Growing Your Business When You Need to Take a Step Back with Dr. Lisa Griffith

Racheal Cook: Could your business handle you having to take 10 to 12 weeks away from it? That is the question that we are answering in this episode. We're talking to Dr. Lisa Griffith and sharing how she not only took a 12-week maternity leave but also a year later took off 12 weeks when she had an injury that prevented her from actually working with her chiropractic clients. In this episode, you are going to get so many insights into how you can continue to grow your business and keep your business running when you need to step away.

Are you ready to grow from stressed-out solopreneur to competent CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook, and I've spent more than 15 years helping women entrepreneurs sustainably scale their businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there, CEOs. I'm really excited about today's episode because I remember way, way back in the early days of my business, I launched my business, had my new website, and I was starting to work with people, I was so excited and then I found out I was pregnant with twins, then I had to go on bed rest, and then I had two infants to take care of.

Needless to say, my first maternity leave was really overwhelming, really exhausting, and basically I pulled back in my business in a big way. I dropped down to just a couple of clients who I was doing done-for-you services for, I was doing their marketing, and I made sure that I could keep those retainer clients going while I figured out this whole new mom thing.

Let me tell you, a new mom thing with twins was hard. It took me a solid year to get my feet back under me. When I took my next maternity leave when my youngest son was born, I actually had a great maternity leave experience because by then, I had the infrastructure in place, I had the support in place. My team was in place. I was able to take off four months and continue to get paid all of my clients in my group program and my one-on-one clients were all taken care of.

My team kept things running, they kept the marketing going, they kept all of our evergreen online sales going, and even my one-on-one clients were taken care of. We worked out arrangements with other service providers that they would come in and work directly with my clients while I was gone during those months. If they needed a brand strategy session, they worked with a brand strategist. If they needed a copywriter, they worked with a copywriter. If they just needed some behind-the-scenes tech work, they would work with an operations technical person.

That was something that not many people had thought about, having someone else come in and take care of your clients while you are away for a period of time. But it changed everything for me because that was also the year that my business really started to take off. It was the year that my husband decided he was going to leave his job as a teacher and we were going to go all in on our dream lifestyle and the way that we wanted to run this business.

It has just been incredible ever since knowing that whenever I need to take time off, I have built my team to run this business for me. I have built this business in a way where when my mother needed a lot of support, when she needed full-time nursing care, she's 100% wheelchair-bound and has 24-hour nurses who I manage, and I had to take easy the first three months of that and work from her house, manage all of that care, and pitch in as a nurse when needed but my business kept going.

It kept going because we believe in building life-first businesses here. We believe in building businesses here that grow with you and give you the flexibility when you need that, when you need to know that you can turn things over to someone else on your team.

Today I wanted to bring on Dr. Lisa Griffith who has been my chiropractor, my client, my friend for the last three years. We are going to share a little bit about our little meet cute story, how we got connected through referrals, how referrals continue to drive a lot of both of our businesses.

We're going to talk about how she transitioned from being an independent contractor in another chiropractor's office to the stage she's at now where she has her own office with two chiropractors, a massage therapist, two admin and operations team members, and she's continuing to grow even while she's been out on our maternity leave and she had to take time away for an injury that resulted in a wrist surgery. This is a can't-miss episode. There are so many takeaways. I really hope you enjoy it.

Hey, CEOs. I'm so excited because you may have heard me reference this amazing woman a few times on the podcast when I've talked about my chiropractor who became my client, Dr. Lisa Griffith. She has been just an incredible person to get to know over the last few years and I'm so excited that she's joining me today to talk about her journey over the last few years growing her business despite lifeing and taking her out for a few months at a time. So, Lisa, thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Racheal Cook: I almost laugh when I think about how we got to know each other because this happens to me and I know this happens to you, it doesn't matter where I go in my life, I end up finding people who need my help and I know you're similar that we just are doing life and we run into people.

I remember it was the middle of the pandemic, I was struggling with some back pain and some other issues, and a peer was working on mobility with me and recommended that I go check you out and start working with you. That's how we met. It was through a referral through a mutual connection. When I met you, it was so funny because you were in another office, it was the pandemic so you had us coming in like the side door into the office so that we didn't go into the main office.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Not sketchy.

Racheal Cook: Not sketchy at all, but you were there for quite a while and I think this is normal for a lot of chiropractors where you're working as an associate in someone else's office. Can you tell us a little bit about that period and what was going on in your practice?

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Yeah. I was at a point where I was called an independent contractor. I was running space at another chiropractor's office. It's more common to come out of school and the only thing they tell you is to be an associate and just work for somebody else and be their employee but it works better for me and I wanted to have my own business and run my own practice in my own way but I had to do that running in somebody else's space.

With that, you lose a lot of autonomy. Just like Racheal was saying, it's like there are these weird side door access points during the pandemic, and just even the smells, the sounds, the atmosphere, it's just not your own when you're renting from somebody else. You can make it your own as best you can but even the system had other people's hands in them so it really just didn't ever feel completely like my own.

Racheal Cook: Yeah. I remember when we started talking and then started working together, you were ready to find your own space.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: The pandemic was the push I needed to really get uncomfortable enough to move out because at least, when you can treat your patients and do well by them, the space doesn't matter so much but then there becomes a point where certain things push you over the edge and hoping we never go back through that, but I'm grateful that it gave the nudge to go out and search for spaces that fit me and my patient base a lot better.

Racheal Cook: That was so much fun because, again, we both live here in Richmond, Virginia and what's fun is the connections and all the connections that you and I have had over the last three years of working together. You started working with my friend Cindy to find a location and the location you found was incredible, it's perfect for what you were looking for even though it was a little bit bigger than maybe initially you were looking for.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Yeah. It was an incentive to grow into things.

Racheal Cook: It was an incentive to grow into things. You found an office suite that had five treatment rooms and this is a huge level up from being in space you're renting in someone else's practice to now you have five treatment rooms on your own. How did it feel when we started looking at that?

Dr. Lisa Griffith: First, it was big but the price was right and the space just immediately I walked in and I was like, “This feels right and I need to have it.” There was a letter of intent on the space and I was like, “I don't care. I need this space. It is mine.” When it felt perfect, you walked in the space even though it was an attorney's office, it was brown and bloody red colored on the walls, it was still like, “This is perfect. We will make it work.”

Racheal Cook: It was so fun to watch you remodel that too because you worked with another person we have in common who also did the design for my office space. [Shirelle] came in and turned it from this old more traditional lawyer's office to now a very light airy feminine holistic space.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Yeah, and we were able to do it, we planned it far enough and ahead that we didn't have to spend much money. It was like we saved everything. I didn't have to take any loans out even to get that space opened up, which was incredible. But there was enough planning ahead to make that work out. That was awesome. It feels good and when people walk in, they always say how good it feels, how it smells, everything. It's been worth every minute of that renovation.

Racheal Cook: Knowing that it was just you going in there, I want you to share a little bit about how you had an in-between stage with the two rooms in the back.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Yeah. We had two rooms spaced out in the back that I knew I couldn't fill right away so I put out short-term rental leases and that ended up being a great fit because I was able to collaborate with two like-minded providers in the community. I was a little bit particular in holding out on getting the right renters in so that it was both a collaboration but the space was also held out for continuing to heal people.

I didn't really just want somebody in the back doing their taxes as much as that's a really important thing, it just felt good to keep the energy in the space the way we wanted it. We had like-minded professionals, a PT and a massage therapist, and they were able to elevate their practices to the next level and then now they've been able to grow into their own space as well, full circle for them too. But it was a nice short-term way to fill the void in the payment gap, but I'm sorry, I'm getting off track.

Racheal Cook: No, I think it was so smart, it was such a smart way to bridge the gap knowing that you were going into a space that you were growing but you were a little ways off from being able to really utilize the whole space on your own. This is really important. I hope everybody's paying attention. When you go into your own space, you take the time to renovate the space, you take the time to have a decorator come in, the expenses do start to add up.

You've got the rent on the space, utilities on the space, the insurance on the space, and finding that bridge of having those two renters in the back takes some of the pressure off that you don't have to figure it out all on your own.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: I think what we're forgetting too is I was pregnant.

Racheal Cook: Oh, yes.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: I was growing a human and I needed to get out of this space for my maternity leave so I was also leaving. I think the renter started right at the tail end of my maternity leave and we all came back in the office right about the same time, which was pretty funny.

Racheal Cook: Yeah. This is funny because I knew this is a challenge for women entrepreneurs, you had your first child while you were working in the space you had rented previously and you knew you wanted to have another child, we were in the process of finding the space, renovating the space, and you go, “Oh, yeah, by the way, I'm pregnant again. We need to plan my maternity leave,” so we knew that you were going to take that month of, I think it was like August and September. It was like the end of the summer months. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, we're doing it all right now.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: And we had set up the SOPs initially to mask, or not mask, but not have repeated the first maternity leave. We're like, “We're not going to have that again,” so we had already started building out some of the SOPs like at the old practice to run to the new office but it was nice to already have those in place knowing there was another maternity leave on the deck.

Racheal Cook: Well, the nice thing about maternity leave is generally, you get a pretty good heads up that it's happening. We had eight or nine months there to plan. I remember we made some really important decisions. One huge decision was setting up the right CRM. You switched to a platform called Jane, which was a thousand times easier than the previous one, the other office had you using.

Suddenly that took a lot of pressure off of you just from the running the day-to-day of the business because everything, all the client management, all the appointment setting, everything was online, the reminders were automated. It was awesome.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Much better. It was a huge relief. Yeah, definitely, anybody in healthcare, you find the right EMR, check out Jane. It's great.

Racheal Cook: We will add your little link to the show notes because these are the things where I know investing into these platforms are big. You took a lot of big risks like, “I'm going to sign up for this new platform I haven't really used before but I'm hoping it's the right one.” You hired an assistant to come in and take some of the pressure off of you, especially getting all these tasks done day to day in your business, going into this whole new space.

When we decided that maternity leave was going to start, you took a little bit of time before Mason came, I believe, and then you had a nice maternity leave. I think you took how many weeks off?

Dr. Lisa Griffith: I want to say it was a little bit closer, who knows what his it might have been, 10 to 12. I tend to go back a little bit early just because patients want me back a little bit but I was able to take a little extra time. We moved during that maternity leave so I ended up meeting every last minute of that lead that I took.

The tail end of his pregnancy was really tough and I think that was the curveball we hadn't been anticipating but thankfully, the coverage doctor was already in place. She was already trained so I was able to pull out a few weeks earlier than I had anticipated from physical patient care, which was a relief.

Racheal Cook: Two things I want to ask about quickly. One of the big challenges a lot of people have when they're moving from, again, being a contractor for someone else in someone else's space to really finding their own space, standing in their own “This is my business, this is my brand” is getting their clients to come along with them and we made a whole strategy to move everyone over.

I think this is where a lot of people get scared that people aren't going to follow them. But we did not experience that so I'd love you to share a little bit about that whole shift getting people to move along with you.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: We built out a system of just different platforms, emails, some typed-up newsletters that went in the snail mail, mostly it was all online and just emails and messaging with patients. We did have some different incentives at the new office and we built out connections for people to connect with the new sales and the new offerings and get excited about the new space because the renovations, people were really pumped up about.

Racheal Cook: They were so excited, yeah.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: I think we had a streamline of communication going throughout and people never really had to be kept guessing. They just knew what was coming. We just kept it light and just updating them on what was happening but people knew the whole step of the way. They knew new phone number, new different ways to get a hold of us. It really just went very smoothly. We didn't lose anybody along the way.

We were dropping insurances as well. We went from insurance to cash at that same point. There were a couple of people that we needed to navigate getting them to different practices because of insurance needs but our insurance limitations and how our patient base is, it really wasn't a huge deal. We were able to make those new office offerings work instead of insurance. That was a big leap.

Racheal Cook: Yeah. I'll say just for anyone taking the notes, communicate. This is something, when we mapped out that whole marketing strategy around the new space, one of the things you did really well was sharing the behind-the-scenes. People are excited to see you thrive and we saw your community was really excited.

They loved seeing the renovation in the space. They love seeing the little details like Lisa's got this great little nursing nook because she works with pre and postnatal women and their babies and she has such a cute little space that everybody was excited to see, “Oh, this office is really built around me.”

From the nursing nook to the changing table, in the bathroom to the baby toys, it's very much geared towards her ideal client and they were so excited to see that because that is completely different from probably the majority of practices they had been in before, which is geared towards everyone. That was huge, the sneak peeks, the taking along, the “see what I'm doing for you, I'm building this for you.”

The other thing is the making the special offers, the incentive offers to get people to pre-pay for some of those packages. We did offer a little discount on some of those to move people over but a lot of people were good with going ahead and doing that.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Yeah, really and it was the communication of this is why insurance is no longer working for us in these ways, this is the style of care we hope to curate here, and just speaking about everything and what's in their best interest and that's what we always bring forward is like, “This is what's in your best interest,” if we don't feel that way, we don't offer it.

We tried to make the space and all those offerings match that. I think just talking it up to people and being upfront with them throughout the whole process was the biggest win there.

Racheal Cook: And communicating a lot. I think people underestimate how much you have to communicate but it was emails, it was social, it was snail mails, it was picking up the phone. It was when people were in office letting them know this is changing. It might feel like a lot because I know a lot of us tend to be a little more hesitant when it comes to being so, I don't want to say salesy, but directive and “here's what's happening, you need to move along with us.” But people don't see stuff so if we don't put it out on all those channels, they won't see it.

The other thing I wanted to ask you about is the idea of coverage. Now this is something that I didn't realize was such a normal thing in the chiropractic, and it turns out a lot of other healthcare world. Talk about what that means and how that worked while you were going on maternity leave.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Yeah, some people call it locum, coverage work, however they want to term it, but a lot of people honestly don't utilize it because they just [inaudible] it and they'll either close their office and go on vacation or just never take days off and we know that's not reality.

I think finding some coverage doctors even if you don't need them, just to have them in your repertoire is a really important thing. I was fortunate to find coverage doctors that I knew locally for my first maternity leave and then our community is really awesome, we grow each other up in this area so her practice was now pretty full by the time I was having my second maternity leave so she wasn't available.

Just, again, that power of connection and referrals with one another. A patient of mine who's a realtor knew a chiropractor coming to the Richmond area, they messaged and said, “Who do you know that might need help?” and I said, “Me.” Fortunately, that doctor was able to come down from New Jersey.

We met, it felt like a good fit. She was able to come down and start learning my office, learning the systems, learning my patients, and how I manage their care so that she could emulate my care for them. Since as a contractor, you can go in and do your own thing and be your own doctor but really as a coverage doctor, you want them to be very much like you and your clone.

I wanted her to practice in my likeness as much as possible, learn our systems and styles, and how we communicate with our patients. Being a pre-natal, postpartum practice, that is a little different than most people so we're very rehab-focused and we wanted to know she knew our exercises. There did go a lot of training, like I said, a lot of work going into it but it's really worth it.

We could then fully move out of the practice, I can go again even early for maternity leave and know that everything's handled, all of my patients were completely handled. So then even if suddenly there's a wrist surgery that needs to come up and you need to get coverage last minute, you're able to pull from all of your different surrounding people and we had our coverage doctor, SOPs, and templates already built out so that a last minute need for coverage didn't turn into an emergency. We were able to just have everybody lined up, ready to go, knew who was covering what dates and we made it work.

Racheal Cook: That's the funny thing is you had the end of that one summer, the baby was born, you took your maternity leave, got back, you continued, started looking for a second doctor to come into the practice, and it took a while, I will tell everybody, and Lisa will reaffirm this, it takes time to find people to join your team.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Especially the quality good fit people. You need to put the time out there because they're out there but you want it to be a good match.

Racheal Cook: Well, that's the thing, if you're looking for culture, if you're looking for people who are values aligned, who understand what you're about, and who are going to add and contribute to the feeling your clients have when they come in your space, it takes time. It took a while to get your first full-time doctor in.

Then you broke your wrist the following summer. I think I'm waiting for you to tell me that this upcoming summer, we're just going to take a month off for vacation.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Just for vacation, no injuries, just vacation.

Racheal Cook: But because you had that SOP of coverage and you have very established relationships with other chiropractors in the area, the office did not have to shut down when you went. How long were you out, for 10 or 12 weeks again?

Dr. Lisa Griffith: At least, I couldn't even move my hand so I went back and I could only communicate with patients after that eight weeks. But I still couldn't really work on them for a good 12 weeks or so, it was a lot.

Racheal Cook: Which is intense for a chiropractor, not being able to manually do what you are there to do for people. But it was interesting because at the same time, we had started talking about other things you wanted to focus on in the practice.

Now that you had another doctor in there, it was time to really start laying the foundation for what comes next. That means you actually pulling back on your patient-facing hours so that you can step into your role as CEO, which is what we talk about here all the time, but also so you could focus on some other projects.

You have some other really cool projects you wanted to work on. I'd love you to share a little bit about some of those that you've been able to do now that you've pulled back your hours overall.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Yeah. The major projects we're working on behind the scenes are some video courses to offer to the patient. Whether they're just in the office and we need their at-home care to be more digestible, also saving us time and energy to not be repeating the at-home care over and over with patients because as much as we feel like they're able to hear it all in that one visit, a lot of these people are newly postpartum and they really need to take this advice home with them, so we just wanted to be really manageable for them to work with.

Certain videos to help rehab after an injury or maybe reset after pregnancy or postpartum, a couple of courses to help mom and baby as a whole dyad to make sure everybody's more comfortable, moms avoiding wrist and hand pain, babies avoiding arching into refluxy uncomfortable positions or maybe tolerating tummy time better, and then a couple of courses on oral tongue and lip tie tether challenges and how to do their suck retraining.

Again, these are really critical times in people's lives so the more digestible these courses can be, the better. Then it's going to save us a lot of time in our office where we know that people are getting the instructionals in a way that they can really utilize them so that's really important and hopefully help people that aren't even in the office, which would be great too.

Racheal Cook: Yeah. It's such a great way to layer on to an in-person practice because this in-person practice continues to grow and the time that you've been in this space, you've hired a chiropractor, you hired a massage therapist, another chiropractor just came on recently.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Interestingly enough, that chiropractor who just came on used all of our same SOPs that Racheal gave us. She was moving from the same practice into our space and she was able to use all of the same communication platforms. We had it all and we're like, “Here you go. Use this. We know it's tried and true. It's great.” That was amazing.

Racheal Cook: Well, and now you've got a lot of these rinse-and-repeat systems in place so, in addition to all the people working with your patients, your administrative team can take quite a bit off of you than you had experienced in the past. Because when I met you three years ago, you were the one-woman show and now you've got two doctors, a massage therapist, a front-desk person, an ops person, and a financial person.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Yeah. Little team has grown pretty quickly.

Racheal Cook: Little team has grown pretty quickly. The final thing I want to ask you about is the CEO Retreats because you're luckily here in Richmond so you've been able to come to I think every CEO Retreat since we brought them back almost. I think you attended almost every single one, if you were to share with anybody who has been listening and following along with the podcast what has your experience been with the CEO Retreats and working on your 90-day plan with the process that we teach?

Dr. Lisa Griffith: The CEO Retreats have just been amazing to connect with other women first of all. I think it's just nice to take a day out of my business just to be around like-minded women. It's really critical and I think that piece can't be ignored because the in-person aspect really is nice for me.

I get people do great virtually but just being around all those women really is a great day just in general for me. I always look forward to it. Then I think it's just shifted my game plan of just having that 90-day focus in a lot of aspects of my life. Now I look at things on a quarterly aspect rather than day-to-day, week-to-week, or month-to-month which can get a little overwhelming.

Having that quarterly outlook is extremely helpful. I think taking that day out of my practice and just focusing on what the next quarter is going to look like has been such a game-changer for me. I tell people that all the time, I'm like, “No, no, these are hard passes for me. I don't miss this. This is a non-negotiable day out of my practice for me.”

I also try to attend the Mastermind days and they are my favorite, favorite day. I love the CEO Retreat days because I get my whole plan done but it is more work. You go in, you really gotta hunker down, and you want to get through everything you need to get through. So it is work but it's also a lot of fun and a lot of community and connection when you're there.

But the Mastermind days are an amazing deep dive. If you ever get an opportunity to go, I would highly recommend those as well because you just nitpick your business in a different way and shed light on things, again, in a different way, having Racheal and maybe a few different experts’ eyes and ears on things is a phenomenal way to get through maybe a plateau or something you're stuck on.

Racheal Cook: It's so funny because I feel like a lot of the Mastermind days, which we host these prior to the CEO Retreat, they're for clients only and they're very coveted because we only have six spots available for them, but it's so funny because people show up and we start by figuring out like, “Where's everybody? What do you need while you're here?” and the themes are so common.

Somehow, most of the time, everybody's bumping up against the same challenges even though all the businesses are different and still face the same challenges, still facing team challenges, marketing challenges, or things are shifting in the world and how do we adapt and adjust? It's been so fun to put that into the mix as well and then to see you pop in and share your in-person business whereas a lot of my clients don't have a storefront brick-and-mortar traditional business so it's really been fun to see that.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Yeah. Interesting to learn from all the virtual platforms too. There are just different challenges and it brings a different lens to things. I think for an in-person practice, it's interesting to see too.

Racheal Cook: Yeah. I think that's where we got a lot of the automation going for you. We've got a lot more automation and systems that you might not have put in place until you got in front of all these people. I love it.

Well, Lisa, it's been so fun to chat with you today as always. Where can people find out more about the work you do and the upcoming videos if they're interested in learning more about some of the online trainings that you're creating?

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Instagram is probably our easiest platform @drlisarva. The website is www.drlisagriffith.com, and pretty much everything will land on that website as soon as it's all ready. Actually, I just got an email that our videos, our first batch are all ready so hopefully we'll be getting those out there very soon.

Racheal Cook: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

Dr. Lisa Griffith: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Racheal Cook: Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Lisa, and yes, I always refer to her as Dr. Lisa. It's just what everybody knows her as. She is just so much fun to work with. She's just been somebody who takes things and runs with them. Massive implementer.

For me, there's nothing better than working with clients who take my recommendations, who take my insights and the strategy I've created for them, and just implement like crazy in order to get the results that they're looking for.

There's nothing better than knowing that now she's able to take more time for herself. She's been able to work less in the practice, have less client-facing hours, start building out new exciting things, and honestly, have more time for herself and her family, her friends.

She's been taking up a lot of different hobbies and that makes me so happy. That just makes me feel so aligned with the work that I'm doing when I get to see other people starting to build their life-first businesses.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. As always, if you want to leave any thoughts or feedback, insights, and ahas, make sure you give us a little share on Instagram. Take a quick screenshot, tag both of us at @drlisarva or @racheal.cook, we would love to hear from you.

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the one coming up next, another interview with another client who also was able to build a life-first business scaling back their time hands-on in their business so that they could work on other exciting projects. I cannot wait for you to dig into that one. Alright, until next time.