Have you ever thought about how important 10 minutes can be to your health and well-being? Just 10 minutes a day and how it can improve your mood, outlook, and general health?
Our guest today is Lisa Burbage, who is a health and wellness at work expert. She is the founder of Wellness Five where she provides the tips, tools, and strategies she has learned about mindset, well-being, and feeling better so employees can thrive at work and lead a life they love from the inside out.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- You can visit our guest’s website at: https://www.wellnessfive.com/
- If you are ready to franchise your business or take it to the next level: CLICK HERE.
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Lisa Burbage is a top real estate agent turned corporate wellness coach after recovering from food addiction, overcoming breast cancer, and rebuilding a relationship with herself.
She now provides the tips, tools, and strategies she has learned about mindset, well-being, and feeling better so employees can thrive at work and lead a life they love from the inside out.
Through her company, Wellness Five, Lisa has impacted thousands of people through speaking and leading workshops for various clients and companies and speaking at conferences across the US since 2015.
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If you are interested in being a guest on our podcast, please complete this request form or email podcast@bigskyfranchise.com and a team member will be in touch.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:00):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I’m wondering if you’ve ever thought about how important 10 minutes can be to your health and wellbeing, just 10 minutes a day, and how it can improve your mood, your outlook, your overall health.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:27):
And our guest today is Lisa Burbage, who is a health and wellness expert in helping people implement health and wellness strategies at their companies. She’s the founder of Wellness Five, where she provides the tips and tools and strategies she’s learned about mindset, wellbeing and feeling better, so employees can thrive at work and lead a life they love from the inside out. Lisa is a top real estate agent, turned corporate wellness coach after recovering from food addiction, overcoming breast cancer, and rebuilding a relationship with herself. Throughout her company, Wellness Five, she’s impacted thousands of people through speaking and leading workshops for various clients and companies and speaking at conferences across the United States since 2015. So let’s go ahead and jump into my interview with Lisa Burbage.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (01:15):
Well, thank you, Tom, for having me on the show. My name’s Lisa Burbage and I am the CEO of Wellness Five, which is a corporate wellness company, and we help employees get happier, healthier, and more productive. And isn’t that what we all want, productivity?
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:33):
Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Well, one of the things that intrigued me about you is your journey that you’ve been through personally to arrived at the company you’re with now. So I’d love for you just to share in your own words, a little bit about your backstory.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (01:52):
Sure. Well, Wellness Five is not my first entrepreneurial adventure. And I say adventure because they’re all adventures. My first one was as a real estate broker. I did that for, gosh, almost 30 years, I guess. I started when I was a kid. And then I had a life-changing event that made me realize I wasn’t passionate about that anymore and I wanted to do something that’s helped people in a bigger way. And I’m not saying that real estate agents don’t help people, they do. But when I had, and I don’t mind telling you, I had a health scare, and when I had that, I realized, okay, I had to make some changes in my own life. I had to get myself well.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (02:42):
And then once I did, I didn’t want to go back to what I was doing. So I haven’t worked for somebody in so many years, I think they’d probably fire me. I just love creating and being my own boss. And yeah, granted there’s a lot of things that come in your way, in your path, but if you’re always… To me, challenges are opportunities, and that’s how I’ve always looked at it. So my newer business came out of my own journey to become healthier.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (03:23):
Just by way of example, you talked about employees being more productive when they are well and have greater wellbeing. So I’d just love to talk about some of the benefits of wellbeing and be what that looks like.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (03:38):
Well, that’s evolving too. When I first started Wellness Five in 2015, I was doing this business and still selling real estate. And then I slowly just started cutting back the percentage of time that I focused on real estate to start my newer business. And I realized that as I was creating Wellness Five, that things were changing. When I first went into it, I thought it would all be physical health, eating better and moving more. The pandemic hit, and mental health was an issue prior to the pandemic, but I think it got on steroids during the pandemic. And so then mental health and emotional health started becoming a priority. So I’ve evolved as wellness has evolved. So today, depending on who you’re speaking to, wellness may mean emotional help, it may mean mental health, it may mean physical health, it may mean all of all three combined because, really, they all dovetail on each other. If you’re not well mentally, more than likely you’re not going to be well physically.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (04:59):
Well, and as you, with your specialty of helping organizations help their staff and employees be well, one of the things we had spoken about reviewing is how small businesses can do it. Certainly, they have limited resources, limited staff. So I think oftentimes, and being a small business of running my own small business, you have limited resources to be able to offer. So are there maybe some suggestions or things that even a small business can do to offer as a wellness support to their employees?
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (05:40):
Well, I think you first need to start with the CEO, the person in charge, because this was a lesson I learned in my first business, was as I was starting to make money, I didn’t want to hire anybody, I wanted to just do it all. And I quickly realized that I couldn’t. So slowly but surely I hired an assistant, and when I left real estate, I actually had five people on my team working for me. And I realized I had more free time, I was much more productive, because I wasn’t trying to do everything. I would hire people that had a skill set that I don’t have. I still do that.I just hired someone the other day to do some data entry for me. Not a sexy job, but a very needed job, not my skill set.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (06:34):
So I think when you hire people, that frees you up and then you can model, what is setting boundaries all about? What is self-care all about? Do you have flex time? Those are the things you can offer somebody when you’re a small business, when you’re a big business, large corporation, it’s totally different, although they do offer some of that as well. But if you are not set up to offer a full-fledged wellness program, you can offer some benefits that involve maybe taking a afternoon off and go getting a massage or working a four day work week or having a three day weekend once a month. These are easy things to do, which don’t really… Well, obviously, if you’re paying for five days of work and you’re only getting four, that is coming off of your bottom line, but what you’ll get back… That’s what any sized company, they’re all focused on the bottom line, whether you’re a company of one or whether you’re a company of 1000, everybody’s focused on the bottom line. I’m focused on the bottom line, you’re focused on the bottom line. But we can’t keep…
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (07:56):
People are tired and we can’t keep expecting them to step up and perform at their top peak performance if they’re tired and worn out. And the word burnout’s been overused, but I think if you’re a CEO or a boss or whatever and you’re not paying attention to your employees and realizing they’re not creative, it’s just a paycheck, they’re quietly quitting, that’s the new term, they show up, but they do the bare minimum, they’re telling you something. They’re telling you something loud and clear. And if you care about your team and you care about your employees, then you need… And even if they’re 1099 people, it really doesn’t matter. If you want to get the most out of them, then you need to show them that you care by offering some things that will create some work life balance for them, if they’re not doing it themselves.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (09:07):
I can remember, I don’t have this happen much now because I have pretty firm boundaries, but when I was in my other profession I didn’t. But I started to learn towards the end, but it’s kind of like a child, if you don’t start off firm, then the expectation’s been set. And I remember I had this one client, he called me at 10:00 at night, he texted me. And I didn’t return his text and he said, “I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight if you don’t get back with me tonight.” Well, I still didn’t return his text. Then he started texting my assistant and she texted me, I said, “Do not respond to him. Nothing we’re doing is life or death. It can all wait till in the morning.”
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (09:58):
And so just setting boundaries like that where you’re not so available all the time. Small business owners, we tend to run ourselves ragged. We really do. And setting a boundary, turning off at a certain time, turning off your computer, not checking emails at night, not writing emails at night, getting up a little bit earlier. Exercise is my form of stress relief, so I get up at 6:00 and I’m usually out the door by 6:30 if I’m jogging. If I’m not jogging, I’m doing a yoga class. So that’s my time of day for me. And so you need to just, I guess, find the time of day that works for you based on… If I don’t exercise in the morning, it isn’t happening. I’ve learned that about myself. But other people, they enjoy coming home and going for a walk. That’s a way to de-stress from the day.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (11:03):
So everybody’s different, but you need to just figure out, we’ve all got 10 minutes. When I run a program, a lot of my students will say, “Well Lisa, I don’t have time to exercise. I don’t have 30 minutes. No, maybe you don’t have 30, but we’ve all got 10.” We’ve all got 10 and we start with 10. And then maybe you find, “Okay, well, I’ve got another 10 later in the day.” 10 minutes done three times, last time I checked the math, was 30 minutes. And the research shows that 10 minutes done three times is every bit as beneficial as doing it in one swoop of 30 minutes. A lot of people don’t know that. And entrepreneurs, time is the thing that we have the least of most of the time.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (11:56):
Yeah. Well, that’s great, great advice. And this is a great time for us to transition here, Lisa, to the same questions we ask every guest before they go. And the first question is, have you had a miss or two in your journey and something you learned from it?
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (12:12):
Oh yeah, I’ve had a lot of misses. And you always learn, it’s always an opportunity to learn. I get so, I don’t want to say annoyed because that’s not really what I… But people today don’t want to fail. They don’t want to make a mistake, they want to be perfect, and there’s no way to learn if you don’t fail. So I always tell my participants, my students, “Fail often and fail big so you can learn from it.” And so I failed a lot. When I got in my first business, I was married or engaged to be married, and I thought it was going to be a second income. So I was like, “Okay, well, this will be fun money. I won’t really have to work that hard at it.” Well, lo and behold, I realized I didn’t want to get married to that individual. And then I was single in the profession and it real estate is a very, very competitive business. The 90-10 rule is very much alive and well in that profession. So I knew I wanted to be in the 10% that made money at it.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (13:22):
And so it went from being a hobby job to a full-time, “I need to make money,” career. And so I didn’t plan ahead. I didn’t have a nest egg saved up that I could do, so I just worked and worked and worked and lived on peanut butter sandwiches until I could get that business up and running. This business I planned. And I saved up a lot of money before I left real estate to start this business so I wouldn’t have to go in debt to any great extent to foster this business, as any business takes two or three years to really get going and so I planned for that one.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (14:17):
So I guess not planning was a goof, but I was lucky, I only had to worry about myself at that point in my life and so it turned out okay. Trying to think what other… Oh, and more recently, I was doing everything in-person prior to COVID. I would go on site, I would lead programs. When I was doing individual coaching, I would individually coach people face-to-face, did nothing on the platform that you and I are using right now, Tom. And I had three programs starting in March of ’20, on-site, they all came to a screeching halt and I didn’t have a default. And so I learned very quickly that you need to diversify. Now, I can go on site if somebody wants me on site, I can do virtual, I can do a hybrid, whatever a client wants. But I was totally unprepared because I only had one mode of delivery and that was in-person.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (15:31):
Sure. Well, let’s talk about a make or two that you’d like to share.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (15:37):
A make. So a success I’ve had. Gosh, I’ve had a lot of successes, too. But a lot of times you’re told, especially in sales training and whatnot, to set these big goals. And I really did not really set a lot of goals. I had to make money, that was non-negotiable, and I just focused on every day. And by doing that, by doing what I needed to do every day, repeat, maybe I miss a day, repeat. In other words, 80% of the time I did what I needed to do, I was able to create a lot of success.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (16:29):
But I can remember my broker always saying, “Lisa, you never know your numbers.” No, I don’t. I don’t worry about if I’m in the million dollar plus club or whatever, I just focused on what I needed to do every day and taking small steps. And compound interest, whatever you want to call it, before I knew it, I had a lot of success. I look at my numbers more with this business because nobody else is really looking at them, but me and my bookkeeper. So I tend to pay attention a little more now than I did when I worked for a big real estate company, who they were always keeping track of it for me.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (17:10):
But yeah, just focus on what you can do today. And when somebody comes into one of my programs and they’re like, “I want to lose weight,” and then they get fixated on this number, they’re so fixated on the number, they forgot what they need to do each day to get to the number. And so that is something that I think, I don’t know if I knew it intuitively or just didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on anything beyond what I was doing each day. I don’t know what it was, but it turned out to be a good thing, Tom, for sure. And it’s still a skill that I use today. I teach it. It’s a skill that I teach when I run my programs, is to just every day just bite size it down. A lot of us get overwhelmed if we think too big, and sometimes a week is even too big.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (18:10):
So that was, I guess the biggest thing for me. And then just reaching the pinnacle of success, that was in the real estate business, being in that 10%, that was great. A lot of money, a lot of recognition. It gave me a lot of confidence that maybe I didn’t even know I had, things I was good at that I didn’t even know I was good at because I tried. And maybe I didn’t do it perfectly the first time, but I kept trying and I kept going back out there and kept doing it. Most people quit, but right before they make it. That’s so true in the small business world.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (18:56):
And I’m not where I want to be with this business. I had a setback with COVID because I wasn’t prepared, but things are trending in the right direction. And I’m revamping as I go to incorporate, like I said earlier in the show, more mental health, more physical, more emotional health along with the physical health, because that’s what people are asking for now. So I’ve had to pivot again. I guess being able to pivot. And isn’t that what most entrepreneurs are really good at, is being agile and pivoting?
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (19:33):
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And that’s a great lead in to our multiplier question. Have you used a multiplier or two? Pivoting is a great lead in for that. But what’s been a multiplier you’ve used?
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (19:50):
Hiring people. Realizing I am not capable of doing it all, nor do I want to do it all, nor do I have the skills to do it all. And that was a hard lesson for me to learn. And then once I learned it, learning to delegate and not micromanage. They’re not going to do it the way you do it, but that’s okay, you’ve got to give them the freedom to do it their way. And as long as it’s impacting your organization in a positive way, I think that’s a great thing.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (20:26):
One thing that I’ve also learned, more so in this business than in my prior business, was a lot of people will come to me saying they’re passionate about wellness and holistic health and they love what I’m doing, but they don’t really have the skill set for what I need. So I’ve had to become real intentional about asking the right questions, “Do you love excel? Because if you don’t, then that’s the skill I need.” So just hiring the right people, hiring the right people and realizing if they make their salary back and then some, have they not contributed to the team? Absolutely.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (21:15):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and the final question that we ask every guest, Lisa, is what does success mean to you?
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (21:25):
Oh boy. Well, it used to mean money. I’ll be totally transparent. My former entrepreneurial adventure was all about making money, because one day I didn’t have to make it and then all of a sudden I had to. So it was a survival thing and I was highly motivated by money. But once I got sick and I realized that I didn’t have any boundaries, I didn’t know how to manage my stress, I wasn’t eating right, my priorities changed a little bit. And now taking time for me and spending time with my family, my family always got shortchanged, and making time for them, spending time with friends, I get a lot of enjoyment… Friendship is a high value for me, as is family.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (22:23):
And I realized, my family I took for granted. My friends were all my clients. And when I walked away from that business, I was like, “Wow, I’ve never slowed down long enough to really cultivate good friends.” So I’ve spent a lot of energy doing that and just having balance in my own life, I think. And listening to what’s important to me, what my values are, bring me joy and keep me energized to do what I love to do, which is helping people get healthier. If you give somebody their help, you’ve given them the greatest gift you can give them.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (23:05):
And Lisa, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (23:13):
Well, knowing who your audience is, Tom, that most of us are people like me, small business owners, I would just say make sure you take 10 minutes for yourself. Just make an appointment with yourself. We always blow ourselves off, it’s very easy to do that. But make an appointment with yourself and keep it. You wouldn’t break an appointment with a client or with your… Well, you might with your dentist, but you than likely wouldn’t break an appointment with a client. So make an appointment with yourself every day to do something that brings you joy, whatever that is.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (23:58):
Exercise used to be something that really didn’t bring me joy, I just gutted it out. But now I had a friend want to take me to a spin class, so I finally went to a spin class, absolutely hated it. I will never do that again, but I didn’t know unless I tried. But she said, “Oh, you burn all these calories,” and this, that, and the other. And I was like, “Well, yeah, but I hate it. I don’t care how many calories you burn.” I hated every minute of it. So even if you’re exercising, do something you enjoy. And there’s lots of things to find that you enjoy and then spend a little time with it each day, try different things. I tell my students all the time, “Try different things.”
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (24:50):
Running may not be your thing. I love to run. I’ve been running for 40 years. It’s therapy to me now because I don’t go at the intensity that I used to go at. I’m not running marathons anymore, not necessary, but I’ll run a 5K every now and then just because I like the competition. But yeah, just find what you like to do and then make some time for it. That’s probably the biggest nugget of success. Because life goes by quickly, very quickly, and one day we wake up and we’re, “Oh, I haven’t done this. I haven’t done that. All I’ve been doing is working.”
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (25:36):
Lisa, thank you so much for a fantastic interview and let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one, is when she talked about what wellbeing at the office means. And she said, for her, originally she thought it was physical health as the primary. And now she recognizes that this could be emotional health, mental health and physical health, they all intertwine with one another.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (26:01):
Takeaway number two, is that you can’t keep people performing at high levels without them getting tired and worn out at some point. So helping your team set boundaries, and yourself by the way, by things like making sure you keep your computer off over the weekends or not answering calls after business hours, or not sending emails during evening or weekends, taking a day off, getting a massage, doing some of these things to help recharge and refuel.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (26:34):
And take away number three, is when she shared during the miss, where she talked about having many misses throughout her career and life. And she said she’s recognized that people today, she’s noticed a trend that they don’t want to fail or make mistakes. And she encourages people to, “Fail often and fail big.” I thought that was great, “Fail often and fail big.” And now it’s time for today’s win-win.
Lisa Burbage, Wellness Five (27:04):
So today’s win-win is when Lisa said this phrase, “We’ve all got 10 minutes.” I thought that was great. And she said, “We’ve got 10 minutes to exercise, to do something for yourself.” And she said, “Take those 10 minutes every day and do something that brings you joy. And when you set that 10 minutes, keep that promise and commitment to yourself. Whatever it is that you like to do, go and do it. And that will make an impact on your overall mood, wellness and wellbeing.” So I thought that was a great, great takeaway. And that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to having you back next week.
