Be A Successful Ergonomist: Start Before You Feel Ready

Ergonomics is an in-demand and value-added service that adds to your revenue stream, and it’s likely already aligned with your skills and experience. You could be here reading this post from a wide variety of backgrounds. It could be that you're already in the ergonomics field doing ergonomics assessments. Perhaps you're a healthcare professional looking to add ergonomic services to what you're already doing professionally to serve your clients better. There's so much opportunity here. In this post, I’ll be talking about how to shift from doing your day job to starting your own ergonomics consulting business as a side hustle. I want to share with you certain key indicators of success that I've noticed. Read on to find out what they are.

Shift Your Mindset

School sets you up to be an employee, not how to effectively start and grow an ergonomics consulting business. Whether you go to school to study Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, Kinesiology, or other types of backgrounds, they’re going to teach you how to be proficient at those skills to be an employee. It could be that you’ll be an employee of someone's clinic, or an employee of someone's consulting firm, or maybe manage the ergonomics program of a large organization. Those are all well and good too. But to be successful at running your own business, you need to make one major mindset shift—from working as an employee to doing the most impactful things as a CEO and to move your business forward. 

One thing that I've noticed from my successful members and students who are making great progress in their business is that they're starting before they're ready, and this can mean a lot of things. Sometimes, this means that you're going to be doing things that you’re not necessarily comfortable with, such as marketing yourself, letting your community know about what you offer, or networking. And that's a big shift you need to take. It's about learning what you need on time, having a big picture perspective of where you want to take your business, and then taking action. Successful people know to start before they’re ready and iterate as they continue to move forward.

A Perfect Time to Start Doesn’t Exist

There's no such thing as a perfect time to get started. This is what I realized when I'm running my own ergonomics business. Waiting for that website to be perfect is only going to hinder you from getting started. You don't need to depend on a fancy website because it’s really not required, especially when starting out.

Reputation, in many ways, is greater than spending your time building a fancy website. When you’re just getting started, networking and sharing your message to the key players in your community is much more valuable. You might find that your idea of what services your ideal client wants is drastically different from what they actually want in reality. The best way to effectively deliver the information about your ergonomic services is to get out there and have a conversation with your ideal client. As Ergonomic Consultants, I believe we make more of our revenue in providing our services, doing the marketing, and building relationships rather than building the "perfect" website. Even though this method takes more time, you’ll surely see success in the long run if you stay consistent.

Building Your Business Takes Time

Another thing that I want to point out is that it takes some time to build your marketing strategy or to learn the details of your services for you to start seeing the results. But continually going forward and taking imperfect steps will help you get your business to where you want it to be. This is where the idea of starting when you're not ready comes into play again because the process can take time. It takes a lot of steps to get to where we want to be, but if you start before you’re ready, you'll slowly get more progress and see faster results towards your goal.

The same is true when it comes to business. Many people want to start building a business thinking that they can get revenue overnight. However, there’s no silver bullet solution that works that well. Of course, there's always going to be an exception to that sort of phrasing. But when I need a quick burst of revenue into my business, I find that what works for me is not a silver bullet solution. When I want to build a relationship with a client, I like to offer something of value at no cost, such as a lunch-and-learn or a content via findings from a literature review (hint, hint). That’s something that works much better for me and for a lot of my Accelerate members instead of going forward with that silver bullet (if it even exists in the first place!!).

Starting a business is very similar to growing a plant. When you plant new seeds in your field, you don’t check them the next day and expect to see fruits—the process takes time. So just like a plant growing to maturity, a business takes many months of consistent action for that change to be realized. You need to consistently water the plants and tend the seeds until they grow and bear fruit.

Keep a Consistent Action

If you wait until you’re fully ready before you put yourself out there, then you've probably waited too long. It's more valuable to take consistent action, whatever action it is that you think will move your business forward. It could be attending networking events, developing your landing page, making connections through social media platforms, or connecting with your old clients that you’ve served from your healthcare business. Consistently getting out of your comfort zone and doing the necessary steps will help you get to your goal. 

Let's face it. It's just a matter of time before someone that we know in our network or in our community needs ergonomic assistance, whether it’s ergonomic assessments, a workers’ compensation claim, a discomfort issue, or just purchasing a new chair. They’re going to need your expertise. The only way that they're going to know that you exist is through consistent networking and making connections with those organizations that you love working with. By doing so, it will help you build your system, so you can be known as the go-to expert in your city or community for ergonomics. 

What’s Next?

When growing a business, it’s essential to have your own system because that's where the value is. I can show you how to do it in my Accelerate program. One of the coolest things that I offer in my program is time-saving content to grow your own marketing system. I save your time with my monthly literature reviews and monthly infographics. I'm going to be showing how you can build upon your expertise and your marketing skills. In addition, I bring in experts to give you a good overall perspective of how you can add value to your clients and grow your business.

So if you're interested in how I can help you market your services and grow professionally, sign up to the waitlist and earn some sweet freebies. I’m opening the enrollment at the end of June 2021. I'll also be doing a three-video series again before the opening.