Name: Andrew McVittie
Business: Process Physio
Location: Preston
Key takeaways:
Don’t let negative preconceptions of what ‘business’ is blind you to opportunities
You don’t have to wear a suit to see a business opportunity
Do you need to rethink your attitude to what a ‘proper career’ involves?
Introducing Andy McVittie of Process Physio
The first thing to say about Andy is that he’s definitely an entrepreneur, in the sense of someone who sees opportunities and takes them. And he’s also a successful businessperson in that he’s making a healthy living running a physiotherapy practice, working an average of three days a week, giving him enough time to focus on family and personal life as well.
But when I speak to him for the Business of Adventure he’s very quick to tell me that he’s only recently realised that he is running a real business although, in various shapes and forms, he’s been doing so for more than a decade. He just didn’t realise it!
“I saw business as something that took place in a city with people with smart clothes, you know, sitting around a table discussing spreadsheets and such like. That wasn’t me!”
Partly he says this was his background, as no-one in his family had been in business, and because he’d gone into public service working for the police after leaving university. But in the last few months he’s published a book, launched new products and had some ‘transformational’ business coaching, and now he says, “I realise I am an entrepreneur and I’m not a passenger; I’m in charge!”
Let’s start at the beginning
Today Andy’s business is a successful physiotherapy practice, Process Physiotherapy, that specialises in physio and rehab for climbers. He’s also recently published a very well-received book called The Self-Rehabbed Climber and he does some climbing coaching in his spare time. We’ll come onto the physio business in part 2 of this blog but Andy’s business journey started elsewhere.
Like many of the people we talk to, he got to where he is today by making a living from what he loves doing, even if he didn’t see it as ‘business’. Having left the police to make more time for his family, he started doing some freelance outdoor instructing work in the Lake District.
Looking back, he says he realises that a lot of his friends – ‘outdoorsy climbing people’ – were actually running businesses but he didn’t think of it that way. A chance conversation with two of these mates over a cuppa presented Andy with his first business idea, giving him a chance to move away from freelancing, gain more control over his life and earn more money. The idea was ghyll scrambling – an adventure activity for which the Lakes is ideal but in the early 2000s was in relatively early stages of development.
Andy saw an opportunity to create a specialist operation, and grabbed it. He says that, looking back, this was his first entrepreneurial step:
“We sat and chatted about the opportunity and how no-one was really taking advantage of it, and it was only a bit later that I thought, ‘I could do that’ even though I definitely didn’t see myself as a businessperson. It felt like it was quite low risk – I had the qualifications and the investment in kit was quite low, so I decided to go for it - even though I’m not that keen on getting wet!”
Andy financed his start up with his credit card to buy the kit he needed, as well as set up a website with a URL that did what it said on the tin - www.ghyllscrambling.co.uk – plus some investment in SEO. A spot featuring the activity on the BBC’s Countryfile was also really well-timed in helping him get off the ground pretty quickly, and he was soon earning as much in one day as he did in two or three freelancing.
‘What a wally!’
The business did very well for several years and, with the wonderful benefit of hindsight, Andy feels he was a ‘wally’ not to grow it but, he says, his attitudes at the time stopped him:
“It was a thing I enjoyed doing that that that made me some money, and perhaps I was too much of a control freak to think about employing staff.”
He now wishes that he had employed people, given how many connections he has in the outdoor industry, and that he hadn’t decided to sell the business because of a move to Spain for family reasons.
Although he sold the company for a good sum (to one of his mates from the initial café conversation who is still running it over a decade later), Andy realises that if he’d been a bit more business-savvy he could have kept it and run it from Spain.
“I went back to freelancing in Spain, taking people climbing. Looking back I realise that perhaps I should have hung onto the website and the business, and that what I could have done was employ people to lead the trips, while I sat in Spain on the balcony, drinking a glass of wine, while taking the bookings and managing the business remotely!”
Time for a ‘proper career’
As we say, hindsight’s a wonderful thing! When Andy returned to Manchester from Spain a few years later, he was still convinced that ‘working in my hobby’ was not a ‘proper career’, and so he decided it was time to retrain. Having originally done a sports science degree which got him interested in biomechanics, he decided on physiotherapy.
In part 2 of this blog, we’ll pick up on the next stage of Andy’s journey and find out why and when he realised that you can both run a business and do what you love at the same time. (Subscribe below and we’ll send you an email when it’s live!)
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