Ep 51 - Why isn’t your business growing?

Episode Show Notes

Welcome to Beyond the Clinic!

If you’ve been feeling stuck in your business, wondering why clients aren’t flowing in despite all your hard work, you’re not alone. No one taught us how to run a business when we trained as healthcare professionals. We were taught to help people, not to market ourselves or build financially sustainable practices.

In this episode, I’m sharing the three most common mistakes healthcare professionals make in business and how to fix them. These insights will transform your business and income, so let’s dive in!

Episode Summary

Here’s what we’re covering today:

 The Time-for-Money Trap – Why relying solely on one-to-one sessions keeps your income capped and what to do instead.

 The Automation Gap – How not having a client attraction system is making business harder than it needs to be.

 The Marketing Myth – Why being on directories or having a website isn’t actually marketing your business.

This episode is all about creating awareness, not blame. Once you understand what’s been holding you back, you can start making changes that will give you the freedom and flexibility you’ve been dreaming of.

Key Takeaways

• Mistake #1: Relying on One-to-One Sessions

  Trading time for money caps your income. Even if you’re fully booked, your growth is limited by the hours in your day. It’s time to rethink how you structure your services and pricing.

• Mistake #2: Lack of Automation

  Without a system to bring in leads on autopilot, you’re stuck on a hamster wheel of endless hustle. Automation can help you attract the right clients while saving you time and energy.

• Mistake #3: Playing Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe with Directories

  Being listed in directories or having a website isn’t enough. Real marketing means reaching people before they even know they need you, building trust, and nurturing them into paying clients.

Resources & Links

• Episode 22: Learn more about automation and how to buy back your time.

• Episode 19: Get ideas for creating a lead-generating freebie.

• Join the Freedom Formula: My free 3-day event where I’ll guide you step-by-step on how to attract dream clients, automate your marketing, and break free from the time-for-money trap. Spots are limited, so sign up now!

I'd love to hear from you, click the link to 'text' the show directly

Mindset Programme Waitlist: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/mindset-waitlist

Freedom Formula: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/freedom-formula

The Master Plan:

Helping you build the business of your dreams. Get your 22 point step-by step workbook here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

Connect with me:

Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/beyondtheclinicbusiness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Sarah Almond Bushell: Now if you've been feeling stuck in your business and wondering why, that despite all of your hard work clients aren't following, in the way that you expect I want you to know this. It's not your fault, no one taught us how to run a business, when we trained as healthcare professionals. We were taught how to help people, not to market ourselves, not to attract clients or build a financially sustainable practice.

[00:00:28] Sarah Almond Bushell: And so if you are struggling right now, feeling like you're doing everything right, but still not seeing the results that you want, please note, and I can say this hand on heart. As a business coach, you are not alone. In today's episode, I'm going to walk you through three of the common mistakes that so many healthcare professionals make simply because we were never shown a better way.

[00:00:53] Sarah Almond Bushell: Number one, relying solely on one-to-one sessions and why this keeps your income [00:01:00] capped and what to do instead. Number two is the automation gap. How not having a client attraction system is making business harder than it needs to be. And number three, the marketing myth. Why being on directories like nutritionist resource or having a website isn't actually marketing your business.

[00:01:23] Sarah Almond Bushell: So this wasn't a particularly comfortable episode for me to write, but I felt it was an important one that could help so many of my colleagues because this isn't about blame, it's about awareness. Because once you understand what it is that you are missing that's been holding you back, you can start to make changes.

[00:01:43] Sarah Almond Bushell: And honestly, these changes will transform your business and your income. So with that said, dive in. So I know you are a highly skilled health professional. You've put in years of study, [00:02:00] you are passionate about your work. You're deeply committed to helping your clients, and yet your business isn't where you thought it would be.

[00:02:08] Sarah Almond Bushell: Maybe you're seeing some clients, but you're constantly looking for new ones. Or maybe you've got a fully booked calendar, but you're still not making enough money to give you that freedom lifestyle that you imagined. And I know that when you decided to go into private practice or start your own health business, you probably pictured flexibility, financial security, and the ability to work

[00:02:34] Sarah Almond Bushell: on your own terms without a boss to answer to, but instead, you are working harder than ever. You're juggling admin and marketing and content creation alongside your client sessions and your clinical paperwork. And at the end of the month, you're still worrying about making enough money to be able to pay yourself.

[00:02:55] Sarah Almond Bushell: So you might be thinking. I need more clients, but I don't actually have the time to go and [00:03:00] find them, or I'm putting in all of this effort, but I feel stuck at the same income level. Or how is it that others seem to be making a lot of money while I'm still struggling? And you know what? You've likely done all the things that you're supposed to do.

[00:03:17] Sarah Almond Bushell: You've followed the standard path, you've built the website. You're posting consistently on social media. Maybe you've even started growing an email list, but nothing seems to be making a real dent in things. You are not failing because you're not good enough at business. You're stuck because unknowingly, you're making just a real small handful of crucial mistakes that so many healthcare professional business owners make, and it's through no fault of their own, after all.

[00:03:48] Sarah Almond Bushell: As I said at the beginning there, our university education is geared towards working in the NHS and not setting up private practices or running our own businesses. But it's [00:04:00] these key mistakes that are keeping you in that constant cycle of struggle, making you question whether, what, is this really worth it?

[00:04:08] Sarah Almond Bushell: So let me tell you now what those three most common mistakes are that I see from my colleagues. So the first one is exchanging time for money indefinitely. So this is where your business is completely dependent upon you showing up. No clients booked today, no income. You need some time off. No income. You wanna scale?

[00:04:34] Sarah Almond Bushell: Well, You can't. You've only got a certain number of hours in the day. So imagine this, it's Monday morning, you wake up, you've got scratchy sore throat at a pounding headache. You know, you should take it easy and rest have the day off. But you've got a full day of client sessions booked. You know that if you cancel them, you either lose a day's earning

[00:04:56] Sarah Almond Bushell: or if you reschedule, you're gonna overload your [00:05:00] future self. And so what do you do? You push through, you drag yourself through session after session, you are popping, paracetamol, and ibuprofen. Your voice is cracking. The energy is just draining out of you because your income depends on you physically showing up.

[00:05:18] Sarah Almond Bushell: And let's be honest, when you don't put your own oxygen mask on first, you can't optimally help others. This is the reality of relying only on one-to-one work. Your income is capped by how many hours you can work, and that means even if you're fully booked and running a waiting list, there's nowhere to grow from there.

[00:05:38] Sarah Almond Bushell: Sure, you can bring in an employee to share the load. But that also means paying a salary and therefore less profit to you. But here's something else I want you to consider. Even when you are at max capacity, you're still not earning what you should be. My question is, are you really charging enough? So those clients who've come to [00:06:00] me for business coaching who are fully booked are fully booked because they're the cheapest professional out there.

[00:06:06] Sarah Almond Bushell: I had one client who charged 35 for consultation, and was chocker, you can see why now, as well as devaluing our profession, and that's another issue entirely. I won't go down that rabbit hole today. If you are still pricing your sessions based on what you think people will pay rather than the true value of the transformation that you provide.

[00:06:29] Sarah Almond Bushell: You are already undercutting yourself. And if you are booked solid with one-to-one sessions, you might not even have the time to step back to look at this as a business owner and not a clinician and fix it. And so that leads me on to mistake number two, and that's where you are not using automation to bring in clients on autopilot. 

[00:06:54] Sarah Almond Bushell: So let me ask you something here. Where are your clients coming from? Are [00:07:00] you constantly trying to get more eyes on your business? Are you posting on Instagram and hoping for clients? Maybe you're trying to figure out Facebook ads, but you're not sure if they're actually doing anything for you and still no more clients.

[00:07:13] Sarah Almond Bushell: And tell me honestly, how many of our social media followers are actually people who would be your dream client? Because most often health professionals, social media accounts are filled with other health professionals liking, commenting, cheering you on, but of course they're not booking with you and nor are they ever going to.

[00:07:36] Sarah Almond Bushell: You might have thought I just need a bigger audience before I can sell anything, or I just need to keep posting consistently and. Eventually people will start reaching out, or if I had more followers, my business would surely take off. But I'm gonna let you in on a secret. You do not need a big audience, but what you do need is the right [00:08:00] audience.

[00:08:01] Sarah Almond Bushell: You could have 10,000 followers on Instagram and still struggle to get clients, or you could have a hundred engaged ideal clients on your email list and be fully booked. So you need to have a proven system to bring in leads consistently. And when I say proven, I mean proven in terms of your business, not in terms of what somebody else is doing and succeeding in, because everything else that follows comes after lead generation.

[00:08:30] Sarah Almond Bushell:  You can have the best offer in the world that delivers incredible life-changing results. But if you don't have a steady, consistent stream of leads, those sales just won't follow. Getting leads in the first place is the cornerstone of getting more clients and customers. And if you don't have a system to bring in new leads on automation, you're going to be spending a lot of time.

[00:08:56] Sarah Almond Bushell: Energy, hustle, power to get them, which [00:09:00] can feel like a hamster wheel just working harder and harder and harder than you need to doing, let's face it, what isn't the most interesting work for us as healthcare professionals? Here's what I mean. Say you create an amazing social media post about gut health.

[00:09:18] Sarah Almond Bushell: You spend an hour crafting the caption and designing a beautiful Canva graphic to create a carousel, and you choose the perfect hashtags and then you post it. And crickets. You might get a couple of your dietitians colleagues comment. Maybe a friend gives you a fire emoji, but no one's clicking the link in your bio to book in.

[00:09:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: There's no discovery calls, no new leads. You might get one DM from someone who could be a potential client, but by the time you respond, they've lost interest or they found someone else. Does that sound familiar? So without automation, you are in effect relying on look, hoping [00:10:00] that the right person happens to see the right post at the right time and take the right action.

[00:10:05] Sarah Almond Bushell: But instead, you could have a system that works without you constantly having to be on Instagram and monitoring the process. So imagine this instead, a potential client sees your gut health post notices that you've got a quiz called Is Your Gut Healthy, or Is it Actually the cause of your tummy troubles and asks for the link in the comments.

[00:10:29] Sarah Almond Bushell: They're excited to find out why they started the day with a flat stomach, but by noon they look six months pregnant and they feel bloated and really uncomfortable. To get their personalised results, they enter their email address and their personalised report is sent directly to their inbox. They then begin to receive really well crafted, welcome email sequence that introduces them to you, shares tons of valuable advice and resources, and they begin to appreciate your expertise [00:11:00] Over the next few days, they look forward to getting your lovely, nurturing emails packed with values that they read over breakfast and action straight away, all the while warming up to working with you.

[00:11:14] Sarah Almond Bushell: Now, by the time you make them an offer, they know they like and they trust you. They feel a connection with you and they appreciate your expertise, meaning they've literally got their credit card in hand and are ready to buy. That's how you turn cold leads into paying clients without chasing people down or relying on social media algorithms, and every step of this process can happen automatically.

[00:11:42] Sarah Almond Bushell: I'm gonna link to episode 22 in the show notes, which is all about automation and buying back your time. And so actually that brings us to the final mistake, mistake number three. You think you are doing marketing, but you are actually just playing Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. So a [00:12:00] lot of health professionals believe that they're marketing their business when in reality they're just listing themselves in directories. and hoping for the best. So directories for dietitians like nutritionist resource, the BDA free directory, the consultant finder. They're great, but they're not marketing your business. It's like placing an advert on a virtual notice board, and often they aren't even written as adverts. They simply list your qualifications, your skills, and your experience.

[00:12:31] Sarah Almond Bushell: None of which actually encourage people to buy. Now, nearly every client I've worked with has signed up to these directories at one point or another thinking, now my details are out there. Clients should start coming in. And it's the same with websites. They spend time and energy creating a website and think, now I'm marketing.

[00:12:50] Sarah Almond Bushell: My clients will find me. But here's the problem. This isn't marketing. This is waiting. Being on a directory or having a website [00:13:00] means you're only visible to the people who already are actively searching for a certain professional, like a dietitians. These are the people who already know they have a problem that can be solved, and they've already identified the type of expert who does that.

[00:13:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: They want help, and they're literally going through a list of names, playing Eeny, meeny, miny, moe to decide who to book with. They're not choosing you based on your expertise or your unique methodology or even the quality of your results. They're choosing you based on who's got the nicest profile picture, who's closest to them if they don't want online, and who's the cheapest?

[00:13:41] Sarah Almond Bushell: Do you really want your business success to be based on whether someone prefers the name Sarah over Susan? Websites and directories are only tapping into the smallest percentage of your potential clients, the ones who already know they need a certain type of professional. But what about the [00:14:00] hundreds, if not thousands, even millions of people who have the problem you solve, but don't even know that a dietitians is the answer.

[00:14:10] Sarah Almond Bushell: It could be the woman who's been struggling with her bloating for years, but doesn't realise that improving her gut health could help her. It could be the parent tearing their hair out over their toddlers fussy eating, but thinks the only solution is bribing them at the dinner table. It could be the professional in their forties who's constantly exhausted, but assumes it's just getting older.

[00:14:33] Sarah Almond Bushell: Now these people aren't searching for a dietitians. Instead they're Googling, why am I so bloated all of the time? How do I get my toddler to eat vegetables? What are foods that give you more energy? So if you're only relying on directories, you are missing out on the entire audience that doesn't yet know they need you.

[00:14:56] Sarah Almond Bushell: Real marketing, the kind that grows a sustainable [00:15:00] and highly profitable business means getting in front of these people before they even realise that they need you. It means creating content that's. Speaks to their struggles and their hopes and their dreams before they even think of hiring someone. It means providing valuable free resources that build trust so they see you as the go-to expert, and it means using automation to take them off social media and bring them into your world where you can nurture them via email so that when they're ready to buy, they choose you. If you're only on directories, you are fishing in the teeny tiniest of ponds and you are competing with everyone else who's doing the same thing, and that's when price wars happen. One undercuts another to get the client colleagues comparing rates and asking each other, how much should you charge for this?

[00:15:53] Sarah Almond Bushell: How much should you charge for that when the truth is you can charge whatever you want to charge when you're doing your marketing [00:16:00] properly. I charge 997 pounds for my fussy eater program. When it's on discount, it's 1500 pounds at my standard price, whereas the next dietitians will charge a hundred quid for a new client and 75 for a follow up.

[00:16:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: Because when you learn to market effectively, you become the person that your ideal clients find, follow, connect, engage with, and trust. Even before they know they need a dietitian. Now that we've uncovered the biggest mistakes holding you back, it's time to take action. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed here because you don't need to fix everything at once.

[00:16:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: Just start with one small step today and your business will begin to shift. So here are three things that you can do right now to start growing your business in a smarter and more sustainable way. So my first suggestion for you is to set up one lead generating freebie. [00:17:00] So if you don't yet have a lead magnet that's a free resource that helps potential clients and brings them into your world, this is going to be your first step.

[00:17:09] Sarah Almond Bushell: So think about what your ideal client is already searching for. If they struggle with gut health, could you create a quiz to help them understand their symptoms? If they're exhausted and low on energy, could you offer a three day meal plan for better energy levels? You really don't need to overcomplicate this.

[00:17:27] Sarah Almond Bushell: It could be a simple PDF guide, a checklist, or a short email course, as long as it's something that your audience actually wants and is searching for. You can check out episode 19 if you want some ideas. My second suggestion for you is to stop relying on directories and fix your marketing message. I would really love you to take a hard look at where your clients are coming from.

[00:17:57] Sarah Almond Bushell: If you're only getting clients from the directories [00:18:00] or relying on doctor referrals, you're fishing in that teeny, tiny, smallest of ponds possible, and you need to learn marketing if you want your business to grow. So instead, you start creating content that speaks directly to your ideal client's problems and frustrations and fears and worries and anxieties and goals and hopes and dreams.

[00:18:22] Sarah Almond Bushell: And then ask yourself, are you using language in your content in a way that connects with your clients or you are using scientific jargon and clinical terms that actually put potential clients off and only other professionals understand? The ones all the time are symptoms and clinics. Now, symptoms is not a positive term and nothing good ever happens in the clinic.

[00:18:48] Sarah Almond Bushell: And my third suggestion for you: I would love for you to join my free three day event coming up called The Freedom Formula. So if you want real guidance on how to fix these mistakes and [00:19:00] build a business that gives you more freedom, you absolutely need to come along to my free three day event. It's called the Freedom Formula because that's exactly what you get when you nail these things.

[00:19:13] Sarah Almond Bushell: So over three days, I'll walk you through step by step how to attract your dream clients, how to automate your marketing, and finally break free from that exhausting cycle of trading your time for money. This isn't just a theory, it's a really practical roadmap that will show you exactly what to do in order to build a thriving health business.

[00:19:36] Sarah Almond Bushell: I will pop the link in the show notes below so you can sign up before our spots fill up. Okay, so here's what I want you to take away from today. If your business isn't growing the way you want it to, it's not because you're not good enough. It's not because you need to work harder or post more on social media or chase after clients.

[00:19:58] Sarah Almond Bushell: It's because the way [00:20:00] most health professionals are taught to approach business is broken, and you're simply following a model that doesn't work. But here's the good news, once you recognize these mistakes. You can fix them. You can stop trading your time for money and you can create a business that actually scales.

[00:20:18] Sarah Almond Bushell: You can stop hoping for clients and instead build a system that brings them to you automatically. You can move beyond passive listings on websites and directories and start actively attracting the right people into your world, the people who are ready to work with you. And if you are ready to make those shifts, I do want to help you.

[00:20:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: So make sure you take at least one action step from today's episode. And if you want to make real changes, come and join me inside the Freedom Formula. It's free and it's gonna completely change the way you think about growing your business.

[00:20:55] Sarah Almond Bushell: Bye for now.