Hello, my friends. Today I am interviewing the CEO of Keep Moving Health. This is Carey Coco. She is an APRN out of Winter Haven, Florida, and she just started a med spa, a hormone replacement therapy studio. She does STEM cells, PRP, all of the good stuff.

She has such an interesting backstory. She came to me in October, and she was working for another company as an employee, but the company was kind of being bought out. It was having a lot of transitions, and she was trying to decide whether or not she wanted to start her own business. She came into The Circle in October of 2023. On October 24th of 2023, she posted that she made her very first dollar. You guys, it has been straight uphill ever since.

She exceeded her December goal, her January goal, her February goal. She had her biggest month in March, April. It is just going up, up, up, up. She had a lot of big transitions during this time. I mean, not only leaving her job and her career, but starting a business and then immediately having to move her company into a new studio. She’s been through a lot in the last like seven to eight months. So I’m interviewing her today. I hope you guys enjoy this episode. It is number 160. I am your host, Becca Pike, and it is time for your weekly dose of Hell Yes Coaching. Let’s go.

Hey, guys. I’m Becca Pike and welcome to The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast, the number one show for entrepreneurs looking to create their first six-figure year. If you’ve got the drive and you know how to hustle but you’re not sure where to channel your energy, we’ve got the answers. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Becca: Hi, Carey Coco.

Carey: Hello. How are you? 

Becca: I’m good. I’m so glad to have you on today. Can you take a second and just tell my audience who you are and what you do? 

Carey: My name is Carey Coco. I’m a nurse practitioner who has left the traditional medicine setting, and I’ve opened my own clinic. It’s been a wild journey and a very short amount of time, but it’s going well. Becca has been my biggest cheerleader, I think so.

Becca: Well, thank you. That’s why I want to have you on today because you have made some really serious moves very quickly. I mean, you came into my world in October of 2023, so not too many months ago. In that time, you have left a secure job, started your own business. You moved your business, you’re gaining clientele, you’re beginning to build a staff. Like this is a whole situation that has happened in nine months. I want to like pick your brain.

Can you tell us a little bit about just like who you were when all of this was going on? What were your beliefs? What was going through your head? Why did you leave your job? Just give us a little insight into who you were in October. 

Carey: So in October I was working for a multi-specialty clinic. I had been there for six years, and that had been my first nurse practitioner job. I had gone back to school at age 38 to start a new career. I had never left that initial job. Part of it’s because I was comfortable. 

So long story short, that clinic was being purchased by a large hospital. Because of that purchase and that, you know, everything was changing. So my collaborating physician was moving. Everything was unstable. So I started looking around at what my next move should be in my career. I was faced with either starting over in a new specialty and a new clinic or going out on my own and trying something completely new. I’m so glad I did.

I started with building on the skills I already have, which is joint injections, orthopedic musculoskeletal type injections with PRP or steroids or different modalities. I just kind of went from there. So it’s been really a lot of fun. I’m glad I did it.

Becca: Yeah. I feel like the universe gave you this like opening. It was like, okay, here it is. This is your opportunity. Everything’s changing. Your company’s being bought out. Everything’s moving in a different direction. Are you going to stay, or are you going to do the thing that you wanted to do? It was like the perfect timing.

If I remember right, when we were talking back then, you had a lot of the same feelings that I had in the massage world before I started my massage company, which is the massive discrepancy and seeing what they were getting paid compared to what I was getting paid. It was one of the reasons that I wanted to lean into being one of the highest paying positions in the massage therapy world. 

Because there was a time that I was getting paid $17 an hour, but the people were paying $110 an hour and feeling kind of helpless. Like, is this all? Is this all I get? Because I’m not the chiropractor, I don’t get to profit and realizing that starting my own business and keeping all the profits was completely a no brainer. You had a little bit of that in your world too, right? 

Carey: Yeah, I did. part of it had to do with COVID and the changes that happened there. But after being in the same role for six years, I had taken that role at a lesser pay because it allowed me to do some of the things I wanted to do, which was the joint injections and the Botox and things like that. 

But I had never gotten a raise in six years. I had actually asked for a raise. They told me well, we can give you a raise, but it’ll come out of your bonus. I’m like oh, well, my bonus isn’t that much. So. Then towards the end, I did ask for my numbers. What revenue had I brought the practice? It was in the millions of dollars. It was a lot of money. A lot of that goes into overhead, and it’s not all profit. However, at least a cost of living raise.

Then the other thing is that as a registered nurse, you can make a lot of money now. It’s not like it was six, seven years ago, the revenue, you can make significant amount of money. So using my advanced degree, I was really not getting compensated competitively. 

Becca: Yeah. Well, let me tell you something. It was really fun watching you go through those fall and winter months. Because from my perspective, you came in, in October. The first class that I think you took was the October webinar course. Then we had a Black Friday course in November. I remember your wheels were really turning, and you were asking lots of questions. 

Then you had posted, I don’t know if you remember this, but on October 24th, you made your first dollar. You made your very first dollar in your business on October 24th. Then from there, it was like you were dropping in comments in December. Like my December goal hit. January. My January goal is hit. My February goal exceeded. March goal exceeded. Like it’s just started rolling. Was it just immediate evidence that you made the right decision? 

Carey: It took a little convincing, but it really made me understand that need on the patient side. A lot of the population that sees their traditional practitioner, they’re not getting the things that they need. They’re not getting the care that they want or the care that they need. Sometimes it’s because of insurance constraints. Insurance won’t cover this test or this medication or this modality.

So as a cash-based provider, I can serve those needs that get dropped by primary care. So really just seeing my clients come in. Clients that I had already had established relationships with for five, six years in the pain management world who were also business owners, those are the ones that really stepped up. They were excited for me. 

One gentleman stood up and shook my hand when he found out what I was doing. He was so excited for me. So just to see the feedback from the business world as my established patients and clients, they were so supportive of me. So that really clued me into the fact that I do have something I can offer outside of traditional healthcare. They have continued to support me and continued to show up and support me financially and with like the atta boy or maybe you should consider this. They have really good insight to the business world. 

Becca: Yeah. I’m so glad that you have that kind of support and that you had that kind of support. Not everybody is that lucky. A lot of people are just straight uphill battle. Everyone that’s around them is telling them it’s a bad idea, but they don’t know anything about entrepreneurship. So they’re scared of it. Family members are scared of it.

It’s so priceless to have that type of support. It’s also really helpful when it comes to your identity. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that because watching who you are and how you’ve changed has been really dramatic. I don’t say that lightly. Like you were nervous, definitely, to start your business, but there was also an identity of like you were really afraid to talk about money. 

You were afraid to charge anything. Like you were just, you were really, you were nervous to talk about money. You were a little nervous to charge what you wanted to charge. You had a hard time calling yourself a CEO, a boss, having the boundaries that you wanted to have. 

Now in a few short months, like I’ve watched you turn into this genuinely mature CEO. Like when you come to the calls, it’s, this is what I’m doing. This is how it’s going. This is the way that I see it. What do you think? Instead of I’m scared to even consider this, and I don’t know how to go about it. 

So can you just tell us a little bit about your journey with your mindset? I know this is a really broad question, but I don’t really know how to wrap around the change that I’ve seen. It’s just been so big. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

Carey: I think some of that that you’re seeing is as a professional nurse practitioner with competency in my role six months ago, I was very confident provider. I would come in to the room, and I could read your imaging. I could assess your symptoms. I could address your needs, and I could make an accurate diagnosis with a treatment plan. A lot of times patients would kind of push back. Like oh, maybe I don’t want to see the nurse practitioner. But once they give me 10, 15 minutes, like they’re on board. 

My accuracy was very good. So I know I’m capable of doing a thing very well. However, this thing is a business thing. It means feeding my family, paying my mortgage, sustaining our living. It’s also an identity thing. I had to see myself as a different person. The culture of nursing tends to be one where we don’t worry about compensation because we’re they kind of instill in us that we’re supposed to be giving and nurturing and caring. We are. We are giving, nurturing and caring.

But part of that culture is that we’re also following orders, following direction, and we’re not worried about being compensated. So, I had to change a lot of those ideas to reflect a business mindset that making a profit, it’s not wrong. It’s actually very good for me and my family and my clients. So if I do well then I can grow my business and serve more people. I can serve better. I can serve more people in a broader scope and serve my family and my community in that way. 

So I had to kind of change a lot of that thinking. That took some doing. You were definitely helpful in that because the people in my ear, the other nurses, the other physicians. My sister’s a physician tends to be on the negative side. Like, oh, well my med spot didn’t work. So good luck with yours. Not that they’re trying to discourage me, but their experience hasn’t been very good. So. 

Becca: Yeah. People only tell you advice based on their own experience. No one that’s been successful is ever going to tell you not to do it because they were successful. They’re like hell yeah, you should do it. It’s amazing. Like all the money, all the time freedom. The people that failed are the ones that are like, don’t do it. Or the people that are too afraid to try are like, don’t do it. Because they’re just mirroring their own experience in the world with it. 

That’s something that I’m constantly trying to get across to my students is like your brother who has never had a business or had a failed business is going to be the number one person that’s trying to detour you from it because that’s his experience. He’s trying to protect you. But had his business been successful with a few tweaks, he wouldn’t be giving the same advice. 

I love what you said about nurse practitioners and really just the whole medical world in general. I’ve kind of fallen into this random place where I’m working with a lot of medical people, and I noticed that they tend to be some of the most successful people in my world. I know for sure that it’s a mindset thing. 

I see my nurse practitioners with this insane work ethic that I’ve never seen before in almost any industry. You brought something to light too, which is this nurturing thing. You can teach people how to work hard, but you can’t teach people how to really care about their quality. That just kind of comes already hardwired in to my medical students. 

Carey: Yeah. I mean taking care of patients, I started out in trauma care and trauma ICU and trauma step down. These patients completely depended on the people around them for every basic need. So if you’re having a bad day well, it doesn’t matter. You get up and go anyway because you have to take care of this person’s bodily functions. So you can’t just not feel like it. That doesn’t really matter if you feel like doing X, Y, Z. It’s your obligation. 

So that continues through the rest of my career because you want the best for your patients. When I hear things patients were told or things that happened, I really feel for them. So, I do a lot of time. I spend a lot of time with my clients one-on-one. I usually give them like a full hour in the beginning and really go through what’s going on in their life. Are they married? Are they newly divorced? Do they have a toddler? Do they have four teenagers? These things impact your health. They impact your diet, how you feel, how you feel about yourself, what’s your stage in life. 

That’s what I think, you’re right. This window opened at the perfect time because I have two teenagers who really don’t need me to be hovering over them anymore. They’re living their life the best thing they can. Mommy isn’t going to be there to like check their homework like she used to. My husband too, he was surprisingly just super supportive. Never questioned, never worried about the money, or if we, how long is it going to take to be profitable? He never asked me anything, any of those questions.

Becca: Oh my, God bless the husbands out there. 

Carey: Just completely blindly supported me. I still kind of chuckle. It’s like well, he has no idea what the books look like. I sometimes wonder if he’s just ignorance is bliss or what, but it’s kind of.

Becca: Have you given him insight into the growth that is happening? 

Carey: I’m kind of in a place where when I have a customer come in, a new customer come in, I don’t feel compelled to tell everybody like oh, I got a new one. Or I’ll sell like a big package. I’m kind of just the point where I don’t have to go home and tell oh, I’ve got this new, just closed on a big package. So that, to me, means like okay, I’m adjusting to the temperature here which means I’m getting used to having the income. I will share with him some of it, but he’s got no clue.

Becca: He will when you start bringing home a hundred thousand dollar months. He’s going to be like wait, what? Every med spa that I’ve worked with for longer than probably a year, I would say a year, year and a half, usually in an intimate setting too. I can’t say that it’s all from The Circle, usually from one-on-one or from masterminds. But I know for sure that every med spa that I’ve worked close with is into the six figure months at this point after a year to a year and a half. 

I’m really excited for your future. Maybe a little bit more than you are. Like, I feel like I’ve seen the path that you are walking down, and you’re walking down it just joyfully kind of blind. I’m like I know exactly where she’s going. Your husband is also just joyfully kind of blind, has no clue what’s coming. But you’re going to be six figure months without losing any quality at all. In fact, if you staff it well, you’re going to only gain quality and nurturing in your company. 

Carey: Yeah. that’s, that’s my next goal. I kind of go back and forth between like growth mindset what could I do next? Really the fact that I’ve gone from zero dollars to replacing my income in December, maybe six weeks or so of runway and then being able to pay my bills. I’m okay. You know things are going just fine. Like I kind of need to keep building and growing and making sure that my care is solid. The way I take care of people and show up for my clients is excellent. Then it’ll continue to grow.

That’s been probably my biggest frustration has been advertising and Google presence. That’s been really frustrating. So this has really been organic growth, showing up in the community, showing up at craft fairs, at just different events and letting people know what I’m doing. 

Becca: Yeah. You’re in a field too where retention is pretty solid. Like once people get on a hormone replacement therapy plan, once they get comfortable with someone who’s doing their Botox, once they know that the PRP is working, they’re going to be telling people. You don’t lose people as easily as some industries where it’s just like come in and get a haircut and leave.

People tend to stay with their end piece in the med spa world. You’re going to be seeing like a snowball effect happening because you’re just getting started. I know it doesn’t feel like that. Like you feel like you’re several months in. You’ve lived a lifetime. You probably have a few more extra gray hairs after all these transitions, but you really are just getting started. Even if you don’t have the Google and SEO that you want now, your numbers don’t lie. Like it’s working. It is working, and it’s only going to snowball and compound. So I’m excited to see where it goes for you for sure. 

Carey: Yeah. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve really enjoyed being able to use all the parts of our personality. I think I might have mentioned this before, but I tend to be an artist at heart. I’m a creative person. My dad always encouraged us to go into fields where we could make a living and be financially stable. So he didn’t encourage us to go into art, but now I get to make flyers and I get to design things and I get to create things that I wasn’t doing before. 

So really looking back six or eight months ago, I was pretty bored. Just plain old not engaged in what I was doing. Now I’m learning something new every day. The health and wellness space is just amazing. I mean, they’ve got some amazing leaders. I’ve gotten to go to conferences and learning about peptides and all these just things that are just really on the cutting edge of medicine. That’s really exciting. 

Becca: Yeah. I think building a business is extremely artistic, and it’s not talked about enough. Like you’re taking nothing, you’re taking thin air, and you’re building out services. You’re building out impact. You’re building out staff. You’re learning how to market. You’re learning how to do this, and you’re taking your paintbrush, and you’re just applying it to the canvas with all these different colors, all these different players, all these different team members, all these different tools. 

In 10 years, you have this masterpiece of a functioning entity that came from nothing. It just came from your brain. I mean, that’s amazing. It’s the most artistic thing on the planet. You keep a very humble mind. I think that that is going to serve you more than you know. I think that one of the things that creates these large companies is someone at the forefront of it that is truly remembering what it’s like to work 12 hour days. It’s one of the things that I like to continue to do. 

Just last night I was in my kitchen, and I was unloading my dishwasher. We use a lot of kitchen scissors to like cut meats and vegetables. We just use scissors more than knives. We have this huge drawer that’s just full of really sharp scissors. I was unloading the scissors into the thing. I was like, this is the richest shit ever. 

Like you can never remove that piece of me that remembers that we had one pair of rusty ass scissors growing up from like a hand-me-down from three generations ago. I never was able to cut anything. I know that this sounds ridiculous, but this is just how we live. We just never had shit that we needed. Like I was unloading the dishwasher, and I was like, I can’t believe I’m here. It was from a drawer of scissors. There’s a piece of you that I feel like is that as well. It’s going to take you very far. 

Carey: It’s been an interesting journey. One of the things about the art is that in the beginning October, November, December, I was trying to put out an image that I thought I was supposed to look like. Like I’m supposed to look this way in the lab coat. But now I’m in a place where, and I’m in a physical place where I can be myself. 

So one of the interesting things is that I’m leasing as a medical suite inside of a tattoo studio. So it’s a really high end tattoo parlor, I guess you would say. The space is really nice. It feels really good. But now I’ve joined this other community of artists. I thought maybe my patients would be a little like oh a little off put. They love it. They walk in, and they’re like, this is awesome. I’ve never been in here. This is really cool. It kind of just be true to yourself and follow what you think looks good. You know? 

So now my business card has like this floral design on it. It’s really kind of cute. I just know I’m going to get tired of that in three months, but that’s okay. I can just change it. I’ll just change the print. So I’m not like married to one image. I can pivot and be different things and be interesting. 

Becca: It’s an ever evolving door. We talked about this a lot in the take my money class with the positioning and branding. Like what’s his name? Dwayne Johnson, the Rock. Like at some point he was a wrestler. Then at some point he was a movie and show actor. At some point he was a bodybuilder. Now he’s like one of the top business owners on the planet, bringing in a billion plus dollars just for his portion of his tequila company. Constantly pivoting, constantly creating. 

We don’t have to change industries to pivot and create. We can just stay within our business and reinvent ourselves all the time. I mean, the way that I show up is different every other month I feel like I’m evolving so quickly. So, yes, that is beautiful. Would that be your main piece of advice to a business owner? Do you think that you have something even more important that you would say to someone that’s growing their company? 

Carey: I think that is good advice. Don’t look around to see what other people are doing. That has been the most impactful advice on me was to keep my attention focused on my business. What other people might be doing might be working great for them. You don’t know. You don’t know that. So if something feels good to you, and you feel like this is a good path. Or even like, is this a good color for the wall? 

Like just go with it. Because you can spend a lot of time looking around at other people and really spend a lot of time on decisions that don’t really matter in the end. Just go with your instincts, and you can always change it. I think that’s probably been the best piece of advice for me.

Becca: I love that. All right. Awesome. Well if my audience wants to get ahold of you and look you up, where can they find you? 

Carey: So I’m in Winter Haven, Florida, which is kind of situated between Tampa and Orlando, a little south of there. You can find me, my business name is Keep Moving Health because that’s kind of my personal mantra to myself and my patients. Just keep working, just keep moving. That’s the goal of life I think sometimes. So I’m at KeepMovingHealth.com, and I’m also on Instagram, that same handle. 

Becca: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. I cannot wait for this episode to air. 

Carey: All right. Thank you so much. Have a good rest of your day. 

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