Our,’ Ten Minutes With,’ series of interviews gives businesses the opportunity to tell us how they’ve adapted in response to the Covid-19 crisis, what their experiences have been and despite a second wave looming what their plans are for business in the future.
This week we’re talking to the owner and founder of Positive Steps Physiotherapy, physiotherapist Lorna
Saunders.
What five words would you use to describe yourself?
- Enthusiastic
- Passionate
- Positive
- Empathetic
- Understanding
Tell us about your business?
Positive Steps helps and supports both children and adults across Staffordshire, Cheshire and Shropshire. We help children with a whole range of difficulties from mainstream aches and pains to extremely complex conditions.
We support adults with all forms of neurological conditions from people who have suffered a brain injury to those that need rehabilitation because of a stroke.
What did you do before launching your business?
In 1997 I joined the NHS as a physiotherapist and worked at the Royal Stoke Hospital before joining the
Community team, supporting special schools in the area.
I started taking on private work in 2012. Not longer after I left the NHS to work in private practice and launched my own company Positive Steps in 2017. We’re now a team of four and I’ve never looked back.
Tell us about your yourself.
I’m from Scotland originally and now live in Cheshire with my husband and two sons. I’m also a guide leader
and I’m as passionate about that as I am physiotherapy.
What’s the first thing you ordered on-line during lockdown?
We’re moving to a new house soon, so I brought a beautiful lamp in preparation for the move but unfortunately when it arrived it was way too big. I have now got an extensive collection of new cushions though much to my husband’s delight.
How did you cope in lockdown?
I was really overwhelmed at first – trying to juggle the business and home school two boys was hard. My husband had to shield too, which was difficult.
Once I’d got a plan in place for the business I felt better. It gave me a real chance to focus, introduce virtual sessions with our patients and I started doing Facebook Lives which were really therapeutic and definitely helped build the business brand.
From a personal perspective it was great. We ate as a family, spent quality time together and went for walks, which like may families didn’t always happen before.
Have you learnt anything about yourself?
I’ve learnt to be proud of myself and have realised how enthusiastic and passionate I am about my job. To me it really does matter.
My Facebook lives sessions got spotted and six months after we went into lockdown I was asked to speak virtually at a national physiotherapy event in front of 300 physios – something I am really proud of.
Are you going to do anything differently?
At the start of lockdown, it was stressful. The majority of our work is seeing clients face to face. Like a huge amount of businesses, we had to adapt and adapt quickly.
We relaunched our services on-line and thanks to Zoom we delivered sessions virtually, tailored to each client’s individual needs, whether that was setting them physical challenges to support their rehabilitation or
doing exercises with them.
We’ll certainly carry on with the virtual sessions. They’ve gone down really well with our clients. and it’s been
great to see how they’ve got involved.
We’re now at a level where we’re doing three days a week seeing clients in person and the other two days
virtually.
What are your plans for the future?
Apart from moving to a new house – the plan is to keep growing the business.
We’ll be keeping the hybrid model and combining our virtual sessions with face to face visits to clients.
I’ve spent much more time on my social media and getting involved in physiotherapy related on-line groups.
It’s really helped to build my brand further and establish new relationships. From a confidence perspective that’s helped me too so it’s certainly something I want to build on in the future.
And finally, what was your dream job when you were at school?
I always wanted to work with children or animals. A lot of my clients are children, so I’ve achieved that dream.
If you’d like to be one of our, ‘Ten Minutes With,’ interviewees find out more by dropping us a line at
hello@legspr.agency
