Welcome to The Health & Wellness Practitioners Podcast! Dr. Danielle and other guest experts talk about everything from getting your practice started, developing your clinical skills, growing your practice YOUR way, and dealing with the real stuff life burnout and work/life balance. Whether you’ve been practicing for decades or just started your journey, you’ll find something here for you!
DR. DANIELLE: So friends, I am here today with Nichole. Nichole was someone, I don't even remember how we encountered each other online now, but we did. That's what I do. And the more I learned about you the more I was like, please come on my podcast and talk about what you do. So I'll let you introduce yourself and share a bit about what you do. We'll take it from there.
MEET NICHOLE HIRSCH KUECHLE
NICHOLE: Okay. I go by Nikki. It's like I have to have that Nichole thing out there professionally. But when you know me, Nikki is great. And I've been in the holistic health industry now for 25 years. I got my start as a birth and postpartum doula, childbirth educator, cranial sacral therapist, and began muscle testing when I was age 20. So here we are, 25 years later, have been muscle testing full time for 12 years, and what we do primarily, I'm in the office only three days a week, but over 50% of my practice is online. So it's a tough thing for some people to wrap their brain around. First of all, you muscle test, that's weird. Second of all, online, like how do you do that?
So we really address lots of, I don’t want to say symptoms, right? We're not symptom chasers so much as we are reversing getting to root cause, but it's the symptoms that bring people through the door, right? Or through the zoom, as you might say. And so we reverse these issues and more importantly, we bring a way to empower and educate mostly women, not always, but mostly women and their children to kind of build a bigger toolkit for them to utilize so that we can bring kind of a layer of convenience and support, and so as moms they could just check the box like I was able to take care of my family, take care of my own health all while being in the middle of a school conference. So really adding that remote aspect in has been highly successful for us as a practice. And then I see the success in it and how it handles the families we work with.
CATALYSTS FOR TRANSITIONING FROM IN-PERSON TO ONLINE
DR. DANIELLE: I'm sure that I asked you this already, but did you transition to seeing clients online through zoom because of the pandemic or before that?
NICHOLE: So it was kind of the perfect storm, if you will. So colleagues of mine all over the world and some of my besties were being managed in a remote aspect. There are many people who do similar modalities to what I do, and they're like, I'm the only one in the city or in the state and so like nobody ever gets to check me. So we were all kind of hanging and supporting each other in that way. In came the pandemic and I would say in the first six months, we only - the word I would've used at the time was lost. Like we've lost about 10% of our in-person to online. I found that that transition was easy. It was just like, enroll them, educate them, and so it was just giving them that same value and having them see that we can actually get the same result by just hanging out online together. And now it's been two years and over 50% of our practice is online. So most of it was enrolling people, educating people. And then here's the other thing is like, people are taking back their power. They're taking back the time in their day. They're taking back how much freaking time they want to spend in their car. Or how much time even they want to be by via zoom. So more and more people are like, actually don't want to meet by video today. Can we just talk on the phone? Or like, I just don't even have the space today, I'm going to send an email of all the things that I want you to check on, I'm going to go back to work. You just send me my updated schedule at the end of the day, let me know what I need to pay attention to and changes I need to make with my lifestyle. Okay. So great.
So I just think the more people continue to step into their power of like, wait, what's important to me? It's important to me that I manage whatever is needed with my kids today. It's important to me that I get this work project done. It's really important to me that I get outside in the sun and I get that walk in. But I also have this appointment, so how do I make all of that work? So fun watching that evolve. And really, it just meant being innovative and being willing to evolve instead of like, it's the friends episode, right? Carrying the sofa up the hallway, pivot, pivot. You're not going to pivot. You're going to run into the wall.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah, it's interesting - I had a conversation with someone locally a couple of weeks ago about the pandemic and how initially everything just came to a screeching halt in March of 2020 in the US. And I was kind of watching, observing what was going on and thinking - interesting. We kind of needed this in a way, we needed to take this pause and sort of reset, but I think I was hopeful that people would really embrace a slower way of being, and I don't know that that's really happened. So for example, where I live in a mostly rural town in Missouri, we got back to relatively normal life in May of 2020, and people were so like, I'm just going to go do whatever I want to do now that it's like I don't know that we learned the lessons from that experience. We actually could embrace a different way of being. So it sounds though to me that you're hearing from your clients that they are integrating what they learned.
NICHOLE: They are and in Minnesota this was very different because we didn't get to return to a normal way of life. It took quite some time actually. It was just this past July that the mask mandate went away where we are. And so there were several of my - I know I'm not a chiropractor, but I really consider many of my chiropractic friends sort of cohorts and colleagues - and many of them even closed their practices and we didn't shut our doors for a single day of it. We just kept going business as usual. And if there were some that were concerned about that, then they were online. And mostly what we found is people were like, oh my gosh, you're open. I needed to get away from my house. Like I have kids schooling. I have, my husband now works full-time from home, and I worked from home to begin with, and now I don't have space. I can't get anything done. And so it became like this - they were like, just thank you for being like this fam like home, it felt like home. And it felt like we could just keep coming in and kind of just keep doing the norm. And so it also kind of weeded out, I hate to say it, what didn't fit and what wasn't working. And that's a little uncomfortable on both ends. You know, of course we lost a small handful of clientele, but truly what we gained was - it was our biggest 2020 was our biggest year yet. Like our biggest, it was crazy.
WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE TO CARE ONLINE?
DR. DANIELLE: That's also delicate, isn't it? Because not every business can say that there were businesses that were definitely negatively impacted. Some had to close permanently. And yet there are also people who had their best year ever in 2020. So yeah, it's just a reminder to me we're all on our own journey. Like there isn't a certain expectation that we should all have arrived at this place at this time. We all survived the pandemic the same way - it's not, it's not that. You mentioned that you had transitioned from like early on about 10% of your clients started to see you online, and now it's up to about 50% of them are seeing you online. Did you make that transition intentionally or did it just sort of organically happen?
NICHOLE: I guess I would say it's sort of 50/50. I remember in February of 2020, we had hired three new employees and I could feel this shift was coming, but I didn't know what it was. I mean, this thing was in China, but I don't even think that was the thing, right? I just think there was another energetic shift that was happening that we were feeling. So to be prepared for and have kind of the systems and the infrastructure, that's really what we hired for was to just create more of that, create the solid foundation. And it was a desire on my end for running my days a little bit differently, having a little more flexibility inside of our 15 minute follow up visits than I get in-person, providing some flexibility to our practice members, and then of course as mom, seasonally my hours shift a little bit because like school drop off times shift and kids' needs, and I really hate kind of jacking around the schedule like that, but it was kind of at that season of now we need to tip it and kids were home. So there was this need for like, I have to be home one day a week. And how do I do this? And it was like, well, here's the answer. This is the only thing I need to shift. Now I would say 10% in like right away in that March, and I would say we were at 50% by October of 2020. It was a pretty quick transformation if you will.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. Do you find that it's changed how you provide care for your clients?
NICHOLE: I don't know if it's changed is like kind of what I just said. It actually gave me a little more flexibility. Well, yes, let's say it does because there were things that there were elements about what I was doing that felt limiting to me. And there were parts of my training that I felt weren't serving our clientele the way they needed to be served. Because now there was this thing as if we didn't have stress before there was this thing called a pandemic and kids at home and the work from home and then, oh my gosh, there's going to be a food shortage. And then, oh my gosh, everyone's going to run on money. Run for your life, go move to the hills. And so there was fear. And so I'm picking up on all this stress and it's like, you can only supplement so much stress without being cause in the matter of handling your life.
And so I do not believe it was, I don't believe in coincidence, right? It was no accident that this timing was just sort of this sheer veil of like, we're going to bring this energy in so that this energy can then shift from this direction. And really all it was was me standing in my own power. And me saying like, actually there is more that I can offer. There is more direction that I can provide. There are more tools and resources that I can give if I shift the way that I am testing, if I bring in what is so loudly barking in my right ear for how I need to do things, it just blew up in a great way. So yes, it did.
GETTING CLEAR WITH YOUR ONLINE CARE INTENTIONS
DR. DANIELLE: Awesome. I would love to hear from you, there are a lot of people in this community who are like, they're really wanting to transition to more online services and kind of blend together offering in-person and online, but they're just struggling to figure out how to make it happen, how to get people, to understand how they can help them when they're used to seeing them in person, for example. What would you want them to know, or what encouragement would you want to give them?
NICHOLE: I really think the first bit is clarity as the business owner, the professional, the practitioner, if you will. So if you are not clear how you can provide that value or that value add, because truly I think the value add is less time in the car there. The value add is more time with your family. There's a million reasons why we can get our time and money back and things like that by just connecting right in immediately. And in my world, I say it's like a heart space connection, because people are like, how do you do that? Well, I just can drop in, like, I'm going to connect with you. Now that we're connected, I will be connected to you.
So if you don't know what you're up to and what you're providing, there's no way that you can speak it. So if you can't speak it, then you're lost. So if you're just like, it doesn't work, it's probably because you're not clear on what that is. So get clear on what it is, then you can speak to it, then you can enroll your people. Because if you're like over here, wishy washy, they're wishy washy and they're like, I'm out, I'm going to find the person down the street. But if you're like, here is what I can provide you, here are the hours in which we're going to do that, here's what it's going to look like here is how much it costs, here's the benefit I think you're going to receive from it - then they're like, I’m pretty sure you just answered all my questions. So the clarity in what you're manifesting is huge.
DR. DANIELLE: That is great insight. So thank you for sharing that. If someone that's listening or watching would like to connect with you and learn more about your practice, where is the best place for them to go to do that?
NICHOLE: MyHealthyBeginning.com. And then I really think there's just so much more, right? There's just so much more to who we are. So I love a discovery call. I really love that 15 minutes of like talk about laser focused time. I get to kind of feel out what your grievances are, your concerns, why life isn't working, and I then have the opportunity to say, like, I think what I do can support that. Or you know, like, can I refer you to my friend Susie? Because I think she's going to be a better fit for you. So I have zero problem doing that if I don't feel like there's that good, energetic connection. For sure we need to make sure that we're working with the right people.
DR. DANIELLE: Yes. I'm a hundred percent with you on that. And I have always felt too as a provider that I have a responsibility to the person in front of me who needs help with something to know if I can't help them with it, then where is the best place for them to go to find that help? So that's why I love building connections like these. Thank you so much for hanging out.
NICHOLE: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.