the financial success of the company. Even if they understand the necessity of a target, it can feel like an overly onerous imposition upon a clinician who just wants to do their best work. I will say that if you’re a businessperson or business owner with employees, there are so many ways to get productive employees without it being a burden or awful experience for individual clinicians- talk to me about how to do this!].
And look, I could go on but suffice to say that my point is that the business aspects of my work in private practices were often my least enjoyable components. I didn’t like working so hard and pulling long hours, only to enter my time into software that told me I’d only billed 5 hours out of my 10 hour day, usually because I spent too much time helping my supervisees or doing essential work I couldn’t bill for. And I met my billing target plenty of times and I did it without dodgy billing practices or inflating my time, but I did it by becoming a workaholic, with an enormous caseload and I was constantly on the brink of burnout or mental break down whilst building resentment towards “the business”.
There were other business aspects I didn’t really enjoy and I was also frequently fed the message that I didn’t really understand business or wasn’t business minded particularly when I asked questions or put proposals forward about changing business practices. So all in all, I not only didn’t like business as I perceived it, I was also not good at it!
Unhelpful business belief #3. Why business?
This is probably a variant of no 1, but I think my challenge overall in health has often been understanding the why of business and the businesses I’ve worked for or seen in practice. I understand why allied health businesses exist in that our health system in Australia is set up such that people can have private health insurance to access private hospitals and private rehabilitation and outpatient services. That there are schemes such as WorkCover, organisations like Lifetime Support Authority (in SA) and the NDIS who have funding behind them; all of which serves to take the load off our public health services, by having the capacity to fund allied health services in the private sector. So that obviously there is a need for therapists to work in the private sector. But I’ve often felt that I haven’t understood the reasoning and why for individual companies. Why do they work in that space? What is the vision? The passion? The reason they set up a business?
Not understanding or not knowing the vision often meant that I had trouble committing to a business when I worked for it. It wasn’t my vision and so sometimes I didn’t really care that much about the success of the business (beyond keeping my job). I realise, upon reflection, that sounds so awful but it wasn’t my business, it was started by someone else. When our purpose wasn’t really communicated clearly, I think it meant that to some extent I didn’t really get the heart of the reason we existed in the first place. I think that’s one of the reasons why not for profits often were a good fit for me (in some ways), because the vision and purpose was often so clear and so powerful and something I could get behind quite easily.
Baggage
So I think these unhelpful thoughts of not liking business, not being good at business and not really understanding why business have been baggage that I’ve been carrying with me since starting EncourageOT. And it’s fair to ask that if I have all of this baggage, then why start EncourageOT in the first place? And why then be growing it and focussing on it so much over the last 12 – 18 months?
Well, here’s the thing.
I think somehow, stupidly, I convinced myself that my work wasn’t really a business, I was a sole trader. And being a sole trader was just a way for me to do the work I like best, that I’m good at and to help people. And to do that without the demands of a “business” or company behind me. It gave me the freedom and flexibility I wanted with my family and to pursue work I wanted to do and believed in but it wasn’t really a business (because… point #1). The flip side of this has been that there have been times when systems, processes, finances, growth and progress (and admin!) have been really hard because I haven’t valued those things and I haven’t worked on those things because I’ve been just working in it and focussing on being a clinician (and mentor/supervisor). But I’ve known for a while now that it wasn’t working for me to ignore these aspects of running a business and that I wasn’t getting to where I wanted to go with all my big ideas… and so I packed my bags and headed to the Healthy Practice Retreat.
Unloading
And boy was the Retreat totally worth it! With my goals of getting clear about what I wanted to do with my EncourageOT work, it came at the right time to really open my eyes to some of these unhelpful thoughts. And it did this through really talking about doing business with heart and soul. This was powerful to me because this is the why. This is the vision. This was all about developing our vision for ourselves and understanding ourselves. Amy presented so beautifully about having “one wild and precious life” and understanding what we want from that as individuals and as practice/business owners. We spent time working on and considering the balance we have in our lives, our ideal diary, our strengths (and zone of Genius) and the interface of all of that with our clinical and practice work. We reflected on where our practice was sitting at in terms of Heart and Soul and the impact we want to make in the world. We reflected on other business aspects like strategy and finance, operations and marketing and the team around us (whether as sole traders or bigger companies). We worked on our vision and values and reflected on things that pulled us off our “Island” where we do our best work.
And over the 3 days we went deep! There was honestly something so amazing about being in a room full of other like-minded allied health business owners that was so incredible. Everyone in that space was at a different level with things that were going well or where we were struggling but it felt like a safe place to be vulnerable about that and to be able to share freely and get fresh perspectives. And I think it was really being around Amy and this group of incredible business owners, that just absolutely crumbled belief #1. Because these businesspeople were not money hungry profit driven people. They were incredible clinicians with goals and a vision of how they wanted deliver services to their clients and make a difference in their own unique space and setting. And being around this energy, I think freed me up, to let go of that belief about business being bad. It helped me to understand the why and then, with the content about finances, to perhaps even then understand how we use our finances to help us achieve that vision and goal for our work. I think this has helped me to bridge the gap between all my ideas and things I want to do but how I do that in a viable and sustainable way to fulfill my vision of being able to support OTs to be able to do their best work, with confidence and without burning out.
So moving forwards, I really hope that those of you that read my blog and follow my socials, will start to see me becoming clearer and more confident in my communication and in my work and my business. And hopefully to put some of my ideas into practice!
PS. Unhelpful belief #2? Well, I’m working on that! I certainly don’t feel confident in my business skills but I feel like I know what I need to work on and that I have some clear understanding of what good business and a healthy practice looks like. And that’s a great step! Plus I’m a member of The Connection which means that I can access so much support on my journey. Learn more https://theconnectionco.com.au/
PPS. To be totally clear- this is not a paid post or advertisement. I’m writing about this because it has made such an impact on me. I process things through writing and I learnt soo much from this retreat that there’s enough for 3 blogs worth!
