I'm Judith, and this is the Starline Equine Bodywork podcast. This is a podcast about all of the things that I've learned and continue to learn in my career with horses. For the better part of a decade, I've been a full time equine bodywork practitioner, educator, and author. My obsession how horses really work and how to get the most from our relationship with them in training and in sport. My passion helping horse owners and body workers and aspiring body workers get going.
Unpack the latest science, research and experiences behind what we do with horses to support their potential and optimize their performance. For those of you who are long term listeners of the show, you know there are two topics I love to chat about body work and the business of running a bodywork business.
So today I feel incredibly fortunate to have joining us, someone who is one of the most inspirational, not only body workers, but also someone who has revolutionized the way thousands of body workers do business. So join me in saying hello to Jen Joyce of Aggregate. How are you today? I'm great. Thank you. Judith. Yeah. Really great. Thank you. How are you? I'm well. Thanks. I, I love talking to you. I find you one of the most inspirational people that I have had the chance to meet.
Really and truly, you have one of the most fascinating origin stories for how your business came to be and how it's evolved. And, if when I think of you and your story, I like to break it up into, pre the magic moment, the magic transformational moment that happened to you and what happened after that. And you know what? Even beyond that, how it's affected, all of us in the bodywork business. So, I guess your story starts.
You are an osteopath for horses, and you had a large and thriving practice. Can you tell me a little bit about that? The beginning? Yeah, absolutely. So, I had a chat with myself in the mirror when I was 11, and, decided very early on that I wanted to become an osteopath for horses. Very specific, I know. But obviously set out to train to become an off path, which I did train to the European School of Philosophy. And then, started building a business.
And, you know, I started with this aspiration of having, you know, a thriving business. I wanted to travel with my work. I wanted, you know, to be able to get great results. And over time, that's what happened. And it did take a bit of time, as these things always do. But then, got to the point where, you know, I had a six month waiting list. I was seeing ten horses a day. I was traveling all over the world.
I was being flown here, flown that, be working on, you know, horses that were stables, horses at top level of competition, being referred in by vets, you know, for really complex cases. And so I technically at that point should have been like, awesome, I've made it. This is incredible. But in doing so, I literally lost all work life balance. Like, I woke up, I started working, I didn't stop working until like five minutes before I went to sleep.
I was traveling all the time, and I think being a soldier preneur, as I'm sure that a lot of us, you know, will have experienced so much of our business is in our head. So knowing which clients need a bit longer, which clients need less time because the horse is less tolerant, which clients need, you know, more of a conversation at the end, which, you know, route takes perhaps a bit longer.
You know, some people they pay on the day, other people you don't really mind that they pay you a little bit later. So the prospect of actually integrating somebody into my business was so overwhelming, that I didn't I mean, I run two phones. I, like I say, was just drowning in an admin, essentially. You know, I trained and wanted to become an osteopath and to be able to do good work with horses. But in doing so, I built this. You normous albatross around my neck.
You know, simply all of your social media ends up swallowed with it, because the moment you open your phone, you've got inquiries coming in, and, you know, you try and have a day off and the, the overwhelm of, like, looking at the number of red numbers dotted around all over your phone on email or Facebook or text message on WhatsApp, on, you know, trying to keep track of all of this, run a practice and, you know, remained sane. It reached the point where I was on almost the verge of a burnout.
It sounds like the dream became a nightmare. Yeah, almost. Almost. Yeah. For sure. And I think there is and this is this will sound familiar, because all of us are doing a very, very similar thing. We set out to do one thing, but without the right support systems that have been designed specifically for our industry specifically to do exactly what we need it to do.
You know, I looked at the tech options that were available, and they were so complicated and so prohibitively expensive, and they'd actually add time to my day, not take time. And I am obsessed with time because time is all we have and don't. And when you are a service provider, your time is so valuable and you have to become, you know, so streamlined, so efficient, so effective. And, you know, my time was my days were literally like, there wasn't a minute spare.
So, you know, when you're actually looking at integration, the prospect of integrating a system or the prospect of changing the way you do things, it has to save time in the long run.
But it also, has to actually do as much as it possibly can for you and work as hard as it can, to try and, you know, and that was that was something that I was really struggling with, you know, keeping track of messages, sending reminders, you know, not to mention for the record keeping and invoicing and all of the rest of it, but prioritizing my clients and their experiences, their appointments with me as well.
And I just, you know, I hadn't found a way to be able to integrate anything in statistics. So it was just me and the phones and the diary and the overwhelm, the overwhelming people that was happening. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's exactly. Yeah. And I think, most of most of us look at a thriving business. And from the outside we say that's what we want. We want to be there and, there. I mean, when you're trying to juggle that many things, there's a downside to it.
If you don't have the correct support structure put in right from the very beginning, right? You're building a house on a terrible foundation. And it just it sounds like it just wasn't sustainable. I mean, you say you're, you know, on the verge of, you know, a mental breakdown, trying to keep track of everything. But still, you know, this is the dream that you wanted since you were an 11 year old girl. So what a nightmare that you get there and it's not what you expected.
But then, you did something, that sort of revolutionized the way you approach business, approach your life, and that actually, and you hear a lot of high level entrepreneurs talk about this is take a mindset course. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely.
So in, it was in lockdown where, you know, because we were in forced to actually have a bit of time at home, where, you know, you had to kind of take your hands off the brains and, and once we, we'd all I mean, I cleared out the cupboard under the stairs and generally organized all of our, you know, stuff in the house. It's like, what else can I do? And it was that introspection time that lockdown afforded me. And I was like, you know, I'm going to do a mindset course.
So I did the mindset course and it was all about, you know, actually introspecting a lot. And also lifting limiting beliefs or shifting limiting beliefs, which is something that, you know, I wasn't overly aware of because we all assimilate beliefs, throughout our life that aren't necessarily true.
So, actually being able to identify a belief that is limiting you and to go, hold on, is this actually true or is this just a belief that I've made up and, you know, to be able to work on that shifting that, you know, and I mean, I am working on your mindset and working on, your self is a life long job that I don't think, you know, certainly not when you're training that when you're starting a business, at no point then everyone go, do you know what?
Yeah, you can work on your, you know, your practice. So you're really great practitioner. Yeah. Awesome. You can work on your business skills. Yep. Awesome. Really good at that. By the way. You're also going to have to work on your mindset and your personality traits and, you know, your mental health as well. And this is something that I was, you know, kind of new to. So like, okay, we'll start integrating, some of this and I, I am aware I am a complete workaholic. I've always been a workaholic.
But I almost ended up validating my the success of my business by how busy I was. And it was, you know, this busy fall meant as long as you really busy, you're really successful. But I wasn't. I was just busy, full with a crummy system that wasn't supporting me in the way that I needed to. But you can almost lie to yourself. No, no, I'm really successful because look how busy I am. Look how busy I am. Look at all of this paperwork. Look at all of this. And it isn't valid. It's not.
It's not constructive use of your time just because you're busy, you know, and you've got loads of work to do, like admin work that doesn't necessarily align with the success mentality, because there are systems that can support you better. So I did all of these limiting beliefs that are quite a lot of limiting belief works in a much but, you know, mindset. Oh crikey. Yeah. You are actually, you know, capable of a lot more than you think you are.
And then I have the cold realization that I'm actually going to have to make this up. I've had the idea for this up for years, and I always thought, I can't do it because I don't know about tech. Someone else who do it my way to someone else would do it and wait another year. Someone else will do it. And like I say in lockdown after having reassessed my priorities. So okay, there has to be some software that will fix as many of the problems as I need fixing.
And this is where I looked at the tech that was available and it didn't. It wasn't good enough, it wasn't quick enough, it wasn't going to save me the time. And what's more, it's like it wasn't built with a modern, busy practitioner in mind. So yeah, I realized that I don't need to know about tech, I need to know about courses. So that I can afford to work with someone who knows about tech. And that is a huge realization. You don't need to know everything.
You need to know what you know so that you can then work someone who knows what they know. And so you began the process of creating the one thing that, would save you from being a victim of your own success. And you began to create this app. Now, tell me, what was the process like? How did you, you know, sum up the bravery? How did you decide? Okay, I don't know anything about tech, and I am absolutely going for it. And I'm going to build something that solves the problems that I am feeling.
I just had to start. That was the most difficult step, was actually starting and going right. I need to do this. So I spent some time on the internet, found the developer who what is brilliant. And I think this is something that regardless of what you're trying to achieve, I think the brilliant is how different in how different people's brains work.
So, you know, as a body worker, I think one way, but as a developer, my developer thinks like very, you know, logically, and in a completely different way to, how how I thought so essentially, I reached out to the developer. I said, look, these are my problems. These are the systems I'm currently using. I said about client messaging. And, you know, I have paper records and I have invoices that look like this. And I'm chasing payments and data, and, they came back with an idea of a solution.
Now, it took the best part of 12 months to work through the and they call it, like a UI or UX, a user interface or user experience. So an idea of how the app would flow would work out. Now, that first version in 2020, I think it was is yeah, it was it was basic compared to the products that we have now. But like I say, you have to start and you're always going to be rubbish at the beginning, but it's only by being rubbish you get less rubbish.
And regardless of what you're doing, whether you're being a practitioner, whether you are building a therapy business, whether you are building any kind of business, any kind of product, just having the courage to start and the courage to be bad at something, you and I think that's, that's something that I had to get. I, I, getting better at being good at something new because I've only ever worked on horses. I've never developed a products and launched a tech company.
But it's being brave enough to just be bad at it. It's it would be really easy at the point in life where I was at where I was like, do you know what I really know about osteopath being an osteopath forces and I can confidently walk into any stable with any horse and be confident that I will be able to help that horse to one or other extent. And to just stay doing that without stepping away and being brave, being brave enough to be brave at something new. It's almost like you limit yourself.
You've got to keep being rubbish, keep being the, you know, the student of life. And so that was the point where I was like, you know what? I I'm going to get better at being part of something new. So we hashed out this UI, and then we kept developing and kept developing and kept developing. And at times it was two steps forward, three steps back, and it felt like we were never going to get there because it started off with such a, oh, I'll just make this little thing for me in my business.
And it's like, actually, hold on, if we make this for my business, all of our businesses are essentially the same. It's only the service that we provide that's different. You know, clients contact you, you make them an appointment, you turn up and you do something. You perhaps leave them a report. They pay you, you leave. You maybe schedule them to get a reminder the next time. The only thing that's different is the actual service that we provide.
So when it all kind of grew from there to be able to support all different practitioners in all different areas of animal service provision. Although we do also offer, human recordkeeping for, any human practitioners. So we provide human anatomy diagrams. And so, yes, it was immensely difficult. And there were huge hiccups along the way.
And it's I think in those darkest times when, you know, I was crying left, right and center, I felt the, the like the crushing weight that we I'm not strong enough to get this where it needs to be. And it's in those times other incredible profession calls. See what you're doing and are there to support you. You know, a great, I mean, she's a she's an incredible lawyer. Who's been a client of mine for a long time.
You know, I've reached out to her for a little bit of advice and the support that she gave me, like, literally, because it's like she can see the effort that's going in to what we're doing. It's like she's worked that hard somewhere along the way to get where she's at now. Absolutely. Yeah. I think being supported by other incredible women in business, who see how hard you're working, you know, the, the support that is just offered can be, you know, really humbling.
And the other thing is, I think when you're in the thick of it, when just like when you're overwhelmed in your business with all of the admin staff and the behind the scenes stuff, or when you were building the app, all of these things, what, you can't see it because you're in it, but the people outside looking in see the brilliance and how incredible to have a support network where they say, no, no, what you're doing is brilliant. You have to keep going, right? Absolutely.
When you're going through hell, keep going. Yeah. And it literally got to the point where it was like, oh, you can't stop now. And I'm glad you did it because it, yeah, the end product, guys, after this big, long journey is, one of the most insightful, intuitive, really brilliant interfaces
for any business. So, Jen, you're so inspirational just in the fact that you know what you created in your one on one practice as an osteopath, and then the fact that you had the bravery to say, you know, what's making me successful is also killing me. And I have to change it.
And then you went out and just completely went into a world that you'd never been in before, and went through the thick of it and have developed one of the most rev evolutionary ways of running a practice, the best piece of tech. Tell us what the app actually does so you told me once that you had lost. How many hours was it that you said you had lost? Just doing paperwork.
It was something outstanding, like 6000 hours was spent just on paper and I thought, oh my goodness, that yes, that has to change. So tell me, how what features does your app have? Tell me, you know, for someone who is starting a business and obviously wants to build it to the point of success that you had, but doesn't want to fall into the same pitfall of becoming overwhelmed right from the get go.
Or if you are overwhelmed and you want to take that overwhelm away, what things does that app support? Yeah, I mean, so to touch on the point, you made a shoddy recordkeeping system, a shoddy systems in my business have cost me 6000 hours of my life. Now that's 6000 hours of my life I'm never getting back. That's 6000 hours of my life that could have been better spent improving my education. And growing social media presence. Tweeting more horses, earning more money.
However, success looks to you and whatever resonates with you, how you choose to invest time. I would just advise you to do it as conscientiously as possible. You know, we have a daughter now. We have a three year old daughter. And, since using aggregate in my own practice. So I'm actually able to, you know, I, I am a working mum. Yes. We run the app as well. And it's very important to say that we're only able to do this.
I say we because it's my self, Jen, but also my husband Steve, who is absolutely. You know, he's a force to be reckoned with. He's, you know, so supportive and so dynamic. And more often than not, when you, reach out to us as a company, it will be Steve who actually replies to you, because I, I'm in practice to several days a week.
But it's only since entrega integrating aggregate of a support system in my business that, you know, as a new mum that is running a business as well, I can come home from work and I'm completely present as a mum, and, you know, I'm able to keep track of everything that's going on in my business with, you know, piece of mind, but actually able to be present in the evening. That is, you know, feeling organized. That's such a gift. Right?
My own experience was, we call that raising your your child and work life balance. I called it the perpetual cycle of guilt. I always felt guilty that I wasn't doing more for my business when I was with my son. Instead of being really and truly present, and then felt guilty when I was at work that I wasn't doing more than my son like it was. It was really awful to be able to tune out. That is an incredible gift and have your life back. That, I mean, you can't you can't even put a price on that.
Absolutely. And the number of, our users who have become parents since using the app and the messages you had literally just fill my heart to the point of bursting, they go, thank you so much. I have, you know, the brain space now to be completely present in the evening with my daughter, with my son.
You know, I'm able to I'm here now watching them both swimming, at a swimming lesson and without feeling guilty that I haven't done all my recordkeeping because I've done it all whilst I was going through the day. So essentially, aggregate can be the key to you having your cake and eat it. You can have it all. You can have a wonderful, thriving practice where your clients get a really great experience of their appointments with you. You work speaks for itself.
It's easy for them to recommend you to other people you, mind. In your GDPR, you're making sure that your account is up to date. You, all of the the mechanics of running your business and have your spare time actually as spare time or time that you choose how you are spending it, not just, you know, being busy for busy sake or hand balling, you know, handwriting your reports, hand marking up diagrams, you know, the hand sending invoices or emailing things.
It can be so quick and easy through the day so that by the time you finished work, it's the work. It's finished. You know, live to know. Hold on, work to live. Not live to work, but to get that money right. Exactly. I did work, live to work for years, you know, learn from my mistakes. You don't win any points for being exhausted. And we say, you know, drowning in admin isn't a marker for success, but it is a market that you're missing a trick and you can't. It is optional.
And aggregate can take all of that stress away from you. So whether you are building a business and you just want to make sure that you are starting right, it's much easier to start right than start wrong and then have to change. And, you know, we offer aggregate for free for students for the duration of your study and for three months after graduation. Even if you are a new grad, you can reach out to us and would extend you that same three months, you know, period as a new graduate.
And that just means that you didn't fall into the pitfalls. You know, when you first start practicing, you have got enough to worry about remembering all of your training, all of your practical, you know, techniques, remembering to ask the right questions to communicate with your client, minding the biting and minding the kicking and actually getting paid at the end of it, as well as turning up on the right day, at the right time, in the right place.
You know, that's a lot to remember when you and your clients show up in the right time and place and making sure these remind, like the, the whole thing is a lot of, a lot of balls in the air.
You're juggling a lot of things now, and, and being able to do it during the day as you're going, I think to not only does it not extend your day, but it makes your record keeping, more accurate because the horses in front of you, the owners in front of you, and I find that also not having your head in the pen and paper, but having an app gives you the ability to be more present to your clients in the moment as well.
And, I know one of the things that's very exciting for me in your updates, I work in a lot of barns that do not have a cell service, do not have Wi-Fi. I mean, they're in a void where, you know, pen and paper used to be the only option, but, very exciting. You were able to make this work offline and still store things and then be able to pick up and send out what you need to send out and have those reports filed for people, which I think is, just the most incredible gift. Thank you for that.
Yes, we did make it offline. All of the features that we've built in aggregate, born from experience and it's this product was literally made because I spent 18 years doing the job that we're all doing. And, you know, I've found myself in so many of the same situations as so many of your list listeners will be in losing track of messaging because clients message you everywhere, suggesting where you've written somebody's appointment down.
If you haven't noticed, the year on to leap Year, February and March have the same days and dates so you could verbally agree with somebody to maybe be there on Tuesday the fourth and they're expecting you one month. You're going to expect to be there another month. Misleading reports, arguing with the printer. And you can guarantee that on your busiest day, when you're five minutes late to leave already, that's the day that your printer decides to stop working.
So you know you're heading out for the day with not enough paperwork with you. You know all of these things are born from experience. Yes, absolutely. We did. We've been working really, really hard, to get the offline functionality working. So at the start of this year, we launched offline mode, and we've got an update coming to improve the functionality of that.
So basically once you've, you know, booked your appointments in for the day, as long as you, open your phone before or tablet because you can be locked in on anything, before you lose signal, they just pause all of your appointment, data onto the phone for the day, and then it just queues all of the data so that when you go back online in the evening, then it just kind of uploads everything from there. So perfect. So perfect. Now, who is this for?
So if you were to write a list of people who, could use the app, you've got massage therapists, osteopaths, spoken therapists, saddle fitters, who who is this app for? I mean, we're running out of people that it's not for really. So chiropractors, anyone, any equine, canine or human or any animal, to be fat body worker.
So whether that is, massage therapists, physiotherapist, chiropractor, osteopath, bone acupuncture, ist, masters of method practitioner, cranial sacral therapist, any body work of any, any, any sort. We provide detailed anatomy diagrams, muscular, skeletal with a dorsal view as well. For the chiropractors, we have a great cranial diagram. We have all of the visceral diagrams for the osteopaths if we would like to work with those as well.
And what's more, you can, we provide you a resource library. Yeah. Now this you can use, to fill with your exercise videos so that you can be prescribing your exercise videos from there. But also if you treat any other animal. So we have a couple of practitioners that treat like exotics. You can upload any other anatomy diagrams, any other animals that you work on. And when I say we have somebody who does exotic pets, I think she treats like iguanas. Pigeons. I'll find oh no. It's incredible.
So she will upload her own anatomy diagrams. And again, just mark those up in the app. And, it is important to say we made this up so that I could use it. Now, I can barely copy and paste on a keyboard. I know a lot about working with horses, working with my hands, but I don't know anything about tech, so we need to make sure that this was super quick and easy to pick up. And the thing I stress, if you tried tech a couple of years ago, thought it was too complicated and didn't get on with it.
Try at quick eight because it is so much simpler and easier than other platforms have been previously. So yeah, any equine, canine, human or other animal practitioner, farrier, podiatrist, behaviorist, coach. You Krishnas. We have, a saddle fitter profile as well.
And we've also just launched it's called the Big Saddle Solution, which essentially is the largest Android tablet you've ever seen, which provides an A3 screen which runs the app so that saddle officers can complete digitally to scale on an A3 screen. Again, just helping us move away from paperwork. It is, the coolest thing ever. I encourage everybody to go on your socials and look at it. I mean, it blew me away. It is really the saddle fitter tool is so innovative. It is just it blew me away.
So if you guys, if you guys are, is excited about your business now, as I am, after listening to Jen and how she has revolutionized her business, I hope you're just as excited, about this app and what it means for you and for the business. Now, Jen, and I are going to extend something to you here. Now, as you heard, if you are a student, you do have access to this for the length of your studies.
If you are already in practice, whether you're starting out or you're feeling that overwhelm and the need to make a shift and have a better solution. And you want to try Aqua Gate. So Jen, correct me if I'm wrong. So you sign up, you get to try the, the app for one month for free. Yes, everybody. Correct. That's correct. Correct, correct.
And if you are interested at the end of the month in purchasing the app, then it saves all of the work that you've done for that one month and it continues on seamlessly. But if you would like to get a second month for free, then you can use the code Starline 40 at the end of your one month free trial to get 40 pounds, which is UK money. So that translates to a lot of money in Canadian and American money. So you will get that off the price of your, annual subscription for that first year, right?
So the month option as well, it's worth okay. You can do it monthly as well. So essentially it's a 40 pound value by getting that free month. And all you have to do is use the code Starline 40 when you reach the end of your free trial. So how do people find you on socials and how do people find and download this app? So aggregate is an app. It's available on the, the App Store for iPhones or, the Play Store for Android.
We also have a website aggregate.com which has a bunch of helpful information on there. So you can get an overview of how it all works. You can also find us on Facebook as aggregate, Instagram as aggregates. We do also have an aggregate users community on Facebook, which is a closed group, aggregate users. And we try to add some great value to help to support our users because, you know, it can be quite an insular industry that we're in.
You know, I can't remember the last time I saw another practitioner actually, in practice, apart from a CPG day. So we do try to have some really great people in to talk to us. We've just had, Katie Penn, the equestrian psychotherapist, came and talk to us all about imposter syndrome. And that was really, really wonderful. So that is somewhere that you can head to as well, but you can essentially reach us anywhere.
And like I say, a really, really key thing for all business is that there is always a human at the end of the message. You know, not being particularly tech savvy myself, the prospect of moving my business over to tech, I would find a little bit, you know, posting me a bit overwhelming. So I wanted it's it's one of our core pillars that if for me to have, move my business, I would want there to be a post on the end of the message. And that is the service that we strive really, really hard to do.
So whether you message us on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or from the help button in your app itself, there's always a human on the end of the message to help you with any queries that you've got. So it's all just to try and help you to be spending your time, you know, productively. It's an increasingly competitive industry. You know there are more practitioners than they ever have been before.
So as a way of helping you to, you know, invest your time wisely, stand out from the other practitioners in your area and just offer that bit better service. That's what we're here to do. I love that. And guys, I'm going to drop all of that information in the show notes how to reach aggregate. And also that shopping code. Very exciting. Thank you so much for giving everyone that. And Jen, thank you. You are an absolute inspiration, both as a body worker and as a mindset person.
As a business person. And your app has really helped thousands and thousands of people get their lives back and still do what they love at the level that they want to do it at. So thank you so much and thank you for spending your time with us today. I know you said time is valuable to you, so, I, I just thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
And I think you're doing a wonderful job of helping to support all of us because, like I say, it is a bit of an insular industry. We spend a lot of time kind of on our own. So this kind of support group that you've, you know, created, I think it's wonderful, Judith. Thank you. That means so many others, you know. Thank you.
And to all of your listeners who are, you know, doing the work, building their incredible businesses, I think the thing I would just say is whether you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're right. So get on top of, your mindset, how you're talking to yourself. You know, what you're surrounding yourself with because, it's amazing what you can do when you just adjust your self-talk, adjust your beliefs, and, you know, really focus on where you want to get to.
Because if I can do it, anyone can do it. So yeah, good luck to you all. Oh that's lovely. Thank you so much.