Humans in Healthcare: Chapter #8

Anything here is a direct quote from Alexis

At the end, Alexis will offer her call to courage for clinicians wanting to step into the creator life

I’m a registered dietitian, heading into my 20th year in practice! It’s hard to believe this, time has flown by in life and career. I’m a Canadian from just west of Toronto, Ontario, a sports enthusiast, and mom to two little boys.

I grew up with a family who struggled with obesity and diabetes and this was my early motivation into the nutrition field. In grade 8, I wanted to own a health spa where people could go to get healthy.

When I first became a dietitian, I really wanted a career in sports nutrition. I worked in quite a few traditional dietitian roles doing a variety of outpatient counseling for a few years, while doing private practice sports nutrition on the side. I was into triathlons and most of my practice was triathletes and endurance athletes. I completed an ironman 💪 in 2009 and then got a bit bored of the sport, and stopped racing. Since then I’ve taken up skiing, mountain biking and kept up moderate levels of swimming, cycling and running.

Around this time I started getting into retail nutrition. I was working for a vendor of Canada’s largest grocery chain, Loblaw, running a dietitian and pharmacist health promotion program from 2007 to 2009. The funding for this was cut and I found myself leaning into building my business for the next few years. These years were fun and pre-social media, pre-online businesses, so most of my work was in person 1:1 counseling, and speaking at camps and events.

In 2011 an opportunity to return to Loblaw came about, and I decided it was time for a change and accepted a full time director position where my mandate was nutrition programming for the company. I started an in-store dietitian program as well as managed a nutrition scoring system called Guiding Stars.

Over the 10 years I spent there, there were many directional and business priority changes and my role evolved. When I left in 2021, I had a team of over 90 dietitians and was involved in many aspects of health and wellness for the company, including digital, in-store and telehealth services.

One of my main challenges which inspired me to create Business Skills for Health Professionals is that while I had great clinical and nutrition knowledge, I lacked the basic business skills for working in the retail environment. I learned things like finance, marketing, and ROI somewhat the hard way, with a lot of trial and error. I wish I’d had a guide and training to help me along this journey which is why I created what we have today.

In addition, my time in retail showed me the value of having health professionals working in business. I was able to build quality, evidence-based programs and services that helped improve health care in Canada. I was also able to provide input on strategy and the health and wellness direction of the company. This experience has led to my belief that the more health professionals we have working in business and industry, the better products and services will be created, having a positive impact on health.

After 10 years at my role at Loblaw, I was itching to get back into the entrepreneurial space. I wanted to create and be responsible for my own destiny again.

I contacted one of my former colleagues, Melanie Byland who had gone on to pursue her MBA. We discussed how many health professionals who want to get into business see getting an MBA as their only option. An MBA is great, but for many of us who already have paid for a masters degree, it’s just not a financially viable option. We decided to create a series of courses that could provide health professionals with a high level business education, to set them off on the right foot. We started prototyping with just running a simple webinar to gauge interest. I mainly promoted on LinkedIn and Facebook groups. After we had early success with the webinar, we took the feedback from the webinars and started building out our program. During this time, I was also getting a lot of requests for career transition support for health professionals who wanted help with their resumes, LinkedIn, and networking. I leaned into this and started supporting them and created this as a service our business offers.

I was motivated by the many creators I’ve discovered on LinkedIn as well as by an early coach I worked with, Ingo Rauth. Ingo ran a course called Life Design which is all about exploring your life and prototyping careers you think you may want. One of the biggest learnings from working with Ingo was the concept of prototyping. Before jumping into a career, find ways to test it out easily and cheaply, so you can see whether you’ll even like it and if there is a market for what you want to do. This allowed me to get past the hurdle of being stuck in strategy and move into action by running some simple webinars.

Sometimes it can be challenging to continue to put out content when the engagement isn’t as high as I’d like it to be. But I try to continually show up as I know it takes time.

I don’t currently see patients but I’ve toyed with the idea of getting back into that but I’m wary of how much energy that can consume. So for now it’s a TBD.

I think there is a huge opportunity with clinicians being creators and I’ve seen this growing, especially in innovative tools for other clinicians. Who better to create for clinicians than clinicians themselves?

In working with other entrepreneurs over the past several months, I’ve realized I have some mindset issues to overcome as it relates to money. My liming belief is that the only way to have financial success is being employed full time. I’ve been doing some energy clearing work in this space as well as reading books on this topic to work through it.

I find my time outdoors is most valuable for my creative side. I tend to think of ideas and the biggest challenge is remembering them when I get home. I don’t typically listen to music or bring my phone which I find helps my creative thinking. I’m a morning person and I try to stay off my phone for the first hour of my day. I’m not too rigid with what I do with this time but it’s a combination of journaling, activity, reading, meditation and sound therapy. Sometimes I use this time to work if my day doesn’t allow as much work time (e.g., in the summer or holidays when kids are home more).

Some practical things I’ve learned about are how to use LinkedIn for business, the importance of SEO, and a bunch of tech tools like course platforms and website tools. I do find the tech part of being an entrepreneur challenging, but I try to embrace and take advantage of tools to teach like ChatGPT and YouTube videos.

I want to help clinicians know there are many opportunities out there for them career-wise. I want companies to hire more clinicians and for them to be more business savvy as well as bringing their healthcare expertise.

I have built a LinkedIn group to share resources, job postings, and I do career journey interviews so clinicians can inspire others to pursue different paths. The best support that this community can provide is engagement with content and spreading the word.

Find the pain points of other clinicians and use a design thinking, user centered design approach to create. Take a big idea and figure out the easiest, cheapest, simplest way to prototype your idea in public.

CALL TO COURAGE

If you are thinking of becoming a creator, try starting small. Writing a blog or posting regularly on LinkedIn/social, running a webinar, or simply engaging with others content in this space. We often over complicate our business ideas and get stuck in strategy without any action to move us forward. Take messy action and don’t overthink it.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with something simple and see if it gains traction. It might take a few attempts but don’t give up if you’re getting positive feedback.