Lucy Burns – Building An Online Business To Empower Doctors And Patient Weight Loss

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the #CriticalFewActions? to improve your business podcast. I’m John Downes and I’m here to help you cut through the overwhelm and prioritize what matters most to improve your business. Let’s get started and discover the #CriticalFewActions? that have the biggest impact.
Dr. Lucy Burns is a general practitioner, fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, and a specialist in lifestyle medicine with a focus on weight management through achieving a healthy metabolism and mindset. With her business partner, Dr. Mary Barson, they formed a weight loss training organization to teach and empower overweight people to manage and rectify their health. This is uncommon amongst the medical fraternity that typically operates in a patient by patient appointment, individual treatment business model. Lucy, welcome. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
So Lucy, what inspired you to get into online and cohort based weight loss training and how did you make your way into an online training business from being a practitioner?
Yes, great question. Well, I was running a weight loss management clinic. in person using traditional one to one medicine. I had designed a program that ran over eight sessions. The problem was I was booked out for months and months and months. And so it was then becoming this concept where I realized, Oh, actually I’ve got something to offer here, but I can only, You know, I’m only one woman. I can only do it in one sitting. A lot of the information I was giving was the same. So I was having the same conversations with the same people. Having spent a couple of years listening to people, and understanding that their story was in fact, similar to my own journey on weight management. I just realized that I could do this in a one to many forum rather than this one to one model and impact more people and save my voice We decided to look into this online business. I have, a colleague, Dr. Mary, my, business partner who I happened to meet serendipitously at a conference. We had so many things in common that we decided to form an alliance. After a little bit of experimenting, real life medicine was formed and it’s been one hell of a journey. Fantastic. Perhaps you can tell us a bit more about your journey. We spent probably a couple of months sitting down and nothing else, our program. And again, that wasn’t actually that hard because I’d already done it, tested it, was working, people were loving it. I guess the weight loss industry is massive. It’s a huge juggernaut of vested interest groups and, doctors trying their best, but in general practice, which runs in a very small consultations. You know, every consultation is somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes. Most doctors don’t want to talk about weight management. It’s complicated and hard to do in a short time slot. Some doctors do it poorly and the patient goes away feeling terrible about themselves, like they’re a failure. The fact that we had a model that was working and people were coming back, loving it. Therefore I’ve gone, okay, we’ve kind of on a winning here. let’s scale it and see how we can do better. Tell me how does your business model work then? What is your service offering and what are your channels to market? Yeah, so I think lots of people think doing the online course is the hard bit you do the course And that’s all you have to do. In fact, creating an online course is the easy bit, there’s lots of offerings out there, lots of platforms. We use one called Kajabi, but there’s plenty of others and they’re not that hard to do. However, the marketing and transitioning people away from that traditional medical model into an online course took a lot more than we were anticipating, but I think we’ve done it reasonably well. We have a number of offerings. We’d still do one to one consulting if people want to do particularly coaching. So the thing that I think separates us out from most of our competitors and most of the even medical fraternity is that both Mary and I are trained medical doctors, but we’ve also done extensive training in psychological medicine. Getting into the nuts and bolts of behavior because it’s one thing to know what to do, but the thing to implement it, to do it all the time, to be able to do it when the going gets tough. That’s the bit that requires some understanding about our psychology. So I think for us, the thing that really did separate us out. And we market it as being understanding your physiology and your psychology. So the two P’s, which don’t sound at all like a P. That has been really helpful, but getting the message out is really the first thing. There’s no point having a beautiful online course with lovely handouts and a beautiful background and all those things if nobody knows about you. Unlike traditional medicine doctors don’t need to market like we rarely do we maybe market for the first four weeks and that’s about it. So we had to learn marketing. We had to learn messaging, how to make our office sound good, how to move away from Medicare as a funding model all of this has been part of our learning journey, which has been both, difficult at times, but exciting. Yeah. And it is, bigger than we thought. I actually like that because sometimes if you knew exactly how much work you were going to have to put in, you might not do it. But once you’re in, it’s like you’re halfway there and you go, well, I’ve already put in this much work. Now I’ll just do the extra bit to get that next level and that next skillset to do the things I want to do. what’s your service offering and what are your channels to market Yes. we have one to one offering. We have a one to many and a one to few. The one to one is obvious. The one to many is we do some small groups. So these are groups, no more than six of people who really are looking for accountability is their major. And so, we run those fortnightly over an online forum like zoom Our one to many is a combination of, we have a 12 week program. And then that leads into a membership for people that want to continue to work with us. And so without 12 week program, it’s based on the three C’s we call them. So it’s having content, coaching and community. The content is our prerecorded course. The coaching is weekly life coaching, which is really around mindset and also the opportunity for participants to have their questions answered. The community is, where a lot of the gold is. people feeling connected to a cause, to something, they’re all in together. We think those, having those three Cs is a fundamentalI reason why our programs have been so successful And the community piece, is that, purely online or is that both online as well as face-to-face So generally online, although this year, now that COVID has finished, we are running a series of events. So community events that we call the low carb roadshow. And one of the key pillars in these events is to get people connected and having conversations. If you’re doing something that feels like you’re the only one doing it, then you’re much less likely to stick to it. But if you feel like you’re part of a community and it’s part of you becomes part of your identity, then you’re much more likely to continue to stick to things. I think that word identity is really important. When we start to see ourselves as having changed our identity, the way that we relate to food or to exercise or to be tidy, it really has a fundamental impact on it becoming second nature. absolutely. Behavioral change, yeah. weight management for us is an area of our cohort that we’ve identified through listening to people’s stories, learning about our audience is that the majority of our people are people that have, air quotes failed dieting and they feel like they’re, hopeless that they can’t do it, that it’s their fault. So really empowering people to real recognize that it’s not their fault. There’s a million reasons why things haven’t worked. Some of it is poor advice that I used to give out around weight management because I didn’t know any better. But a lot of it is just understanding our beautiful brain and why it takes us down a path that we know is not taking us to where we want to go, but we feel powerless to stop it. Do you see two cohorts of customers or referrers and consumers? In your business? Yeah, absolutely. So one of our things, both Mary and I, are really passionate about helping people. Our community as Australians is under siege with a tsunami of chronic disease, that chronic disease is related largely to our lifestyles and this is not to blame the individual because the lifestyles are coming about, because people are marketed to within an inch of their lives. There’s nowhere you can go where there’s not a marketing message telling you to eat something or, play this online game or join this gambling service. It’s everywhere. So we, spend a lot of time, giving away a lot of content. Like we just want people to be able to do the things. Our podcast has a lot of content and there are people that just listen to the podcast and go, Oh, good. All right, well, I’m going to go off and do that. And they make phenomenal changes. And we’re so happy about that. But then there are people who really, want that extra accountability. And that’s, I guess what they pay for. So that will then come and do one of our courses, depending on what suits them, whether they’re happy to do a one to many model, which is cheaper and, more economical for them, or if they want that more boutique experience, then they can either do one to few or one to one model.
Mm. Absolutely. And so we hear from so and cynic quite a lot about, you know, understanding our why, what really drives us. How would you describe your why Lucy?
Yeah. So I guess as a doctor, my whole job, and my identity is about helping people. The more people that we can help, the more people that we can impact. The better It absolutely fills our cup. When we get a little email saying, Dr. Lucy, Dr. Mary, I listened to your podcast. It’s brilliant. I love it enough, lost 10 kilos and I’ve changed my life and my fattiness has gone away. And we just go, Hey, happy dance. the second one for us is really recognizing that the current medical model, particularly for GPs, is broken and GPs are leaving in droves cause they’re burnt out. They’re exhausted. they’re not getting any of the satisfaction that I get as a lifestyle medicine physician, because it’s like band aiding. We wanted to design a system that stops us burning out, that pays us, reasonably well for what we offer. So that we’ve got longevity in the game. Earlier in your career, you ran programs for GPs and physicians to help them with their own challenges. Oh yeah, absolutely. And in fact, that was not that long ago. And that business is still going, just not run by me, Doctors, you know, even though we’re meant to be the pillars of understanding health, we’re not good examples walking the walk, we will tell other people what to do. And then because of the, sheer burnout, the exhaustion, the fact that we are self sacrificing and relentless, we then engage in all the habits that we know people do when they’re stressed. so we’re not really great examples of health. So how are your competitors in this game? And what’s unique about real life medicine compared to other providers? Yeah, absolutely. Great question. we have many competitors. It’s a massive industry. Huge industry. In fact, some advice that we were given, which fortunately we didn’t listen to was don’t bother you. You can’t compete. And it’s always interesting when you have the market saturated. And also because we launched our business right at the start of COVID other people said, what are you doing? Nobody’s got time for these. They’re all too busy buying toilet paper. They’re not going to be interested in weight loss. And again, so glad we didn’t listen to them. But, the market is busy with what we call action based solutions. These are things like, a meal plan, a, points system, everything that focuses on actions. But as humans, humans rely on their thoughts that create their feelings, that create their actions. So for us, it’s been really, imperative that we spend a lot of time talking about actions, but mind management. And that mind management is not willpower. So for a lot of people, they’ve spent decades trying to lose weight using willpower as the only mind management resource, which runs out when you’re tired, when you’re stressed, and not understanding the psychology of it all, their stories that are in their head. The reasons why their brain is, as I said, taking them off on a different path when their logical brain knows what they want to do. So I guess the two P’s again, coming back to that physiology and the psychology has been something that has been really helpful. I guess talking to people about the fact that it isn’t their fault, that they have, not been able to achieve their goals in the past and they’ve considered that a failure. So really getting very, clear on that messaging for us has been really helpful. So people come to us going, okay, well, these are doctors, they know what they’re talking about. Mary’s got an extensive history in biochemistry. we’re qualified, but that’s not enough. It’s then them needing to trust themselves and we give them permission to do that by saying to them, it’s not your fault that you’ve failed these other regimes. It’s because you haven’t understood how your beautiful brain works and we’re going to show you how it does. Relying on willpower alone is the foundation of your dieting, I guess. Yeah. It’s willpower, but also a calorie restriction. Which is, again, what everybody would think. We talk about this, it makes sense. It sounds alluring that you just reduce the calories that you consume and you will lose weight. Less exercise more easy. Yeah. absolutely. But that doesn’t work. People think that, you know, people who are overweight just a gluttonous and slothful. So they eat too much and lie around. That is just the most untrue stereotype I’ve ever seen. They have tried so many times and it’s really not their fault. They’ve been given poor advice. The calories in calories out model does not work. So in this very busy market, why do customers buy from you rather than your competitors. Bariatric surgeons who are putting in lap bands or doing, gastric sleeves With a regime of, long term medications because, you can inject yourself, you can take tablets, capsules, there’s a whole raft of things you can do. So why you guys? Great question. I think the thing is, I alluded to the fact that there’s a tsunami of chronic disease and there truly is. So for some people, bariatric surgery is going to be a wonderful tool and it will help them. For other people, injections or medications may be what they’re looking for, but we find that a lot of people have tried that and many of our clients have had gastric sleeves. The thing is really not about what you eat, but why you eat. And so for a lot of them, it is really getting clear on that, that they come to us to understand why they eat. They know, that eating a packet of Tim Tams every night after dinner is not going to be helping them achieve their goals. And they try to stop it and then they can’t, and then they don’t know why. And so that’s what we help them with. There’s a few different causes for some people it is addiction, to ultra processed foods. For some people it is trauma. They’ve had extensive, what we call either big T trauma or small T trauma. So big T trauma, is things like abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse. But small T trauma is so prevalent. And that is really about unmet childhood needs. People have been bullied not listened to not heard or not made to feel worthy in their formative years. understanding that for people is really helpful and then giving them the tools. It’s all very well to understand why you eat, but if you don’t have the tools to know what to do when your brain is yelling at you to go and eat the Tim Tams or scoff the ice cream, then that is not going to do anything either. So again, giving them the reasons why, and then what you can do about it that are not just white knuckling your way through. I think ultimately they come to us because they’ve heard about, us. They’ve either listened to us on the podcast, we do a lot of Facebook lives because audiences can, you know, people buy off people. if they don’t know who you are, they may not like you, they may not trust you. We really spend a lot of time trying to develop that no luck and trust feeling for people and that’s why they buy. And so that suggests that, being accessible online or on socials is a vital part of your, strategy as a runner. As a doctor, I’m very mindful of my boundaries because I’m not available at 3am for somebody to direct message me. We have parameters that we need to operate in around ARPA regulations, which are very strict for doctors and other regulated health professionals. There are things that we literally can’t do, because they’re against our guidelines. We can’t do testimonial advertising. We can’t do, individual medical advice over Facebook messaging or even emailing. And sometimes that can be a barrier, particularly the testimonial thing, because there are plenty of other people out there, who provide, online courses who have lots and lots of testimonials. If you really want to kick off your strategic planning and work in a supportive environment with other CEOs and leaders, the CEO masterclass in strategic planning and implementation is for you. This 10 month small group course helps you craft your strategic plan, presented to a group of peer investors and develop a habit of monthly implementation. Our wait list is open now at www.criticalfewactions.com.au. We can either look at that as unfair, or we just accept it is what it is. And therefore we just have to work within the guidelines of that. And keep marketing our message that we’re doctors, we’re regulated, we’re trustworthy we’re the real deal. What have been the major roadblocks along the way? And how have you overcome them? We’ve been really fortunate in the way our business has grown It started off, it was very organic growth. there was just Mary and I running it for a long time, just two people. We went into Facebook groups chatted and gave free advice on how to manage weight. We then developed a couple of, relationships with affiliates and that was really good. Then like all companies, you get a bit bigger and we’ve got some team now that help us. So we’ve got probably still the only equivalent of one and a half employees. Online businesses can run very leanly nobody needs to come in and open up the shop. and nobody needs to be there to receive goods. Like you can really run a very lean business model. For us, learning how to manage people, is the biggest thing Luckily, we’re quite good at that as part of our medical training, Teaches us to read and understand people. we’ve been lucky, like everybody, I think every single person in the whole universe makes mistakes. You know, we’ve sent out emails that have got spelling mistakes and typos and all those things. But again, we learnt as our business grew and it was right, well, this isn’t a total disaster because we’ve sent an email out with 15 typos in it, but it’s only gone to 45 people. So that’s not bad. And then as the business has grown, we’ve tightened our systems so that we make fewer and fewer mistakes, which is good because now we have more and more people to make those mistakes in front of. now you can afford to send two or three spelling mistakes out to four and a half thousand or 45, 000 people. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. So people management and I guess scaling has been one of the challenges growing at a fairly rapid rate. Yeah, we have. I mean, it’s easy to grow rapidly when you start with nothing. it’s not so easy. Yeah, absolutely. That’s been one of our challenges now our original strategy of going into a few Facebook groups and getting some affiliates, was great, but we’ve saturated their markets. now it’s about where else can we grow? How else can we reach? We’re constantly learning. We’re constantly refining. We’re constantly looking for opportunities, and experimenting with them. You know, we’ve done some things where we’ve gone, okay, well, let’s do this experiment, see if it works. And if it’s worked, go yay. And if it doesn’t, we go, okay, cross that one off the list. We won’t bother with that again. How’s your industry been supportive of this as a new approach? Overall, pretty well. we actually have a lot of doctors doing our courses, as I mentioned, because doctors are terrible at looking after themselves. a lot of our messaging is really teaching people to look after themselves without feeling guilty, without, you know, again, so many reasons why people don’t prioritize their own self care. it’s not because they’re lazy. they’ve got other priorities that they put ahead. So, the doctors that have doing our course or done our course have been really, really like we’ve had such lovely feedback, so that’s been wonderful. but like everything, there are some people in the industry that, you know, who go, well, you should just be doing it my way. We’re really, I think when people get wedded to ideology or their one way is the only way you should do something. That’s when blinkers go on. And things don’t work. So one of our pillars is low carb nutrition, as a concept. Is not in keeping with the current Australian dietary guidelines and these current Australian dietary guidelines are being reviewed. And we are part of a consortium, I guess, that are lobbying heavily to have them change because they’re currently not fit for purpose. A lot of people use them thinking they’re going to help them, get healthy. But particularly once people develop, significant overweight, I’m not just talking, you know, overweight by a few kilos, but overweight by 20 or 30 kilos, that completely changes our metabolic hormone profile. we have a little saying that the thing you do to prevent obesity is not the same thing you do to treat it. the Darcher guidelines may be good for healthy people with normal metabolic hormones, but in some parts of our society, particularly people over 60, about 80 percent don’t have normal metabolic hormonal profiles. So, Therefore, dietary guidelines, not suitable for them. Dietary guidelines, not suitable for people with allergies or, you know, all the things. So there are certainly a cohort of people pushing back on us for not following the guidelines, but we are very comfortable with not following them. We have a lot of evidence supporting low carb nutrition as a therapeutic tool for metabolic intervention.
So changing gears slightly, Lucy, as a business leader, what would you say you’re most often criticized for? Well, it’s interesting. I was having a look at this, and honestly, I don’t, I guess you’re perfect. Yeah. I’m perfect. No, no. The person who is most critical of my leadership would be myself. Because I’m learning as lots of us are learning. And I think if you think you’re not learning anymore, then you’ve got a problem because we should always be open to learning new things. one of the things we talk a lot about in our programs, but it’s also, it was also when I did, when I was doing the, business that I was running for doctors that had a leadership component in it, which I ran. And it’s really about this idea that people’s emotional brains have two jobs to keep them safe and to make them feel better. recognizing that for a lot of people, criticism can be seen as a threat when people feel threatened, they either fight, flee or freeze. And you will have a, people will have a predetermined one of these responses, depending on their experiences and also their personalities. I discovered that mine is to fight. if I feel threatened my brain goes, How dare you do this? I’m not doing that. And it has this little tantrum. I used to then get mad at myself for later on going, Oh, why did you overreact? God, just calm yourself down. Stop being so aggressive. And then I realized, oh, it’s just my brain trying to keep me safe. Okay. Brain. We’re actually safe. I don’t need to worry. I’m not actually under threat. Somebody is allowed to have a different opinion or criticize something that doesn’t mean I’m under threat. So a lot of self talk around that has been really helpful. my biggest, criticism, of myself is to increase that gap so that I don’t overreact to a situation that doesn’t need that much aggression. Or assertiveness. Yes. Sometimes it is actually aggression, but again, I’m happy to own that and go, okay, I can do better. And I am doing a lot better now with self awareness over that. I think that’s really important. By the same token, there’s also people that feel threatened, but don’t want to say anything. So they just go in and say nothing and then explode. And as a leader, that’s not helpful either. they self medicate with that packet of Tim Tams. Yes, absolutely. A packet of Tim Tams. The bottle of wine every night. Playing on your phone. Anything to distract yourself from your uncomfortable feelings.
So Lucy, if you could go back in time as an advisor to your younger self, what advice would you give yourself? I wish I’d started this online business five years ago. That would have been great. I don’t work in a clinic anymore. then I look back and go, I also am a big fan of this belief that things happen. in exactly the right way. maybe if I’d started online courses earlier, I wouldn’t have collected all of this beautiful information from dealing with so many one to one people and seeing their collective stories and recognizing a pattern that then has helped us with our messaging for the online community. So I do honestly believe that things happen exactly as they’re meant to. there’s lots of things that we may, as I said, we made mistakes in, but if you don’t, if you expect to live a life without mistakes you’re not living no matter what you do, you’ll make mistakes. the key is to learn from them, not ignore them and just bury them we see and go, okay, we could do this better. So constantly improving. I’m happy with the way things have gone, particularly for us in the online space, as part of a medical community where we’re probably the leaders in online courses Land, there’s only a few others, not many. so therefore I go, okay, well, I think we’re doing it exactly as we’re meant to. And if you were chatting to a group of CEOs looking to improve their organizations or their leadership style, what #CriticalFewActions?. Should they start doing tomorrow if they did nothing else? So again, we talk about the two P’s of psychology and physiology and in business that translates to strategy and mindset. I guess I would be looking at, strategy, for us, the critical action we are taking this year is to test and measure. we’ve done lots of testing the Measurement side for us has not been that great. we’ve gone on gut, you know, like, Oh, well, I don’t think that worked. So we stopped doing it where now what we’re doing, we’re wanting to do is get really granular on testing everything we do. So I think that experimenting is brilliant. But it’s only brilliant if you can actually collate your results into something that is then measurable. So then you can decide whether it’s actually worth it going forward. So that would be our strategy side of things I guess the mindset side is really about that leadership role and understanding our team, understanding their actions. Where are they, what is driving their actions? If their actions are going well, why are they doing that? if there’s something in their actions that is not going well, what’s driving that? Is it fear? are they worried that they’re going to lose their job? Is it that they feel that there’s, they’re not getting heard? They’re not being validated. all people, every single person wants to feel safe and feel better. And so as a leader, if we can make people feel those two things, then they will perform better. And that’s good for everybody.
Lucy, is there anything I haven’t asked you that I should? I think the biggest thing for us and, you know, we started our company with no capital. it was a side hustle and it’s morphed into, a very successful company and we’re very proud of that. the thing I have to be mindful of is comparison it will look and go, Oh, We’re good, but we’re not as good as them. comparison can make you unhappy with where you’re at. I have to constantly bring myself back to this is our own journey. We’re running our own race. We test and measure. I don’t need to compare our business to someone else’s business. I might look on their Instagram and think, Oh my God, they’re killing it. That’s unhelpful. comparison is the thief of all joy. That’s one of the things that I spend a little bit of time in and just go, you know what, I don’t need to do that. then showing gratitude for the team that we have and our beautiful clients, because without them, we’re nothing. and just drawing from what you said before, knowing your numbers is such a crucial part of. being a successful business leader, but also being a responsible business leader, it’s only by knowing your numbers that you can actually assess, are you getting benefit? Are you adding real value? and also, is the business healthy? Yeah, absolutely. And again, there’s a few ways that you can do this. just over the weekend, we started analyzing our Google analytics a bit more, and I emailed Mary. I’ve gone, Mary, we’ve got a really leaky funnel. One of our funnels is really you had no idea. what that meant for us is we can now track, when people sign into one of our programs, you know, how many emails do they open in their sequence? Do they go to the landing, the sales page from the sales page? Do they go to the checkout page? And from there, do they buy? analyzing the numbers for just one of our courses on the weekend, I looked and I go, Oh my God, we’re not doing well in that one. I could be all despairing and going, Oh God, how terrible. But then I go, Oh my God, what an opportunity we’ve got. I mean, we’re already going so well. And here’s this brilliant opportunity to fix this system. so now I’m just going to go in and test and measure. I’ll change the sales page. I’ll change the offer page. I’ll update the email nurture. And then we’ll see, do we get more conversions?
Lucy, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been an absolute pleasure to, to hear your story, but also to hear the learnings that that you’ve come across as you’ve gone on this journey. And I look forward to hearing that you’re continuing to grow at the astronomical rate you have been year on year, which as you say, it’s easy to do at the start, but you’re actually now a reasonable sized business and it’s, And it gets harder. you’re doing brilliantly. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the #CriticalFewActions? podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe where you listen to podcasts. Follow us on LinkedIn for more insights and share the show with other business leaders. Stay focused, take action.
2024-11-19 TRANSCRIPT F Dr Lucy Burns – Real Life Medicine.txt
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