It's time to get real with one simple fact. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Wow. I know, way to start off the blog on a good foot, right?

The question is what does this mean for you as an ergonomics consultant, especially right now when business as usual has shifted so much for us. 

For many of us, business is slowly coming back to normal. We're starting to see clients again. If not, my students are growing their businesses with remote ergonomics assessments. 

I truly believe that it's still has never been a better time to get started with office ergonomic assessments. Not only is this an in-demand service, but having an understanding in the ergonomics process allows you to easily pivot to performing remote ergonomic assessments, trainings, and consultations. 

In this blogpost I want to share a simple process that's worked very well for me as well as members of my programs Accelerate, and The Ergonomic Blueprint when getting started with something new. 

Before jumping into that process let's talk about its guiding principle. 

Stephen Covey stated when planning the best strategy is to start with the end in mind. This is the whole basis of what I want to share with you today.

So where do you want to be in your career?

Hmmm. I know, tough question.

Do any of these resonate with you: 

• You want an exciting, fulfilling, and profitable career that makes you the ‘go-to’ expert in your city with an amazing reputation. Not only do you offer amazing care for injuries, but you also offer amazing prevention and proactive services too. Imagine treating your client’s injury and then going to their workplace to identify what caused it in the first place. 
• You are such an in-demand professional and there’s are so many clients who want your help that you need a waitlist.
• On top of all of this, you have the freedom and security to have multiple income streams with all your services being aligned with your expertise and experience. You don't have to rely just on insurance reimbursements (that always seem to be diminishing) to get by.

Hope that added some clarity.

There really is so much potential to the ergonomics profession, whether you want to add another income stream to your career or you want to spend 100% of your time with office ergonomic services. 

So, let's jump into this blogpost!  

How To Get What You Want With Ergonomics 

#1 Set a goal. 

As Covey says, when you are setting a goal, it's key to start with the end in mind. I find what works best is to set a quarterly goal, and then work backwards and set certain milestones to get you to achieve that goal. 

Setting these milestones gives us something to work towards, to know that we are on the right track to hit our goals. 

Otherwise the daily actions that you take may take you in entirely the other direction where you intended... something no one wants!

Let's say for instance that you want to have 100 more paying customers for your services by next quarter. Or perhaps your goal is to get your FIRST customer with office ergonomics - but first you have to learn how to do office ergonomic assessments (ahem, my course the Ergonomic Blueprint, ahem).

Both of these are HUGE accomplishments, and require many sub-steps to reach. 

For instance, there's entirely different process for getting your first 100 customers versus your first customer. One-hundred customers means a certain amount of marketing and selling expertise (ahem, which the Accelerate program teaches, ahem). One customer likely means that you're just starting out with office ergonomic assessments - so it means that you're learning the ergonomics process, not focus on scaling your service... quite yet!!

Whatever you choose your goal to be, you MUST be very specific!

There are certain things that you would need to do in order to achieve those goals. And you can get quite specific here when you're setting up these milestones, or achievements. 

These milestones not only keeps you accountable, but drives action!! Starting with the end in mind adds clarity when your setting up these milestones so you know that you're on track.

#2 Do the work. 

This next step goes hand-in-hand with what you selected as your BIG-TIME Goal... it's doing the less glamorous part of actually doing the work. 

• If your goal is to get 100 more customers, what are the weekly actions that are non negotiables to get you there? 
• If your goal is to learn how to do an office ergonomics assessments, what are you going to do on a weekly-basis to get you towards that? 

You see, starting with the end in mind automatically gives you the vision on what type of work you should be doing and gives you clarity in your schedule! 

Whatever you choose as an end-goal I have one pointer about this unglamorous side to ergonomics:

It's the little things done over and over again that yield big time results. 

Doing the work is all about showing up for yourself and your business.

Successful ergonomics professionals make the time to do the things that will drive their business forward!

#3 Take Action.

One of the biggest take-aways that I've recently appreciated is that action brings clarity. 

An example of this is the Accelerate program, where I help ergonomics consultants get ideal customers and build a business they love. 

When I first started with this idea, I knew that I wanted to help ergonomists with marketing and sales. I wanted to create this because I knew I could help ergonomists save time and make more money with everything that I learned from building my own business... but I wasn't entirely sure of how it was going to look in the end. 

When I was in the building stage of this membership, trying to figure out how I could help and what Accelerate's value-proposition was I felt confused and overwhelmed.

I found that I would research my plan and process for a day here or there then stop. 

I would start again a month or so later, but ended up realizing that I had forgotten all the work that I had originally done and I actually did a lot of the same things over and over again resulting in a lot of wasted time and lost momentum. 

It wasn't until I drew a line in the sand and made a goal to launch it was where the major traction and clarity came from. By doing this, I accomplished more towards my goal in two months than I did in the past 6 months, combined. 

... action drives clarity! 

You want to add more 'fuel' to your fire? Let others know of your goal to keep you accountable! 

#4 Starting before you're ready and iterate as you go.

Combined with the idea of starting before you're ready, getting feedback on your performance will drive your achievement.

I believe that doing this is necessary to see if you're on the right track to reach your quarterly goal. It allows you to re-focus (or change) your direction in order to be doing the things that will get you results.

There's no such thing as a perfect time to get started. 

You'll never have enough time. It will never be the "right" time. You'll likely have other things going on in your life. 

In fact, being 100% ready before you start something new in your career is considered a negative. Of course you have to be competent when we're talking about being trained in a health profession.

But, at the same time can you think back to a time when you waited too long before starting?

You continuously looked at the process, the facts, or the procedure... only to learn that when you first started that all that time you spent learning wasn't entirely necessary and you could got started much before. 

Successful people know to start before they are ready and make changes as they go. 

Next Steps 

I hope that this post inspires you to take action. I've shared the big-picture process that I teach the members of my Accelerate program. If you've realized that you want to add office ergonomic services to your career, I also have a program called the Ergonomics Blueprint where you learn how to do a quality office ergonomic assessment. To learn more if ergonomics is aligned with your career, just click here to watch my new training where I teach you how to get started!