Sue talks about the frustration that the increasing demands of a growing business placed upon her at the expense of her personal life and her effectiveness as a business owner. The transformation into a genuine businesswoman, who happens to be a nurse and case manager, has produced a much improved work-life balance and clarity of what her role as a forward looking decision maker should be.

There’s now a clear plan, a great team and the systems to deliver on behalf of clients. ‘The business continues to grow and yet my life is getting calmer’

Video Transcript

You just need to give it a go because otherwise you just get stuck in this rut. And I can see that if we hadn’t have taken this step and had that kind of advice and had that sort of motor. That motivation week by week and steps to take, we would still be stuck in that position where we’re struggling to maintain the quality of what we’re doing and still grow. So, I just think you just got to try it. If you don’t like it, you can stop it again.

We were so stuck in the day-to-day running of the business and doing the actual job of a case manager that we couldn’t then also separate out time to look at the business and think about how to grow it safely and how to protect the good things about it, not lose those in terms of scaling up. So, yeah, we were spending too much time in the business and not enough time on the business.

Matthew was recommended to us by a business that we already worked with, with our IT provider, and they had sort of said how helpful that had been. And so I thought it was worth us giving it a go because otherwise I couldn’t actually see a way out of the sort of situation that we were in this kind of needing to get a bit bigger, but not really knowing how to do that and still keep the quality of what we were doing.

I think we already had a clear plan and vision for the future, but we’d never articulated it. We’d never sat down together and taken the time to actually write that down. So we knew that between one week and the next week, when we were seeing Matthew, there were things that we had identified as needing doing, and he was going to ask us if we’d done them.
What Matthew did was he sort of stopped me looking down and got me to look up and see the business as this entity that I needed to steer, rather than just kind of riding it and seeing where it took me. It was actually about stopping that, looking ahead, formulating those steps, and breaking that down into week-by-week things that we needed to do. And very quickly we started to see the impact that that was having. It was a real eye-opener.

Well, we have grown, for a start. We were able to grow, but we’ve been able to do that because Liz and I have stopped spending so much time doing the actual kind of bread and butter work of the business. And we have started setting out those goals, sharing the plans with the team, listening to the team, getting ideas, working out how we can delegate more stuff.
I’m now a business owner who happens to be a nurse and a case manager. It’s like a change in mindset. One of the aims, one of my aims was to have more me time. What my friends and family are really clear about, because I’ve been really clear with them, is that this is about the transition. And then the idea is that it gives me time to step back a bit and let the people do what they do, and they’ll probably do it better than I’ve been doing it. And that’s the aim. That’s what I’d like to see, that the team are doing what I used to do and they’re doing it better than I did it, and I can then step back and have more work-life balance.

And I think that, again, is a real switch in mindset. I think it’s not just about being excited for the future of the business, about being excited for the future of our sort of quality of life, our work-life balance. So it’s weird to think that the business can grow and our lives can get calmer, but I think actually that is our ultimate aim. And hearing that come back to us through Matthew, this is what it’s about. Are you able to step back? Have you been able to delegate these things and how confident do you feel in. Yeah, so it’s both about business growth, but it’s also about our own health, well being and the rest of it. So I think those two things are very exciting, that we can see them both happening in parallel. That’s been greater.