From Bulimia to Business: Rebecca Rectoric’s Journey to Healing and Entrepreneurship

Lee Barovska: Welcome to Founders Few, a podcast powered by Users IO where we explore the journeys of innovative entrepreneurs and the road ahead. I'm your host Lee Barovska. In each episode we uncover the stories behind pac, the challenges faced, the lessons learned and the series few today I'm thrilled to joined by Rebecca is the co founder of Holistic ed where she supports teens and adults fruiting disorder with a holistic action a Carolyn Institute certificate disorder. With a decade of experience her own exercise, she focuses on health and well, not just less sick by addressing the whole person. I'm so happy to have you on the plus today.

Rebecca: Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. And uh, he gave me goosebumps when you talked about me. So thank you for the very kind introduction.

Lee Barovska: Of course, of course. And I'm super excited about the conversation we're about to have. So what I like to do at the start of every episode is I like journey time. So take us back to where you started your business. What would time motivate you to start?

Rebecca: Um, so I promised I will try and be as direct as possible. But my background, before I started doing this, I actually worked in sales and advertising. And while I was doing that rather successfully, I was also silently battling an eating disorder. Um, one that was present with me for probably about 15 years. And it came to a point in my 20s where I. It all came to a head. I could no longer pretend that it wasn't as bad as it was, and I had to go into treatment. And I was there for a very, very long time. I spent probably 11 months in formal treatment and then much more time after that, continuing the journey to wellness. And when I came out of treatment, I went back to my sales job and realized very quickly but that was not a good environment for me at all. And decided I needed to do something different. And throughout my journey, my own personal journey to recovery, it inspired something within me. Because living with an eating disorder is probably the worst hell a person can experience. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. And I had struggled for so long, I didn't believe that recovery was actually real. People talk about it, but I'd never met anyone who was recovered. Um, I met people who got better ish and did the relapse roller coaster, much like I had myself. And I had the fortune of meeting a few people while I was in treatment who were truly recovered. And it was inspirational. And having lived without hope for a very, very long time, I, uh, this might sound a little bit cheesy, but I Wanted to be able to. I wanted to be able to offer hope to other people who are still in their journey. And so that's when I decided to do a complete career switch and go back to school and get specialized training and volunteer and do all kinds. I didn't know where I was going to land in this field, but I knew I wanted to be a part of helping people really know that you can recover from this illness. That's the story.

Lee Barovska: Did you always know that you were going to be an entrepreneur or did you have, like, an aha moment once you kind of, like, stepped out of your job? Talk to us a little bit about, like, the, like, origins of the business. I know that you left your job. Tell us a little bit more about.

Rebecca: Ironically, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. Both my parents have had multiple businesses themselves. And the job that I was at when I. That I actually left was probably one of my only jobs where I was an employee. I've also had many different businesses over my life. Um, I think at one point, particularly when I was really unwell, I was very scared. I was scared of everything. I was scared of uncertainty. I was scared of failing. I was scared of not paying the rent. Like, everything was scary to me. And there's a thought process that I think a lot of us are taught. Focus on stability, be stable. That is the recipe for a good life. And the truth is, I do not like being an employee. I am not really a very good employee because I don't like to be managed. Um, that's a blessing and a curse at times. But you do have to know yourself. So I like to be my own boss. It comes with its challenges. Absolutely. But over the years of being both an employee and an entrepreneur, I definitely know that I prefer the challenges that come with managing myself versus the challenges at least that I experience being managed by another person.

Lee Barovska: 100%. I feel like there's two different sets of problems. It's just all about which ones you prefer, like, dealing with and what you're good at dealing with. So it sounds like you've always kind of had that entrepreneurship spirit. And this just came about as you wanting to, like, inspire people. And I love that so much. So let's to the business today. So who would you say is your idol customer? Who would you say that you love working?

Rebecca: I love working with. Well, let's see. It's. It's an interesting question because I want to say motivated client, but when we talk about mental health and healing in that arena, nobody has 100% motivation. 100% of the time, they are going to roller coaster through wanting to do the change and not wanting to do the change and being all in and then pulling back. So I love working with people who realize it's time to do something different so you don't feel like you're pulling them through all the time, but sometimes you have to hold their hand through the lack of motivation that comes. I also love it and it's a privilege that some people have a really great support system outside of their formal treatment team, family, friends. It's so great when I work with someone that we can involve more people in their healing. That just makes me feel so good. And it's so healthy for the individual not to have to carry the load all by themselves.

Lee Barovska: 100% and a big change. I think it all starts with a decision. And as you say, motivation will dip in and out, but once you've made that decision to kind of go all in, that's when the true healing, the true change starts. So I really love, like the way that you've put it. And then so with the business, so is it like fully. I know it's like, is it in person because it's like a center or like, is it online? Like, how do you like, what's your core offering? What does it look like to work with you specifically?

Rebecca: May I give you some preamble before I answer the question directly? Okay. So years ago I did have a brick and mortar space and it was really starting to come into its own. It was such a beautiful thing. You could see the product of the hard work. And then Covid happened lockdown. And in Ontario, we had some of the strongest lockdown regulations of anywhere in the world. And it was pretty devastating at the time. I had to give up my office space. I had to move to being virtual at a time. Which sounds silly now because six years later, everybody is used to doing everything virtually. But not that long ago, that really wasn't the case. Particularly in a therapeutic environment, people wanted to be in person, they wanted to sit in the energy of the room, they wanted that three dimensional experience. Right. So when that all happened, I really, I did have a crisis of faith. I'm being perfectly honest. Um, but with business, you pivot based on what is happening. And sometimes what is happening is 100% out of your control. And so today we are 100% virtual. I'm in Ontario, my business partner is in Alberta, and we have other people who work in different time zones as well. And it's actually worked out to be a blessing in the sense that one of the biggest barriers to care is geography. There's a lot of places where actually around you there aren't any specialized professionals for eating disorders. And so our mantra really and being 100% virtual is that anyone, anywhere, geography is not a barrier to support.

Lee Barovska: And uh, I want to touch upon what you said. As a business owner, your ability to pivot is so important because things are going to come up with your business, things are going to happen, things are going to dip, things are going to change. It's all about your ability to pivot and work with the changes to really make sure that the business can continue and even thrive. And it sounds like change was honestly like a blessing in disguise because it really allowed you to have a further scope in like your ability to care for, uh, a lot of different people. So I honestly, I think a lot of people can relate with like Covid being a blessing in disguise in some cases, of course. And then so with the business. So when it comes to client acquisition, what are you guys doing in terms of lead generation to really speak to your dream customer?

Rebecca: So again, if I may give you a bit of an anvil because it's taken us a few iterations to get to where we are and I'm sure this will not be where we land forever, but it's working for us right now. We have worked with a lot of ad agencies and marketing people and done the things that they've told us to do. Funnels and automations and Google Ads and throw money at all this stuff. And most of it has turned out to be a money suck for us personally. Because when you work in with this demographic, I don't even like to call it a sale because to me that doesn't. That takes the humanness out of it. It takes an immense amount of courage to reach out for support. And then if you're being met by a bot or something AI generated, it doesn't feel like the personal touch. So we have discovered through trial and error that are business does best through our referral network. And it's something that we've always had a strong referral network. And then we tried all these other things and turns out for us, referral is where it's at because that starts the connection right from the beginning, the human touch. So we spend a lot of time nurturing our referral network, more so than, I'm going to say, traditional ways of advertising. The other thing we discovered is particular again in this field, particularly with eating disorders, when it Comes to things like Google Ads or social media or things like that, there's a lot of words that are shadow banned. So you have to be very compassionate and creative, which is not always easy. Then you're not necessarily reaching the right person because you have to be so creative in the language that you're using. And then, you know, we are a small boutique organization. It's we, we can't compete financially against some of the really, really big organizations out there. And we realized why are we trying to, we're not trying to be them, we're trying to be us. So what works for us and what do we know has. We may have fewer initial leads, but our conversion rate is much higher than it ever was using traditional advertising.

Lee Barovska: 100. And then with the traditional advertising, it's all about making sure that like you have that human touch. Like as you said, I think so like with your guys's experience. So you've just found that referrals has been like your number one sort of leads. And it just, you guys just didn't really find that return on investment before, if that makes sense.

Rebecca: No, we didn't. We were getting lots of leads, but they really, they weren't, they weren't really qualified. Um, the conversion rate was not fantastic. So we would be spending a lot of time doing discovery calls and then the person would drop off. Whereas when you get a referral, again, half, half the process has already been done for you. So we have a great referral network of clients we've worked with in the past who are happy to talk about us and a great referral network of other professionals who we've worked with in Circle of Care, have seen the quality of our work and are also very, they feel very safe in referring their clients to us. So it's a beautiful, we're very lucky to have this organic system that works for us.

Lee Barovska: And um, those referrals are always going to be the strongest leads because as you said, like the referrals they do like the selling for you. So like they, they talk about like how, how much they've helped, like you've helped them. So it just, honestly I think it just sells itself in and then so with the business. So when you think about your vision for the next 12 months, what are your guys, goals, targets, what milestones are you really looking to hit in the coming year?

Rebecca: It's a great question because we've been talking about this a lot for the last Q4 and Q1 of this year. Um, one of the things that probably we're A little slow to learn when it comes to scalability is when people come to work with us, they come to work with us. The challenge with that is I can't replicate myself. So I used to think scaling was getting more clients. But that's not a recipe for scaling, that's a recipe for burnout. If I always have to show up. There is a threshold with how many hours in the day you can work with someone individually. So now we have two core offerings, our concierge program and our standalone meal support program. And we have learned that our meal support program is where we can scale with the most ease. We only hire people who go through a rigorous training program and have similar philosophies and are, um, have their own lived experience with eating disorder as well. But it's the one place that we have and it's also the thing that people need the most. And so what's super cool about that is we are and have been hiring other people in different time zones because our business model, again, what sets us apart is you have access to support seven days a week. So we get to have people in different time zones, which means we can cover from 6am to 9pm seven days a week. For those who need help when they sit down to.

Lee Barovska: Yeah, I love that. And it's all about hiring those right people when you're scaling. Because if you make the wrong hire, uh, I think it comes like twofold. So it's really making sure that you as the business, business owners have like the sops in place to really make sure that you can train that person. Also making sure that that's the right person for your organization and they understand the mission, the vision and the values. So yeah, I agree with you there. And then what do you guys feel like are going to be the biggest challenges to making your goals happen in the coming year?

Rebecca: Ongoing challenge is fulfillment capacity. Right. Um, what sets us apart. We are very high touch. So our clients are allowed to text with us between sessions. We're available seven days a week. And that is amazing that that's something that's missing from almost every other program or professional. You know, you can go see your therapist on a Monday, then you have a whole week of stuff that's going on until you see her next Monday. M mhm. But you have to hold on to all that stuff and hopefully remember so you can process it with her or him the following week. And we don't believe that recovery happens in session. We believe it happens actually outside of session. But that high touch communication and access There's a capacity issue that eventually starts to become very apparent. Um, so again, that piece of hiring the right people that we trust can represent everything that we stand for. In between session is where we have historically hit roadblocks, but it's our main focus for this year is really to ramp up hiring 100% exciting stuff.

Lee Barovska: And so with, with our listeners. So, uh, if they want to find out more about what you guys do, where would be the best place to find out?

Rebecca: I would say probably our website, actually. I know social media is a big thing and everyone wants to be on it, but in truth, and this is personal philosophy for both myself and my business partner, we don't like social media as individuals. Um, we know it's going to call it a necessary evil in, in today's world, but we also understand the effects of social media on mental health. So it seems there's this dichotomy between using it to be like, hey, good stuff for you. While we also see the darker side with the clients that we work with. So our website is probably the best place to go and get a full picture of what we do. We have a very, very informative blog section as well. And if you're looking just to deepen your understanding, if you're supporting someone in recovery or who has an eating disorder, even for yourself, if you're trying to figure out a little bit more about what's going on, please feel free to read through all the free resources. They are extremely useful.

Lee Barovska: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's been such a pleasure talking to you today.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate this.

Lee Barovska: And if you are a business owner and you're looking to scale your business and you really want to enhance your sales and marketing efforts, visit Closers IO to hop on a call with our team and discover how we went from 0 to 30 million per year in less than three years. Until then, keep on climbing.