Becoming Virtuosa with Dr. Susan Crockett | How to Keep Your Goals on Track

Episode #109:

How to Keep Your Goals on Track

Have you ever felt like you’re laying down new track in your life or business? Like you’ve gone through a major transformation and now you’re working to build up the infrastructure and systems to support your new reality?

In this episode, I share my own journey of selling my house, building a new office for my medical practice, hiring new doctors, and opening a new outpatient surgery center. It’s been a whirlwind of activity with multiple new revenue streams and “engines” coming online all at once.

I discuss the challenges of balancing the increased finances coming in with the need to invest in people and systems to reach the next level. I also share the importance of sometimes just sitting down to do the basic, foundational work – or “laying down new track” – so that everything else can flow smoothly. Tune in for an inspiring discussion on navigating growth and transformation in your life and business.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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How selling a house and moving on can be a powerful metaphor for transformation in life and business.

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Why having multiple streams of revenue creates more stability and opportunity for growth.

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The challenges of managing increased capacity and infrastructure needs during a growth phase.

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How a train and railroad track can serve as a helpful metaphor for building a business with multiple moving parts.

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The importance of investing time in foundational tasks like building a website or reviewing finances.

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Why becoming the best version of yourself has a positive ripple effect on the world around you.

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How to navigate the uncomfortable “pinch” phase of transformation by keeping the vision of the other side in mind.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Come find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show and subscribe today.

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Virtuosa Vitamins

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Virtuosa Surgery

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Intuitive Surgical

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Transforming Care Together: Welcoming in the New with Dr. Sonia Koshy

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Passive Income: Road to Financial Freedom with Keke Johnson

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Let Go and Break Free: How to Use the Powerful Phrase “I Don’t Live There Anymore”

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The Polar Express – movie

TRANSCRIPT

If you are finding that you're like spinning your wheels and having a hard time just sitting down and doing the basic work that you need, I want you to think of it like laying the track, like piecing it together, finding the pieces and actually getting them to snap together like they should. There you go.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

All right, y'all, welcome back to the Dr. Crockett show. I am your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. I am a board-certified OBGYN in San Antonio, Texas, and I practice a specific type of gynecology called Minimally Invasive GYN Surgery, which for those of you who have never heard of it, we can substitute the little initials MIGS, or we call ourselves MIGS.

What I practice is mainly robotic surgery and my whole purpose of my practice called Virtuosa GYN is to make surgery easier for women. Now we're expanding upon that to teach other surgeons how to make more surgery easier for women. And I'm gonna give you a little update today. We're changing our format a little bit. The title of today's show is called Laying Down New Track. Get it? You like my new train? Girls can like trains too.

In fact, I have a little story to tell you, a whole story. We're gonna get on with that in just a minute, but I got my little cards. We're gonna talk about what's been going on in my life and the world around me. And you can comment below and tell me a little bit about your life too.

I don't know about y'all, but I've had a really fun October. I'm glad we're getting through that. So here's what's coming up. We've got an election coming up next week in the United States. For those of you who are not in the United States, this is kind of a big deal. We are not going to talk politics today. Not part of the show.

We have gotten through Halloween and we're headed on to Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'm already thinking about planning the meal for me and my kids. We are a single parent family. For those of you that are new to our show, the father of my children passed away about seven years ago from a heart attack. And that's part of my inspiration for doing the show where we go where the scalpel doesn't reach. We are going and teaching about health and wellness and healthy lifestyle.

And it's the conversations that I have with my patients in the office all the time. We're just thrilled to be able to bring this to a larger audience on our channel. And thank you for liking and subscribing and supporting the channel. If you have other wellness topics that you'd like me to explore on here, I can do that. But right now I'm really excited about fall foods. We just did a really nice lunch downstairs. We do cooking with a whole food, plant-based diet, mostly before the show. And it gives us a chance to kind of have a community bonding and conversation and to plan the show. And then we come up here and do the show. So we had a little pumpkin potato roasted veggies with a homemade tomato sauce on top of it. And it was just so good.

So what's been going on in my life? I have had a really difficult time getting into the studio lately because I have so much going on in my business life. There's so much coming up all together at the same time. So I wanted to give you a quick overview. I'm going to go back to the end of August when I sold my house and there was an episode that we did September 17th. It's the "Let Go and Break Free, How to Use the Powerful Phrase, 'I Don't Live There Anymore.'" You can go back to that episode. That was the end of our series that we were doing on the seven seeds of the soul. That's actually the epilogue to the book. And we talked in that episode about a Bo Burnham song called "The Chicken" and about transformation and going from being in one part of your life to another.

I've gone through this huge transformation in my business and personal life where I've sold my house and I've built a new office for my business and our patients and that office opened mid-summer. I've hired new doctors and we've opened a new outpatient surgery center. It's called a HOPD, Hospital Outpatient Department at Methodist Northeast in San Antonio. And there are all of these engines that we talk about, which are in business, they are the product lines. They're the launches that you're doing. They're the revenue stream puller. Puller? I don't know how to explain this.

So in that episode, I talked a little bit about the metaphor of selling a house and closing the door and not going back there anymore and moving on to the new life, getting to the other side of the road. The chicken was crossing the road to get to her new life that she was dreaming of. And so now I'm at this place six weeks, two months, um, two months down the road of having closed out that life and worked on building everything that I had in my pro forma, which is like a business plan where you're like setting out predictions for how all of these revenue streams should flow.

And I talked in that episode about the last day I was in my house, the movers had cleaned out almost everything. And there's just trash laying around, you know, little tape and boxes and whatnot. And there was a photo left, it was the last photo left in the house in the bottom of one of my closets, cabinets in the study. And it was a really old photo from Christmas in the 1980s. And it had track, it had a picture of our Christmas tree with the electric train track that was my dad's. It was a Lionel train track that we used to put up every year.

And I took that as a confirmation of a God wink is what we call them when you have those kind of synchronicities in your life. Like of all the thousands of pictures that were in that cabinet, this was the one that ended up there. And it's not like I had a bunch of pictures of train tracks, but I took it as a sign that I was on the right track with my businesses. And I was making that big leap of faith to sell my house, to get the capital, to build all of these revenue streams that we're building.

So I have this really cool little train set. It's called an N track. So it's a really tiny little miniature track. And I have, I have two engines to show you today. And aren't they cute? Like I know not to put the wheels down on anything other than track. So I talked to that story about how now I've got all my engines and I'm working on putting all the wheels on the tracks and getting them, you know, ready and how detailed it is to try to get these little wheels on the tracks.

I have a second engine here, so I'm actually working with my staff. We're talking about the revenue streams we're building. And there's actually nine or 10 of them all going on the track at the same time. And we've been working on them all for a very long time. They're just kind of all coordinating and coming up at the same time. So this train metaphor has become something in the office where, you know, we're talking about the engines in the office would be the providers that are coming up online.

So I've hired, in addition to myself and my two other nurse practitioners, I've hired two new doctors. Dr. Koshi was on the show a couple weeks ago. She's super awesome. Dr. Alsup's next week. And so now we have five provider engines, and we also have an ultrasound engine. If you go back even further in our episode, you'll see one last year from Kiki Johnson where we talked about six streams of revenue. And she and I talked a lot with her husband about how when you go to build stability in your family or in your businesses, that it helps to have several streams of revenue.

So if one goes down, you have something else to count on. So a lot of people talk about doing investments or properties or savings or a job that pays you hourly or evergreen intellectual properties. Those are like some of the very basic revenue streams that you can think about.

In the office, we've been having a really, really good time talking about the trains. And then what I've been dealing with now, I thought it was worth doing a show because I've gone through all of the stress of crossing the road and facing the oncoming traffic and getting to the other side. I've gone through the pinch of the hourglass and we're now finally on the other side where the revenue streams are starting to work. We're starting to see what we put in place start to yield fruit. We've planted all these seeds. Now it's starting to yield fruit.

Sometimes in my office, my office manager, Melissa, she's so funny. She's like, "Dr. Crockett, you're putting the caboose before the engine." And I would just laugh because sometimes it feels like that scene in the Polar Express where they like hit the ice coming downhill and the train is going under the lake, which makes no sense at all. The tracks are going under the lake, but the train like starts to swerve and the caboose comes way out in front of the engine and then they're like swerving back and forth. So that's a little bit what it's felt like as we are all as a team working to deal with the increased capacity that we've created in all of the work that we've been doing.

And so for me personally, it's been a struggle to balance the incremental increase in the finances coming in with where we need to spend that money to increase our infrastructure, to hire more people or more systems to be able to get up to the final level that we want to be in our practice. So we've gone from being this very small private practice now to a more medium size, more corporate type structure, and we're adding all these other revenue streams around it.

So we have this YouTube channel for one, the wellness channel, which is super fun. I've really enjoyed it. We're going to keep going with this. And we've added a new surgery teaching channel called Virtuosa Surgery. I've stepped up into teaching on the national faculty level for Intuitive Surgical. I've gone and done my first two courses where I've led them. And that's been super exciting. And we've opened the case observation deck at the new outpatient surgery department, which is the most beautiful OR in the whole United States. And I'm so grateful for everyone who's supported us in that endeavor, because now we're able to share, we're stepping into being able to share on a broader level and teach what we do so that reaches more people, more people can have that benefit.

So we've got all of these streams coming up. We've got the vitamin shop, Virtuosa Vitamins, which we've been working with what that track looks like. We've had a couple little cars on that train that they haven't been working. They've kind of been laying down like this on the side of the track. So we've been working to get those wheels on the track. That's our distribution center. So we distribute the vitamins through our clinic, which is like the train station and the cute little train station.

Oh, look, there's even people. These are the employees and all the people around us that are helping us build our patients. You guys here who are part of our audience, this represents the brick and mortar, which is the office itself in the outpatient surgery center. But then we have all of this other growth that's happening that's not brick and mortar, like the show and the vitamin shop and the new teaching channel. So it just keeps growing with momentum.

So what happens when you get across the road and you've gotten through the really hard part, you've shut the door behind your old life, and now you're trying to madly keep up with where you're going in the new life? One thing I realized, actually, I woke up in the middle of the night this last night. I do that a lot. I wake up and I'll have an inspiration that I will have just had like in the middle of a dream and I'll wake up and I'll be like, that's what I need to, that's what I need to talk about.

So what I realized this morning is another extension of this metaphor, which is I need to lay more track. I need to lay down new track, like more new tracks. So I have these engines ready to go and I don't have my website finished to where I need to have it done. I don't have my webinar done to be able to explain to people, I am still working on some of that detail. And so it's kind of like having, you know, these engines ready to go and some of the cars behind them and the caboose and the people all around. But really I need to lay down the foundation and pay a little bit more attention to that.

So I found this cute little train set at the toy store today, and I thought I'm going to go lay down some more track. And so for me, what that means is I need to do the basic work of building the new website and working with my accountant to make my financial decision-making and books and everything look like they should at a higher level of functioning. And I've hired a new operations person that I've talked about, a COO, Erin, and Lacey and I are talking about what she's gonna be doing to help us keep all the trains on the tracks and moving where they're supposed to be so that we can do the most benefit for the world around us.

And, you know, that's really basic to our philosophy here at the Dr. Crockett Show, the word virtuosa, which is our branding for the medical practice, means to be the best feminine version of yourself. And we believe that that's important because when we are becoming the best versions of ourselves, then we improve and interact with the world around us. And that's how change happens in the world. That's our idea about how we influence the world. It's a really important lesson here.

If you are finding that you're like spinning your wheels and having a hard time just sitting down and doing the basic work that you need, I want you to think of it like laying the track, like piecing it together, finding the pieces and actually getting them to snap together like they should. There you go. Sometimes your train goes in different directions. It's a little direction box and I don't even have it hooked up to the juice yet. So electricity is coming and there's a metaphor in that somewhere for the business too, I'm sure.

So I wanted to just present that to you today. Think about how you're going to be when you get through the pinch of the hard part of getting to the other side of wherever you're wanting to transform. Maybe you're, you know, wanting to do a weight loss journey or transform in your business or uplevel your life. Whenever we go through that transformational process where we have an idea of what else is possible, and then we set our goals to move there, and we start laying out resource to our capital, whether that's emotional or financial or physical capital, there is that pinch where you're like, it's really not fun right here, but I can see the other side and you get through that. And then you get to where your new reality is your new being.

Well, it takes a little while for you to get your feet underneath you to get the tracks laid down on the road. Sometimes just setting aside a day where you just journal and you take care of yourself or you build the website or do whatever the boring thing is that you don't want to do, do the finances, do the planning. Sometimes that's the most important thing and most loving thing that you can do so that your engines and your trains will flow the way they're supposed to.

So I hope you enjoyed what I had to share with you today. I hope you have a wonderful week and I will see you next week on the Dr. Crockett show. Thank you so much. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

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