How To Scale Your Business Without Burning Out, with Nicole Serena

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast. On today's episode of Multiplier Mindset, we have Nicole Serena. And Nicole is a consultant in what I think is probably going to be the fastest growing industry, maybe in the world, but certainly in the United States and Canada, because it's health. So actually consulting with all areas of providing better service, better quality experience for people who are in the healthcare, you know, and the healthcare is going through a massive, massive transformation. Babs Smith, my partner, my wife, lifetime partner—we've really taken advantage of all the new breakthroughs in healthcare.
 
And I think the thing that's really changed it certainly over the last 10 years, has been the application of AI to every aspect of the healthcare system, but especially in the testing area, where today you can find out things in a matter of minutes and hours that used to take months of actual testing. And that puts a lot of pressure on the existing healthcare system because they're geared to certain time periods. So more and more, it's becoming a great opportunity for entrepreneurs because you can just focus on a particular area that's not being provided by the healthcare system. And working in both the United States and Canada, there's lots of gaping holes in healthcare.
 
And I think it's a tough business for the practitioners, the doctors, the nurses, because with the knowledge that's coming out that every individual can have, if you take a hundred patients together, no doctor can possibly keep up with what those patients are learning by social media. You know, they're on YouTube and they're investigating different kinds of problems. And it sort of overwhelms the members of the healthcare system who are in the hospitals, who are in their clinics. And it calls for more and more great problem solvers. And Serena is certainly that. She's got a long, long amount of experience in the pharmaceutical industry.
 
But that was as an employee and she became an entrepreneur. That was a solution, but it was always a big problem because entrepreneurs and really what we focus on in Strategic Coach is to actually allow the entrepreneur just to be great at one or two things, and then have networks of team members around. And it's the toughest breakthrough that I think all entrepreneurs have to make, that at a certain time, it isn't about you and what you can do, thinking you have to do everything. You actually have to just focus on your role and then supply yourself with all the other roles around you where they're much better at than you are.
 
So I was very pleased to mention the concept of Who Not How, because that is the crucial thing that either you're just a hardworking entrepreneur who basically just created yourself a job or whether you actually have a company. And in the company, I'm in my company since we started the workshop programs in Strategic Coach, I was the only coach. So we started in 1989. I had coached for 15 years just as a one-on-one coach, but I could only do a certain number of individuals. And then we made it a workshop program and it grew and grew and grew, but I was still the only coach. And then in 1995, 30 years ago, we started getting our other coaches and we started building a great back stage. The entrepreneurs were in workshops. It wasn't one-on-one.
 
So the interesting thing is, Nicole says she's a consultant, but I think she's actually a coach. She's a very creative coach, and she's building structures where other Whos can come in, and they can do what they love doing, but you're all in teamwork together. So it's a perfect example, and she's made enormous progress in just two years in Strategic Coach. The other thing is my belief that what Nicole does, the growth possibilities for it are just unlimited because what the public wants in terms of healthcare and different kinds of specialty care is just going to increase. Part of the reason now is the vast number of people who are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies—and what we're seeing is that for the most part, the healthcare industry has actually been a disease management industry. It's not really healthcare. The money is made off of disease, but there's a huge opening for just making people really healthy.
 
And I don't believe it's going to be done by the bureaucratic system. I don't believe it's going to be done by the large corporations. I think it's going to be done by very, very ambitious, very confident entrepreneurs like Nicole. And what she has is a great opportunity just to focus on what's important, not what's urgent. The whole healthcare system is about urgency, but she has a thing to focus on just what's really important for each of the patients. So it's a great pleasure to listen to her story and what she's discovering and how she's simplifying her life as a special role in her own company, and then it's expanding the size of her company. It's a beautiful story.
 
Nicole Serena: Hi, I'm Nicole Serena. I'm an entrepreneur and my specialty is in the healthcare industry, specifically in patient assistance programs. The reason I became an entrepreneur is I saw an area in healthcare that needed additional insight and strategy and believed we could be the answer to that. One of the biggest struggles I face is the growth of my business and not doing too much myself and truly ensuring that I have a team to share the opportunity as we grow. And I was able to overcome it because I changed my mindset for trying to do it all myself, but find people who had the key strengths and talent in areas that I didn't or that they were better at it than me so I could focus solely on the growth of my company and where I have the true talent.
 
One of the biggest lessons I've learned is truly that building the team and delegating so I can focus on my Unique Ability. And without Strategic Coach, I would definitely work all the time, and get in my own way of growth because I wouldn't allow my team to do it for me. Next for me is continuing to build, sharing the success with my team and becoming a worldwide sensation. So the reason I'm in the healthcare industry, I've been in the pharma industry for the past 30 years. So I worked on the corporate side for many years. And we've also had a family consulting business in healthcare for 25 years. So I started in university in the science area, added business into that by going into the corporate world. And through that have always in my whole career been in the healthcare industry.
 
I think we all know in Canada, it's a bit of a fragile industry. So any way through our knowledge and expertise, we can improve it, whether working on the public healthcare side, or the private healthcare side, any way that we can help from the strategy side to improve our healthcare system, that's the passion we have. So the entrepreneurial side, I think I've always had a bit of that passion. I joke that in the corporate world, I had my golden fur-lined handcuffs on for many years, and it was comfortable. My husband ran our consulting company for many years, his area of expertise, just the way the healthcare system, it changed. He also found a new profession and became a full-time firefighter.
 
And with that, and where I was at my area of my career, I was in a very niched area within the healthcare system, really helping design patient assistance programs and support programs. And I saw a gap in the industry. There weren't any consultants in that area. And that inspired me to take the leap and go into entrepreneur. I think everyone who knows me has learned that once I took the leap, I've not only gone there, but I've opened multiple companies. As I see opportunity, just that spark has come alive and I don't think I'd ever go back.
 
So before I joined Strategic Coach, I was started in our company really as a solopreneur because I was redeveloping our company. I started as myself and I did everything myself. And as the business grew, it got busier and busier. My schedule got more full, but the complexity of the company got more complex too. And so I was wearing many hats. There are many balls in the air. I would joke, we'd have to like decide which were the glass, the others you'd have to let bounce or put on the side. And I'd always be worrying that I was just doing all the urgent and not the important. So I was always wondering what am I missing because I'm so busy focusing on the business myself and was trying to be an expert at everything.
 
So after two years of Strategic Coach, I'd say I'm still learning. Sometimes I get in the way of my team. I now have a team and my team continues to grow. So I've added a lot of Who, so I'm not doing everything. And that's given me some space, one, to be more creative, but also more strategic. And I have the space to see where we want to take our company, also where the opportunity is, but also where the need is for our expertise. And before you know my schedule was so full I didn't have that space to really be able to strategically grow our company as well as look after our team and look after myself as well. So the biggest mind shift I would say really comes about really thinking about how I structure almost my week, my calendar, even my year of thinking of like, when are my truly focused times, but also remembering to have some Free Days, as they say.
 
But that time for me, I think that's where I still need to grow is I think about work all the time, I can't help myself, yet at the same time, it's so important to unplug and refresh yourself so that you can be there for your clients, for your staff, really for everyone. That's been one of the biggest mind shifts. I think the other one is to truly learn what my skills and my Unique Ability is and to focus on that. I can be really good at many things but I'm truly unique in only a very few things. And that's truly how I become a greater success, but also how I serve my team and clients the best ways to focus on what I'm best at, rather than trying to be good at everything.
 
A Unique Ability is the thing that's almost like your superpower. No one does it quite like you do it, and it's what you're known for. One of the ones I'm at is I can look at a very large problem and quickly dive in and go, that's the issue right there. I've also learned that others have areas of Unique Ability that I'm not good at, at all, and learned that they can be really good at something that I actually don't wanna do at all, and that's great. A scary pivotal moment I would say in my entrepreneurial was truly the decision of, do I wanna keep doing the business myself and be the expert of everything and keep it small and manageable? Or do I wanna grow it and build a team of experts?
 
And it's scary because then I become responsible not just for myself, and it's easy to be responsible for one, but to be responsible for a team, can be scary, especially as I'm a fairly new entrepreneur. In the corporate world, I looked after teams. I didn't own the business, so it wasn't fully responsible for, you know, paying everyone and everything or bringing in the business. So that was a pivotal moment because there was two paths to take. And truly, it was up to me to decide which one might be the best. What helped me make that decision partly was to lean on others to help me make the decision.
 
So I learned I'm not the best Who to make that decision. I leaned on other consultants. I joined Strategic Coach. I also joined Genius Network. And through those, I could learn from other entrepreneurs, but also learn from consultants of what are the risks and benefits of both and then choose based on my risk appetite and the opportunity I believed out there. The other thing I did is I didn't go all in at once. My tendency would be to go all in at once, yet I listened to others who'd done it before and made choices and started small, tried out something, does it work? Yes. Okay, let's expand a little more.
 
And so we continue to grow and it's really exciting, but I've also learned to plan and be prepared for that growth, so that all of the team can feel comfortable on the ride that we're taking. I'm very comfortable with risk, but I have to recognize not everybody is. And so to keep them informed and comfortable along the ride as we continue to grow.
 
So a few things that I do to keep my team informed, and I'm not the best at it. Sometimes I'm like 10 miles ahead of them and they remind me that I need to keep them up to date. We have regular check-ins. We just had a big team meeting. So the first in-person, our company's virtual. So we brought everyone together to give them a vision of where we're at and where we're going, and also for all of them to get to know each other in a different way so they actually felt comfortable on the ride because they now know everybody and I would say remembering to keep them informed of my plan even though it's in my brain and written down, I have to remember. And I'm building a leadership team, so it's not always up to me to let the whole team know. I now have others who help share the message with them rather than it being all on me.
 
I'm very future-looking, strategic, and so I'm building the team who can actually let everybody else know where we're going and to be comfortable with that. The feedback my team shares, the nice thing is, especially my consultant team, they're a team of experts who are very experienced. None of them are shy to give me advice, but also to remind me that I go faster than a lot of people and that I need to check in and remind them of where we're going and keep them up to date. And then I have a great support team that also a lot of them are starting their careers and learning the confidence to put their hand up and ask me questions if I haven't given them a full picture of what we're doing.
 
What's on the horizon for us, we're building some tools. So a lot of the consulting work we do is manual work with consultants and everything. And so I have been successful in a couple of patents and we're building systems and software that will help automate certain parts of our business. So one, it will be able to do more for more clients and yet hopefully in a more efficient way, whether the efficiency is in time or from a financial side, it's really being able to help all of our clients at a different level because we're bringing in that efficiency of having a SaaS tool, hopefully having some AI in there to really put ourselves at a higher level, raising the floor truly.
 
Delegating's been very important and I'm still learning to do it better. And I actually had a conversation with someone about this recently. One trick that I've been given is when I'm thinking of a Who, even if I think there's no one out there that can do it, is I write down everything I want them to be able to do. And if it was the perfect, say for a task, a delegation task, exactly what they could be, and then usually someone a day or two later pops into my head, or I share that with people I know, and then they know someone. So writing down exactly what that Who could do, or that task or that delegation that you need done, has been a way that works for me.
 
And a lot of the time when I tell people that, they're at first like, oh, I don't think that'll work. And I'm like, it would even be better for you to know, because even if you're gonna keep the task, write it all down and then go, am I really good at that or should I truly give that away to someone who can do it better? And I always think, and I forget the exercise we did about what you do good or your Unique Ability and all of that—there's times where you're doing something and it's hard to do. You may be good at it but it just sucks your energy. And you don't realize that someone else loves to do that. And they actually get tons of energy from it. And that's the person who should be doing that. And that's where you delegate it away.
 
Yeah, Who Not How. First off, it's one of my favorite books. And I think it was part of the success of our company. So rather than figuring out how to do everything, especially as your business grows, as it grows, you'll have to do more and more instead of going, how am I gonna do this, it's who is gonna do it for me? And truly that's the way that we 10x our business rather than trying to build it one step at a time and overwhelming ourselves with things that will be hard to learn how to do it. Yes, you can do it. It'll take up a ton of energy that could be used to solve a problem for one of your clients, expand your business, that sort of thing. So I find using the term Who instead of How am I gonna do this, of who am I gonna find to do it or who on my team can do this better than me becomes my key question. I try and take how out of it as much as possible.
 
And with Who Not How, if you're so focused on how to do something that may be taking you off your strategic vision, and then you're wondering why is my business not performing the way it is, it may be that you're off focus trying to fix something that's getting in the way of your business rather than hiring a Who that can expand and make your business run even better. So if you're in healthcare and how you fit into Strategic Coach, I would say no matter what industry you are in, you'll fit into Strategic Coach. I almost enjoy being in the room with others in different industries because I learn from them and we don't put on our blinders almost, of, we can't do that in this industry. You get different ideas from everyone in the room.
 
And if there is another person in healthcare in the room, which sometimes there is, it's great to have conversations because truly there's usually no one in competition in the room. So you can expand and almost have an expansion conversation rather than worrying, oh, I can't talk about my business because someone else is in the room. I honestly don't worry about competition. I think of collaboration. So whenever someone's in the room, think of it, especially in healthcare, how can we collaborate on a potential business opportunity or idea? Or how can we help each other in our businesses truly to improve our industry?
 
And I think anyone in healthcare right now, especially how we can improve the whole healthcare environment in Canada, North America, wherever you live, having more people in the room in that kind of mindset of improving, you might find the next Who that you need to improve your healthcare industry by talking to someone in the room because I find the network and Strategic Coach truly can give you an opportunity to up-level as well. I think the opportunity after being in Strategic Coach for two years, from changing how my mindset is, or even how I look at the business, is one, I think of growth in a different way. I don't think of how do I double my business, it's how can I 10x my business, and do it without exhausting myself or burning us all out. It's truly learning some systems and tools to do it.
 
The other thing is within Strategic Coach, when I go for a day, I tell everyone, because they're like, why are you going to this? I'm working on the business instead of in the business. So it's truly, you take yourself out and it takes your business to the next level, truly, because you're taking time out to work on it, where we're always in our business every other day. Or you're just doing the same thing and wondering why it's not changing. So when I chose the fork in the road to build the business, build my team and everything, I truly believed there was a lot of business out there. The next part was truly planning. So I built and added a few, and I had a great coach and consultant on the side say, you have to plan your next few. So I'm always looking at who's next on the team, rather than worrying, do we have enough work for the current team?
 
There's tons of opportunity. It's being prepared for the opportunity that comes with it. And I think by building the team and taking that road, truly see that there's all the opportunity in the world rather than just as myself, I would be overwhelmed because I'd be like, I'm full, right? And I couldn't do it. And for some people that might be their choice for the type of business. In the end, it wasn't risky at all by building it in a step-by-step kind of way and testing it with, as you said, your clients and your team to make sure it works and then try something more. If it works really well, keep doing it and then keep building.
 
So what I did to have that clarity and confidence to build the team, one thing is really thinking of the roles I need, the Whos that I don't have, or sometimes I may need an extra Who even because we've grown and now we need two instead of one. And it's truly thinking about what that role is, thinking of the whole team in general and where we may have gaps and need and also getting feedback from the team. We have a team who has great contact so they may know somebody in it and by working with the team when I have the view of we need more, it also makes them feel comfortable on expanding the team rather than saying no, no, we can do it all. It's sharing with the team this is why we need extra people because there's enough work to help us fill gaps in our either expertise or support. I would say that's one of my tips is truly thinking but also sharing it with the team.
 
The other one too is sometimes you don't make the best choice. Sometimes someone comes into your team and they may be excellent, just not at the role you thought they were at and to accept that and allow them to either find a new role on your team or to let them go so that they can find the best role for them. Rather than trying to make it work and it disrupts your whole team is know that sometimes you can't win 100% of the time. And sometimes what you thought was gonna work didn't work and be flexible enough to change on the fly rather than waiting and waiting and hoping it'll fix itself. I think that would be the second tip.
 
The third tip truly is to be brave, and sometimes you're like, I don't think I can have that person on my team because you're worried about and you get into a scarcity mindset. Truly an abundance mindset—when you go with abundance it shows up because when you have a scarcity mindset and you're worried about I can't afford this or there's not enough business, you'll make that happen because you're focusing on worrying about not enough rather than looking at abundance and saying there's so much opportunity. If I don't hire this person, then I won't be able to accept the opportunities that are coming our way.
 
Last thoughts that I would share I think would be on Strategic Coach. A lot of people are like, oh, I don't know if I'll fit or is my business the right fit? Ask the questions. There's lots of opportunities to try out Strategic Coach. And I think anyone who has a business that they have a vision and they're growing it, you need the time to take out to work on your business and not in the business. And the best way to do it is in a room with other entrepreneurs, because the energy and support that you have in a room like that, you don't have as you're running your own businesses, little silos of businesses all over the area. You build a community of colleagues as well as you're building the business through Strategic Coach. As an entrepreneur a lot of the time you can feel very alone as a leader even in your own company and this is a way to be in a room with other people like you who also have similar struggles and success to learn from.
 
What's the return on investment? To me, I always think 10x. So if I'm investing any price, how do I 10x it? I'm gonna get that value out of it. Honestly, what you put in it is what you get out of it. I wouldn't be worried about it. Think of it as an investment rather than an expense or a cost. It's an investment in you. It's an investment in your company. And by investing it, it's the way you show up to get the true value out of it. Any investment that you make, in your company, you have to show up and do the work to truly get your ROI out of it. I don't even think about, am I renewing again? It's just a must have to be successful in my business.