I met Jen Wright around the time she started her clinic and I’ve been impressed with her unwavering commitment to her values and beliefs around offering wellness services - which we talk about in more detail on this episode of Small But Mighty.

Episode transcript:

Karen Wilson: Hello and welcome to the Small But Mighty Biz Stories podcast. I'm here with Jen Wright, owner of Whole Therapy in Ottawa. I've known Jen for around seven or eight years now. Is that about right?

Jen Wright: That many? Yes, that makes sense. That makes sense.

Karen: The reason we met, it was years and years ago at a WBN breakfast—the Women's Business Network here in Ottawa—and we've actually been each other's clients here and there as well. I go to Jen for massages fairly regularly—not as regularly as I would like to—but I've known you for a long time and I love the whole purpose behind your business and what you're doing with your practice.

Tell us a little bit about Whole Therapy as a clinic and what you have been wanting to do with it.

Jen: Okay. Thanks for having me on.

Karen: You're welcome.

Jen: One thing you didn't mention is that we bonded over Sharpies on the M&C committee for WBN, that was our first meet.

Karen: Yes. It was a long time ago too.

Jen: Yes, it was. Whole Therapy actually had just started around that time. We opened our doors in 2013. We had one location that went nice and strong for that long and then in October, we just opened our second location in the east end of the city, Lancaster Road, so that has been a long time coming.

Whole Therapy, the idea behind it is essentially it's a group of holistic healthcare practitioners who not only work beside each other, but they work together with each other. It's extremely collaborative and it's very client-centered. The idea is that we want to see people as little as possible, but as much as necessary to keep people well. That includes getting them over injuries and preventing injuries and getting stronger and having them understand their bodies on a deeper level so that they feel empowered and self-sufficient instead of just depending on the system for healthcare.

Karen: Awesome.

Jen: That's the general gist behind it. When I opened Whole Therapy, I actually wasn't sure if that was a pipe dream of an idea because I had seen and worked at other multi-disciplinaries before and they were fine, but there wasn't the level of collaboration I was looking for. When I opened Whole Therapy, I thought, "Is this actually going to work?" It turns out it does work. It works very, very well. You just need the right people.

Karen: What's interesting is I've had experience with that whole multi-disciplinary approach. I sent my husband in when he's had back pain, and I've gone myself where I've gone to physio and I've been talking with Bailey about various challenges I'm having and then she'll go and tell Jamie that when he's training with me that we need to work on whatever. It is very collaborative, and you guys are very open and transparent about that with your clients.

Jen: Well, thank you. It's so important because so many things get lost in translation. If you go and see a practitioner somewhere, they can be an excellent practitioner, but if you need oHther work done or if you need a different specialty looking at you, which happens often, we have overlapping spheres of education and experience, there is no one good thing for everybody. At different times, you're going to need different things, different modalities looking at you.

In Whole Therapy, you can see me for a massage and I can say, "There's a thing that I'm not getting to here. Is it cool if we talk to Bailey or Jamie or somebody else?" and you can say, "Yes, I give you my permission." Then I can just go, cut out the middleman. You don't need to know any sort of lingo, you don't need to understand the intricacies of what's happening, you can hear me talk about it and then see us come to a conclusion about what's going on together. It eliminates a lot of unnecessary treatments, so it's nice.

Karen: Absolutely. Well, and there's a lot of practitioners, certain types of practitioners where they have this model where you come in three times a week and then two times a week and they slowly wean you off. When I've gone to a chiropractor at Whole Therapy, I go until the issue is resolved, and often that's two or three weeks and I'm done. It's not three times a week, they decide each time the amount of time we need to spend between visits. It's very, very open, and towards getting me back to optimal physical health.

Jen: Exactly. Yes, it's very rare that the three times a week, two times a week, one time a week model is actually implemented. It happens, but it's not the rule. It shouldn't be the rule. Some places actually have a minimum for their practitioners, you have to see somebody six to eight times.

I get it on a business perspective. I've been in business long enough now. I understand you have to make money in order to stay in business, but you have to balance the integrity of, "Does this person need this many sessions?" If they don't, you're just stretching it out and that's not fair.

Karen: Yes. Especially with benefits the way they are, they run out eventually.

Jen: 100%. Some people don't even have them to begin with.

Karen: True, it's true. One thing that I wanted to talk to you about is I had the pleasure of seeing you speak and it was short but so sweet at the Women in Business Conference back at the beginning of March. It was the last big thing that I got to go to before we all went into quarantine.

Jen: Same here.

Karen: Your talk that day was so powerful because you basically for, I don't know, 5 or 10 minutes, just went over the idea of motivation versus discipline and how to apply discipline when you don't feel motivated because motivation is really more of an emotion than it is anything else. When you're in the blahs, it's hard to feel motivated.

Jen: Oh, yes.

Karen: Yes, right? I feel like that's a real issue for so many business owners right now. You guys are a great example. You've had to close both locations, you're not considered an essential business, and you just opened one of the locations last October. That can feel so defeating and discouraging.

I wanted to give you a chance to talk about how that concept of motivation versus discipline has worked itself into your business as you figure out how to pivot and offer services online during this time.

Jen: Well, yes, it's a good point because we basically shut down within an hour's worth of making the decision. We shut everything down. There was a few days there where I did not feel motivated or disciplined, but we did manage to turn things around.

I'll start with how I got to talking about discipline as my topic for the WIBC. That was because I had always considered myself a very undisciplined person for my whole life because I was overweight as a kid, and as a teenager, and into my 20s. I was never able to run and I always wanted to. I was never able to be at the very top of my class, but I always wanted to. I had all this desire for great things, and I could never muster enough oomph to get it done.

I would feel this defeat over and over again in my life, and for so long I just thought I was unmotivated. I would continue to set goals and I would continue to try and reach them and I would set out a plan. I would just depend on feeling like I wanted to do it and I would always fail.

I'm not sure when this exactly changed, but over time, I started to use motivation to set myself up later for success. I would say to myself, "Okay, self, what do I need to tell you when you are not feeling like you want to do this?" I started writing on my mirror, and I started setting alarms on my phone.

I was telling this to a client one day at Whole Therapy, and I was telling them about my process of actually losing my baby weight after having my youngest daughter Cindy, she's three now. I was telling them about doing all of these things, and my husband Jamie overheard me and my client was like, "Yes, thank you so much. This is great. I'm going to use this technique and whatever of talking to myself and telling myself the right things." I was like, awesome. Jamie said, after she had left, you know what that is, right? I said, what do you mean? He said, you know what it is that you're doing, right? I said, no. He's like, this is discipline. I was like, oh, my God, it is. I had a happy cry and I realized that I had created discipline in my life without even knowing that I had. In fact, had I known that that's what I had been doing, I probably would have stopped because I would have said, no, that's not- I'm not a disciplined person.

Karen: Talk yourselves out of it.

Jen: Then I was like, if I can talk myself into being disciplined, I can talk myself into doing just about anything. That's what I started to do with this whole COVID-19 thing shutting down the clinics. It was the right decision. We needed to do that. Then, we're mandated to after. I'm glad we did it before we were forced to, but in the whole pivoting of the business and turning to the online space and doing telehealth and stuff like that, it has been hard. That is really the truth.

In turning it around, I have to acknowledge that it has not been an easy thing to do. However, one of the biggest motivations in getting past that obstacle has been, we just opened our new space in October and we had to create a little bit of income at least in order to remain open in the long term because we had put our heart and soul into this over the last seven years, and the last six months have been amazing and difficult and wonderful, but it's all for nothing if we have to close our doors.

That was my motivation. That was my little spark. Then I had to tell myself the right things. I did. Every morning Jamie and I would get up and I'd say, okay, are we doing this today? He'd say, yes, we're doing this today. I say, okay. I'd go into the bathroom mirror and I would look at it and it would say, effing persist, like the whole thing because that's what I tell myself, just keep going. Just keep it like Dory, just keep swimming. That's it really. Sometimes the message on my bathroom mirror changes. Sometimes it's a quote that speaks to me. Sometimes it's an affirmation, but most of the time it's just, effing persist. Then Jamie and I wake up and he tells me the same thing over and over every day. I tell myself the same thing, we can do this, we've got this and then we just create from there.

Karen: Yes. You and I are friends and so I've talked to you a lot during this time and I'm a huge supporter of you and I just want to see you guys succeed and you've started this new online program. I would love for you to talk about that a little bit because-- and in relation to how it fits within the original purpose of your business because I feel you guys have done such a great job of designing it to-- It's not like you're going off in some wildly different direction. You guys actually set this up and you designed it in a way that it fits into what you've already been doing.

Jen: Yes. Well, I have to thank you for that too. That actually, that's one of the reasons that we did pivot so quickly as well is that I reached out and asked for help and you were there to help and I really appreciate that because this is your area and genius. Helping to organize the thoughts and put them together and create the online space to be a reflection of what Whole Therapy already is, that was not just to me. Thanks.

Yes, basically the whole- the name of the game for Whole Therapy is collaboration. We knew that it wasn't just going to be Jamie and myself. We knew it was going to be a collection of as many of our staff as we thought we could get because we knew that they were collaborative in nature as well. That it would just be better as an offering if we all donate a little bit of our time and expertise and flavor. We have so many things on there now. We started with that morning coffee and that's our 8:30 AM--

Karen: Morning coffee is so much, I don't make it most days to see it live because mornings are crazy around my house. My son likes to have a morning coffee talk with me. Sometimes when you're having your morning coffee, I'm having one too. I don't always make it, but I love even just going back and watching it because you guys share such nice little nuggets of wisdom, like Jamie's brain and your brain work in such cool ways. You just got, have so much good wisdom to share and inspiration and practical advice and that's one of the reasons I love you guys so much, is that you're not out there telling people they need to be perfect.

Jen: No. Well, I hope not because we sure don't feel like we're perfect either. It's about being as real as we can. Morning coffee is a great way for us to start our day too. We've said this more than once on the show, the segment which is, it keeps us in a routine and it's just as helpful for us as it is for everybody else. Jamie and I have worked together for so long now that we just are very good together on camera and off. Like you said, he has so much wisdom and experience and I'm pretty good at it now too, but I still learn from him and we've been together for 14 years. Yes, like, so the whole space is just from morning coffee to our workout to different sorts, to all of the educational offerings, the guided meditations that are short for people.

Again, it's very real, some massage techniques, we've got some specific warmups, we're going to get some mental health stuff in there too from David, our integrative therapist. Yes. It's just getting richer and more collaborative as we go. We've been outsourced too like, we've got two different yoga instructors from outside of the Whole Therapy space. People that we have worked within the past. Sam Johnson who is a trainer of Good Life and Mark Lohan who is a long time yoga instructor and yes, it just keeps getting better. Whether or not this continues after the fact, I am so glad we are doing this because it's- I've heard from many of the members already that it's helped them out and it's continuing to help them. It's certainly helping us too.

Karen: Yes. I was telling someone recently because they were saying they needed to go for a TMJ massage. I was like, what? Whole Therapy offers that? I didn't know. Then, of course, Stephanie posted a series on how to do it for yourself. I don't think I've been as excited about anything as that. I'm a teeth grinder and always had that tension. I was so excited to hear that. I'm even learning things about a business that I thought I knew pretty well.

Jen: Well, that's the thing, right? With Whole Therapy, we have so many different practitioners like Stephanie who did the videos, she works at Lancaster, and then at Queen's View we have Roy who also does TMJ. It's funny because I can do it. Do I love it? No. So if you ever want a TMJ massage, you absolutely see one of those people because that's their jam. I'm not afraid to refer people to the right folks who are doing those things. So important.

Karen: That's the thing that makes the collaboration so effective is that you guys play to each other's strengths and interests. It's not just about what you're good at, it's also about what you're really interested in, what's best for the client which is the ideal.

Jen: Well, it's nice because the different practitioners, they get to do what they're passionate about. Dr. Turner is our concussion guy and he's like so into concussions and he in fact recovered from a very bad one in his younger years. He gets it. Stephanie as well, from Lancaster, she had a concussion. It took her out of a very competitive sport. She's sort of leaning into as well. Dylan, who is quite quiet by nature, one of our massage therapists at Queen's View, she's a newer therapist, she has found the video making space, the online space. Amazing. She just is a natural on camera. She's integrating that into her practice. So happy practitioners who are pursuing their passions are just so much better practitioners, so it's good for everybody.

Karen: Well, and that's an interesting commentary. As a leader in a business, you want to help people hone their strengths and interests in their profession. In that way, you and Jamie are an example of how to more effectively build a team that's really engaged in what they're doing.

Jen: Sometimes that means helping people out the door too because that was something Jamie was very good at because he worked at Goodlife fo a number of years as a manager. He is great at seeing when the space that people are in is not for them more so than people are good at seeing that. A lot of us don't even realize we're stagnating until it's too late.

Karen: That's not a bad thing. It's not that someone isn't doing a fine job. It's just not serving them as well as it could if they were in a different situation that suits them better. Keeping that in mind is important.

Jen: It totally is. On that name too. Everybody has a formula for getting treatment, a formula for being in a space. We're not for everybody, so we recognize that. In recognizing that, I think I can let a lot go. My energy is open to accepting the right people for the space. That makes me a better leader as well in understanding. I'm not going to lie though, the first time that somebody outgrew my dream of Whole Therapy and was like, "It's not for me," I was hurt by that and then I got over myself. I've been better since.

Karen: It's a hard shift to me because we've got this mental programming where-- I think our parents stayed in jobs for years and years and years, many of them lifers and now there is this idea of finding the thing that's right for you. What's right for you mainly lasts a short period of time. We have a society that's a little bit more open to people moving around and expanding on their own dreams as opposed to being a cog.

I can see why it would be a challenge. I think that in 10, 20 years, we're going to see leaders who are happy for people when they decide to leave as opposed to having even that moment of hurt which is totally understandable if you are going to miss working with them.

Let's talk about marketing Whole Therapy. I want to brag on you a little bit because we worked together in- I can't even believe it, it's been this long. 2015.

Jen: Five years ago.

Karen: Five years. We worked together back then. I remember having meetings with you and Pat and talking about, "Are you sure you need me?" because you guys were doing such good work and you already had such a good foundation in place. What we ended up doing is we came up with so many great ideas. It was like the collaborations I'm sure you guys have at work. We came up with a richness of ideas and plans that you almost didn't even have time to do it all.

Jen: Story of my life.

Karen: You have been one of those business owners that has had this instinctual approach to marketing that-- I don't know if you felt fears about it or not or unsure, but you had this combination of educational content and you had a natural personality that was very engaging and personal. Witty, with all the clinic life posts.

Jen: I got to give Pat kudos there. I am not witty. He is amazingly witty. He is the brains behind the clinic life wit - 100% him.

Karen: Well, and you've got a team that has a really interesting dynamic and that comes through whether it's Pat driving it or some of the pranks you guys pull on each other and the crazy workout thing you do like you climbing on each other. That video, I'll have to link to it. I know it's still up somewhere because it comes up every now and then. That video, it makes me laugh because you guys use each other as workout props.

Jen: We have a lot of fun. The thing with that is, you can't make up that stuff. I wanted to show and I've always innately had a good way of taking the temperature of what it is that people want. I don't have any experience or education rather in marketing itself but I did know that when we put ourselves out there, it had to be real. The combination of educational offerings with clinical life was a good move, absolutely was, but it's just us being real.

We're just capturing the shenanigans that happen around the clinic. We keep it professional. We are a professional group of people but we definitely have fun at work. Like my favorite one by far is, Bailey is lying on her stomach with her feet sticking out of the curtain, the physio room. I think she's showing her client how to do a push-up or a cobra or something. Pat captured that moment and said something like, "Bailey is a great physio but she sure does suck and hide-and-go seek."

It's stuff like that. We get these hilarious things on video and on photos and we put them up and I think people feel like they know us sometimes before they even come into the clinic. They feel like they're part of the Whole Therapy family. That's exactly what we're after. We want people to feel comfortable because a lot of times people come in and they're not feeling physically comfortable. They are in pain or they have an injury or they're frightened about what's happening with their bodies. If we can lighten the mood and be a little less starkly clinical, then so much the better.

Karen: All of that has added up to building a community. I know that not everyone who follows you is a client but many of them are and you keep that energy that happens online. You feel it when you go into the clinics. It's very authentic in that way. You're not putting a face forward that isn't real.

With regard to your marketing, what has surprised you about the process since you started the business?

Jen: About my marketing process in general, I was surprised at how much clients actually cared to contribute, actually. I didn't expect to have people, I guess, engaged with us so much on say, our Facebook pages and our Instagram and stuff like that. The idea is to put out content to educate at first and then it was like, "Hey, let's show people what we're really about."

Then people asked for more of the clinic life. People asked for more content for education. They really came out and basically told us, "Hey, this is what we want to see." I was like, "Oh, okay." I was surprised, absolutely. It's great because as a person who has been influencing people for a while, I didn't actually realize that I was, I guess, until somebody said--

Karen: That kind of influencer.

Jen: Yes, I guess and I love that. That's what really surprised me because I always fell back on like, "If it was me, what would I want to see? If I was worried about coming into a clinic, what would I want to see, what would I be interested in?" Rachelle, our other amazing physio or one of them, she said she came from Goose Bay in out east. She obviously couldn't see the clinic in person before she came to work for me, but she said that our online space was really what snagged her too. It was the zombie headstand that I did and she was like, "I want to learn how to do that." That was one of our weird gym thing that we did there. She said, that amongst other videos was definitely what pulled her in.

Karen: Oh, yes.

Jen: It's feedback like that that both surprised and encouraged me and the marketing of Whole Therapy is the journey of that. I think at first when I started the clinic, I think I thought everything had to be very over-professional, very clinical. Very clean, very boring.

Karen: It's not you and so that would come across as awkward in a way because you're not being yourself because no one can ever call you formal.

Jen: No, I don't do that very well.

Karen: Have you had any challenges that you've run into with marketing that you want to share? Any advice?

Jen: Ask for help. Actually, what continues to be my biggest challenge is that I don't have a good enough process from conception of idea to execution. That is where we, you and I had chatted about this actually at the WIBC in having you help execute this online member's page, that speaks to your credibility. Again, thank you for that. Having a process is something that is absolutely essential for the marketing and that does continue to not keep me up at night, but if there was something that I'm missing, it's that. I think I'm better at it. I have a space on my phone now where I have a great idea and I write it down and I have blog points and I write those down. A lot of the time, honestly, it doesn't get past that stage so I rely on my team for a lot of the content and then I try and steer it.

Karen: It's a challenge. Business systems, and I feel like you see this in every area of life. So marketing, of course, wouldn't be any different. Coming up with the system that work often means trying a hundred different ways of doing it before you finally get to the thing that really does work and then it's being disciplined to really follow through and carry that through to completion. Honestly, it's going to be different for every business but finding it-- You've been in business for seven years, it's not a quick thing.

Jen: It's not. Actually, something that I just realized when you were talking about that, something that I do now that I did not do before and so can act potentially as a piece of advice for other business owners who are stuck in the same situation. I used to think I had to reinvent the wheel for everything. I used to think that I had to create my own marketing plan, create my own template for this or that or the other thing.

Then I realized that I could "steal other people's stuff" and that has become something that I actually tell other people to do. My massage therapist, I'm like, "Steal my stuff. Steal my technique. Steal the way I do this. Steal my process." I say steal obviously lightly. I don't actually mean plagiarize things and I don't actually mean steal and take away from somebody else but there's a template for everything out there.

Now, I just ask people. The Women's Business Network was integral in helping me create my initial marketing plan because they had a marketing plan. I was like, "This is how you organize things. It's just a spreadsheet. Cool."

Karen: Isn't that why you joined the marketing committee…

Jen: It is.

Karen: …to get more comfortable with marketing your business?

Jen: Absolutely. The first time that I had to post, I think four different things in one day for the WBN, it took me over an hour to do it because I did not understand how to log in or to post something properly with proper spacing, with emojis, with hashtags. I had no idea what I was doing. In joining that committee, I played to my weaknesses and it quickly became much more of a strength so I'm very grateful for that part of my experience area.

Karen: That is a great committee for learning how to just to do the tactical stuff. Because the tactics, if you don't have a comfort level with all these tools, it can be a real barrier because anything that you feel uncomfortable with, it can be a stumbling block to actually getting work done.

Jen: Yes. Some of the time that I've had during this time off and I don't have a ton of time obviously. I have four kids and we're still doing the members group and all that, but I've been trying to learn some of the things that I didn't know about. I've been learning about different task organizers, project management, things like I-- I was looking at Trello and monday.com. I settled on Asana, I really like that one. I was looking at MailChimp in the back end. I did a course there, of course, on MailChimp and it's the little tiny things that I have always wanted to know about but didn't have really the time to sit down and be like, "How do I figure this out?" Those learning processes is my new favorite activity like, "How does this process work?"

Karen: I love Asana and they have--

Jen: Yes?

Karen: Yes, it's a great project management tool.

Jen: I think in different ways. I love lists but I also like boards but I don't just like one or the other. Depending on how I'm thinking, I need one or I need the other, I need both.

Karen: Totally. It makes a lot of sense and it's different things too. If you're doing content planning, having a Kanban board is a little bit more user-friendly than a spreadsheet. Because you can drag and drop things around to where they need to fit and it works better.

Jen: Sometimes I still resort to multicolored sharpies and paper but I'm learning to condense and use what I have like often I just have my phone when I get good ideas, I'm like typing in the notes.

Karen: There is a tool you might really like. I mean it's called Miro. You can create post-it notes, virtual post-its. You can share the board with other people and collaborate in real-time.

Jen: That sounds fun.

Karen: I'm yelling for that, it's very cool. This has been really fun. Is there anything that you would like to promote to the audience, like maybe this Whole Therapy online program?

Jen: Sure. The online Whole Therapy community is a group of like-minded and unique individuals who come together to have some support. Part of it is my staff, my team, part of it is people that I know, part of it is people that I don't. Different provinces, people are all over the place and involved. You can come on for $99 a month and you can cancel anytime.

The idea is we are trying to provide more value all the time with education, with workouts, with morning coffee, with meditations, with all sorts of different things that appeal to just a ton of people. We would love to have you on there if it is of interest.

Karen: You guys have done such an amazing job of putting this together and the content that you're producing, just the workouts throughout the day, there's the quick and dirty and there's different types of workouts from yoga to abs to--

Jen: Strength training for runners and bodyweight class.

Karen: You pretty much can't join and not find something that fits what you need because it's not just workouts, it's also so much educational content and how to just be healthier and live a more optimal life which I love that about it. You guys are just so fun and you keep it real.

Jen: Thank you. That is the ultimate aim for sure, is to keep it real, especially during this time when reality seems a little bit suspended.

Karen: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Jen, for joining me for my very first podcast.

*****

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