Stop Doing Everything. Try These Foundational Things Instead!

We all trained in something, whether you are a body worker, massage therapist, acupuncturist, nutritionist, yoga teacher... whatever it might be.

And, thank goodness, hopefully, the places that we went to school trained us very well in a skill set of providing care. That's their job.

But what we don't get taught, is that for most of us being in the healing arts means we will be self-employed. There certainly are jobs available, and I don't have specific percentages, but a very high percentage of us will wind up working for ourselves.

And we don't get that skillset taught to us. Or if we do, it's a half day or an hour long workshop. It's tacked on to our trainings: make a business card... have a website... but it doesn't get into the specifics.

So. I'm here to help people have those specifics so that they can thrive. And, I'm here to say it doesn't have to be painful!

You don't have to get the equivalent of an MBA. You don't have to suddenly fall in love with learning whatever the next hot marketing tactic is. You don't have to love sales. None of those things are required.

We actually don't need a lot of the noise that's out there about small business skills in our situations.

But it does have to be thoughtful. So what I have done over all of these years in my own practice, and after working with hundreds of practitioners, maybe thousands now, I don't know, I have boiled this down to the essential elements that work for us: tiny, healing arts providers in private practices.

Meaning we're running our own show, we have our own business, and we are still the ones delivering the service that we trained in to our clients or patients.

As I said, it doesn't have to be complicated or messy. It doesn't have to be long winded. So let's talk about the essential, really simple building blocks that any private practice is going to need to put in place in order to get there.

We're starting with the foundation.

You've heard that metaphor before in a million different places, but you've heard it for a reason, right? What's true for houses is true for businesses. You have to have a sturdy foundation to set yourself up for success.

The question that usually comes in for folks is, "How? What does that mean?" What are the parts that make up the foundation? Or we think, "I have the foundation because I have great training. I'm great at my skill.... I'm a great acupuncturist. I'm a great massage therapist..." whatever it might be.

That is super foundational, but in the realm of small business skills, we're talking about a different kind of foundation in addition to your training.

This is my "start here" information. Not because it's overly simplistic, but because this is what's going to truly set you up to have the kind of practice that you want in your life.

I hear common assumptions of what people think they need because I'm talking with people in private practice all the time. I have a good topographic view of what themes repeat.

But the solutions that people are jumping to, the assumptions that they're making about what's going to work, it's not always addressing the heart of the matter. And that's because the problem is often at the level of the foundation, and we didn't get taught like what makes up the foundation.

For example, here are some of the repeating themes, or assumptions, I head. You may have said them out loud or in your own mind to yourself. I certainly have said all of these things to myself at some point in my career, particularly in those early years when I was grasping at straws and I was trying to figure out how my practice could become the thing that pays my bills and takes care of me.

Assumption:

I need to have more clients. It's a very common one. This is one that usually comes from a should. Someone's telling you, you should grow your audience on social media. Start posting to social media, or post more frequently to social media. Or, you should get another certification or training (in order to get more clients...), or sometimes we're thinking that for ourselves, "It is crickets around here. Things are too quiet. So maybe I should train in something new, get a new additional training, an advanced training, or maybe I should add a new offering to my practice. Maybe that will start to bring more income in". Or sometimes we start thinking, "I'll just get an additional office location. I'll keep this one, and I'll get another one and I'll split my time". That is obviously dividing the pie slices of your time and attention into too small a slice.

Another assumption: I've hit my income earning ceiling. I need to add a side business, a side hustle to my practice.

That might be selling products in your space. It might be creating online content, or online courses, hoping to monetize something that's more in the influencer sphere, like a podcast, a blog, etc.

But what if, instead of having these thoughts and then, grasping at straws (I'm going to mix all my metaphors, which is something I'd love to do if you haven't listened to me before) throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, hoping something or anything sticks.

Let's instead cut the clutter for you and help you think through what actually needs to be considered, and in what order, so that you can focus on the work you actually love to do.

The right steps in the right order make a really big difference than just, "Here's all this stuff you need to do".

What we're going to cover are the three simple building blocks that every business has to attend to. And then within those three building blocks, there's three steps.

We will also cover how to know for yourself which building blocks might be shaky for you, and how to sift through those solution assumptions that I was just giving examples of: The shoulds, the have-tos, maybe I should, all that kind of thing... so that you can take correct root cause action and get faster results with less effort for yourself.

Welcome to The Simple Prospering Framework to create a solid foundation for your practice.

These are the building blocks that make up your foundation, and they go in order.

Building block #1: Attune. Meaning, paying attention. And then learning from where you place your attention.

Building block #2: Attract. This is practice building mode. If you're just getting started, certainly you're going to need to do attract work, aka practice building work. Or maybe you've been in a lull, maybe you're moving to a new city and you need to start over again or fan the embers and understand how to even out some of the rollercoaster nature of ups and downs in your business.

Building block #3: Attend. There is no such thing as a set it and forget it business. How do you simplify attending to the right things so that your practice can keep doing well once you've got the foundation set up.

We're going to go in order: Attune first, then attract, then attend. You'll see why as we go.

Within each building block, there are three steps. So it's nine things. You can do nine things! They're not super long winded, none of these are going to take you a year or even a month.

Okay, so let's start with that first building block: Attune.

The first step in this building block - and this is proof that I'm not just cheerleading you, because it's the least fun. But I make it number one because we love to put our heads in the sand and avoid this one - step one in Attune is to know, to really know, what we need to earn in order to take good care of ourselves and in order to have a financially sustainable business.

Everybody who I talk to, with extremely rare exceptions, feels bad that they aren't looking at their numbers or that they can't tell me a number of what they need to earn. I say that because you're not alone, and there's no shame in it. We don't have to feel bad that we haven't done that.

There's a ton of emotion attached to earning, particularly when you're self employed and it's your business. This is survival level stuff-- Can I pay my bills? Can I get by?-- so it makes perfect sense that we go into avoidance and that we go into just kind of a foggy, hazy place, like, "Well, kind of enough is coming in and things are going okay... I think?" That we, we don't take the time to really know what we need to earn.

What I mean by know what you need to earn to take good care of yourself is what you're paying yourself. So all of the money that you earn in your practice is not your pay. Because it's going to be divided up into paying your taxes, and paying your business overhead as well.

Even though we typically have low overhead businesses, you're still going to have to pay rent, utilities, office supplies, insurance, membership fees, continuing ed, all that kind of stuff... all the web stuff, right? And you're going to need to put money aside so that you can be a good boss to yourself and have sick and vacation pay when you need it.

I'm not going to go into all the complexities here, I do that in my practice earning course, but I want you to start with the important number, which is: what do you need to pay yourself?

Here's how you do that, you're going to go into your personal checking account, and you're going to look at the last three months statements so that you get an average, and you're going to write down what you spend every month for your personal expenses. Take out those business expenses, don't count them. We are looking to know what you need to pay yourself so that you're able to pay your rent or mortgage, cover your groceries, all the regularly recurring expenses. And then if there's things in there that you're like, well that doesn't count because that was my mom's birthday last month and I don't buy a gift for my mom's birthday every month, still put it in there.

That's why we go on averages, because no month is a cookie cutter where our expenses are always the same. There's always something! So we want to have an idea of what that extra is.

And this is not to be attended to with a budget mindset! I'm not asking you to feel shame about what you want or need, or to whittle it down and tighten your belt. In fact, the exact opposite. I want you to really know the number. I'm just pulling a random round number out here for an example, but if I ask you, "What do you need to pay yourself to take good care of yourself every month?" I want you to be able to say 5,000. Or 10,000, or whatever it is based on your real numbers.

Because sometimes when we're in desperation, we can also go into that place of, "40,000 a month would make me feel like I could breathe". Or if we're in deep under earning, we can be like, I think I would do okay with 2000 a month. I want you to look at actual numbers.

So that's step one. And once you know that, then you can understand what you need to charge. So, going back to what I said initially: make sure that you are aware that the amount that you earn is not the amount that you keep. That's not all your pay.

Step 2 in Attune is knowing what the business (your practice) needs to earn. If you want to make it easy to ballpark your gross revenue (what your business needs to bring in), double the number you know you need to pay yourself. If that sounds crazy, it's usually pretty accurate. for covering taxes, expenses, etc.

Once you have a number, then you can know what you need to charge, and how many clients you need to see. I'm not advocating for you to work yourself to the bone. Again, I want us to be good bosses to ourselves, not the kind of bosses we would hate to work for. So keeping it realistic, how many people can you actually see in a week and feel good?

Realistically, we know that there will be busy weeks and quiet weeks. There's going to be those weeks in the summer where everyone's on vacation and those weeks around the holidays where everyone's busy, but you're at least not picking a number out of the sky.

So to give an example of how these things will sometimes not work, you say, "I don't feel good charging more than 50 a session"- I'm going to give silly numbers here, but just to drive the point home, "I don't feel good charging more than 50 a session or 30 a session. And I really can't see more than 10 people a week, but I would need to be able to pay myself 7, 000 a month." Well you can see there that math doesn't work. So I want you to be able to get to a place where you can see, does the math work?

And then the last piece, the 3rd item under Attune is a different kind of attunement. We talked money attuning first, but good news! There's other stuff you need to attune to, I'm not going to talk money the whole time here...

Step 3 in Attune: You want to really be attuning to your clients.

Deep listen to why people are seeking out your work. The reason why we do that is because we all have a deep love for our work. Most of us are called to do what we're doing, right? We, most of us did not grow up in a household where our parents were saying, "You'd better grow up and become a certified Rolfing practitioner."

There was a calling that happened at some point, and that's true for most of us. Then we enter our fields, we get well trained and so we have this very rich understanding of our own work. We have a very advanced understanding of what we do because we're the practitioner and we have a deep love for what we do.

We also know how powerful it is, and how much potential it has for our clients. And so sometimes actually all of that deep knowledge means that we're projecting assumptions about why people are seeking us out, as opposed to listening to why people are actually seeking us out.

Yes, we do want to sometimes gently educate our clients about what we do, the benefits of our work, the vast potential of our work, but we also need to meet them where they are.

If somebody's coming to see you because their foot hurts, we might not start by explaining how their whole life is going to change, right? Because that's just too big a step for them.

So we listen to their words, their exact phrases. When new potential clients are connecting with you, what are the words that are coming out of their mouths?

That cover the Attune building block. That's it! That's the important stuff, with all of the clutter stripped away, that we need to pay attention to. And so what does it look like when this particular building block is a little shaky? I want you to mark off for yourself- this is quiz time- what you relate to here.

• You're on the income rollercoaster ride, sometimes you're doing great, other times it's crickets. (Or I would add to that, even if it's not crickets, meaning it doesn't feel quiet, you still feel like you're on an income roller coaster ride and doesn't make sense).

• You can't take time off. Or when you do, you can't pay yourself, you wind up behind, and so you're working all the time.

• You feel hemmed in with little to no ability to take sick or vacation time for yourself. Y

• You swallow the idea that self employment means precarity

• You really have tried to learn about being a small business owner, so maybe you have watched other webinars, you've read books, maybe you've gone to the small business association. Local to you, but you're finding that it just doesn't seem to apply to what you do, which is a healing arts private practice.

• Or you are very aware of your earning ceiling. Meaning, I can't charge more and I can't see more people, and so then you hit that ceiling and it feels too low. So you start thinking about tacking on new offerings. Maybe it's a new offering of your services, maybe it's a new training, a new certification, maybe it's a new office location.

So if you relate to any of those, write that down. We will circle back to that.

We're going to head into the Attract building block. This is the second building block of three, and it also has three steps.

This is why we go in order, because you need the information that you got from Attune in order to put it to use in the Attract building block.

Step 1 of Attract: Based on what you learned in Attune, you're going to clarify your message to prospective clients in verbal and written form. The way this is mostly going to show up is through what you write on your website so that you're communicating well to the potential clients who find you there.

The verbal way this shows up is around what are you going to say when you talk with potential new clients. I'm not an advocate of really robotic elevator pitches, but having an understanding of the repeating themes from the attune building block: What are the common questions, the common concerns, what's bringing people in?

Now you can clarify and tailor your message to meet them where they are and help them to understand, if your work is the right fit for them.

Step 2 in Attract: Based on what you learned in Attune, based on who your clients are and why they are seeking you out, you're going to clarify your message in visual form.

So yes, I do branding and graphic design, but I also would like to say this does not have to be flashy. It doesn't have to be expensive. You don't even need to hire someone to do it for you. We have a lot of great, templates we can use these days. Places like Canva, Squarespace, and Wix.

Canva is a very user friendly graphic design tool. Wix and Squarespace are user friendly website builders with great templates. So if you are inclined to do it yourself and it doesn't make you crazy, that exists!

I'm not advocating that you utilize branding to make this as flashy as possible, rather, there should be coherence. When people see something visual about your practice: your website, your business cards, postcards, your office sig..., anytime your practice is a visual identity to people, it should be cohesive.

So you don't want to use one Canva template for one flyer, workshop, sign, and then do a totally different thing because it's kind of fun to play around, which, I feel you, I'm a designer, I love playing around! But if it is visually all over the place, people then aren't getting repeated, cohesive impressions of your business. And then you're not sticking in their mind.

If they're driving or walking past your office, you want them to see that sign, what that imagery looks like, colors, typography, the logo. And then if they go to the farmer's market and there's a bunch of postcards, and it's the same. That is an impression. You're becoming more visible in the community.

And then this is the big one. The most important part of Attract is step 3: You're going to have to connect with actual people. I say actual people because I don't mean social media followers.

I mean real people in your community. And that community can be if you see people physically in person, or it can be an online community. But it's not going to be everyone who's online. That's billions of people! It's going to be the people who swim in the same streams as you and who are looking to find you.

This takes creative thinking. It takes trial and error. Usually you have to tweak things, to figure out what you're going to do to connect. And of course it takes putting yourself out there. Not that you have to become something you're not, which I think is actually a terrible idea because people are looking to work with you, they're not looking to encounter some fake Identity that you're projecting.

You don't need to become salesy, you don't need to use, pardon my French, douchey tactics, but you do need to connect with people. You need to connect with your colleagues, your potential referral sources, and you need to find other spaces, whether physically in-person or online, where your ideal clients are already gathering, and you need to figure out a way to connect with that community.

That's the most important part of the Attract building block.

So what does it look like when this building block is shaky? Back to quiz time. Mark down yes or no if any of these feel true for you.

• You aren't bringing in enough income, so this isn't an issue of just not paying attention or not knowing where all the money goes. It's just, it's not enough and you don't know where to start to get things going.

• Too few referrals are coming in via word of mouth.

• Too few new clients are finding you through your website.

• When new clients are coming in, you have a heavy lift educationally to explain to them what your work is and how you can help. So sometimes I just say "the vibes are off".

• And maybe you've tried all the things they say you need to do: posting to social media, running Google ads, hiring an expensive small business or marketing coach, or going to those networking events where everyone's just handing out their random business cards... and it's not working, and you don't like any of these things.

Those are great examples of burning energy you don't have, and it goes nowhere, because it's not actually growing your practice. Okay, so keep that. We're going to tally it up at the end.

Last building block: Attend. Attend is the foundational piece of taking care of your business.

We need to pay attention to our practices in a few key ways so that we don't run into a brick wall where we wonder, "Why isn't this working anymore?" Or "What's happening? Or where did all my money go?"

Step 1 in the Attend building block: Start with being honest with yourself about what's bumming you out in your business.

I'm a huge advocate for gratitude practice, but sometimes we err on the side of silver linings and we feel like we don't have permission to be honest about what's bumming us out.

So I hereby give you permission, you're going to do this for yourself, by yourself, in private. You're not going to share this with your clients. You're not going to post it on social media. If you feel like talking with a trusted friend, particularly one who's also in the same space, like also a healing arts provider, of course, go for it!

But the reason why I emphasize that this is private and just for you is because when I give you that permission, you're more likely to let the gremlins out, right? The parts that maybe you've been tamping down can speak out loud.

I'm aging myself here, but in the tv show Seinfeld there's an episode where they called this the airing of grievances.

We have to air out our grievances from time to time! Things like, "Oh my god, I'm responding to too many really long, high need, complex emails." Or, "I'm so sick of clients flaking" Or, "I just need more time off." Whatever it might be, start with being honest.

Step 2 in Attend: Then you're going to look at the truth of that list, your airing of grievances, and you're going to explore what tiny tweaks you can make to smooth out those rough edges.

The reason why I emphasize tiny tweaks is that sometimes when we let the airing of grievances energy out, we feel like we want to burn it all down. And I'm here to tell you that if you're self employed, you're probably going to have a few I want to burn it all down moments. That's normal. If you don't, you're amazing.

Most people I talk to, and I myself, have had moments where we're like, "I'm done". And it's usually because we weren't paying attention to that creeping grievance burnout. So instead of burning it all down, instead of starting from scratch, tiny tweaks that can smooth out the rough edges.

In step 2 of Attend, we explore what systems and processes your can put in place that are going to take these things off your plate.

Sometimes that involves technology. To use my example, let's say so many people are flaking, or I spend way too much time scheduling my clients and rescheduling them. Maybe it's time to invest in booking software that includes appointment reminders.

That's an example of when technology does the job. But it's not always technology. Sometimes it's just simple clarity. To give an example from my own life, my own practice: there are times of the year that are really quiet because I do in person work. August is one of them, because everyone's doing their summer travels before it's back to the school year.

And so after a million years of just expecting for August to be really, really quiet I decided I was going to do my earning for August in advance, so that I didn't have to feel the pinch of the quiet practice.

And ultimately what I wound up deciding was to take a bunch of time off in August. I synchronized my schedule with my clients' vacation plans.

That's an example of having clarity. Which also meant I needed to have clarity around what I had to put aside for the whole rest of the year in a savings account that I didn't touch in order to have my pay for the month of August before that month arrives.

So what does it look like when the attend building block is shaky? Quiz time!

• You might feel like there's a hole at the bottom of your bank account. Money's coming in, but you don't know where it seems to go. And usually that's around systems and processes for tracking income expenses, saving for taxes, which brings me to number two.

• You get surprise tax bills that set you back financially.

• You feel like you spend a ton of time doing unpaid work like responding to emails and texts, rescheduling clients, waiting around for clients who flake, reminding people to pay you, all of those nagging, annoying, unpaid labor things.

• Your schedule is all over the place. So you feel like you're mentally keeping track of when you have to see clients. There's no true off time. You're just sort of available whenever people want you

• And of course the telltale sign of creeping burnout: you're just feeling burned out. You're starting to think about burning it all down leaving your field starting over maybe getting one of those J O B's

I am not one of those people that says jobs bad, self employment good. I think both have their pluses and minuses and we just need to decide which pluses and minuses we want for ourselves. This process also helps you to do that!

Going through the foundation helps you to understand, Oh, this is the work of self employment. And so, do you want that more than you want to be an employee?

And if not, like, you can be an employee. These are all options.

So tally it all up. I want you to look at those three quizzes you did for building blocks, just so you can get a sense of which building blocks might be a little shaky for you. So if one of those building blocks is mostly yeses, like 3 out of 5, 4 out of 5, then it's a really important one.

If you've got 5s across the board, you've got 15 yeses, you're not alone. None of this quizzy stuff is to make people feel like they're a mess. My intention, as always, is that people feel like they have the skills and the support and the know-how they need.

So, if you feel like you are dealing with a lot of shaky building blocks here, notice those conclusions you jump to. Those assumed solutions that I talked about at the very beginning about what you need to do in your practice. "I should get a new certification." "I should open a new office." "I should be posting more on social media."

And ask yourself why, because usually it's what you're going to see when you ask why is that there's some building block that's shaky. There's some piece of your foundation, or the whole foundation just needs to be re attended to if it has been a while since you did that.

Some examples:

If you're saying, "I'm busy, so I've got plenty of clients, this isn't a practice building problem, but I still don't seem to have enough money to pay myself what I need." That's attune. You're going to have to look at the numbers. You're going to have to math it up.

If you're saying, "I'm just getting started in a new area. I'm opening the doors, new office, new city, new town. I need to let people know I exist." This is a clear example of attract mode. What are your strategies going to be for that?

If you're saying, "I'm so burned out, tired of the hamster wheel. There must be a better way." It's time for an airing of the grievances and then thinking through what are the tiny tweaks you can make to attend to your business so that your business can attend better to you as well.

So that was a lot of information. This is my, if you imagine one of those real estate drones flying over houses and neighborhoods, it's the zoom out, look at the topography framework.

I hope that zooming out and seeing the map helps you to feel like some of that exhausting clutter can fall away, and that you can have some clear steps to take to get closer to what you want.

So you don't have to do everything, but you do need to do some things.

The thing about being self employed is we actually do need a skill set in addition to what we are trained to do as practitioners. And there really is no such thing as just It magically works. You know, we sit in our office and we dream a beautiful dream of what our practice is going to be like, and the universe delivers.

If we're talking universe stuff, we're talking manifestly stuff. It's a conversation. It's a relationship with life. So you need to do something to have life be communicating back with you.

I cannot tell you how many times, so many times, all of the time, that people get in touch with me and they feel like they're going to need to overhaul everything. And it comes down to actually tiny little tweaks. Clarity, consistency, clear action. Not doing everything, but doing the right things. In the right order.

If you want more support, I have all of my courses available withing the Healing Arts Practice Incubator.