Burnout, Business Models & Sustainable Growth with Filipa Bellette

Craig Minter (00:01.06)
Hello everybody and welcome to the Healthy Business Lab podcast where we talk to allied health and related health and wellness type business owners to get their insights, their experiments and all their gold learnings that they’ve learned in business. And today I’m super excited to have Filipa Bellette on the call today from Chris and Filly FM (Functional Medicine).

Welcome to the call, Filipa.

Filipa Bellette (00:24.536)
Thank you Craig, I’m excited to meet you.

Craig Minter (00:27.568)
We love on this show to let our guests introduce themselves. And I love to do that from a framework to share a bit of your background in the health and wellness space as well. And also that bit of the lens on it as business owners, we often don’t look after ourselves. So, if you’re sharing a bit of your background of what you do and how people can also take a few nuggets there that they can look after themselves a bit better because they are their best asset in the business. I love you to speak to that point as a part of your sharing your expertise as well.

Filipa Bellette (01:00.082)
Awesome. Well, I am co-founder of Chris and Filly Functional Medicine. We’re best known for ending body burnout in busy people with energy, mood and gut issues. If I go back a little bit into the past, I guess, why I do what I do, I had my own burnout episodes, three major ones actually. And it wasn’t just the classic working too hard, need to have a break. Brain is a bit overloaded. I was actually showing up with a lot of weird health issues that where I hit a wall in the conventional medicine, basically all the tests that GP’s medical specialists ran, they’re like, Oh, your tests are fine. But inside, I felt like I was an 85 year old. And at this point, I was in my late 20s. So, as part of that journey of healing myself, which essentially took like 10 years because I was figuring it out on my own a lot of the time. I mean, I did have some practitioners along the way, but I needed a very robust, holistic healing approach. And initially I started healing with physical protocols, kind of like doing functional medicine lab testing and using natural supplements and changing my diet and, you know, clearing out toxins from my environment, which was all great and was needed because my body was riddled with a lot of pathogens and toxins. But a big part of my healing journey later on too was realizing that I had kind of caused my health issues in the first place. There were a lot of busy, overdoing perfectionism, people pleasing patterns that I had been running. My nervous system was constantly stuck in fight-or-flight. Even if I went on a holiday or went to the beach with my kids, I struggled to relax.

The healing journey that I went on took both a physical and a metaphysical approach, which worked in the end. And so, that’s now what we help our clients with in our practice. Yes, we’re still running lab testing, creating physical therapeutic protocols to help fast track the physical healing, but really diving into deeper dysfunctional beliefs that they have about self and the body and their ability to heal, rewiring those busy patterns because you could take all the right supplements, you could change your diet and eat super healthy, but if you’re not changing those patterns that actually led to body burnout in the first place, at some point the symptoms are going to come back.

Craig Minter (03:28.793)
Yeah, it’s a great summary and overview. And as you were talking there, I know we talked about it on one of our pre-tracks as well. I’m loving the idea of the body keep score and you know, lot of the things around that, which you’ve sort of started to touch upon there and definitely something that plenty of business owners in the allied health and health space are in that, you know, always looking after their clients first, always doing exactly what you just talked about and burning themselves out and the like. That’s just something that I think we all need to be conscious of and aware of. And number one, as I said before, it’s that how do we look after ourselves? Because the old aeroplane analogy, if we don’t pull down the oxygen mask for ourselves, we can’t do much for our clients at the end of the day, can we?

Filipa Bellette (04:26.357)
Yeah, exactly. And I think that that was a big pain point for me. That led that Where I realized that I was still managing symptoms using physical protocols, but adding some extra stress or a bit more of a more intense busy period, or if I didn’t sleep very well, I was struggling to show up for clients also because I was running like a lot of money scarcity patterns. It was kind of like, I need more, I need more, I need more.

Filipa Bellette (04:54.253)
Nothing is ever enough. So, I was working 110% and also struggled to say no to clients. And so, my one-on-one schedule is getting like very booked up and I was tired.

Craig Minter (05:08.815)
Yeah, I can imagine and I know I’ve seen it and heard it plenty of times before so I think as you’ve gone on the personal evolution yourself and then tying it into the business side of things and running your business. I’d love to now step through as we love to talk about the experiments that, you know, this idea of saying no to clients and looking at different business models and approaches that work for you from a business sense that also helped you with the that that personal growth and journey for want of a better word I try not to use that word but that that process that you were on I’d love to hear some of those early experiments as you were sort of working through the challenges you had at the time.

Filipa Bellette (05:58.51)
Yeah, so prior to COVID, I was working as a sole trader, pay per consult, not charging a lot either. But I guess like, yeah, back then 2017 was when I initially graduated from clinical nutrition and as a functional medicine practitioner.

Then COVID happened, my husband also had a business. It was a gym at the time and COVID, he locked down the gym and he was really burnt out as well. Waking up at 4 a.m., training clients, coming home like at 10PM after everyone had left and the gym was cleaned. And so he loved lockdown. He’s like, this is the best. I don’t think I want to go back to that business. How about I join your functional medicine practice and I’ll be kind of like the mindset guy because he was also doing mindset coaching back then too.

And you know, it all sounded great in theory, but at the time because I was, I had so much heightened stress in my body and my nervous system was on a constant high alert. One, all the changes that COVID brought in the lockdown and we, you know, my one-on-one clients disappeared for a while because everyone thought the world was going to end and like, should I be spending my money on my health? And you know, all that sort of stuff. So, that was intense. And then my husband came into my business, like my baby. And he is very big and visionary and big risk taker. And he’s like, we’re going to change this and we’re going to like change that. So, I was freaking out at the time. But in hindsight, all the things that he was trying to implement what we both wanted was we wanted more of a lifestyle business where we could still serve our people. But we weren’t tied to the calendar and to clients like all day, every day and on the computer or, you know, serving people. So, we actually started experimenting with a hybrid model where we kept one-on-one support, but we also created an online program. Our first course was called Rise Up. And essentially that was helping our clients to have the knowledge and to help them implement anybody what they needed in order to heal at a root cause level so that when we caught up with them one-on-one it was to help them kind of like troubleshoot the stuff that that was struggling to implement on their own. So, it also meant that they were getting way more support. We didn’t need to see as many people one-on-one and we also charged a premium because they were also getting like all this other support throughout the program.

That was good for a little bit. And then we probably did two launches and it sold and then the third one just wasn’t. And like honestly, my calendar was drying up with clients and I’m like, Chris, I blamed it on Chris initially. I’m like, Chris, you’ve broken this. Like before COVID, I was like booked out and now I don’t have any clients. And now in hindsight, I’m like, how lovely that I had space in order to like heal and my deeper wounds around like not enoughness and scarcity and like freaking out that we were going to go bankrupt. And so anyway, so we tried a bunch of different things. We ended up pivoting and we created a program called Power Parent, which the things that we helped our clients with is similar to the stuff that you know, we were doing, but the messaging was all wrong, like we were confusing people. And it was a lot higher ticket to this time as well. Clients were just like, I’m confused what you’re doing now. Are you parenting coaches? There were people who wanted to work with us and get that functional medicine support and like mind support. But they’re like, but I’m not a parent. So, I guess I can’t work with you. And it was even more specific. It was parents who are business owners. So, which is, which is something that we hear in business. It’s like niche down because if you’re serving everyone, you, you know, often people struggle to to, um, to be successful until you’re known for something and then you can branch out. It’s like, I serve everyone cause everyone knows who I am now. And so, that was a good learning curve in that, it was a complete failure. We sold one.

Craig Minter (10:40.845)
Love a good failure, but as long as he’s learning, which again, you’ve touched upon there. I love your phrase theology of that was, hey, we got a lot of learning because it was complete failure. I love the ordering and the sequencing of that. A lot of people go, I’ve had this failure. It’s the first thought actually comes in that it’s actually a failure. I’d like to touch upon that idea of the confuse, that “Hey, niching is great.” Yeah, there’s obviously benefits to that. I’ve experienced benefits of that when done well at work when these challenges with it, can be a big challenge, but just given that notion of, I lose truckers. I’ve forgotten all these names, story brand. he says a lot, the confuse.

You confuse you lose at the end of the day from a marketing. You confuse you lose. It sounds like a pretty big learning around that and you experienced it.

Filipa Bellette (11:37.834)
Yes, so there was a lot of confusion and then it was a struggle to sell the value for the price of the program because people were like, is this for me? I’m not a parent or I am a parent, but I don’t want parenting coaching. I want like to get rid of my my fatigue and the gut issues that I’ve got and X, Y, Z. And so we sold one spot to that program and then 30 days later she asked to cancel, it was a six month program, so it was a commitment. I was just like kind of shattered by then and I’m like, whatever, take your money back. And it wasn’t because it wasn’t a good delivery of service. I think she just felt like she was going to be joining a program with a group of people and she was kind of the only one there and it felt awkward. So then, so then, so we pivoted again, we went back to, you know what, let’s put the whole program thing on the hold. Let’s just, get more clients in through the door and I went back to pay per consult but charged a bit more than what I was doing because by then we weren’t paying ourselves a wage. We were running at a loss. So, it was actually very financially stressful. In the meantime, we just started listening to what people were saying. And it’s like, a lot of people were being drawn to working with us because of my story. So, like the perfectionism, the overdoing, the struggling to relax, the symptoms that I had experienced. And we realized that it’s like, it’s burnout. People want to work with us when they’re feeling a lot of chronic stress, they’re doing all the things and now their body is screaming at them. And so, that’s where we created the ending body burnout method, which is what we run now.

The model of that was initially just a membership model. It was a little bit like, you know, it was pretty cheap actually, to tell you the truth, for the amount of like one-on-one support people got. And they also got group coaching, but it was, it gave us the time to experiment to see, does this messaging work this time? Are people signing up? Are people getting results? And are they working through the coursework material to get transformational results that purely just catching up one-on-one every month or two wasn’t giving them. And we proved this concept. That was great. And in the meantime, I was working on my book. I was reaching out to third party media to get on into publications like Forbes and Body and Soul. And when the book was released, I was on the Today Show and winning awards. And so that was helping to increase authority and trust in our brand. Then we were also just accumulating beautiful success stories from clients. They were so generous in sharing reviews or coming on our podcast and sharing our stories. So, we were able to say like, Hey, our method works.

Craig Minter (14:52.121)
Yeah, that’s super cool. And what you’ve shared in and what you’ve done really well in such a short space of time is highlighted the fact of how many experiments you’ve done in that process. I’m really curious around, cause I’m hearing there’s experiments in delivery model, high ticket, low ticket, dollar kind of experiments. There’s the branding, there’s the positioning, there’s the authority, there’s a bunch of different experiments that you’ve done. What’s your process that when you have this idea of, “Yeah, we’re going to try this.” How do you go about that thought process? Is it a go with it and run, or is it a process of let’s step this out and then I’ve got milestones, and if we’re going here, cause you’ve also used the word pivot a lot. What are some of the trigger points in those that process that I think would be super useful for the listeners to just to unpack your experience of doing that. We’ve all got different approaches, but because you seem to doing lots of these, I’d love to sort of hear if you can unpack that kind of idea of, “How do you work through an experiment per se? What’s a trigger for a pivot or a tweak and how do you approach that?

Filipa Bellette (16:11.399)
There’s so much in that. I’m like, “How do I answer that?” Because there was some different things I would say, one, was like getting help from experts. Especially, I think in the health industry, we become business owners because we are really good at what we do and how we help people. But we haven’t been taught how to run businesses, and marketing, and finances, and advertising, and like even just like people managing all that sort of stuff. So, that was really important, because and even back then when we first started working with people and like paying someone else to help us in our business, we didn’t have the money. So, it was a big risk, but it was like we can. I just had a belief that we could move faster if we’re working with someone that has created the results that we wanted.

Craig Minter (17:04.643)
Love that thought process of through the money way, but I obviously sitting on that other side of the fence and helping people. It’s like such a good investment. Again, if you get the right person that’s aligned and that sort of thing.

Filipa Bellette (17:04.991)
And kind of like, I’ll throw my money away and hopefully it works.

Well, also to that that language that I used was past Philly. That was before I did like deeper trauma work and like stuff around money, it, and that was what it always felt like. Whereas now, I love giving my money to people that can help me to get the result that I want.

Craig Minter (17:29.165)
Cause you are definitely seeing that you’ve gone on that process of like this is an investment. And again, cause you’ve seen the results. You’ve seen the results. Yeah. 100%.

Filipa Bellette (17:43.954)
So valuable. And there have been things that we have spent money on. Like we hired an ad agency, for example, tens of thousands of dollars, They, we didn’t get any sales. But that was still a learning that it’s like, you know what, I think we’re going to have to figure out this ad thing ourselves. Yes, we can still get help, but we care more about our business than someone else, even if we’re paying them for like that. And I’m not saying that we might not do that in the future. But if we were to outsource that in the future, I know what works for our people and like for our community and our followers.

Craig Minter (18:20.355)
You’d be more aware now. Again, you’ve tried it, but then you’ve gone full circle. How does this look? And then it comes back at the right time. Is it an option? But again, it’s how would we go about it next time?

Filipa Bellette (18:32.383)
I think the thing to like back in the day when I had money scarcity, the fact that I was paying money, I then took action. Like, I’m not going to pay all this money and not doing anything. And look, the perfectionism and overdoing a pattern was probably helpful in the beginning because I just did the thing. I’m like, you told me to do this strategy. I would do it. Now, it was very interesting though. Because over a period of probably 18 months, we were doing all the things, like all the strategies that worked for other people. Yet I still felt like we were hitting a ceiling from a financial point of view. We weren’t making money. And that’s when I realized that I was actually the one stopping that from happening because I wasn’t showing up in sales conversations in a really confident way. It was almost like, I feel like I’m like taking their money, you know, that language that I used before. Also showing up on social media and because there were parts of my own healing journey, the deeper metaphysical unconscious healing that I hadn’t personally done for myself. I was kind of like trying to sell a method that I’d only half embodied.

And so, I kind of put a pause on really pushing the program, like our business model for about six months. And I worked with an amazing life coach who helped me to get to root beliefs that were holding me back, rewiring them, reprogramming them. And then literally in three months of starting that process, we started making an extra $10,000 a month, which was massive for us back then.

And that was just like, “Whoa, you can have all the strategy in the world. But if you’ve got deeper beliefs that you’re not worth it, you can’t do it, you’re not capable, or like money is bad, you have to serve for free.” It’s going to hold you back every single time. And then vice versa as well, you could have like the best beliefs, but if you have no strategy, it’s unlikely that your business, especially in this in this age in this like, very tech driven way that we need to know things and we need to have nice branding that is aligned and our messaging is dialed in, you you need both of those. And so, when those both came together, that’s really when our business took off. And we were booked up with our membership. Then we changed it to a six month program that was and we doubled the price. And we made more sales.

Craig Minter (21:17.241)
You’re highlighting there of still that continual idea of going, learn about yourself, look after yourself, then experiment with where that can go, open the mind, expand into that space, and then rinse and repeat. Is that a fair sort of picture of what the cycle is at the present time for you?

Filipa Bellette (21:39.136)
Yeah, definitely.

Craig Minter (21:41.528)
So, another experiment I’d love to talk about because you keep on pivoting on little parts and you shared part of that journey. And even since we had a pre-chat, you know, a little while ago, we jumped on and it like you’ve got more experiments underway at the moment. What’s the latest experiment and how did you come to this one?

Filipa Bellette (22:03.155)
Yeah, so we’re holding a retreat, like an in person retreat. And this is evolution, probably not so much of our business, but of my own personal growth. So, previous decision making around business was pretty strategic. Like it’s like, okay, when we dial in this product ecosystem, and we have this funnel running, and we have this price and this many clients.

We’ll have like a thriving business. But last year I just had a period of a few months where I was kind of feeling a bit apathetic, like not depressed, but I just felt like kind of like Groundhog Day. I’m like, and then I’m like, but my life is great. Like it’s the best it’s ever been. Our business is profitable. We have beautiful clients that wanna do the work. Like my marriage is the best it’s ever been. My parenting is great. My health is great. Why am I feeling like this? And I just realized that I’d kind of, I just felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again. And there’s a, I’m a very creative person. I have been right as a little girl and that creative part of me was being neglected. And so, I went to a retreat, which is actually a beautiful full circle moment. It was a client that had worked with us for 18 months through our program. And then she did our backend membership to heal her own body burnout. And she works with business women. So, she wanted to hold this retreat as kind of like an overflow of her own healing journey to help other women in business, have some time out, like let’s just reset and connect to vision. I went to that because before she launched it, I just kept getting this feeling that I want more retreats in my life. I don’t know what that looks like, but I think that that would just be a really lovely thing to give myself. Got this email from Mel and I booked in the next day and during that retreat, I was just really listening to my heart and my heart had been desiring more play, more adventure, more nature, more in-person, real connection and as a follow on effect from that.

We have like literally the last three weeks we launched a retreat, but also like in my life we went on a four week caravan trip around Australia because my daughter woke up and had a dream that she went to Queensland and I’m like, you know what, let’s have a look and see if there’s any spots on Spirit of Tasmania because we’re in Tassie, there is, we’re gonna go, book the spot. And also my husband and I in a musical production that’s starting this week in May.

Craig Minter (24:51.439)
You 100 % epitomize the idea of experiments in the business. That’s why I love you sharing that the heart centered sort of process that you went through as well to go, Hey, where’s the fun? Where’s the play? Where’s the adventure? Where’s the nature? What’s going to work for you? Can you incorporate that into your business and cool, let’s put something on and make that happen.

Filipa Bellette (25:19.378)
I think it was the embodiment too of like my experience over three days of feeling really stuck on something for months that I was trying to work through and not really understanding what was going on to it’s just like, Whoa, if we can add that into our into our business is another way to help people in their body burnout. Like what a beautiful way to do it.

Filipa Bellette (25:44.148)
That gets great results and we get to like stay at the most amazing place on the cliff of an ocean in solitude and peace and quiet and be with amazing human beings.

Craig Minter (25:57.2)
That’s one of the best experiments I’ve heard. in his mind. And it’s got me thinking about different cool things that I could do myself, which is what this is all about for people to listen is to hear awesome ideas, trigger light bulbs, thoughts, and inspire people to take action, which is something that you’ve done constantly through that evolution of business. We also do like to talk about the transformations that you see, and you’ve already shared some of your own transformations there as well, but also whatever that word means for you, whether you continue down a path or any of the client results that you see, and you touched upon that with some people that you’ve worked in as well. What transformations have you seen in what you’ve done in your business and the ripple effect that you’ve had across your community there?

Filipa Bellette (26:45.544)
So many. I mean, we’ve got quite a few client stories on our podcast. Grace comes to mind she was struggling with vestibular migraines. So well, actually, that’s what the doctors end up labeling it. It still wasn’t quite classified, but basically she would like get spinning episode. She’d be in bed all day. She’d vomit and diarrhea when these episodes came on. And she was a massive overdoer, and she had been for like decades in her life, so during the process and it wasn’t it wasn’t easy for her, like there was a lot of she went into her healing in the same way that she was approaching everything in her life like  let’s do it! So, it was a beautiful learning for her and I would say 95% of the healing came at a deeper metaphysical level where we rewired unconscious core beliefs about self and the way that her nervous system was running. And when her body felt calm and safe and there was trust within, around her body and herself, the symptoms like literally disappeared, gone and have been gone since then, like then it’s probably been about two years.

Another lady, Linda, came in with so many autoimmune conditions. One of the worst one was Rheumatoid Arthritis, she couldn’t even move her hands. She struggled to pick up a pen and write. Within three and a half months, all of her symptoms disappeared. The only thing that was kind of left that we continued working on for a bit longer was just a bit of restriction in her mobility of her hips. But that was just like mind blowing for me to see. I knew that our method heals and like it reverses these conditions, but it did it in three and a half months…

Craig Minter (28:38.499)
Yeah, the time that’s as as with anything like transformations are amazing and what you’ve shared there like over a over extended period of time that would be amazing. But then to see results so quickly is just brilliant. And again, that’s why we want to share these stories with work that people are doing and how they’ve created whether it’s the model or the business approach to spread that word even wider because we want transformations happening like that for more people. We want more awesome health and wellness business owners, allied health professionals, know, creating businesses that have this sort of impact for the communities and beyond.

We just need more of that happening in the current world that we’re living in and with so many people that are burnout and overdoing things and wanting to be perfectionist. It’s just something that’s massively needed. I really, really appreciate your shares today and we have to get your contact details. Where’s the best place for people to find you so they can connect and you know say whether what you do could be helpful for them or even just to have the knowledge in their world.

Filipa Bellette (29:56.498)
Yeah, awesome. Probably best place to find all the things is on our website, www.chrisandfilly.fm, I’m going to give you a link for a free copy of my Ending Body Burnout book. If any of your listeners are curious around like learning a bit more.

And on our website too, we have some free resources. So, people love our Ending Body Burnout Assessment Scorecard, which looks at the rate of your burnout based on your symptoms. And it also looks at the three main root cause contributors. The mind, the body, and the environment.

Craig Minter (30:37.367)
Yeah, that’d be super cool. And yes, we will definitely include those. in the show notes here. That’s a very generous offer. And I highly recommend our listeners jumping in and getting that and connecting with Chris and Filly with everything that they’re doing there. Once again, really appreciate your shares today. And like I said, you’ve totally epitomized the idea of experiments and building sustainable, impactful business. Thank you once again, Filipa.

Filipa Bellette (31:05.79)
Thank you.

Craig Minter (31:07.587)
That’s a wrap here from the Healthy Business Lab podcast for this amazing episode. Like, subscribe, do all those cool things so that you can hear more of these great stories and keep on learning and growing and evolving.