Ep 57 - The Season My Business Nearly Broke (And What I Did Next)

Episode Show Notes

Welcome along to episode 57. This episode is a deeply personal one that I’ve titled The Season That My Business Nearly Broke and What I Did Next. It’s a vulnerable share, and if I’m honest, recording this felt like lifting up my skirt and showing my knickers. But I believe in being real with you, and I hope my story can help you navigate your own challenges.

Episode Summary 

In today’s episode, I take you through the highs and lows of my journey over the past two years. My business, The Children’s Nutritionist, went from thriving, 150,000 monthly visitors, 500 new email subscribers each month, and incredible social media engagement - to a sudden and dramatic decline.

I share the honest truth about what happened when my website traffic tanked, my engagement flatlined, and I was left wondering if all my hard work had been for nothing. But this isn’t just a story of struggle. It’s about resilience, adaptation, and finding new ways to thrive.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing everything right but still seeing your results dry up, this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways 

1. You Are Not Your Metrics: Your worth isn’t defined by page views, likes, or open rates. Numbers will rise and fall, but your expertise, passion, and commitment to helping others are what truly matter.

2. Connection Over Content: Building real relationships with your audience is far more valuable than chasing algorithms. Trust and human connection are the real currency in today’s online business world.

3. Business Is a Journey: Success isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a series of small, brave choices made every single day. Growth often comes from the messy, uncertain moments, not just the wins.

4. Stay Curious and Open: The business landscape evolves quickly. Clinging to outdated strategies is like building on quicksand. Stay curious, keep learning, and adapt to the changes.

5. Success Is Inevitable If You Don’t Give Up: Resilience is key. Keep showing up, even when it feels like no one is watching, and believe that your success is just a matter of when, not if.

Let’s Connect 

If today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you. Tag me on Instagram, reply to one of my emails, or share this episode with someone who needs to hear it.

Until next time, keep believing, keep adapting, and keep building the business and life you truly want. Bye for 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: Welcome along to episode 57, and this is an episode that I've called the season that my business nearly broke and what I did next. Now I feel a little bit uncomfortable sharing this because I try and portray myself as a successful business person, but you know what? I have struggled in business as well.

[00:00:22] Sarah Almond Bushell: One of my mentors talks about when we talk about things that make us feel really quite vulnerable, it's like lifting up your [00:00:30] skirt and showing your knickers. And I totally understand where she's coming from with this because that is exactly how I feel recording this episode. And and all the time I was preparing for it and making notes for it as well.

[00:00:45] Sarah Almond Bushell: So I'm going to take you back about 18 months or so ago, maybe closer to two years now actually. And this is in relation to the children's nutritionist. My health business I run. So at the time, [00:01:00] that website, the blog that I'd poured my heart and soul and all my energy into was getting a lot of traction around about 150,000 visitors every single month, which was amazing.

[00:01:14] Sarah Almond Bushell: That meant that I was getting a lot of new email subscribers that averaged out around about 500 new subscribers coming in every single month. At the same time, my social media engagement was high, and every time I posted something, people were tagging in their friends or DMing me and [00:01:30] asking me for help, and you know what business was working, it was flowing. It was actually really fun. And then almost overnight it stopped and, it's in this episode that I'm going to share with you the honest story of what happened inside my children's nutrition business over the past two years or so, and how traffic tanked, engagement flatlined, and yes, somehow I stuck with it.

[00:01:55] Sarah Almond Bushell: I didn't quit and I adapted instead. So if you've ever felt [00:02:00] like you were just doing everything right and you're still watching your results dry up, then I hope this episode will resonate with you. So I am going to take you right back to the very beginning of the children's nutritionist story. So this was back in 2007.

[00:02:17] Sarah Almond Bushell: I was a mum of a newborn. I had a little boy, Charlie, and I was juggling everything. I had NHS work, I had family life, and I had, this quiet hope [00:02:30] that maybe just, maybe I could build something of my very own. So at first, this was just a really small side project, a private practice. And to be honest with you, I started it 'cause I was a little bit bored on maternity leave and I still had a lot of time before I was going back to work.

[00:02:47] Sarah Almond Bushell: So I worked with families locally. I squeezed in consultations around things like nursery pickups when my husband would come home from work and take over doing bathtime and [00:03:00] bedtime. But you know what? This worked all right for a little while, but life has a bit of a way of nudging you, doesn't it? So I'm going to fast forward 10 years or so to 2017, and this was that kind of pivotal moment, that breaking point when I realized that I just wanted more.

[00:03:18] Sarah Almond Bushell: I didn't just want to help the few families who could physically come and see me. I wanted to reach. More people. I wanted to have a bigger impact. I wanted to create more freedom for myself and my family, [00:03:30] and that's when I , threw myself headfirst into learning about digital marketing.

[00:03:35] Sarah Almond Bushell: So initially it was blogging and SEO and building my list off the back of that, and what I found was actually there was very few dieticians who were doing this. It wasn't the sort of thing that we just did. And I realized that Google had the potential to become my greatest ally in business. If I could answer the questions that parents were typing into the search bar in [00:04:00] Google, I could bring them to me, to my website and to my services.

[00:04:04] Sarah Almond Bushell: So it was fair to say it was fairly slow work. At first. There was late nights, after the kids went to bed writing blog posts in the quiet Saturdays, spent reading about keyword research instead of relaxing. Learning what on page SEO and backlinks actually meant When I trained clinically and not in digital marketing.

[00:04:25] Sarah Almond Bushell: But it paid off. So at first I just got a trickle of traffic a month, [00:04:30] maybe 2000 visitors or so, and then it went up to 5,000 and then up to 10,000. And before long, I'd built this website that was getting over 150,000 visitors every single month, and it truly felt magical. I was getting 500. Plus new email subscribers every month.

[00:04:47] Sarah Almond Bushell: Off the back of people finding my website, people were DMing me on Instagram, they were tagging their friends in posts. Families were finding my work all over the country and actually all over the [00:05:00] world. My little side hustle had become a real brand essentially. And. Life felt easy. Business felt fun.

[00:05:09] Sarah Almond Bushell: Clients found me, opportunities found me, or the dieticians found me and asked if I could help them, and I felt like I'd crack the code, a business that ran around my family and not the other way round. And then came 2018, and that was the year that everything changed. So if you've been here a while, you'll know that that was the year that my [00:05:30] mum passed away.

[00:05:31] Sarah Almond Bushell: She was relatively young, actually too young, and it just turned my world upside down. I took a three month sabbatical from my NHS role to be with my dad in Spain where they'd retired to helping him just navigate a life that he hadn't expected to be living alone. And it was. During my time. In Menorca, walking amongst the lemon trees and the dusty walking trails.

[00:05:56] Sarah Almond Bushell: I had a lot of time to think, to walk, to [00:06:00] grieve, to reflect on things. So I take these really long walks with the dog through the countryside earbuds in podcasts playing. Often it was business shows but actually, sometimes it was just the sound of my own breathing that I wanted to be there for.

[00:06:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: And it was the first time in years that the noise of life had quietened down enough for me to really hear myself. And what I'd heard deep down was this. I was a bit bored. I was really restless. [00:06:30] I'd climbed to, really senior positions in the NHS. I'd been a dietetic manager, a divisional director.

[00:06:36] Sarah Almond Bushell: I was in a consultant role, and you know what? There was nowhere left for me to go, and I was still quite young. And the thought of doing this same thing for another 25 years filled me with, quiet horror. Actually, I didn't want to look back on my life with regret. I didn't want to miss out on my kids' lives, working endless hours for a system that really no longer felt as fulfilling as it did when I [00:07:00] first qualified. So sitting there, in my dad's son drenched villa journaling on my laptop. I made a decision that when I went home, I wasn't going back to business as usual. I was going to take this online business that I'd built on the side of my NHS work.

[00:07:19] Sarah Almond Bushell: This blog, this passion for helping families, and I was going to make it my life's work. I did well, I think probably a lot of people do, I started [00:07:30] consuming business information a bit obsessively actually. So the business podcasts, I discovered Amy Porterfield and Pat Flynn, the really big names in online marketing.

[00:07:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: I fell in love with this idea of passive income creating something once and helping thousands of people without any extra work and building a life around that freedom rather than clocking in and out. And so slowly over time this vision formed. I wasn't just going to have a private practice, [00:08:00] I wasn't just going to have an online blog.

[00:08:02] Sarah Almond Bushell: I was going to build a full thriving online business, a one that would give me both impact and independence. And actually by 2020, that was only 18 months or so later, that vision became a reality. That was when my blog traffic really exploded. That was also when that business hit multiple six figures within a year.

[00:08:25] Sarah Almond Bushell: That was also when I chose to leave the NHS. I built out a team to [00:08:30] support me and I was quite honestly living the dream that I'd only whispered about before. And it actually all started with SEO and also the heartbreak and that quiet decision made under the Menorcan sun. And then about 18 months ago, two years, as I said, the winds shifted again.

[00:08:51] Sarah Almond Bushell: So at first it was fairly subtle. I started to notice I was getting fewer website visitors, a quieter inbox. [00:09:00] My lead magnets signups were dipping. I just brushed it off. I was like thinking maybe it's just a blip. Who knows how Google really works? Maybe it was just the season, it was the summer holidays, it was Brexit noise, all of these things I thought might have been the reason for it, but I was also in a lot of forums.

[00:09:18] Sarah Almond Bushell: Especially the blogging communities, and they started buzzing because everyone was noticing the same thing. Quite a significant drop in Google traffic and not [00:09:30] just one or 2%, like massive drops, 25%, 50% drops more. In fact. So these conversations in these Facebook groups turned a bit frantic, is it the helpful content update?

[00:09:43] Sarah Almond Bushell: Has AI killed blogging? And why is Google just burying my articles far further down in the list than previously? So when I was checking my analytics, I saw exactly the same thing happening in my business in black and white. My traffic was falling, [00:10:00] not by a little, but by a landslide, first of all, by a few thousand a month, and then tens of thousands and all that SEO work I'd built really carefully, patiently over years seemed to just be crumbling beneath me.

[00:10:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: And it felt a bit surreal. It felt a little bit like being in slow motion, like almost like a car crash that you can see happening, but you just can't stop and. What's worse was there was no clear [00:10:30] answers. Not on the forums, not on the experts, not my coaches and mentors, not even Google itself. Nobody knew what to do.

[00:10:41] Sarah Almond Bushell: The playing field had completely changed in the face of ai. The very foundation that my business model had been based on shifted, and I was standing there in the rubble of all of this wondering, now what on am I supposed to do?

[00:10:56] Sarah Almond Bushell: I made the decision, I definitely wasn't going to [00:11:00] abandon all the work that I spent years building. I wasn't going to start from scratch, and I certainly wasn't going to let this new shift in the Google algorithm define the future of my business. I'd done too much work to let it all go. So instead I decided I was going to pivot.

[00:11:17] Sarah Almond Bushell: I was going to adapt. So the first realisation I had was I had built this phenomenal warm audience over the years, my community. And they were all on my email list. They were my loyal readers. [00:11:30] They were my Instagram followers who knew me. They trusted me, and they still wanted what it was I had to offer. So I stopped chasing new eyeballs.

[00:11:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: I started focusing more on nurturing the people that were already there. And so instead of throwing myself into frantic. Content creation, which is what I was doing before, just creating, churning out loads and loads and loads of content. I just paused. I stopped creating content, [00:12:00] and I recycled what I already had.

[00:12:02] Sarah Almond Bushell: I pulled my best blog posts from the archives. I freshened them up, and I reshared them again. I breathed new life into existing Instagram posts that had done quite well. And rescheduled them. I leaned on the hundreds of resources that I'd already developed over the years because they were still really good.

[00:12:20] Sarah Almond Bushell: They were still really valuable, and they were still exactly what families needed, and I pushed them out and shared them again. And importantly what I did was I shifted [00:12:30] my energy elsewhere too. All the while that this was happening, I was building this business, my dietician's in business, business, coaching business, and I decided to lean deeper into that work and supported healthcare professionals.

[00:12:46] Sarah Almond Bushell: And this is the part of my work where I can help other people. Build a business that enables them to leave the NHS if they want to build innovative businesses, not just seeing one-to-one clients and [00:13:00] create the freedom that I had fought so hard for. And at the same time, I started planting seeds for a new vision inside the children's nutritionist.

[00:13:10] Sarah Almond Bushell: A vision where I wasn't really reliant on social media or algorithms or search engines. A vision where I could bring my audience into my own space, a space that I controlled and nurtured them there and protected them really, from my business coaching [00:13:30] and from this new idea. Something new, formed a new idea, seed of an Idea was born and that was an app.

[00:13:41] Sarah Almond Bushell: So what I'm doing now, everyone on my email list, all those nurtured families that I've been looking after for years will be invited to come and join. My app, everyone who joins through a lead magnet now, as well as paid ads, actually I do run paid ads , in that business. They'll be [00:14:00] welcomed into the app as well.

[00:14:01] Sarah Almond Bushell: And inside that app, we're going to nurture really, really nurture people. So we're going to have really lovely, beautiful conversations. We're going to build trust. And actually, you know what, this is the real currency of an online business today because. One thing that became really crystal clear over this last couple of years is that connection matters far more than content.

[00:14:27] Sarah Almond Bushell: Relationships matter [00:14:30] far more than how far your post reaches or how many people you're getting in front of. So this season in my business, this messy, frustrating, really humbling season, it taught me loads of lessons that no course, no certification or no coach actually could have prepared me for. I learned these lessons with, doubt in my heart and dust on my knees because growth doesn't just happen in the winds.

[00:14:56] Sarah Almond Bushell: Growth happens when you are out in the wilderness, [00:15:00] when you are, walking through clouds of confusion. It's in the letting go of what you already had. And what I learned was, what I want you to know is this. First of all, you are not your metrics. You are not your paid views. You are not your Instagram likes, you are not your email list, open rates.

[00:15:20] Sarah Almond Bushell: Those numbers can rise and fall like the tides. But who you are in your heart, your expertise, and your unwavering desire to help [00:15:30] people, that's the steady stuff. That's the unshakeable stuff and that is what's real and, the world might change in terms of how it finds you, but it doesn't change your worth.

[00:15:43] Sarah Almond Bushell: The second thing was your relationship with the people in your audience matters more than any algorithm. So in the end, it's not about gaming, SEO, it's not about hacking social media or beating the [00:16:00] algorithm. It's about really connecting with real life people, real trust, real human beings on the other side of that screen who feel seen and heard and helped because of you.

[00:16:12] Sarah Almond Bushell: And people don't remember how fancy and all singing and dancing your website was. They remember how you made them feel. They remember how you showed up when things got hard and how you kept giving when maybe other people around them just gave up and walked away. And the [00:16:30] third thing is that business is not a one-time decision.

[00:16:33] Sarah Almond Bushell: It really isn't. It's a thousand million quiet ones. It's not one and done. It's not like you can go on a course for three months and develop a business or six months and develop a business. It's a constant need for refining and optimizing and testing and tweaking and trying again, and looking at the results and seeing what happens and refining again.

[00:16:55] Sarah Almond Bushell: It's the decision to send that email when you're exhausted [00:17:00] to believe in your work when the numbers tell you otherwise that it's failing to choose hope instead of cynicism, and to keep showing up when you feel like nobody's actually watching you. Because every tiny brave choice that you make, it compounds on each other, and one day you'll wake up and you'll realize that you didn't just survive this storm.

[00:17:25] Sarah Almond Bushell: You became stronger because of it. So the fourth thing [00:17:30] here is that your business, CPD, is really just as important as your clinical CPD. So when we work clinically, we're taught to keep our skills fresh, to keep our knowledge sharp. It's an HCPC requirement, but when you run a business. What I've found is the world evolved faster than any textbook.

[00:17:49] Sarah Almond Bushell: You know what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. If you are clinging to strategies that served you five years ago, you are building a future in the quick sand. You do not have to chase [00:18:00] every trend, and in fact, if you do, you'd probably go down quicker, but you must stay awake. You must stay curious, and you must stay open to evolution because what I've discovered is business is like a live living thing.

[00:18:14] Sarah Almond Bushell: And anything alive, it needs care. It needs nourishment, it needs growth. And fifth and probably most importantly actually. Success is inevitable for those who refuse to give up. So it's [00:18:30] not inevitable because it's easy. It's not inevitable because it's fair. It's inevitable because you decide that it is because you make success.

[00:18:39] Sarah Almond Bushell: A non-negotiable because you stop letting every setback feel like the final chapter because you keep showing up. Even when the world isn't there showing up for you. Because when you believe, when you truly believe that your success is just a matter of when and not if everything changes for you, you [00:19:00] think differently, you move differently, you breathe differently, you grow differently.

[00:19:06] Sarah Almond Bushell: You are being called into being a stronger, braver, wiser version of yourself, A one who can handle the dreams. the only ones you dare to whisper, and I, for one, I can't wait to see what you build from there, if this has resonated with you and your business has changed beyond recognition as well. Okay. I wanted to end [00:19:30] this behind the scenes ish episode with you with this, because.

[00:19:36] Sarah Almond Bushell: I know what it feels like to wonder if your business is failing. I know what it feels like to be sat at your desk, staring at your laptop and wondering if all the hard work that you've put in over the years was even really worth it. I know the quiet ache of feeling that you have in your heart and your soul, and hearing nothing back.

[00:19:58] Sarah Almond Bushell: I know what it's [00:20:00] like when you pour yourself into a project or a launch or a service and it doesn't land the way you hoped. And when you watch other people succeed, seemingly, effortlessly, you wonder what's wrong with me? And the truth is that every single successful business owner you admire has probably sat in silence at some point.

[00:20:19] Sarah Almond Bushell: Every single one of them, no doubt, doubted themselves. And I wonder whether there's quite a few of them that have thought, is this the end? Shall I give up now? [00:20:30] But what I want you to know is it's not the end. It's actually often just a turning point. It's a place where you can decide to either stay in the game and adapt and pivot and find new ways to make your business work and keep your heart open when it would actually be easier to close it and walk away.

[00:20:48] Sarah Almond Bushell: So thank you for coming with me today through the highs and the lows and actually everything in between. And I hope this story has reminded you that even those of us who [00:21:00] seem on the outside to have successful businesses still face setbacks, that growth is actually really messy, but resilience is a choice, and that you two are capable of navigating whatever changes come your way.

[00:21:15] Sarah Almond Bushell: So if today's episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. Tag me on Instagram, reply to one of my emails, and you know what? Until next time, just keep believing, keep adapting, keep building the business and the [00:21:30] life that you truly want. Bye for now.