Nell Mead - "Overcame MASSIVE Obstacle, Increased Income 85%, And Now Has Time To Focus On Goals!"

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Nell Mead
BUSINESS NAME: Victory Health and Performance
LOCATION: London
BUSINESS MODEL: Physiotherapy, rehabilitation, private personal training, fitness and yoga classes
NPE STATUS: PRO MASTERMIND™ Program

Nell was an army physiologist for 10 years but discovered her true purpose after rupturing her rotator cup playing tennis.

When she left officer training in the army, she went to a facility called Headley Court where seriously injured soldiers went for rehabilitation.

After spending two years there, she was posted to a “sandy place” where she had to deal with more gun shot wounds and amputations. Once she returned, Nell ruptured her right rotator cup when she was playing tennis and had to return to Headley Court. But this time, she was a patient.

A lot of people had been getting medically discharged in the forces, which meant they only received a very small pension and had effectively failed rehab.

“I wasn’t totally convinced that everyone failed rehab. I thought, some of the time, rehab had failed them. And that’s when I started to realise that maybe I could play a bigger role in this, and I started to find my purpose.”

In 2007, Nell’s mother got cancer, and Nell and her sister nursed their mother 24/7 for the last two weeks until she passed away. Three years later, Nell left the army with a massive vision to set up her own version of Headley Court.

With money that her mother left her, she started creating a plan to open a business that would help bring back soldiers who had “failed” rehab and get them back to their everyday life.

Nell had a business plan and started talking to an accountant who specialised in start-ups.

“He told me I was insane. He said I had no market, no clients, no way of getting clients, no real business plan, and no social proof. He basically said that if I did what I was planning to do, I would blow all my mom’s money in just two months.”

Nell took his advice and decided to start small and grow organically. She started her business, Victory Health and Performance, and conducted split testing for her location. Two days a week, she rented a room by the hour on Harley Street and she did the same thing with a room on Liverpool Street. After six months, she realised Liverpool Street was better for her business and moved there full time.

But then she started to run into problems. As her business continued to grow, she wanted to hire high quality staff but had no idea where to get them, how to train them, or how much to pay them.

Nell also struggled with cash flow. She had been renting a room for £25 an hour, but once she moved to Liverpool Street full time, she started paying £2.5k per month in rent. The first month there, the business only made £2.5k, which was painful, but she survived.

By August 2014, the business was averaging £14k per month, and she grew her team to two additional therapists and a remote admin. But then the rug got pulled out from underneath her.

Nell had been renting rooms from a personal training center, and their lease ran out and they didn’t let her know. Plus, she later discovered that she had been paying the rent for the whole building – not just her few rooms – and decided that she would find a new place on her own.

In December 2014, she moved to Sun Street and found a studio with four treatment rooms that was an empty shell. The fit out cost £120k so her bank account dropped to -£20k and now she had a massive rent bill to pay.

Nell’s rent in her old location was £30k per year, which included rent, rate, and utilities. Her new location cost £74k in rent and service charge only. She quickly realised she had to make changes in her business to pay for the new clinic.

“I needed a completely new business model because in physiotherapy, the aim is to get rid of clients as quickly as possible. We needed cash and more staff because we have four rooms and a studio and only three staff members. That’s where NPE came in.”

Nell went to a FAST FORWARD™ event and joined the ACCELERATOR™ programme in December 2014. She had a back-to-back best month ever (#BME) in February and March 2015 and started to feel like things were on the right track.

But then tragedy struck on 10 May. Nell walked in to her studio and discovered that more than 20,000 litres of water had come through the ceiling and damaged the electrical cupboard, walls, and floorboards because a machine from the Starbucks above their studio had broken.

Nell’s insurance didn’t cover ceilings, walls, or floor so she had £60k in damages and a £15k rent bill due. But she had emptied her bank account for the remodel and was completely stuck.

Instead of giving up, she looked at her success principles, got her crap together, and gathered her team for operation “pay the rent.”

With the help of NPE, she created a referral campaign for people to get £100 off their first session, and 55 people took advantage of the offer. Twenty of those people bought additional packages for a total of £10,606.

Since they were still short to pay the £15k in rent, they launched a cash flow campaign, which offered people three months of services at the six-month rate, and six months of services at the 12-month rate, which generated £4,500 and allowed them to pay the rent on time.

But they still had £60k in damages and asked NPE for help.

“I reached out on the Facebook group and everybody was absolutely amazing and came up with so many ideas. Sean came up with a scary idea to set up a crowd funding campaign, which I didn’t put live. I also wrote a press release about how Starbucks broke my business and didn’t help me. I emailed it to the CEO of Starbucks asking for help. I said that if he did not respond by Thursday that the crowd funding campaign would go live.”

On Thursday, the CEO agreed to fund the refit, and over the next three weeks, Starbucks had contractors working on her studio over nights and weekends.

Now Nell’s studio is fully open and back on track. Over the last six months, her income has increased by 85%, she had a #BME in July 2015 at £33,560 and she averages £26k per month.

Since working with NPE, Nell has started offering new services such as personal training, yoga, and fitness classes. Her employees are now paid salary, they all know how to use AUTO-CLOSER®, and they just had a team meeting to develop their core values.

With the right team and systems in place, Nell is able to cut back on clinical hours and work more ON the business so she can make plans to achieve the big goals she has set.

“I’m starting Facebook ads, aiming for £40k by the end of the year, and looking for a new personal trainer, but the big goal is to open Victory Residential by 2020 to help people who have failed rehab with reserved places for ex-military personnel.”

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