Myo Life

Transcript

Hey, I'm Carmen and welcome to Myo Life. That's short for my outrageous life, which is exactly the kind of life I get to live since I found the courage to ditch dental hygiene and build a life I'm bonkers about as a myofunctional therapist and entrepreneur. Here you will find all the things Mayo business and how to build a life that you, too, are bonkers about. I'm very happy you're here. Shall we dive in.
Well, hey there, friend, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Today is going to be fun If you were listening to this in real time, like the day that it comes out. This is the first day of our September enrollment, so I thought it would be a fun, good idea to share my backstory here, since you probably know bits and pieces, but not the complete story. But first, before I start sharing, let's have a fun update which will really tie into this story. As I am recording this, let me back up. So normally I do batches, I like to record my podcast six weeks in advance, but recently I have gotten a little bit of a bad attitude about having such a tight, rigid schedule.
I tend to be more of an all-or-nothing personality, so it's like I gotta do it this way and I gotta do it this way, you know, just to be doing everything right, and I've really been making an effort to I call it remove the bumpers around my life a little bit and just go with the flow.
So today I came in from the pool and I decided, here I go, that I wanted to record this. So I laugh as I'm recording this because I can hear the kitten downstairs batting his ball around and it just makes me realize. You know how much I teach my students about taking ugly and perfect action. And here we are. So I was thinking about this story and why, today being the first day of September enrollment, why this would be so good.
So let's do the update first.
So last September, um, scott and I took a trip to like, uh, we flew into Kentucky, we went West Virginia, north Carolina. We just did a big road trip because we were looking for kind of an area where we wanted to settle down. We knew that we wanted to go somewhere else. We wanted to have a house with property. You know, I've always been a dreamer, like the world's biggest dreamer, so we did that and I don't know that we left that trip feeling like we had really found the perfect place for us. So, anyhow, fast forward to now, as I'm recording this, we have. We moved in May, bought our dream home on a lake on 14 acres in northern Alabama and are absolutely thriving. I could not have imagined this being a more incredible time.
Scott left his job in April when we first went on vacation, went and got married, came back as newlyweds and set off on this adventure across the United States. So that's April, may, june, july. So that's three and a half months that he hasn't I say he hasn't worked because, let me tell you, he works his guts around here on this property and it is so I have really grown to love just him being here all of the time. I have had a couple moments where I had to do an attitude adjustment, because when you're the sole earner or the primary earner, a lot falls on you and I have had to remind myself like hey, don't complain, because this is what you were wishing for a long time ago.
So, that is our, our life update. That's the biggest thing. We go to town. We're about 30 minutes out of town. We go to town, do our errands, we race home to our paradise. I just absolutely love it. The dogs have a pond to play in, we have a pool to swim. You know just all the things. So I am so happy. So this is why I felt like this was a good time to talk about this, because I've been on this journey since I started my myofunctional therapy business. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. So I have some notes and we're just going to roll with it. Okay, so I learned about myofunctional therapy. I learned about mouth breathing in either 2004, 2005.
I was a green horn, I was just a new dental hygienist and I don't know about you, but I just needed a paycheck. Okay, I had been so broke all through hygiene school, um, that I was ready to get paid, so I did not give it any more thought, not in the least. So, over the course, uh well, let me back up. So I went to hygiene for all the wrong reasons. I had been an engineering student and I did several internships for Marathon Oil and I was a safety engineer. So at some point during my last internship for Marathon Oil I thought I don't like being connected to a laptop in a rental car, on a pager, on a cell phone in an airport, you know, I just wanted something that was simpler. So I switched to dental hygiene. I just kind of like picked it out of the hat because it had good pay and it had family friendly hours. So that was how I ended up in dental hygiene. Okay, I didn't come from a family of dentists. I didn wasn't a hygienist or anything like that. I just did it based on pay. Now I was a hygienist for 16 years.
Over the course of my career I worked for some doozies. One of the bosses that I worked for I had to turn him in for insurance fraud to the tune of over $5 million of insurance fraud. I worked on building. You know, the stuff that I talk about was a job that I went to. I went to it because it had 12 hour days. Okay, so I at the time I was single, I was traveling a lot and I loved having the four day weekend.
So I went to this office. It was an office that I had temped at before, so I thought it was going to be a great fit. Now, for the first year, I was the most amazing employee that they could ever have. I worked all the miracles, I did all the things. When they short-scheduled and only gave me 75 minutes to do two quads of scaling, I did it.
You know, you just spin over backwards to make everything happen, and then it became to be expected of you, which got kind of frustrating. But so after my first year there, we got a new manager and then we got a dental consulting company and suddenly the dental hygienists were just these divas who were costing the office so much money. So they restructured our bonus system. So prior to that, the bonus system had been the whole office. Everybody got to share in it. So I was used to regularly getting, oh, seven, $800 a month bonuses, okay, uh.
And so now we got a new bonus system, and this new bonus system also include you know it raised our production numbers. Well, the frustrating thing about them raising those production numbers is the boss also got a cost of living adjustment. So so now we had to have higher production numbers to cover my boss's paycheck. The rest of us didn't get a 6% cost of living adjustment, but she did and I knew what she was needing to be paid. I understood that she was the boss, but I was frustrated with why we were suddenly being separated out. Why the hygienist? Because they got paid so much money. Mind you, we made good hourly wages but we had no benefits, we had no health insurance, we had no 401, none of that kind of stuff. So was it really getting that good of pay?
I don't know, but anyhow.
So we had this new bonus system and the bonus system. I gave it 150% effort and I fell short by this much and you either get your bonus or you get nothing. Okay, they're, uh, you know, close did not count. So meanwhile, that first month I killed myself to to really try and see if I could make it, and I didn't. Everybody else got a huge bonus, that same group of people that used to be part of the bonus that I got they all got one and I didn't.
Okay. So I was really aware of what was going on and suddenly from there in that second year I went from being the outstanding employee to being told that I was the cancer of the group. And you know, they had nothing bad to say about me the first year and the second year they had nothing good to say about me and really I think it is because I had a spine and I had a brain and I wasn't the sheep. Okay, I saw what was going on. So that now I'm thankful for, because just that thing was the thing to just kind of push me over the edge.
So let me back up one step in between, um, you know, amongst my various hygiene jobs, because I did a lot of temping. I had even gone to graduate school to get a master's in business, looking for a way out of dental hygiene. There was still no luck. And let me tell you, I did some dental consulting and if there's anything worse than working for a dentist in the capacity of being a dental hygienist, it was trying to be a dental consultant for dentists. It just was so difficult. So I was back to the drawing board and I started Googling alternative careers for dental hygienists. About the same time I also discovered Jenny Blake, and you've probably heard me talk about her and her book Pivot. So during that time I did all the exercises and the hard work.
I figured out what I loved about dental hygiene and what I didn't. I loved helping people. I loved educating my patients. I loved helping them with wellness and better overall health, not just oral health. I loved the nutritional counseling that came with the job. I hated scraping teeth Okay, I hated probing gums. So essentially, I loved dental hygiene for the social hour and I loved being able to be connected with my patients and help them.
Okay, I discovered that that I really had a huge heart for people. I had a helper's heart. I loved teaching, and what the book Pivot helped me do was a couple different things, like in basketball, when you're you, you've got the ball and you're pivoting, you've got one foot planted, and so that's kind of like using that foot to discover your strengths, and then you're pivoting, looking for opportunities, and so that's really what I was doing. Also, the exercises that you do in that book is looking at things like if money wasn't an object, what would I want my day to look like? Or if I was designing my ideal day, how would I want that to be? How would I want it to feel? It really leaned into some of the emotional stuff and I really connected with that. So I did all of that work, okay.
So during that process, during Googling alternative careers for a dental hygienist and then also doing the pivot exercises with Jenny Blake, I got reconnected to my functional therapy, okay, so I signed up for my course in October and I had to wait till January, which was tough. So did my training January till like April. Okay, so I had my first paying client in May of 2017. I cut back to part-time dental hygiene in July, so a couple months later. And then I retired the following August, okay, which was 2018 2018.
So here's a little bit of a rundown. My first year, so 2017, I earned twenty five thousand one hundred sixty five dollars. Okay, spending money, extra money, I mean $25,000. That was eight times my investment, of my course. Okay, so, so it's not just not you know something to sneeze at. Then, in 2018, I had my first, so that was my first full year. I had my first hundred thousand dollar year. Uh, in 2019, it was 140. In 2020, so that's when COVID happened I still came in at 124,000. And then, um, so 21 was a huge growth year for me. I earned a hundred thousand dollars by April and then ended the year, over 200,000. And then every year, I've hit two, three, almost 400,000 a year. So even one of those years where I was off for most of the year while my daughter was going through cancer treatment, I still crossed the finish line at multiple six figures.
So that's always the first thing that everybody wants to know is like, okay, what's possible? Um, then, in 2023, I brought on my first associate, and now she sees a lot of my clients. So I get to, you know, coach students and I don't work near as hard, so I don't share that information with you to show off. More than anything, I think that people need to be talking about what's possible. Okay, so that's proof of what's possible. And it's also not just about what's possible. Okay, so that's proof of what's possible. Um, and it's also not just about what's possible for me. Um, now is just such a great time to get into my. Whenever I do a connection calls with people, I'm forever saying like now is the time. You cannot go to a conference without hearing about myofunctional therapy, learning about it. Um, dental sleep medicine, all of those things, tongue ties, everything is just sleep disordered. Breathing is just at the forefront. So there is so much science and education coming out Like it's possible, because there are so many people out there who need you.
Okay, so let's talk about how I did it.
So first, I started it as a side hustle. Okay, so I call this building it in the margins of your life. So when I was working for that crappy dental office, I was working Tuesday, wednesday, thursday, I was working 12 hour shifts. I was commuting three hours a day, round trip. So I had Mondays and Fridays. So that was when I started my business, and one thing that I do teach inside the Ditch Hygiene Academy is that's when you do business.
So, even though in those first, you know, several months, when I was still taking my course, I was already getting things set up, but on Mondays and Fridays I didn't just, you know, sit around and eat bonbons because I was off. I acted like those were business days. I was in my office, I was making progress, and then, when I cut back to part-time, then I added those clients both for or I added those hours both for seeing clients and then also for building the business. Now, eventually, that August of 2018, when I went, when I left hygiene and then went full-time myo remember that doesn't mean that I was working full-time as a myofunctional therapist Okay, in fact, I usually just see clients for about 10 hours a week. So that is always the question. You know people will say what happens when I run out of hours every week and there's still more clients to help? I don't think you're ever going to run out of hours, because who wants to work that many hours, right? So over the years, I have had different schedules.
You get to totally decide your calendar and it could change every three months if you want it to. I have worked schedules where I worked two really long days. Because I work globally, I want to make sure that I offer appointments that can accommodate people all around the world. So I always have morning appointments, I always have evening appointments, okay, and so I used to work, like, say, tuesday, wednesday to eight. Now I wouldn't be working 12 hours straight, but that would just allow that big chunk of time for people to get their appointments. So I have worked long, too long days. I have worked four half days, okay, I have experimented and I have changed things with whatever season I was in.
My favorite schedule that I worked last year was I would work Thursday and Friday, and then I would be off for Saturday and Sunday, and then I would work Monday and Tuesday and then I would be off for eight days. So, technically, out of every 14 days, I had 10 days off. Okay, that's a pretty good schedule to earn multiple six figures. I loved it. I'm not doing the same thing now, because I'm doing so much traveling and spending so much downtime with my husband that I'm making sure that I have morning time each week and that I have afternoon time each week. It's not really consistent right now and I'm also loving that too okay how I found clients.
So this is also another question. I first I built my network, okay, and of course, I teach you all of this stuff inside the Ditch Hygiene Academy. But building my network, so that's with the, the, with providers Okay, one of the biggest things that I did that was so good was getting results for people. Let doctors see how bum diggity you are. Let I let doctors see how great my my clients were, and then they would just reach out to me. You know, hey, we have seen some of your clients. We see how prepared they are for their phrenectomies. Is it okay if we referred to you? Absolutely, I would love that. So if you get good results for your clients, you're letting them do the marketing for free, okay, so that's really important. So, building your network, you're always going to be working on that, providing value.
So this is hundreds of hours of work that I have spent educating people and providing free material. Over the years. I used to do Facebook Lives every week. I have done free workshops, I've done group programs. Everything that I'm doing I'm aiming to provide value. Everything I'm doing I'm aiming to provide a solution to somebody's problem, okay, where they are saying, hey, I have this problem I snore or I don't sleep good. Now, sometimes my content is a straight sell, but most of the time it is meant to educate. But most of the time it is meant to educate and I'm really trying to provide value and build that know like and trust factor with my audience.
This isn't field of dreams. That is the one biggest thing. If you're thinking about taking this dive into Mayo, or if you're thinking about taking this dive into the Ditch Hygiene Academy with me, you will hear me say this and it's probably one of the first things I will tell you in coaching just because you study with me does not mean that this is filled of dreams. If you build it, they, they may not come, okay. So you have to be building that relationship with your audience.
For the most part, um, people don't just all of a sudden see a social media post and then say, oh my gosh, I'm a mouth breather, I'm going to go spend $3,000 on therapy to fix that. No, it does happen, absolutely. But for the most part, I have people that I have to kind of. It's like dating, it's like courting. I have to court them for three months, six months, nine months a year, sometimes two years until they are ready to make the investment in themselves. So that's really how I found clients.
Okay, Now, how have I created consistent revenue? So, when you're first getting started, and even still for me, I have high months and I have low months. Very often the low months are self-inflicted. Okay, that's because I had a $50,000 last month and I worked my guts out and now I'm going to, you know, take two trips or something like that. So in part of building this life I'm bonkers about, I very much lean into my travel and my downtime, but consistent revenue is important.
So one of the things that I teach you through the profitable practice principles that I teach, and also the profitable practice framework and everything else that I teach inside the Ditch Hygiene Academy I don't want you to just get money by accident. Okay, you have to figure out what works and you have to keep doing more of that. So I keep things simple by following what I teach, and that goes a lot like this I know my offer. I price it for the value that it has. I know who I'm talking to. So my marketing, my messaging, all of that stuff is written for my easy peasy dream customer. I know how to sell my services. I don't think that I am selling anything. I am offering somebody help with a problem that they have. Okay, so I just do that on repeat. I also practice following my decide and do process. That keeps me not spinning on decisions and it keeps me focused on the most important, essential tasks and not spinning my wheel. So that seems pretty simple, doesn't it All right? So the best advice that I would give you these are going to be fun.
First, stop making excuses and giving yourself an out. So I see this, especially when you're building your, your myofunctional therapy business as a side hustle. Okay, your safety net is dental hygiene, and so I see some students that when building the business gets scary, or they have to do something uncomfortable, or they have to stop procrastinating, or they just got to move the needle. They are not taking a lot of action because hygiene is still safe over here, they still have a paycheck, okay. So I think that is hard and I think that's what holds back a lot of therapists from being full-time, practicing therapists from being part-time. Whatever you want it, whatever you want to call it, how much you want to work versus how much you want to make, I don't care. I want it out of hygiene. So I wanted to only be a myofunctional therapist.
And if you keep giving yourself an out, if you keep having a safety net or a safety net, um, uh, of staying in hygiene, then then it's going to be tough, okay, um, next up thinking that life is going to get less busy. Just today I had an email from a potential student saying should I wait to do this until blah, blah, blah? And I'm like no, because life isn't going to get less busy. You have to figure out how to do this while being busy, because retirees will tell you like I don't know how I had time to work. Okay, so there, that's just all I can say about it. Life is never going to be less busy. Stop saying that. It's not not all about the money life is purchase. So, because I do talk a lot about earning money, how I'm transparent, I think women should earn money I think women can easily be the primary you know earner in a family.
My friend, I hear that when people are like it's not all about money, I get that and I agree. And it's not all about the money. For me, it's about the freedom. But you have to remember that life is purchased. Whatever it is that you value, if you just value time, time with your family, time with your husband, time being able to go on school, field trips, all of that kind of stuff that it still is backed by some money, okay, um, and, and you get to figure out what your currency is. Some people it's time, some, some people it's money. For me it's freedom, the freedom of being able to work wherever, the freedom of having control of my calendar, where I can go from the pool to sitting here recording a podcast and you know, in 20 minutes I'm gonna do an exam and adult for a little bit. You get to determine what that is. But in the end there is still it still is somewhat about the money.
Stop asking for a guarantee before you're ready to invest in yourself. So again, this is a common fear based question that I hear from hygienists who are looking to join me inside the Ditch Hygiene Academy, and they want that. They want some sort of a guarantee. Well, two things come to mind. A, I don't have a glass ball to know how well you actually are with following through, being disciplined, doing what you say you're going to do. Or are you a quitter who makes excuses and fights for your limitations? I know nothing about you. So therefore, I have no guarantee, and there's no guarantee anyhow, because everything is always changing. So you have to decide whether you are worth the investment. That is the biggest thing, okay. Uh, at this point I have earned I don't know how many hundreds of times over my investment. Let me just do some easy my own math. If you enroll in the Ditch Hygiene Academy and you price your services at $3,000, you need to work with less than three clients. Then you have your money back and I give you skills for the rest of your career. So it's easy. Don't be mad at math, my friend, just do it. Um, next stop. I love this one.
Stop being poor between the ears with the whole I can't afford it mentality. Of course you can. This is the example that I use. If somebody told you, if you're a dog lover, okay, and somebody told you that your dog needed $10,000 worth of care, you'd find the money. Okay, I tell people this all the time. Go drive an old jalopy, okay.
Quit having full coverage insurance. Quit having a car payment. I know that it sounds simplistic, but it's just for a short amount of time. Quit paying for an unlimited cell phone plan. Quit buying the latest iphone that comes out and you have to do it on payments because you can't afford to pay for it.
Okay, you're a hygienist and I know that you have the ability to make money. You should have the ability to save some money and if you want it bad enough, you will find a way. But I think just having that mentality of I can't afford that is so poor. I never say those words. I never say I can't afford that. I will say I can't afford that right now Also depends on what it is and if it's something they value. Could I afford a Ferrari right now? No, but nor nor do I want to.
Okay, um, stop fighting for your limitations. Fight for what's possible. This is another thing like quit fighting for the ceiling, or quit fighting for why it's not possible for you, why everybody else is a unicorn and you are just the troll that is going to have such a hard time. Okay, stop being afraid that you will do it wrong. That's the beauty, is, you won't, okay. Another email I answered this morning like wanted to know the expectations from me and I said it is your journey, your pace. You get to decide the gas and the brake. I am just here to support you. There's homework, there's practical applications, there's all these things, but you, it's all your time zone, or your time zone, your time frame. Okay, I'm just here to support you. So, um, you cannot do it wrong. You absolutely cannot do it wrong.
The only thing I think you can do wrong is by not starting and not moving forward. Okay, I don't care what the pace is. Um, stop being confused. Be resourceful. Again, this is another thing. Um, so many ladies that I meet, they just use this I'm so confused as a crutch. Rather than being resourceful and this is the thing I teach in the program you have to be willing to figure things out. Be resourceful. The internet is full of research. If you can't do something, you got to figure out how to do it, or I help you with that. Okay, stop waiting to feel ready. That one is self-explanatory. Here's one. Stop listening to what others think you ought to do, okay.
So when I thought about leaving my good paying job to build my myofunctional therapy business, my husband thought I was crazy. He thought I should just stay and suffer in silence because I had, you know, an $80,000 a year job and I worked three days a week. He wasn't considering that I was having heart palpitations on the way to work, that I was just like dying inside every time I went and I hated it. And it wasn't filling my cup. I was underappreciated. I was verbally abused all the time I mean other than enjoying talking to my patients. I hated it, okay, but he thought I should just suck it up. My dad also same thing. My dad did the same job, drove semi for UPS in Montana over the winter roads, you know, for 40 years. He was like a robot. He got paid. He went and did the robot. He got paid. He went and did the job. He got paid, he went and did the job.
Okay, um, also, don't pay attention to people in the wild, okay, people out there, the internet, trolls, the monster, all of that kind of stuff. I have had people email me and tell me like, well, you can't do your business like that, you can't charge that and nobody's going to pay that. The going rate is this no, no, people pay it every day, and that is one thing that you learn inside the program is how to set your prices, how to charge a premium price. We're not building Medicaid practices. So and that leads me to the next one stop crowdsourcing and looking side to side. So quit asking everybody for their opinion. Okay, especially because you might be asking for advice from somebody who has no business, who does not have a profiting business or a profitable business, and they could just slowly be going broke. Okay, also, quit looking side to side. So when you're worried about what other people are doing, you're not running your own race. So put your horse blenders on and go for it.
This one is a biggie. Stop being a big baby about setting boundaries. I don't care at what pace you want to build this business. You're going to have to set some boundaries, okay. And so while I started this episode by saying I was having a hard time with boundaries, um, you have to have some, okay, so I can't just throw everything willy-nilly to the wolves, but you do, especially when you're getting started. You do have to set boundaries. The smaller amount of time that you have for building your business, you know. I always tell people you can build it in three to five hours a week. Then during that time, you definitely need to be working on business, okay.
And then the last one stop thinking that you're entitled to results without hard work. This is a biggie. And we periodically go around and contact our students and get feedback and see how they're doing, and one of the things that I see um, that kind of it repeats itself every now and again is that just because they were learning from me. Um, they just thought they would have results faster. And I said beautiful, what have you done? And that's the thing is, I shared with you how fast I had results.
Um, but I also did stuff, and that's the tricky thing. Some of my students who are struggling aren't doing the work, they're not going through the lessons, they're not having the conversations, they're not practicing that kind of stuff, so of course they're not going to have the results. Okay, so you're not entitled to them. And if you think of course they're not going to have the results, so you're not entitled to them. And if you think you are, then you're going to have a really hard time in business. So you got to kind of get over that. That's it, my friend. That was kind of a fun walk down memory lane for me.
I can tell you that I do not take enough time to celebrate where I started and how far I've come. So thank you for letting me share my story with you today. Here's what I want you to take away from hearing about my story. Your journey doesn't have to look like mine. If this is on your heart for a reason, then lean into it. Maybe you come study with me. Whatever, it's totally up to you. I teach you a simple, repeatable framework that you can build your business as fast or as slow as you want. So I shared with you my journey, what that looked like.
You don't have to be saying, hey, I want to leave hygiene in 13 months. In fact, maybe you don't want to. Maybe you have a five-year plan of staying in hygiene and just kind of slowly getting into mild. Either way, you can't do do it wrong. The last thing is you can do hard things. Okay, this isn't rocket science, but you have to be willing to do things that you don't know how to do. You have to be willing to embrace the tech. You have to be willing to have conversations. You know all of these things, but you've already done hard things, because look at where you are today. Okay, nobody can create a new adventure without some sort of nerves, and you're not going to be any different. So you can absolutely do this. Um, that is all I have for you, my friend. So in the meantime, till I'm back next time, go work on building a life you're bonkers about, and I will be back soon, where we will be talking about more myofunctional business goodness.