Structuring Your Practice to Provide You More Time, Flexibility, and Freedom with Kate Matheson: Episode 214

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Kate Matheson

Meet our Guest: Kate Matheson

Teaching sales without the sleaze and helping Health & Wellness Practitioners build fully booked practices without sacrificing their sanity, quality of care or spending every.waking.minute working.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

DR. DANIELLE: Okay, Kate, let’s get started with my first question for you, which is what is your number one, your go to, your must-do health wellness habit or routine for yourself?

MEET KATE MATHESON


Get to know Kate Matheson or Mathesonandco

 

KATE: Yeah, so this is pretty basic actually, but for me, it’s my diet. I have an autoimmune disease. I manage it totally naturally, but diet is like very, very central to me maintaining that. And I’ve been very, very strict over the years. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the gaps diet, but I followed that very strictly for probably four or five years. So now it’s like the first thing if I start to kind of slip, I can immediately notice so that, and no alcohol, it’s my number one strategy for myself.

DR. DANIELLE: That is really interesting. And by the way, basic I think is really good. Like basic is better in most scenarios; when we try to make things complicated, it just gets hard to stick with it, you know? And we forget that the really basic things are what matter the most.

KATE: Yeah. Actually alcohol for me has been six and a half years since I’ve had literally like, not a sip to my lips. It has been the one thing that I have not cheated, one Iota. But for me, I don’t eat dairy or gluten, but the odd time my husband will have a piece of pizza and I’ll like have a bite and I kind of slip here and there. But yeah, the alcohol I find for me, it was like, as soon as I cut it out, I felt substantially better that I’ve just never gone back. But even my diet as well, it’s like you said, like a foundational piece that the other stuff, sleep meditation, all of that. It’s super helpful for me, but I have to always come back to my diet and it keeps me feeling amazing.

DR. DANIELLE: Good. Well, I’m glad that it’s that effective for you. Okay, next question. What do you like the least about running your own business?

KATE: I actually don’t like maintaining the day to day of my business. I’m such an entrepreneur at heart. I’ve had a lot of businesses, I love the ideation and creation and bringing my ideas to fruition. But that’s why for me, like so much of what I do is teaching like streamlining and systemizing and automating and outsourcing. So that actually my businesses run very simply and I can spend most of my time serving my clients or creating and doing the things I love and not maintaining.

DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. I totally relate to that. I’m not naturally a systems and procedures kind of person. I’m not naturally like let’s create a standard operating procedure. I learned to do that and learning to do that has been really important to really build a solid business, but it’s been a skill that I’ve had to develop. But I also tend to have a lot of ideas and I need a lot of space. This is probably the most challenging part, the most challenging phase of entrepreneurship right now that I’ve ever been in, because it requires me to do a whole lot of nothing. And I feel like there’s this constant battle going on of, I should be doing more and I’m so unproductive and I’m being lazy, and I could do all those things that my team members are doing. And yet, like I cannot even force myself to do them. I have no choice. I have to be in this space. I have to embrace it. And it’s getting easier just starting to get easier. But it’s like this whole new thing of “my job is to think.”

 


My job is to think, Kate Matheson, Mathesonandco

 

KATE: Yeah. Think and strive and plan. And you could only do that with empty white space, right?

BUILDING STRUCTURE THAT SUPPORTS THE LIFE YOU WANT

DR. DANIELLE: Yes. The reason that I invited you to be a guest on the podcast was because there was one specific thing that you shared on social media recently that I was like, let’s talk about this more because this is a thing that I’ve been teaching for a long time, but the way that you presented it is different. And I was like okay, cool. I love to present similar, but different things because it might resonate with someone and help them in a different way. Okay. So let’s start off with a scenario and we’ll just dive in from there. So the scenario is my own scenario when I started my own practice almost a decade ago? I just set my office hours to be convenient and available for people, with one exception, which I shared with you, which is that I’m not a morning person. I know I didn’t really want to make it to work by nine o’clock every day. And so I set my office hours from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM pretty much every day of the week, initially, at least. I was available pretty much all the time for anyone that wanted to schedule. If they wanted to come in a little early, I would do that. If they wanted to come in a little bit after my office hours, I would do that. If they needed to begin on a Saturday afternoon or a Saturday morning, I would do that. Sometimes I would even see people on Sundays. Because I was so available for appointments for patients, I found myself struggling, hardcore with everything else that I needed to do to run a business, like staying on top of my chart notes, for example. And I knew just, I don’t know, I guess from my previous education and experience that I needed to commit a lot of time to the growth of my business, but it left me with like no time dedicated to do that. So I was just trying to do it early in the morning, late at night, and on the weekends I was exhausted. And on top of all of this, I had a small child at that time who was between like zero to roughly three, four years old. At some point it became a thing for me to teach other people how to avoid burnout in their practices, because it hit me much harder and much sooner in my career than what I had anticipated. So that’s what I did wrong. What do we do differently?

KATE: Yeah. I mean, there’s so much that you said in there. But I think it’s honestly like a really, really common scenario that not just practitioners. I think most entrepreneurs live, but specifically I find with practitioners is like when you’re in school and envisioning your practice, you’re probably thinking I’m gonna be working with cool patients and clients. I’m gonna be really honing my craft. And like it’s very modality focused. You’re really like thinking about yourself as a practitioner and sort of like, yeah, yeah, okay. I’ve got to do the business stuff, but it’s not at the forefront. And so then when you get into business, that’s sort of what you prioritize is like the patient facing time. And it is the priority, but like when you’re just getting started, like who are those patients? So what I always tell people because I find a lot of times for practitioners, it’s the first time they’ve been self-employed whether they’re transitioning from another career or they’ve been employed in another practice or you’re just coming out of school. And when you’re self-employed, you are in the driver’s seat, you are in control. And you really, really, from the very beginning have to create a business that supports your life, or it’ll very, very quickly become your life. Right? And I think in supporting your life, you have to build the business and add a little bit of structure so that you can get all of the pieces done in the week because honestly, there’s more than enough time to get everything done. But I think the biggest mistake that I see a lot of practitioners make in the beginning with their schedules is opening up so much availability for patients and clients. And then they just sort of assume the other, the business stuff will get done. Right? It’s an afterthought. What I usually tell my clients when it comes to this scheduling thing is figure out how many people you want to see a week – what’s your fully booked number? And how much time that’s gonna take. And if you are kind of close to that amount, you’re 50% booked right now, or above, allot that amount of time in the week. If you’re less than 50% booked right now, you’re just starting out. You don’t even need all of your hours. You can expand. It is so much easier to expand your schedule, then shrink it down. So usually I like to have just the amount of hours that you can have, maybe an extra hour or two to fit in the amount you need to see, and then the rest, you actually block time for all your other tasks, whether it be charting or marketing or following up things like that so that it is all in your schedule, not just the patient facing time and then the rest is an afterthought. But then the second, the last piece of this I think is staying very firm on this, right from the beginning. Setting those boundaries with yourself, because we think things will be one or two times, right? Oh, I’ll just do this on a Saturday or I’ll just do this in an evening. Patterns and habits form much, much faster than we realize. And I think if you start the pattern early or start the habit that you are leaking business time into the rest of your life, it does not get better, it only snowballs worse. Yeah. I’m sure that’s what you found.

THE KEY TO MAKING YOUR BUSINESS PROFITABLE AND LIFE-GIVING

Structure will give you so much flexibility. You will have so much more freedom and flexibility the more you have structure in your business. - Kate Matheson, Mathesonandco

 

DR. DANIELLE: Very much so. With my first practice, long story short, I just got to a point where I was no longer okay with dealing with it all. And I was pregnant and I wanted nothing more than to have a healthy baby. So I sold my practice. Another doctor took over roughly like, I don’t know, six weeks after the point which I decided I wanted to step away from practice. So it was all very fast. And a couple of years later, I started to practice again, started with a whole different approach. I kept my office expenses really low, first of all. And that was very key. Yeah. And I set my office hours to be 10-2, Monday and Thursday. And then I had like 4-6 or 4-7, depending on what was needed, like how many people were scheduled on Wednesday evening. So it was a total of like 11 hours every week. And my practice was profitable in less than 90 days. And I remember thinking like, this is a thing.

KATE: It can be so much better.

DR. DANIELLE: Yes. It was so much better. And I was excited and I was energized by my practice, not drained by it. I didn’t feel like it was sucking the life out of me. And I could actually get out of bed at a decent time in the morning. I wasn’t struggling with fatigue and burnout really. And I also knew at that point to make sure that I had time scheduled or dedicated to working on marketing for that new practice. And so it was a very, very different experience.

KATE: I always tell people, because I think a lot of times people are like, oh structure, like it’s so formal, it’s so rigid. Structure will give you so much flexibility. You will have so much more freedom and flexibility the more you have structure in your business. And I’ve found that this is my sixth business that I’ve had over the last eleven years and I’ve just been sort of getting better and better at running them. And this business is highly structured and I have a lot of freedom and like we were sort of saying before you need that white space to just think and dream and be an entrepreneur and the structure allows you to do that.

DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. And that’s a really great point too. When you own the business and you work in the business, you have two primary roles that you are filling. Someone has to be the CEO of the business and someone has to be the delivery person – delivery as in delivering the service, right? You’ve gotta do both of those things. And so you have to make time for both of those things and not just time, but like you have to have the energy for those things. You have to have the bandwidth.

KATE: A hundred percent. And I think actually – we’ll probably talk about this – it’s like, it’s not always time. It’s not always that you need hours. I call it intention and attention. You just need to have some intention on certain things. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to take a lot of hours, but they maybe are quite important still.

WHERE YOU THINK YOU NEED TO SPEND YOUR TIME VS. WHERE BOOKINGS COME FROM

DR. DANIELLE: Yes. Okay, so I brought up the post that you had shared recently on Instagram that I was like, okay, let’s talk more about this Kate, because you have two slides here. And on the first one it says, “Where do you think you need to spend your time?” And on the second one, it says “Where most bookings come from.” And I was like, Hmm, interesting. So really it’s like where you think you need to spend your time and what you actually need to spend your time on. If we know where most bookings are coming from, then we know this is where we need to put our focus. We don’t need to spend time on these other things.

 


 

Instagram post from @mathesonandco on where bookings really come from.

 

KATE: Well, that’s what I was gonna say is I was really careful in doing this post actually, in not to say like, okay, this is where you think you need to spend your time versus where you actually need to spend your time, but this is why I’m saying intention versus attention versus necessarily hours. Because a lot of the things that are very high impact booking sources, they actually don’t require a lot of time. So it’s really about putting your focus and your energy and prioritizing the right things versus sort of needlessly spending time just because we think we should. Which I sadly think happens a lot because like we were saying so many practitioners, they don’t know the business side, you don’t really learn it in school. So they get out knowing they need to be marketing and the need to get the bookings, but then they really look at what you can see, what is happening, and what most people are talking about. And that happens to be the stuff you can see from scrolling Instagram or the stuff you can see on people’s websites. It’s the branding or the social media or the ads. And that’s really just a small piece of the picture.

DR. DANIELLE: Yeah, totally. And as I look at this for people that can’t see it, I’m gonna list out the things that you’ve got here that are places that people think that they need to spend their time on. We’ve got social media, content creation, admin referrals and reviews being only 2%. Branding, logo, website, 10%. More credentials, and then other marketing. And I’m like a lot of people that I talked to or that I’ve coached in the past, spend a lot of time on some of these things that are really a waste of time, their logo, for example, like it doesn’t really matter that much, especially in the beginning when you are actually the only service provider in your practice. Later, if and when your vision for your practice changes and it grows and you’re building a team of service providers, then it is actually more important to have a logo that represents a business, but otherwise you are the business, right?

KATE: You don’t even really need a logo if you’re just like a solo practitioner. It’s so unimportant. A lot of times tweaking the website and changing the colors and all of these things, it actually is I think similar to the more credentials. It’s like, I have a lot of people who are like, I’m also taking this course right now, and I’m also taking this right now and I’m also taking this, but I got no bookings. A lot of these things I think are resistance coming up, right? We’re procrastinating and zooming and learning as a way to be like, well, I’m doing something to grow my business. But it’s because they’re either nervous to do the real impactful stuff or they don’t know what to do. So again, they’re just doing what they can see thinking it’s the right thing.

DR. DANIELLE: The more credentials thing is a really big pain point for me as a coach, because I see a lot of people spend a lot of time and invest a lot of money into their continuing education and getting more credentials, hoping that when they have these more credentials, that’s going to their practice for them. When truthfully, most people don’t even know what those credentials are. They don’t even know that they should be looking for someone with those credentials. So the credentials don’t really matter that much. And practitioners don’t like to hear that because it makes us feel good when we have all those letters after our name. It’s like it sets us apart. We think, but truthfully to the general public, it really doesn’t.

KATE: Yeah. And I love continuing education. I fully, fully support it, but when you’re just starting out where you’re not fully booked yet and getting fully booked is the goal – because that’s what I do, people are coming to me because they’re not fully booked – so if fully booked is the goal, you don’t need more credentials to get there. After you get there, sure do it. But I think a lot of people use it as a bit of a bandaid. And, and I always say like, if you are saying the sentence, like once I have this, then this like once I have this credential, then I’ll get more clients or once my website is done, then I’ll be able to get visible. If you’re saying any of those sentences to yourself, you gotta kind of like stop right now and reevaluate because that’s more of a mindset issue than an actual strategy problem.

DR. DANIELLE: I couldn’t agree with you more on that. Okay. So on your next slide then, it’s a pie chart. And you’ve got it divided into 1, 2, 3, 4 places where most bookings come from with the biggest one of those four places being repeat bookings. And I think we need to spend some time talking about each one of these. And then next after repeat bookings, a smaller number of bookings comes from referrals and word of mouth. An even smaller number comes from marketing and an even smaller number comes from passive brand bookings. Okay. So if we’re putting our attention on where most bookings come from and we know that the majority of them come from repeat bookings, what does this mean when we need to do in our practices?

KATE: If anyone’s listening to this right now who follows me, knows me, you know like I am such a big fan of retention and, and not like needless retention for the sake of it. But like people are coming to you for results, they want something. So like the better you can get those results the better you’re gonna do, the more referrals you’re gonna get. And usually that doesn’t happen in one visit. So obviously we need to be retaining and seeing repeat clients. And I analyze a lot of numbers. I analyze all my clients’ data. So it’s been like hundreds of practitioners over the years and the biggest, biggest chunk of that pie is always going to be your current clients, your past patients, it’s going to be your sort of current patient base. And the beauty of this is the time involved to retain them is very, very, very small. It’s very small. And actually I’m coming up to doing a masterclass soon, basically revealing sort of the behind the scenes of our own clinic strategy and retention is a big part of it. So I know our numbers and I was running them recently, and for us, I think 75% give or take of our total bookings are repeats, revisits in some way. And two thirds of those on average, we rebook in-clinic. So before they leave, they’re rebooked for their next one, even if it’s three months from now, they’re re-booked two-thirds of the time on average. So that totals 50% of our practice’s bookings. So I actually think one of the highest impact skills for you to master as a manual therapist or one-on-one like in-person clinician is re-booking people in-clinic. If you can rebook people in your appointments. It requires no additional time and it can account for 50% or more of your total bookings. And I know it’s a skill that some people have no trouble with, but I see it as a skill that a lot of practitioners really struggle with. Because it’s nerve-racking. It can be a bit scary to recommend people to come back in.

EMPOWERING YOUR CLIENTS TO GET THE CARE THEY NEED WITH A FEW SIMPLE PHRASES

DR. DANIELLE: Absolutely. There was another post that you had shared, it’s a little bit further back on Instagram, and you had talked about, it was like, we typically say this, but instead of saying it this way, say it this way. And I love this post literally with the hearts on it. So an example here was, “You can reschedule in two weeks if you feel like you need another appointment.” And instead of saying that, and then just kind of like walking away, there’s an alternative option that you’ve given here and says, “I’d like to see you again in two weeks, does the 17th or 18th work better for you?” Like you’ve just given me a choice essentially to schedule that next appointment. It’s really simple.


Instagram post from @mathesonandco on simple phrases to help clients get the care they need.

KATE: It’s very simple. I was gonna say, I mean, there are a few other things like in appointments that you can do to sort of support it along so that people are even asking you when they should rebook. But mastering your language around inviting people or really what I consider it is like, it’s a professional recommendation, right? You are the professional, they are seeing you because they don’t know. So you are making the professional recommendation as to what they need to do next, which includes when they need to come back in. So a lot of people will say oh, I don’t want to be pushy. Right? I don’t want to push them into another appointment. Personally, I think when you don’t make the recommendation or you don’t tell them when they need to come back in, no you’re not being pushy, but you are also not giving them the choice. When you recommend, you’re giving them the choice and they can make the empowered decision to say, yes, I want to continue with my care, or no, I’m gonna make the personal decision that for whatever reason, it doesn’t work for me, and I won’t. Most people, if they’re already there, they’re gonna commit to their health. But I think as the professional, you really need to make the recommendation so that the patient can make their own final decision.

DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. And if we think about this in regards to how the nervous system works, specifically how the brain works and decision making processes, there isn’t a decision making process happening in the brain when you just say to someone, you should probably come back in a couple of weeks. They just hear information, that’s it. But when you ask the question, then things are happening in their brain where they’re making a decision. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you are forcing them or pushing them to make a decision. You’ve just asked a question to invite them to make a decision.

KATE: Yeah, it’s very simple. Like literally anyone go find that post, use that exact language. It doesn’t really have to be more comp than that. Always. I recommend this and does this work for you? Which is better? You ask them the question after, like you said, to elicit a response and, and then you rebook, because that I think is once again, the most foundational skills get really, really good at re rebooking people in practice. You don’t have to do work outside of it. And, and boom, that’s 50% of your bookings right there.

DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. That’s a really great point too, because most of us, we love what we do, but we don’t want to do it all the time. We want to still have a life. We want to have room for our family. We want to have room for taking care of ourselves. And the truth is there are only 24 hours in the day. So if you can maximize your efforts in your practice with what you’re going to be doing with the patients that are showing up or the clients that are showing up, then doing that allows you to have the space that you want to have with your family or for yourself.

KATE: Yeah. Yeah. I always say like, no one is handing you an award for like the most hours worked. No one cares how much you do – do the least amount. And this is coming from a type A, high achieving workaholic, perfectionist, no one cares do less, just do the minimum effect of effort. I say, like the minimal amount. And that’s why I like to look for these very high impact strategies. Where do most of your bookings come from? How do you get the highest amount of bookings with the least amount of effort and prioritize those things first and foremost? Your life will change, I swear.

THE POWER OF IN-CLINIC BOOKINGS AND WORD OF MOUTH

DR. DANIELLE: Okay. One other thing that I wanted to talk about is how small of the pie referrals and word of mouth is where we were talking about where most bookings come from. And I thought, again, this just kind of reiterates the point of repeat bookings being a thing that we really want to put our attention on, making sure that we’re making strong and clear recommendations for the people who do show up in our practice, and not creating one I’ve called in the past a leaky bucket where it’s like someone comes in for that first appointment and you don’t really create a treatment plan or clear recommendations for them – there’s a lot to say about this – you give them a sense of, well, I was here one time and things didn’t really changed, it must not have worked. Yeah. Well then we, like we can go down the whole rabbit hole. Is that right?

KATE: I know that’s why I was saying like, there’s just so much about the retention that the piece that I love and, and exactly setting clear expectations and communicating treatment plans; there’s more to it than just, I recommend you do this, but it can be quite simple, but I think outside of your modality, people really focus on like what they’re actually doing, but there’s so much more to the actual appointment in the intangible skills that really support patients – I think just as much, if not more than the manual treatment you’re delivering.

DR. DANIELLE: Okay. So in regards to referrals and word of mouth, the thing that stands out to me here as I considered this was that most people think that referrals and word of mouth means that you don’t have to do anything.

KATE: And that’s why I think you were surprised when you saw the first slide where it says only 2% of time is spent on referrals and reviews. People assume that it’s a passive approach and there’s a statistic, and I wish I had remembered the exact statistic, but it’s something like 83% of people say they are happy to give a referral, but only 29% actually do. So you are losing out again on like 50% of the referrals. And while they are in terms of total bookings in your practice, a smaller amount, they’re generally gonna be the biggest piece of new bookings, right? There’s basically new people, and then there’s existing people. And the biggest amount of new people generally is going to come from referrals. And I like to take a much more active approach to it where you are actively just asking your community for referrals and reviews, because I think reviews also, a lot of people will have like the automated triggered thing that sends people and ask for a Google review – like you’re not gonna get nearly as many reviews if you just ask people because the referrals and reviews then become very, very, much more high quality bookings. And again, it can be about 30 minutes a week or so you spend 30 minutes max an hour and you are out there asking people for referrals and reviews. That’s again, in our practice specifically about 15% of our new bookings come from referrals or word of mouth. But for months, now we don’t actively ask for them quite as much, but we still actively ask for the reviews, but in the beginning actively asking, right. Getting people used to referring you, it will speed up the process of word of mouth much, much faster. And again, we’re talking 30 to 60 minutes a week for pretty much the bulk of your new bookings, right? So 50% of your bookings can come from just getting really good at rebooking people in-clinic, probably another 10%, 15%, 20% of your bookings can come from just thirty minutes to an hour a week asking people for referrals and reviews.

Getting people used to referring you, it will speed up the process of word of mouth much, much faster. And again, we’re talking 30 to 60 minutes a week for pretty much the bulk of your new bookings, right? So 50% of your bookings can come from just getting really good at rebooking people in-clinic, probably another 10%, 15%, 20% of your bookings can come from just thirty minutes to an hour a week asking people for referrals and reviews.

– Kate Matheson, Matheson & Co

GIVING CLIENTS WHAT THEY WANT, NO TRICKERY NEEDED

DR. DANIELLE: Which is really awesome. And I feel like if I had known these things sooner in practice ownership, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be here because I started this podcast to help people like learn from my own experience and learn how to do it differently and avoid getting burned out. It’s become really clear to me over the last couple of weeks; my mission is to make the world a healthier place and I can’t do that alone. Like we need as many health and wellness practitioners out there filling their practices because when that happens, that means that the utilization of natural, alternative, holistic health and wellness options is increasing. And if we are all taking a passive approach to building our practice and just hoping that other people refer to us and then spending time creating content on social media, instead we’re actually missing the boat. We’re missing the opportunity to improve, increase the utilization and make the role a healthier place.

KATE: Yeah, I fully agree. It’s why I started this business as well. Right? I have leaned so heavily on alternative and complementary medicine over the years for my own health, and I would go see practitioners who were incredible. And I remember one time my massage therapist told me that I was her only booking that week. She was in Toronto. It’s not a cheap city. And she had made a hundred dollars that week and I was like, no, no way. And my husband at the time was in chiropractic school or they were like just finishing up and they learned nothing about how to actually bring people in. And so I’m thinking in my head, all of these people out there like myself, I was hunting on Google, I was searching for practitioners who were really, really good in what I needed. And it was so hard to find because everyone was like cookie cutter, generic, generic, generic, generic, like all the same language. I think the thing that a lot of practitioners don’t realize is like with marketing, you don’t need to force, you don’t need to coerce. You don’t need to trick people into working with you. They are searching for you right now and they’re searching for the right practitioner for them. And so, so much of what you do is really about just meeting the needs and making it clear what needs you serve. And it can be so much easier than we think to grow. There are more than enough people out there that want exactly what you offer. It’s just about finding them and really making those active connections rather than waiting passively for them to come and find you because they can’t find you. It’s not easy.

 


You don't need to trick people into working with you. They are searching for you right now and they're searching for the right practitioner for them. - Kate Matheson, Matheson & Co

 

DR. DANIELLE: Right. Yeah. And we want to think that it’s easy. We want to think like, well I have this business now, everyone knows. And that’s just really not what happens.

KATE: No. And especially if you’re let’s say a chiropractor, because that’s sort of both of our worlds, that if you have a list of twenty-five things on your website that you treat and you sort of just sound like a generic chiropractor doing all the same things, how do you stand out for someone who has just had ACL surgery and needs to rehab it or for the senior who is dealing with chronic pain? Everyone has a specific need. And a lot of practitioners now – we’re kind of getting off on different topic – but a lot of practitioners come to me they don’t want a niche and it’s not, you don’t have to niche. You don’t have to really, really focus, but you do need to get the word out there and take an active approach to sharing really specifically the needs that you’re very good at serving, right? The situations that people are in and how you can serve them. And it doesn’t have to be plastering yourself all over social media. It can be really just actively letting your community and patients and friends and networks and other professionals know very clearly what it is that you do. And things can grow much, much faster from there. They can really start to snowball.

DR. DANIELLE: I think that we actually are each other’s best allies, you know? We tend to think that we’re in competition with anyone else that is in health and wellness, or specifically anyone else that helps improve the health of the nervous system and chiropractors tend to get really territorial about like, well, we are the only people that can heal a nervous system and like, eh, you know, I’ve been a chiropractor for almost a decade and a half. And I just don’t agree with that. I think acupuncture and nutrition and oh, I don’t know, sleep – so many things that can also help to heal the nervous system. But my point is we’re not in competition with each other. We are actually each other’s best allies because we all have the same mission, really. We all want to make the role a healthier place and none of us can do it alone. No one of us can help 8 billion people on the planet.

KATE: Yeah. It’s so true. And I think once we start realizing that there is more than enough room and there’s more than enough people for everyone and I think a lot of it also comes from fear and scarcity of like, oh, there’s not enough for me. I must hang onto all of them. But once we realize, and we’re not in a place of so much scarcity, we realize there’s more than enough, we feel a little bit more confident in what we should be doing and where we should be spending our time to grow. And you’re starting to see things flow a little bit more and you’re starting to see things build, it becomes a little bit easier to sort of loosen the reins a little bit and realize that there’s so many practitioners of all different kinds that can support one another. Right? It’s actually a really amazing industry and I’ve worked in a lot of different industries and I love, love, love supporting health and wellness practitioners because their mission is so heart centered, it is so real, and it is so, so needed today.

DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. I say this all the time. I’ve been saying this for years, but it’s needed now more than ever.

KATE: Yeah. What’s that saying like the best day to plant a tree was twenty-five years ago, the second best day is today. I think it’s the same with people’s health. Right. And every day, just more and more people are waking up to the different alternatives outside of maybe conventional medicine or incongruence with that. And I think it’s really, really amazing everything that practitioners do. And it’s why I love, like, you don’t need to be spending 20 hours a week or 10 hours a week or even five hours a week on social media. Right. Do a little bit. And then you actually can spend the bulk of your time doing what you came to do, doing what you studied so hard to do and ultimately what you love. I’m sure most practitioners would rather be with their patients and clients than doing the social media. So when you get a little bit more clear on really what moves the needle in your practice, I actually think you can do much more and much more of what you love.

DR. DANIELLE: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Awesome. Thank you so much. Okay. Share with people before we wrap up, where can they go connect with you? Where can they learn more about what you do?

KATE: Yeah, so probably the two best places if you want to chat, you can always reach out to me on Instagram @MathesonAndCo. But I’m always really happy to chat. You can drop me a DM. I’m like not on there every day I’ll see your message. And then the other is my website. You can find a bunch of resources, although sort of under construction at the moment, but you can go to MathesonAndCo.ca and there’s tons and tons of free resources out there for health and wellness practitioners.

DR. DANIELLE: Thank you again so much.

KATE: It was my pleasure, my pleasure. Great way to end the week.