Hi there, wellness entrepreneur. Welcome back. Today we’re talking about the Mill Escape Plan—building your 100K online business while working full-time.
And what does that mean? It might mean that you’re a physical therapist or healthcare provider with a full-time job as a salaried practitioner. It might mean you’re a massage therapist in a clinic doing back-to-back massages on the hour. It might mean that you’re a studio yoga teacher driving all around town, getting paid per class, per head—and you’d really like to bring in more private sessions or an online membership.
It can be any of those scenarios, or maybe even a combination of them. But here’s what I know, because I’ve been in each of those scenarios. I’ve been a massage therapist multiple times in a chiropractor’s office that had high volume. I also worked in—well, I don’t think Massage Envy was around when I was a massage therapist—but in a clinic like that for some time, where it was high volume and I just saw clients back-to-back-to-back. And there wasn’t as much care for the labor workers back then. There are a little bit more regulations on breaks and such now, but I’ve been in that position.
I’ve also been a physical therapist in a mill clinic, training five people at the same time, back-to-back. It was discouraged to do manual therapy in a closed room even though someone needed to really regulate their nervous system and calm down.
I’ve been a yoga teacher teaching 10+ classes a week, driving all around town to different studios. So, I’ve been in each of those positions.
And I’m here to tell you—owning your own business? It’s not perfect. Sometimes we envision that the grass is greener over here, that everything will be rainbows, daisies, and unicorns when you leave your mill job. I don’t want to give you rose-colored glasses and pretend that when you come over here it’s all going to be perfect and magical—because entrepreneurship is hard, and some days it’s a grind. You do have to learn skills that push you, and you need to self-evolve.
But I’ll tell you—the money I make now for the hours that I work is so much better. And I have so much freedom and flexibility to work with people as I see fit. I’m not dictated by insurance or a boss who is driven by a bottom line. I get to run my business how I want.
And so, having that combination of more freedom and flexibility—control over my schedule, of when I want to go on vacation or what I just want my week to look like—being able to carve out time… Like this week, my daughter ends school, so I’m blocking off Wednesday early because it’s her last day.
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Here in San Diego, her school does a beach day on the last day of school. And I can say, “Oh, I want to block off that day and take her to her last day of school beach day,” so she can have some fun. I was going to say “in the sun,” but right now we’re in June gloom. Just have some fun on the beach with her classmates and celebrate before she and I take off for Florida.
I’m able to do both of those because I do have my own business, and I want that for you too.
I don’t want you to be struggling with back-to-back clients, feeling exhausted all the time. I remember when I was in my massage clinic mill position, I used to joke with my husband—who was my boyfriend at the time—about how I worked in a cave.
I was pretty much quiet all day long because most of my clients wanted relaxation. And so I let them dictate how the conversation was going to flow—or not flow—depending upon what they needed. Most people just wanted to be quiet and relax, which is what it’s for.
So, sometimes I didn’t talk for hours at a time. Then I would come home and talk my boyfriend’s ear off because I just needed to talk and not be in the cave all day.
Then I transitioned to being a physical therapist and worked in the mill scenario where, again, I was treating sometimes five patients at the same time. I was instructing an aide on how to instruct the patients. I was talking to other staff members. I was, of course, talking to my patients. I was just talking, talking, talking all day long.
And I would come home, and my jaw would be so sore. I’m hypermobile, so sometimes my jaw subluxes, and I felt like I couldn’t even talk.
My husband told me he pretty much had whiplash from dating me, going from me talking his ear off to now trying to start a conversation and getting only a few words out of me.
So, I’ve been in all these scenarios.
And it is easy to feel trapped because you are getting a steady paycheck. Even if you’re teaching in the yoga studios, it’s not so much a traditional job, but it’s still reliable revenue where you can make a few hundred dollars to usually one to two thousand dollars off studios a month.
I see yoga teachers making close to 2K, but they’re teaching a lot of classes a week, or they’re able to fill a class and get paid per head pretty well. But it’s hard to break past that point just on classes.
So what’s really keeping you stuck, though, is this thought that you have to choose between the security of your paycheck and freedom. You think you need to quit your job to build your business, or you need endless hours of free time to make it work—and that’s just not true.
I’m going to show you in the next 10 to 15 minutes how you can keep the security of your job, build savings, because entrepreneurship—it’s true—it doesn’t have that financial security. But you can create it for yourself.
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You can also create safety for yourself in entrepreneurship. You can build it while working your job, so you do have more security when it is eventually time to leave your job, and you’ll know when it is time to leave your job.
Here’s what I have learned, working with dozens of practitioners who’ve made this transition. The ones who succeed don’t have more time or energy than you. They just have a different strategy and mindset.
And that’s what we’re going over today.
Okay, so let’s paint a picture of what your life actually looks like right now—and tell me if this hits home.
You wake up early, or even the day before, you sometimes have a pit in your stomach if you look at the schedule ahead and see how many people are on it.
You rush to work, and sometimes you have to negotiate with the front office to move patients or clients around. I’ve had it in both scenarios—just to have time to eat lunch or get a half-hour break in between 90-minute deep tissue massages, or to make sure I had time to pee and grab water.
And you know that you’re about to spend the next 8 to 10 hours giving everything you have to help people heal.
And I know this is how you feel, too, because you really care about the work that you do. You care about the people that you’re serving, which, by the way, is very beautiful. It’s why you’re already an amazing practitioner and why you’ll make a wonderful entrepreneur.
But at the same time, if you’re in a very high-volume setting, it’s also why it’s exhausting.
And then you come home after the back-to-back-to-back day, squeezing in your own self-care just to keep your human being running. You come home feeling mentally and physically drained.
If you’re in healthcare, you might even have to catch up on documentation and notes.
Now your family wants your attention. You need to make dinner, eat dinner, maybe squeeze in a workout if you’re lucky.
And somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re thinking, “Well, you know, I should post something if I really want my own business to take off.”
But you’re too tired to be creative. You’re too bummed out to write compelling content.
So you post something generic like “Stretching is important,” or “Five sessions available in July,” with a stock photo—or you don’t post at all.
And this goes on for weeks—even months. You’ll have a burst of motivation on a weekend and maybe create five posts then.
Then you’ll disappear again for two weeks because work got crazy again or life circumstances happened with your family, so things got crazy there.
Meanwhile, you’re watching other practitioners online who seem to have it all figured out. They’re posting daily, running workshops, signing clients—and you’re thinking, “How do they have the energy for this?”
But here’s the broader truth: you are stuck in what I call the Productivity Paradox.
You need that steady paycheck to feel secure. I get it—the health benefits, etc., etc., etc. The golden handcuffs, as it’s sometimes called. The fact that you don’t have to worry about finding your own clients.
But that same job is literally sucking the life force out of you, and you need to build your escape route.
You’re trying to build a business with scraps of energy left over from your day job.
And friend, scraps don’t build empires. But I know you have the ability to make it happen.
The real problem isn’t that you don’t have the time or energy—because I know you’ve heard this before. And I’m not saying this from a shaming or judgmental place. It’s just realizing that the people who do build while working a job have the same amount of time as you.
The problem is that you might not be using the right strategy for someone who is working a job about 40 hours a week and trying to build a business in maybe five.
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So here’s what I discovered when I was in your exact situation: you need the right strategy to shift the reality.
So we’ll call it the Bridge Strategy. And it’s specifically designed for practitioners who need to systematically, while employed, build their online business without burning out.
Most business advice tells you to post daily, be everywhere, hustle harder—and it just doesn’t work if you are caring for people all day long, because you do need time to care for yourself too.
So this Bridge Strategy—to go from being tired and burned out in your mill situation to growing your online business—is based on three pillars. I’ll give you an overview first, and then we’ll break each one down.
The first pillar is Energy-Based Marketing.
The second pillar is the Credential Leverage System.
The third is the 90-Day Runway.
Now, you can change this runway to however much time you want—three months, six months, maybe even a year. It’s not about quitting your job tomorrow. Even though you might feel like your job is slowly killing you, you can still plan.
Otherwise, what happens is this: if you don’t do it strategically, I’ve also had many practitioners urgently reach out to me to hire me because they need to make money fast in their business. They quit their job and didn’t create that runway. Now they’re hustling, hustling, hustling.
And now their business has become their 9 to 5. They’re handcuffed in certain ways there because they just didn’t plan.
So I’m going to help you plan so you can leave the golden handcuffs and come into your own new golden freedom as an entrepreneur.
The first one: Energy-Based Marketing.
Instead of forcing yourself to create content when you’re exhausted, what you want to do is strategically batch your marketing during high-energy windows and use systems to maintain consistency.
Okay, let’s talk about what that means.
That’s picking a day of the week—or maybe even a day of the month, if that helps you.
I have a client we’re working with to help her create more blogs because she loves to write, and she wants her website to rank better. We were utilizing a strength—something she really loves doing in her business. She was trying to batch blogs a week, but she has a family and three children, and she’s busy.
So after trying it that way, she realized, “Oh, I think I need to just carve out one or two days a month, maybe even a quarter,” where she goes to a coffee shop or books a hotel room or an Airbnb and just batches out content for a month or an entire quarter.
You’ve got to figure out what works for you. Sometimes it is trial and error. Try saying, “Okay, I’m going to do an hour of batching for the week,” or maybe a few hours for the entire month.
But what you want to do is pick a day when you can do this. You can write three educational posts on common issues you saw in patients that week.
The nice thing about having a job is that you can really pull from it for content that will help your own business because you’re immersed in it. You’re boots on the ground, so you’re going to know—even if your audience is slightly different.
Maybe you work in, for example, a massage mill where you’re doing cookie-cutter Swedish or deep tissue type massages. Or you’re in a general orthopedic clinic and want to specialize in helping females transition through menopause. So it’s a slightly different audience, but you’re still immersed in hearing patients or clients talk about their problems every day in their language.
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So use that. Take notes—even in your phone on breaks—as you can, to write down exactly what they’re saying. That way, you can use that to spend, for example, 20 minutes creating three educational posts on a specific problem they have—maybe even Reels.
Then you spend 5 to 10 minutes a day, when you’re posting, engaging with people online, whether it’s on Facebook, Instagram, or even at networking events. You can go to one networking event a month.
You can plan out your marketing for the week or month. What I would do is focus on one social media platform. Then you can repurpose to others if you want—but it’s not required.
So, on Instagram, you might have three posts—carousels or Reels—a week, maybe a story or two, and then you engage and build your audience. Then maybe you go to one networking event a month or quarter, or teach one workshop event per quarter, and follow up and communicate with those people.
Maybe you’ll start—I’d recommend this—sending emails, building your email list, and starting to engage with those people.
If you focus on those three things during your weekly hour or your monthly batching time, then you will consistently grow your audience. You’ll get better at creating content for Instagram. You’ll get better at writing emails. You’ll get better at teaching workshops.
So that when you finally leave your job, you’ll know how to grow your audience—both through events and one-to-one communication—and you’ll also know how to convert it.
And these are the needed skills as an entrepreneur. So, the sooner you can start working them into your schedule in a sustainable way, the better you’ll get at it.
Now, what it does not mean is taking your whole entire Sunday—if you have a busy workweek—and doing all of this.
Because then you’re going to go into Monday feeling even more burned out and tired.
So, you need to make sure that if you are, for example, doing it on a Sunday, it’s only one or two hours. But you also have time to be with your family. You have time to take care of the things that you need to do—like laundry and groceries. You also have time to rest.
But you could make it work in an hour or two on a Sunday, especially if you’re planning ahead and maybe doing two to three hours and batching for the whole month. That way, week to week, you only have to do a few quick engagement sessions, five to ten minutes at a time.
The key here is to pay attention to your energy.
So don’t do this at a time when you feel completely exhausted—like trying to squeeze in posting during your lunch break when you really need to eat, or trying to post at the end of your day when you’re wiped out.
That’s why I mentioned Sunday. A lot of times you can use Friday evening or Saturday to replenish, so you feel more energized to use your creative brain to create the content—and then just schedule it out for yourself.
So, use this strategy based on your energy levels so you’re more productive and creative in less time.
Okay, let’s talk about the second pillar: the Credential Leverage System.
You have something that a lot of online practitioners don’t have—and they would kill for it.
And that is experience.
You also have a business or job that’s probably paying for you to get more credentials and CEUs. Leverage them. Use them.
Use up your CEU hours and money. And get paid to go to these events, because you can take—I forget the exact name for it—but I know for me, I could take a day off and still get paid. It wasn’t sick leave, but it was something else, and I would get paid to go to whatever certification or training I was attending.
Leverage that.
So keep building your skills while you’re at your job, even if it feels busy. Just make sure you are scheduling time to take care of that.
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Because when you become your own entrepreneur, you are taking a day off in your business to do that—or a weekend—to attend the event. That means it’s your time, and you’re paying out of pocket. You’re paying from your own business profits to attend.
Now, it is a write-off, so there’s that benefit. But it’s still different when you’re doing it for yourself versus having a company pay for it.
Then, use those credentials and certifications to show your expertise and authority, even as part of your story as an online authority builder.
You can use the experience of working with a patient and tell the story—not their private information—but storytelling about your work or your own growth is what’s trending on Instagram right now. And it’s what people want to read in emails too.
So, the more you’re working with people, the more stories you’re going to have.
You can also share stories about why you got a certain certification and how it’s going to better help people now and in your own business.
For example:
A patient came in today who hadn’t been able to lift their arm above shoulder height for six months. Then, using this specific technique I just learned a couple of weekends ago—combined with targeted strengthening—they had full range of motion in three sessions.
Here’s the exercise sequence I used.
That’s a very easy Reel. If you had B-roll, you could do 5–10 seconds of you working with someone and that person lifting their arm overhead.
If you don’t want to film a patient—or they don’t want to be recorded—you can film yourself or ask an aide, tech, or front office person to mimic a patient.
Record 5–10 seconds of video. Then do a text overlay that says something like:
“Here’s the exercise sequence I used to help my patient lift their arm overhead when they hadn’t been able to for six months.”
And then you write it out in the caption.
Bam. Done. 10–20 minutes. One Reel.
Now you only have two more to go, and you’ve got a whole week’s worth of content.
Then you can just repeat that story. I wouldn’t recommend resharing the same Reel in your Stories unless you really want it to take off, but you can bring in the same story in a new way.
Maybe use static pictures instead of video.
Now you’ve created expert-level content that a generic health coach without your experience or certifications can’t replicate. And no shame to them—they may have gone straight from certification to entrepreneurship—but they don’t have that same level of experience from working a job.
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I’m talking to you—someone with a job and lots of experience. Utilize it.
Batch using your energy system.
Then show up as the authority online, so people want to work with you.
You’re also teaching your audience how to recognize when they might need this type of intervention—and you’re positioning yourself as the solution: the practitioner they should work with.
So here’s an example of a weekly rhythm using these patient or client scenarios from your week:
Monday – Post your Sunday-batched educational content that we made earlier, for example.
Wednesday – Share a patient success story.
Friday – Answer a common question you heard that week.
Then, over the weekend, you can engage with your community—maybe while you’re resting on the couch.
Now let’s talk about the third pillar: the 90-Day Runway.
We’ve talked about what to market, some examples of how to market, and how to fit it into your schedule in a sustainable way.
But you know how you’ll actually be able to leave your job?
It’s if you’re signing clients and making revenue.
So that means fitting them in when you can.
It might mean working longer days—doing evenings or weekends, or using your lunch hour. Or it might even mean reducing hours.
I remember when I was a full-time practitioner, I reduced some of my hours because I didn’t want to be locked in.
I did the traditional mill clinic, and then I switched to a mentor where I could combine yoga, massage, and physical therapy. And I didn’t want to be locked into seeing eight patients a day, five days a week—forty hours of patient care.
So I made a modified schedule, especially because I didn’t have benefits anyway. I worked anywhere from 28 to 32 hours a week. And just having those extra hours gave me flexibility.
That’s when I started building my Instagram following.
Now, I didn’t have a plan at that time to become an entrepreneur—I was just doing Instagram as a hobby—but you can think outside the box.
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If you want the security and safety of income, maybe you can reduce your hours.
I have many clients who drop down to part-time or modified part-time, where they still get some of the benefits of the golden handcuffs.
It’s not as scary to go from working full-time for someone else to full-time in your own business. You can think creatively—use per diem hours or shift models—so you can create time, and you can figure this out for yourself.
If you saw 3 to 5 clients a week, let’s work this out with some math.
Let’s say you charge $150 a session. $150 × (we’ll go with the middle ground) 4 clients a week = $600 a week.
$600 × 4 weeks = $2,400 a month.
Would that change things for you if you were able to do that consistently?
So we’re looking at 5 to 10 hours a week outside your job—between marketing, audience growth, learning how to sell, and actually working with clients.
You could be bringing in an extra 2K to 3K per month beyond your salary.
Then, when thinking of your plan, you ask:
- How much do I want in savings before I leave my job?
- What do I want my consistent, average monthly revenue to be before I leave?
Those become your markers.
And it might seem far off, right?
I have a client who wants to build to almost six figures in savings and hit consistent five-figure months before she leaves her job. She has great benefits and a high salary, so she’s been working methodically.
Now, it is hard. She works a lot some weeks, but she’s motivated—and she has grown tremendously in her business.
I have another client who’s hit five-figure months several times. She’s now working to make that consistent, and she’s built a lot of savings. Both of those will help create more financial security and safety when she eventually goes off on her own.
And she will make it happen.
I have another client whose runway wasn’t quite as long.
She was working in an office and learning how to build a yoga therapy practice within a chiropractic clinic. She was gaining the skills of entrepreneurship there. She didn’t have a plan to go off on her own at that time, but she was learning the necessary skills—how to bring in clients, how to sign them, and she was starting to grow her audience.
Then things changed at her job.
The chiropractor decided he wanted to change his business model and how she was employed in his business. Essentially, what happened is she ended up going off on her own, not in a planned way.
But because she had been learning the skills of entrepreneurship, she was able to make it happen. She started hitting $5K months in her own business pretty quickly, because she had to make it happen. She had to provide for herself and her partner at the time.
She also did her due diligence to look for jobs. She’s also a nurse, so some options weren’t related to nursing or yoga therapy, because she didn’t want to put herself back into a burnout nursing situation.
But she did find some jobs to help supplement her revenue, such as nannying, which gave her more freedom in her schedule.
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When I became an entrepreneur, I didn’t have a runway either.
I was let go from my job, and I had very little savings. This is why I always preach about savings—it’s the one thing I wish I had planned better.
Because I was coming back from maternity leave, I had used my savings to cover that time. So when I was let go, I just didn’t want to put myself back into another mill position.
I knew my body and nervous system—especially with a baby—needed something different. I wanted to focus on time with her and being a mom. I didn’t want to be stuck in a clinic, with no control over my schedule.
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So I hustled to make it work. And I did make it work.
But if I could do it better and easier, I would have had more savings, so I could have had a runway.
So if you have your job right now, start planning and creating that runway for yourself—to systematically build the skills needed for entrepreneurship, such as:
- marketing
- growing your audience
- learning how to sign clients
- learning how to get results in the way you envision working with clients
If you’re confident that you know how to sign clients, that you know how to make money, that you know how to grow an audience—it gives you so much security when it’s finally time to leave your job.
Plus, if you have savings and you know, “Okay, I’m making around 5 to 6K a month,”—and yes, some months will be off, and some will be really big—but if on average you’re hitting those revenue months, you’ll know: “I can make this work.”
That also gives you so much more peace of mind, so you don’t feel pressured.
I use this analogy a lot:
You’re not forcing your business to learn how to walk—or forcing it to walk—when it’s still a baby and doesn’t have the strength, the motor skills, or the neural development to even stand yet.
We want to grow at the pace that our business grows.
And everyone grows differently, depending on the skills you bring into entrepreneurship.
Okay, let’s wrap it up for today.
First, stop trying to build your business on scraps of energy. It’s not working.
You need to build a sustainable schedule. And yes, it’s not going to be quite the same as when you have the freedom of working in your business full time.
But here’s the truth: even when you do work in your business full time, you’ll still have to learn how to work in pockets of time—because you’ll have more marketing to do. You’ll have more networking events and workshops. You’ll have more clients you’re working with.
So the better you get at marketing and developing these skills in short bursts of time, the more efficient and successful you’ll be as an entrepreneur.
Don’t wait. Don’t think the grass is greener, and you’ll have so much time once you’re on your own.
Start building the habits now.
Second, pick one of the strategies I shared today and commit to trying it for the next couple of weeks.
Don’t do everything. Just pick one and be consistent.
Then, layer in the next one. And then layer in the next one—just as you’re going to layer building your savings, and layer increasing your monthly revenue.
And if you’re ready to build the complete Bridge Strategy System—the exact step-by-step process my client used while working her job to get to five-figure months, or that another client used to hit 5K revenue months as a brand-new yoga therapist who just went off on her own—then I invite you to book a consult with me.
I’ll look at your specific situation and identify the fastest path to creating more revenue in the shortest amount of time, so you can keep your job and all the benefits.
You can grow at a sustainable pace and leave when you do feel somewhat secure.
Because the truth is—it’s still going to be scary. It still requires a leap of faith. But you can set yourself up in the best way possible.
That mill clinic? It doesn’t have to be your forever.
You don’t have to be there forever.
You have skills that people desperately need, and there’s a whole world of clients waiting for exactly what you want to offer—delivered in the way you envision it.
So it’s time to build your bridge to freedom.
I’ll see you on a consultation call or in the next episode.
Alrighty—bye for now.
Important Links To Visit:
Joe Clarke’s Path to Loving Marketing and Growing His Wellness Biz
How Katie Delimon Stays Consistent with Instagram Content Using AI Tools
