Tracy from The Therapists' Coach — 10K followers, not enough clients

Gabi

Thank you for joining me today on our second podcast recording. A few tech gremlins, but here we are.

Tracy

I didn't realise I was your second. Thank you. That's a big honour.

Gabi

Only the second. To kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about you and your business, The Therapists' Coach. Which, by the way, I find a little bit of a tongue twister.

Tracy

Yes. Me too. I can't think of a better name for now, so we're sticking with The Therapists' Coach. So I am a business coach for therapists and wellness practitioners. I help therapists and wellness businesses earn more money with less burnouts. So trying to get the strategy in place, the actual business side of things that we are never taught when we qualify to be therapists and wellness practitioners, like yoga teachers, Pilates instructors, breathwork, energy healing, as well as mental health coaches, counselors, and massage therapists, beauty therapists, all of that side of the world. When we train, we're only given the skills for the actual service, and none of the skills to be able to set up a real business to make real money without killing ourselves with turning up on Instagram and trying to dance on reels and being an influencer. So I'm here to try and set it straight, because I'm a therapist. I have been a therapist for 21 years, and I've learned the hard way how to... Learn the business skills, learn the business side of things so that I can look after myself as well as my clients. And that's my mission.

Gabi

What made you decide to move into coaching other therapists? What was that transition like for you?

Tracy

Bit of a slap because it was Covid. It was the pandemic where I was not allowed to work for six months. Six months of not being allowed in a room with a client. I was completely broke. I'd just built this wonderful studio in my garden, so all of my savings were gone, and then six months of no income. I had to do some deep diving into what were my transferable skills. And so what I did, first of all, was I was on Zoom, online consultations for my clients, making personalised plans for them to be able to help themselves rehabilitate their injuries and their aches and pains. That grew into a membership for live online classes, and it grew into a massive library of all of these self-care, breathwork, rehab videos that I still sell. I was actually just messaging with a client previously, and he sold a little pack of videos to help him with his sciatica. So that is where my business came from. Basically, the pandemic made me do it, and I'm sure a lot of people are in the same position. Grateful in one way. Obviously, it was a horrible time for the world in general. So when I realised that I had built myself a very different kind of business, other therapists that I know in the local area had asked me how I had done it, and if I could show them how to do something similar. So it was really organic. It wasn't something that I looked for, that I tried to do. It was out of need, all of it, in the beginning. Absolute financial need. But what I've built is something that I couldn't even think of six years ago. It's crazy, and I love the coaching. The coaching feels like I have an impact. So all of the lessons that I've learned over the years, I can really help and really support therapists to not go through the same stuff that I've been through, to protect themselves. Like financial security, it's like an insurance policy for their business. It keeps on morphing into slightly different things, which I'm sure if we're all on this journey, you know, of trying to help as many people as possible, finding out that they need different things along the way, I'm training up in different skills for myself so that I can support them deeper and better as well. If that answers your question.

Gabi

Nice. It totally does. So what sort of skills are you training in at the moment?

Tracy

So my latest offering... most of what I do is actually coaching, so you come to me with an issue, like you need more people to be able to find you, to book in your diary. We will talk about different things of how to be more visible online. One of the ways that I support my one-to-one clients is I do an audit of your business. So I go in and I say, "Your website is beautiful, but it's not actually helping you get found. Your Google business profile, you've not filled everything out, so it's not optimised, so that's not working for you." And I'd go and audit everything that's online, how clients can find them, and I would usually give them the breakdown of the audit and say, "Here you go. You should fix these things." And then 90% of them never do it. Either, they're limited by their knowledge of how to do it. Time is a massive thing, like lots of the therapists and wellness practitioners I work with, like me, you know, I have two kids. They have kids, they're busy, they're tired, they don't wanna be doing any of this thing. So my next up level that I just released last month was going in and fixing it for therapists. So more of a done for you service rather than a done with you, which I've done previously. Which to be fair and honest, it's quite scary. So I did it last month for the first time and it's like, "Please don't mess it up. Please don't mess up someone's website." But, it was all very good and the data coming back is really amazing. One of the things that I specialise in is getting found by AI search. So optimising for that, making sure that you're recommended and trusted in the Google overview, in the Claude and ChatGPT recommendations. And one of my clients... some feedback came back yesterday and said she's turned up in 74% more AI searches than only two weeks ago since I audited and fixed her stuff. So that is a great little accolade. Pat on the shoulder. I didn't break it, it worked.

Gabi

I can resonate with that so much. I volunteer for a little charity, and earlier this year we got somebody from marketing to do a little bit of an audit. You get a lovely document back and you go, "This is everything that we should be doing." Do you think we've done most of it? No, because then you go into the paralysis of, "Okay, well, that's great, but none of us are marketing people." Totally get it. So tell me, what does a typical day look like for you? Is there such a thing?

Tracy

No, there is not really a typical day at the moment. I have two days a week where I class those my hands-free days. So I don't touch any other bodies. I don't massage any clients, and they are Tuesdays and Saturdays. And Saturdays, I'm still quite strict on. That is a family day. I don't do any work calls. I'm not coaching. I'm not supporting anyone else apart from my family on that day. But Tuesday has morphed into, that's when I do loads of coaching calls. So no, my typical day is I normally treat some clients for three or four hours, and then I have one to two hours of coaching, and then I'm creating courses, creating support resources for the clients that I'm working with. Yep, so it's a mix and match kind of business, because I'm in transition from reducing my hands-on hours and being able to do more coaching hours. So it's a real transition period.

Gabi

Sounds very varied. So it looks like there's a lot about your business that you enjoy, but if I asked you what's the thing you love the most, what would you say?

Tracy

Oh, I really, really, really love problem solving. Now that translates into all areas of my business, which is probably why I seem like I enjoy it lots, because when a person comes to me with a neck pain and they don't know how it's happened or what the problem is, that is problem solving. It's a little puzzle that I work out. But then when someone comes to me with their business and going, "Look, I'm posting all the time on Instagram, I've done my website. Why aren't I getting any new clients?" That's a different type of puzzle to solve, and so deep diving into that, it helps that I am nosy. I quite like looking into other people's stuff. So it's a problem to be solved, which is a passion, and it's the same in your AI visibility. You can just see the missing pieces of a puzzle and put it together, and then it works. That is definitely what I enjoy the part of it.

Gabi

That's very cool. I love that. I love problem solving too. I'm sure there are challenges. So what's your biggest challenge at the moment?

Tracy

Getting clients to trust me. Because I'm relatively new as a coach compared to some other coaches that work with therapists that have been in the space for longer, I'm almost a newbie coming in and going, "Who is this person? Why should I trust her with my business?" So it's that authority piece that I'm trying to work on. Building trust with people, trying to do it quite quickly. So more clients would definitely solve that problem, but I think I need to step further back and build trust more consistently so I can get those clients through.

Gabi

What's your approach? What do you think is gonna be the thing that builds trust?

Tracy

So the mission has been to grow my visibility on Instagram because that seems to be the platform that my ideal client is hanging out on. So I'm almost at 10K followers. So you'd think 10K followers would mean that I have lots of clients and I earn lots of money of it, but I don't. It's a vanity metric. I've collected these followers along the way. So what my mission now is to enter real conversations with people, to do that personal reach-out. So I've just recently got rid of ManyChat. I don't know if you know about ManyChat. It's the tech automation system where it will automatically send someone a link or send someone some information about you, and it's AI. It's a bot that does it for you. And it worked a year, two years ago, that people liked that, and now people instantly dislike it. So I've got rid of it, and I'm doing the more human angle of actually starting conversations in Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, you know, going old school, doing it properly. I know, I'm saying AI is wonderful, and we should use it to get found, but people are not trusting if something's AI like that. They do want the more authentic person that's actually talking to them. So that's what I'm trying to do to build more trust. I have an aim of starting a couple of conversations every day. And I know people that do this on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn is not a platform that I really dive deep into, but it does work even if you're not talking about how to work with me and here's the link to work with me. Just building a real relationship, nurturing a relationship, that's what I'm looking for at the moment.

Gabi

There's nothing quite like having a chat with an actual human, right? Yeah. Imperfect as that might be sometimes.

Tracy

Yeah. I mean, if I'm looking at my email marketing website and I come up against a little stumbling block that's something I can't fix, there's always a chatbot there. I do not like to use a chatbot because I know it's AI. I like to go into the support desk and see if I can get a real live human because it's just different. It is better. So that I think is the same with ManyChat. When I'm in a launch, when I have a free masterclass coming up and I'm getting people to comment a word which then triggers ManyChat to send them the link, that is really helpful, because I cannot be there and reply to every single person as soon as they do it. You know, we all have lives, as well as trying to run a business. It is helpful in that situation, but not in many others. Not when someone just follows you. They shouldn't really get a bot's reply. I don't think. Or it's not working at the moment. It might flip again to be a good thing.

Gabi

How do you use AI in your business other than the likes of ManyChat?

Tracy

I am using it basically as an assistant at the moment. This morning, just before our call, I am setting up a five-day challenge that's happening in November after October half-term when the kids go back. So I open Claude, which is my favourite. I open Claude in Chrome extension, put the sidebar in, and then open my website, and it can do things for me. So I can set it some tasks. It's like, "Right, here's all the copy for the course that I want it to put in," and it will implement it into my course portal for me. And then it will open my CRM, and it will do all of the emails for me, because I've put in all the copy. And it's just an assistant. It's like I have paid a VA to do the work, which I did used to do all the time, on a retainer. And it does it quicker, and I can go in and check it all the time. I don't know what I'd do without Claude right now, because it is a very big assistant. I don't really use it for creation, as in ideation. I use it for implementation. So Claude Cowork has changed my world, definitely.

Gabi

So do you teach the other therapists how to use AI and how do they feel about AI? Do you find resistance?

Tracy

50/50 resistance. Yeah. There are some people that have never used it before, but when you give them a prompt... I have created a prompt which is called heart-led messaging for therapists, and it's an AI prompt that you copy and paste into your favourite AI, and then it asks you deeper dive questions to really get down to who your ideal client is, and then it helps you create some messaging around it. And it helps you create social posts, and it helps you create emails, you know, all of this stuff that's really helpful. Once they play with it for the first time, they go, "Oh my God, this is so good." But you just need to get over the hurdle of getting them to try it properly and use it properly, not just find me the cheapest flight to Ibiza kind of stuff, you know, proper deeper work. I have in the past had a couple of clients like, "AI is not for me. I'm just gonna ignore it and it's gonna go away." But they eventually come round because it's not going anywhere.

Gabi

One of the things that strikes me about you, and this is gonna play into some stereotypes, therapy is very much associated with soft skills. I think a lot of people think about AI as a more technical skill. Do you consider yourself to be also technical or would you just say that AI's become so easy to use that it's open to anybody? Where would you put yourself on the spectrum?

Tracy

I am a bit techy, but I am not very techy. So I was speaking to my mother-in-law, watching my daughter play football last weekend, and she was a programmer. She used to hand write code. So it is beyond anything that I could possibly comprehend, and we're talking about HTML code that Claude creates for me to then make something. I have no idea about code, so I'm not going to be on the same scale as my mother-in-law. I remember we were at Christmas a couple of years ago, and one of my nieces was doing GCSE maths, and she said, "This is one of the puzzles. We've got to find where the error is in this code." And it was three sheets of A4, and there was one error, and she found it within a minute. I'm not that person. I'm definitely... Because AI has made it so easy to access, then I'm able to access it. Yeah.

Gabi

So five-year plan. Have you got one?

Tracy

I have a three-year plan.

Gabi

Okay. Tell us more.

Tracy

So three years is gonna be 2030, so that's why it's a three-year plan, and it feels like, the end of an era, beginning of a new era. So that's where I've made my plan to go. The plan is that I will be retiring from hands-on therapy by then. I've made big leaps already towards that. I used to, only two years ago, yeah, just less than two years ago, be 35 hours a week hands-on every week, and now I treat a maximum of 15 clients a week. So very, very different. So I'm on the way to reducing and reducing until I'm hands-free. That's the goal. But my goal is to support 1,000 small business owners to be able to earn well without burning out, and however I can do that. I feel like I'm not gonna stay on one pathway all the way, so I don't know what the end result is gonna be. It is gonna be some form of coaching and done-for-you-services is what it's going... That's the path currently, but I don't know what it's gonna be, but the mission is to be hands-free and to be supporting 1,000 small business owners.

Gabi

Wow. What a headline. 1,000 small businesses. I might have to steal that. I guess you've got two flavours of business because you had your therapy and then now the coaching side. Thinking about the coaching side, is there something you wish you knew when you set it up?

Tracy

I wish I knew all of it. I wish I knew everything. The biggest learning curve that I wish I had learned earlier on is I suppose reading people better. You know, reading what they, what they wanted and needed from me much earlier. Now I know that it's not just that I can send people a questionnaire to get their answers for what they want, but it's actually reading the energy, reading people's faces, reading it really, really well. And I thought I had lots of practice with 21 years as a therapist, you know, with people in front of me all the time that I'm really trying to listen to, deeply listen to and help. But it's different when you're through a screen. Yeah. So I wish I would have focused more earlier on, and then I think I would have maybe retained more clients in the longer term.

Gabi

So thinking about the advice that you would give to others, particularly in your coaching business, what would it be?

Tracy

I think knowing who your ideal client is really, really deeply, not just where they live and how much they earn and that kind of stuff. What's their name and what's their age? But actually the psychographics. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What are their deep desires? What's their real pain? That kind of stuff really helps you to walk a mile in another man's shoes. You know, get inside their head and speak to their pain and the solve that they're looking for. That's the thing that most business owners don't get right at the beginning, but they work out along the way. But the earlier you can get it, the better, the quicker you will succeed I'm sure.

Gabi

So who's your ideal client?

Tracy

My ideal client has changed a little bit over the last year or so. I'm looking for, or they are looking for me, a person that's been a therapist for a while and is now going, "Okay, I need this to be easier. I don't wanna work so hard to get clients, to keep clients coming back, to keep them in my little sphere." You know, be able to earn money outside of one-to-one work as well, so they have maybe semi-passive, passive income, and be able to have really strong boundaries. You know, that they want boundaries, to be able to say no to people, but they need them in place so they can look after themselves. We tend to be people-pleasers in this part of the world.

Gabi

Yeah, it's particularly important I think when there's so much emotional... I don't know what the word is, but it's not the same as just coding a bit of kit and then going home, right? You're feeling that other person's pain and trauma and feelings and emotions.

Tracy

And you know their stories intimately, right? So even if I'm helping someone with foot pain, they might be telling me about how heartbroken they are that their neighbour died, and you know, how it's gonna affect them. It's just normal human life, but you get so much insight into what they're thinking and feeling. And it's hard to then say, "Oh, but I need to put my prices up," because what if you know that they can't afford that? What if you know the situation that they're in? And you're torn, and it's really hard when you're in a healing profession to have boundaries. There are ways and means. You know, you've got to make it more client-centered, that it is better for them if they can still access it. But you know, you've got to be kind too, haven't you? Like, I have clients that I've had three price increases, and they don't know a stitch about it. I've never told them about the price increases. They still pay the same price at three price increases previous, because I can, because it's my own business. And you don't need to be a hard ass. You just need to be able to look after yourself.

Gabi

If there was one wish you had, one wish for something the government could do to support small businesses or businesses like you, what would it be?

Tracy

I've only just had my eyes opened to how much funding there is actually that you can apply for. I had never heard about funding in all of my years of being self-employed. I've been self-employed my whole life. I've never had a job, and I've never heard about any funding that I could apply for. I suppose it's all the training academies also sharing information. But to have all of the information available to you to where you can get help, not just for funding for money, but for support. There are lots of schemes where you can go and have mentoring, and you can go and be in support groups to grow your business and to support you as a business owner, and they're just not visible enough. They're just not well-known enough, and I think that's such a valuable resource that's being underused. And maybe they want it to be underused, so that they don't have to pay so much. But it would be really fundamentally life-changing if everyone that came out of training knew that there was a support system, because we do feel... I'm gonna speak stereotypes. Generally, therapists feel very alone in a very big sea of small businesses, and don't know where to go for any help. So I think if they could do anything, the visibility of where to get help would be my number one.

Gabi

Did you find any particular challenges about being a woman starting a business? Or do you hear it from your clients at all?

Tracy

In the therapeutic world, it is best to be a woman. So what I hear is the opposite side of the scale. It is much harder to be a hands-on therapist for men because women don't want to be booked in with them, and men don't want to be booked in with them and it's really, really tricky. Whereas people want female therapists, and I think it's the same in talking therapies as well from what I hear from my clients. So it's a different category of business that I come from. So my opinion might be different to yours. But when it comes to asking for help, I think women are better at asking for help than men. But if you're a small business owner or founder, you might have a bit more oomph about you, and you might want to do it all yourself and then never ask for help.

Gabi

Okay. Yeah. I feel that.

Tracy

Me too.

Gabi

Yeah. There's, there's that constant guilt of, "Why can't I do everything by myself?"

Tracy

100%. Yeah. I, I have never had a coach or any support until Covid and because I was literally going, "What on earth am I gonna do? I just don't know how I'm to earn any money, and I can't even go and get a job in Waitrose because you're not allowed to work in shops." And then I got support to be able to help me set up my online business, and for the first time, when I asked someone for help, I cried after. It was like a failure. Like, what am I gonna do if I can't do it all by myself? Craziness. Now I love asking for help. It's so good to call on someone else for their expertise and me to stay in my zone of genius. I have a garden, and I don't have very much time to do the garden. I would love to have more time to do the garden because it's a really lovely pastime, but twice a year I pay for gardeners to come in and do a massive cutback of everything. That's their zone of genius, and I'm staying in mine. You know, I would definitely pay for them. They're quicker. They're better. They're more experienced. They can do more. That's the same as asking someone like a VA or an accountant to come in and do some work for you.

Gabi

I remember the first time I paid a cleaner to come clean my house, how guilty I felt. Felt so guilty. And then I got used to it and I'm like, "This is a wonderful division of labour."

Tracy

I haven't done that. If I was to consistently earn a lot more money than I am doing now, I think I'd start with someone just to come and change the bedsheets every week, because that is a job I absolutely hate. I'd start with that. But then I think I'd have a private chef instead of a cleaner.

Gabi

One of my friends is a private chef, and she used to work for private households, and I thought, "How lovely must it be to just get home to this fully cooked dinner?"

Tracy

Yeah. Whatever your heart desires. Exactly. Someone to do the shopping, to make really good, healthy choices, to cook you delicious food. Sign me up.

Gabi

I've got some quick-fire questions for you.

Tracy

Go.

Gabi

What do you think your industry is getting wrong or could do better? So I guess therapy in the broader sense.

Tracy

Therapists are a bit slow to roll with the times of getting on with AI, really getting it to help you and support you. That is definitely what's going wrong at the moment. People are in fear of it or thinking that it's gonna go away, and they just need to lean into it and let it help them get more visible.

Gabi

Okay. You talked about loving to solve problems. So what's the biggest problem you're trying to solve right now, and what's gonna help you solve it?

Tracy

My biggest problem right now is I need more clients. I don't have enough at the moment. And how I'm trying to solve it is personal reach-outs. Personal conversations started.

Gabi

Mistakes. Tell us about a mistake that you made, and how did it change how you operate?

Tracy

Oh, name a million mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. I am not risk averse. I go in like a two-footed tackle in football to everything, and my saying is "If it goes wrong, I learn. If it goes well, great." It's all good. I just do a little sidestep onto a different path. Like, recently I had a launch that took me three months, you know, a really big build-up. A free masterclass was to learn how to build courses for therapists. 168 people signed up. Amazing. Things are going great. This is a free masterclass, and then there was an upsell at the end of the masterclass to this four-week build with you program. And I got only two sign-ups, which meant that I couldn't run it because that's not enough people really to fill the group program for it to be worthwhile for me. And so I canceled it, and I'm postponing it until next year. So where the mistake was, I'm still diving deep into, but I think the pricing was wrong. But it's always going in and looking at the data and looking at where the drop-off was and where people started not reading the emails or maybe there's too many emails or not enough personal outreach after the masterclass. But, you know, there's lots of mistakes that are made, so I could tell you about once a month that there's a mistake that's made. But we learn. We, we don't die. We just learn.

Gabi

Have you always been good at coping with mistakes, or is it something that you've had to build resilience for?

Tracy

Mm. So my previous career, I was a professional ballerina. Now, I had done ballet from age eight until I retired at 28. 20 years of it. Now, ballet is a good metaphor for life, because you are trying to achieve perfection in every single millisecond of your movement, but perfection doesn't exist. So it's like relative failure all the time, so you get used to not achieving the thing that you are trying to achieve. And then when you go out into the world and you're auditioning, you have to get used to people saying no, and it might not be because of your skills. It might be because you had the wrong colour hair, that you were too tall, or mine is I had boobs. They don't want ballet dancers with boobs. You know, that kind of thing, and you have to become resilient. Now, resilient is a word that's thrown around everywhere these days, but it's not just that bounce back ability. You have to reflect that it's not me personally. The no is not for me, it's just for that moment in time that I wasn't the right person for that thing. So it's a lesson that has been long learnt over the million years. It's just one of those things that my life has presented lots of these moments where things don't go exactly to plan, and I'm still here, and it's all fun. I'm not gonna break down into tears every time things don't go exactly to plan, because there's a lot to learn, and there's a lot of adjustments that you can just steer yourself down a different path.

Gabi

That's really cool. You're multi-talented. I am in awe. Next quick question. What is something a customer said to you that stuck with you?

Tracy

Oh, I've got a negative one. Should I do a negative one? So I was in the DMs, Instagram DMs, with a potential client, and she was wanting help with a particular thing or mindset about her business and I was offering her some free advice in the DMs, inviting her to book a one-to-one in with me, and it was a paid one-to-one, not a free one. And she basically said, "Why would I pay you? I can just ask ChatGPT." Like, oh, that's crazy, because yes, AI is amazing, but it's not a human with lived experience, and I understand that that is quite a familiar thought process for a lot of people now. It is different having a real life coach than having a ChatGPT or Claude coach, for sure. But I did think then that that's what lots of people think, that they don't need to employ someone like us to support them, that they can just get the advice from AI. Of course, AI crawls the entire internet for information. You can get some advice, but it's not gonna be lived experience advice and it's not gonna be truly personalised to them. You know, someone really listening to what they're going through. But it really made me stop and think about if this business is gonna be here in a year or two because there is that much information available online. But I still have a coach, and he's irreplaceable. I ask Claude stuff all the time, but my coach wouldn't give the same advice as Claude because it's not real lived experience.

Gabi

It's choice, right? Some people won't wanna pay for the personalisation, and other people will see the value.

Tracy

Yeah. Exactly. My social media feed is full of therapists because that's who my ideal client is, and every other graphic, every other post is made in ChatGPT specifically, not in Claude. And you can see it's ChatGPT because it's all so packed. Yeah. You know? It's so much writing in a tiny picture, it's all the same font, and it's all the same colour... Do you not see that it's not making something that is good for you? This is not accessible information.

Gabi

No. And I must say, there are some days when I've spent three hours on Canva and I'm like, "Oh, maybe I should just make an AI picture." But actually, there's also something quite satisfying when you finally get there. And actually, I've started using Claude Design where it creates the basics for you, and then you can go and personalise it. It just takes away a little bit of that heavy lifting, and I still think that's better.

Tracy

No, it is really good. I use Claude Design, but what I have done, I've set it up all of my branding, you know, the colours and the fonts and everything that I use. But I give it a copy of... for instance, I really like help with slide decks to create, because they take me a million hours to do manually. So one that I've created that I'm happy with, that's like 50 slides, I will put it in there, upload it into the conversation, and it will use that template to then make things going forward. That is a different thing, because I've already made it manually, and then it's just copying it. But if you give it free rein, sometimes it's way off what you would actually create yourself.

Gabi

Right, we're almost at the end. Exercise in resilience. This entire experience is an exercise in resilience today. And I just have to keep telling myself that we've all been there. Definitely. We've all been there.

Tracy

Yeah. Well, I was saying I had it earlier today, where I had to change a call that was supposed to be on Zoom into Instagram video so that we could actually still have the call. Tech gremlins are definitely alive and angry today.

Gabi

What's the part of your business that nobody sees?

Tracy

The million hours I put in. There's a bit of a running joke in my house. My husband tries to watch a series or a film with me, and I go, "Oh, I'll just do this." Laptop out. "Oh, and I'll just finish this." And then halfway through a film I'll pick it up because my brain has gone to something I need to do, and, and he'll just be there staring at me going, "Put it down." Like, oh no. It's like it never switches off. I could probably do with some enforced breaks. You know, someone to lock my phone and laptop away so I can't do anything at all. That might be healthier.

Gabi

Yeah. I think it's that always on mentality now with the internet, right? And it's just too easy.

Tracy

Definitely. I have got better, because I am a night owl. So getting to bed at midnight was always my aim, because naturally I would stay up later. It's when the house is quiet, I can get lots of work done. You know, it's definitely my time. And now I've tried to bring it forward to 11:00 PM going to bed, which has changed my world, which is very healthy.

Gabi

What do you refuse to compromise on?

Tracy

My standards. I don't like to hand over work or do anything when I don't believe it's up to my standard of delivery. It's really hard that though, isn't it? Because I'm trying not to be a perfectionist, try to just get stuff done and out there. I don't compromise if people are not nice. It's a hard no. Yes. There are quite a few people that you come across, especially with a bigger audience on Instagram. There are some people that are just not nice. Yeah. And they deserve to be blocked.

Gabi

I hope you're blocking.

Tracy

I do.

Gabi

Block, block, block.

Tracy

Yep, definitely.

Gabi

Doesn't sound like you've got a lot of time for reading but if you do, what are you reading, watching, or listening to right now?

Tracy

I am terrible with reading books. I do audiobooks, and I mostly listen to podcasts. Podcasts are definitely something that I do all the time. I find it quite hard to have silence, so I've always got one ear in listening to a podcast. But we are watching Slow Horses at the moment on TV, which I think we're a bit behind. I think it was a long time ago, but that's really good. Podcasts is always self-growth stuff, always mindset, always nervous system regulation, always rewriting my subconscious for positivity. For manifestation, all of those types of things.

Gabi

So our, our exit question..., there's this big podcast that we'll not talk about. But they have a tradition where each guest leaves a question for the next guest. So if I were to ask you what should I ask my next guest, which would provide an insight into their business, what would it be?

Tracy

Hmm. I know which podcast this is from.

Gabi

Do you?

Tracy

I would ask something about what's the one thing in your life that you would take away or replace that would mean that you would be more successful? What's one thing that's holding you back from being more successful?

Gabi

Right, Tracy. It's been a wonderful pleasure today. So I just have one more question for you. What's the one thing that's holding you back from being more successful?

Tracy

That there's only 24 hours in a day. Nothing ... nothing. I can do anything that I want to do. I can do anything that I dream of. I'm just on it, doing it.

Gabi

You are, and I absolutely love your Instagram videos. And you are definitely inspiring me to go and sort out my Google Business Profile this weekend, because actually one of the things I was really struggling with is, you know, what photo do I take? And then I looked at your photo and I'm like, "Well, it can be any photo." You know?

Tracy

Absolutely any. It's called B-roll. B-roll, like background videos. Just go take photos of anything. Take a video of you cleaning up your house or, you know, reorganising your office space, and you can screenshot along the video, and just natural shots are better than any posed shots ever.

Gabi

Amazing. Lovely bit of final advice. Thank you so much for bearing with me. I have no idea how I'm gonna edit this and make it look decent. But thank you so much.

Tracy

My pleasure. Lovely to speak to you, Gabi.

Gabi

Thank you so much for getting to the end of the podcast. I hope that means that you've watched the whole thing and that you enjoyed it every little bit as much as I loved recording it. We would love to hear from you, whether you've got feedback on the format of the podcasts, the content, or the sort of guests that you would love to see in future. Or actually, if you have any recommendations on really badass female founders, business owners in Surrey that you think we should get onto the podcast, please let me know. You can get in touch on the website, on my email or through Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. Please, can you also help us grow the podcast by liking, subscribing or sharing with your friends, family and other really cool business owners that you might know? Thank you.