Nicole: Hi, and welcome back to the Lead Better Podcast. I'm your host, Nicole Harlow. And my guest today cut a 60-hour work week in half and then in half again. She's taken a full week off every single month since 2018. When I asked her how she pulled that off, the answer was a lot simpler than I and probably you expected. Michelle Rogers is the founder of the Wellthy Woman. She trained at Bastyr, spent four years as a primary care provider, and two more in a cash-based private practice in Portland, and then walked away from the brick and mortar model entirely to build something online. She runs her business from Mexico now, so jealous. And she spends her days helping other health practitioners make that same shift. We got into her flex week and how she actually protects it, the four-box system she uses to decide what to hand off first, and then we went deep on AI. Michelle has built a whole team of agents, a two-way assistant that reports in every morning, and a chatbot trained on her own material that answers her students the way she would. Somewhere in the middle, we landed on the same thing, which had nothing to do with tools at all. It actually surprised me that we went there, but it's so just refreshing to see other business owners having like a similar experience with AI that I am super excited for you guys to listen to this conversation. It was definitely eye-opening to me in a few different ways. And I am like heavy in building with AI and building operations. So some of the things that Michelle said gave me a laundry list that I'm excited to start checking those things off the list. So without further ado, let's introduce Michelle. I've got Michelle here with me. I'm so excited to have this conversation today. Thanks for joining. Of course. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. So I don't want to bury the lead. So one thing that I do when I'm prepping for these podcast episodes is I love to go into the guest's social media. So I've been like scouring your social media, you have posts, and that's where I find my questions I want to ask. So I'm like, I'm looking at like hooks and being like, whoa, that's something that caught my attention. And something that caught my attention from your post that I was like, we have to talk about that. You said I cut my 60-hour work week in half and then in half again. You take one week off a month, and I friggin love that about you already. Like I am such a like hedonist, I'm like, I'm like a quintessential Taurus. So I'm like, let's create systems so we don't have to work harder, so we can take time off, enjoy our life. So what I want to dig in there is like I want to know kind of behind the scenes, like what are some systems that support you? Like, how did you get there? You know, like how did you get there? Because everybody here listening, busy practitioners, they're also wearing their CEO hat. Like that seems wildly like unaccessible. Yeah, like what the actual — like, dude, how do you take a week off a month? Like, what is happening? Yeah, like that is awesome. And I want to know, like, what are some of the steps that got you there?
Michelle: Well, it's actually kind of funny. I will tell you exactly how easy it was. Well, I started that, I guess a ritual. I started that ritual back when I was still practicing and seeing my own clients running my own online health practice. And I just knew that I have a tendency myself to be an overworker, a workaholic. I freaking love what I do. I go all in. But then I also know that I have this tendency to, as most of us do, to burn out. And it's not burnout of like, I hate my job, like that kind of burnout. It's just like I'm freaking exhausted and I need to have some kind of separation from the work that I'm doing and the passion that I have to be with myself so that I can show up even better for my clients, for my family, for my community or whatever. And so when I was in the online space, I just played around with the idea of like, what would it be like? Right. And this is kind of how I approach my business now is like if I could wave a magic wand, what would I want it to look like? And how can we get there? So at that point in time, and granted, this was many years ago, I've been doing this for probably over — I took my practice online in 2017. So I probably started it 2018, 2019. No, 2018. I definitely started in 2018. So I've been taking a week off every month since 2018. And initially, it was just as easy as blocking off my calendar and communicating with my clients. So I worked with high-end, high-performing entrepreneurs who are wanting to optimize their health. And so I think that was an environment where I had permission to do that kind of thing. Like they understood. They're like, Oh, I'm so glad you're taking this time off. But they want that for themselves too. I thought it was like — the response I was expecting. But it was really just like, hey guys, like, you know, I'm not gonna be available the last week of the month. I'll check in with you before, after, whatever. But that week is like, it's my sacred week. And that just took — it was literally that simple of creating that boundary and setting that standard and communicating. And that's all it took. And I've had several practitioners now who've worked with me who've now done the same thing where they do that now too. And it's crazy how simple it is. And now that I'm running a bigger business, a different type of business where I'm training, mentoring, coaching a bunch of other practitioners, running all kinds of systems and processes in my business. I have a full-time VA. And then, of course, on top of that, we're using AI like crazy. So there's several different systems that are supporting me during that time. And for example, I'm going out next week is my — I call it my flex week. So that's my week off. And I have told my assistant, I'm like, I'm going dark. Like, whatever you need from me, like let me know now, like whatever we're doing. Let's make sure we've got things in place. So, what do I need to schedule, record, whatever? And so, yeah, next week is my flex week. I am planning on taking the entire week off. I'm traveling and I know that she's gonna have it under control and that all of our systems are gonna have things under control. And I have zero stress about it.