Do you really need another certificate, postgraduate qualification, or letters after your name? Before you can start a nurse preneur led business. Let's find out in this episode, you'll learn why chasing certificates can be a sneaky form of procrastination. The truth about what skills actually make you credible as a nurse preneur, and the one question to ask yourself that proves you already have what you need.

 Welcome to the Nurse Preneur Academy podcast, where nurses like you discover how to break free from the bedside and build a flexible, profitable business using the skills, knowledge, and experiences you already have. I'm your host, theam Caswell, an RN turn full-time six-figure nurse preneur. In 2021, everything changed for me in my career.

I left my senior nursing role to build an online nurse-led personal brand, one that gives me the freedom to work from anywhere, leverage the skills the hospital paid me to learn and create. Both the income and impact. I always knew I was capable of. Now it's your turn. I'm here to show you the possibilities beyond bedside and help you transition into a nurse-led business that fits your needs and life.

Whether you dream of working from home, earning what you're truly worth, or making an impact on your own terms. I'm gonna guide you every step of the way together. My friend will make traditional nursing as you know it, optional. Now, let's get down to it and let's build your profitable business.

  You see most nurse preneurs believe that they aren't qualified enough to stop. You're sitting there with the dream and a desire to have more freedom, more income, more impact, and you're convincing yourself ahead of time.

That you need another course. Maybe you need a master's, maybe you need to specialize with a postgrad or you need to do your coaching certification. NLP Reiki insert here the certifications that the algorithms are probably bomb bombarding you with. And the reality is this is a trap that so many entrepreneurs fall into and it's keeping you stuck, and it's preventing you from building the business that's gonna give you everything that you desire.

I want you to hear me when I say that. We've all been there, myself included, and in fact, when I first started my business, I did not have a certification. I had the skills that nursing had paid me to learn that allowed me to build a six figure business. Online. And so when people come to me and say, I just need another certification, I just need another qualification, that is a message to me that you are indulging in fear and procrastination, and there's this story that's running subconsciously in your mind.

You're telling yourself When I get the certification, then I will be ready. But here's what no one talks about. There are hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people globally that have certifications that aren't monetizing them. This certification does not unlock clients. No one in the history of my business has a Liam, can you show me that one?

You're a nurse. Two, that you have a nursing degree, three that you have a certification in coaching, NLP, life coaching, nervous system, trauma informed coaching. No one has ever on a sales call or webinar said to me, Liam, can you just clarify that you're qualified to teach this? I'm not saying that's a good thing, but if you're using certifications to stop yourself from moving forward.

You are literally doing it for no reason. There is no purpose to do that for yourself other than building quote unquote confidence. But I want to talk about that. So in business, what I want you to hear me say is, confidence comes from clarity and action, not from more qualifications, certifications. And letters after our name.

In fact, we have kind of got confidence all wrong. So many of us believe that confidence comes from competence, that the more we do something, the better we get at it. Therefore we will become more confident. And there is an element of truth to that. But confidence and the way that I teach confidence is that confidence is something that you generate and curate through your thinking.

If you've been around this podcast for a while, confidence is an emotion. It is something that we generate on a deep subconscious level through our thoughts, and so therefore, if you're telling yourself, I do not have a life coaching certification, therefore I cannot be a coach online, then you're obviously gonna feel under confident.

You're not gonna feel motivated to take the action you need to take to create the result of. Building a entrepreneur led business. So confidence starts in the stories that you tell yourself, okay? And so we want to tidy those stories up so that we can start to build more confidence with that needing the bit of paper.

And I really want you to be honest with yourself. How many of you have got the bit of paper or you've got a bit of paper in the past and you still don't feel confident? That is proof to you that the confidence does not come from the certification. It comes from the stories that you're running and the emotions you allow yourself to practice feeling ahead of time before you have the result.

The other thing I want you to hear is that your lived experience and transform transferable nursing skills, IE teaching, education, advocacy, problem solving, you name it, nurses are incredibly innovative and entrepreneurial in nature just by the work that we do. Those skills that you have personally and professionally.

More than enough. That is why I always say I built a six figure business with the skills that nursing paid me to learn. If I can do it, why can't you do it too? Everything that I generated my income with in building my career coaching business, cv, cover letter selection criteria, interview, I did not do a course on any of those.

I just had skills from nursing where I'd reviewed hundreds of them. As a nurse manager, as a nurse educator, I supported people in my job. And then my career coach said to me, Liam, why don't you use those skills online and build a business? And of course my brain is doing what your brain is doing right now, which is like, how could I, no one will pay for me.

I'm not certified. That is a prerequisite to starting your business. The fear, the drama, the doubt. Does not mean you shouldn't do it. It is a clear sign that you have a desire and that you should follow through on that desire and give yourself permission to work through the doubts so that you can build the dream and the desire that you have.

Okay? I always say there is data in your desires. Do not be a jerk and not give yourself permission. To follow through on the desires that you have because that is your inner wisdom. That is your intuition, that is your north star. And the longer you suppress that, the more you will suffer as a nurse in the system.

I know because I did it for 10 years. So your lived experience and transferable nursing skills are more than enough within your incredible experience, whether you've got six months, whether you've got six years, whether you've got 30 years. You and I will uncover together what that is that you can monetize online in a way that feels so good that you're excited to build a business around without a certification.

Now, the only caveat I will have to this right, is that I'm talking about non-clinical based businesses. Most of the entrepreneurs that I coach are not building and running clinical based businesses. I do not teach that. That is not what we are doing. We are building an expertise, knowledge-based empire where you can leverage the skills that you've learned personally and professionally to be able to build a business that makes nursing optional.

Okay? However, I do have some clients that have IV hydration businesses and aesthetics businesses, IE cosmetics, and of course it goes without saying that these businesses require certifications. Now. These are by far the most popular nursing led businesses because there's a perception that these are the safest paths.

And I will say, having coached nurses that run these businesses, there's a couple of things that you need to be hyper aware of. One, the certifications can vary dramatically in price, and they can cost you upwards of $3,000 up to above $20,000, depending on the provider. So it's a significant investment upfront, and they usually do not.

Teach you the skill of business, or they will brush over it and you'll get like a couple of classes, or you'll get a, a vault with some, DIY course materials that you can kind of go through. But their promise is training you to be an aesthetics nurse, right? Even if they say it's an all in one, typically that means they're gonna teach you the aesthetics or the IV hydration, and then the.

The actual business acumen side of it is kind of like very low level, very just like to get you started. So that's one thing you'll probably have to pay for a certification and then pay for a separate business container where you can learn how to build and grow a business. These areas are also hyper competitive and they require a lot of brand building, a lot of networking, and a lot of.

Cost ahead of time in the sense that you're gonna have to buy stock, you're gonna have to make sure you're compliant, are you gonna have to make sure you're compliant with Apple registry, like regulations around social media testimonials, and not only that, that you are compliant with, controlled drugs and managing all of those things.

So there's a lot to factor in, and when you start to peel back the layers of these businesses, they become more and more complex. Okay. So I don't say that because I think they're bad models. I just say that because they're hyper competitive. There's a lot of people doing it, and you, in order to be able to be successful, it's about understanding all of that ahead of time, that it's gonna take you time to build your brand.

And that most people do this. They get their IV certification or their cosmetic certification, and then they think about building a business. I would challenge you to build a personal brand first as a nurse, as a human. Creating content around things that you love and then can warm up your audience and then you can do that whilst you're getting your certification.

So you're technically building a bit of a business whilst you are getting your certification so that when you get it, you can hit the ground running, not the other way around. Okay, so certifications are of course required for IV hydrations. Uh, businesses and cosmetics, aesthetics. Any other type of business that you might be thinking about?

Like a coaching, a mentorship a breathwork like trauma-informed nervous system. Businesses like, yes. Having a certification is lovely 'cause it's gonna give you tools, it's gonna give you insights and knowledge and it will also make you more confident because your inner narrative changes. But it's because your story changes.

It's not because of the certification, right? It's because you start to go. I can deal with anything that people bring to me in coaching because I now have coaching frameworks. That is the shift that happens. So I want you to hear me loud and clear. You don't need another certification. You need a step by step business building roadmap.

You need to understand the steps that you need to take to be able to go from idea desire. Inkling of like, maybe I could do this. Because that's where everybody starts. No one has got it worked at, and getting a certification isn't gonna help you get it more worked at. In fact, it probably will make you even more confused because you're gonna be overwhelmed with the possibilities.

Whereas if we look at what you have already and we work with what you've got as you build and grow your business, that can evolve over time. For example, I just got started with my CV, cover letter selection criteria business. There was no trauma informed coaching, there was no mindset coaching. It was I will do your CV cover letter selection criteria and help you with interview.

And I gave them a bit of a pep talk and I gave them the tools that I had already learned in nursing, and that's what people paid me for as I built my business and as I had positive cash flow and I had income coming in and profit. I reinvested that profit into tools and certifications that made me a better coach, not the other way around.

Okay. Hopefully you can see that I learned how to build a business first, and then I used that money to buy the courses that I really wanted to do because I loved them. Not because I felt like I needed them, but because I loved the modality and that's where I did my life coaching certification. My nervous system, trauma informed certification.

And those I, I mean, I did other things, but I didn't love other things. I did like NLP, 'cause people told me to do it and I didn't personally love NLP. And maybe if I did it today, I would have a different approach to it. But those certifications, at that point in my business, when I was already hitting six figures, they added a new layer that unlocked better coaching, better experiences for my clients, better results.

Okay? But I didn't start there. And 99.9% of people don't start there either. So my friend, if you are sitting with an idea, sitting with a desire to build something in 2025 and beyond, and if you are telling yourself you need certifications, hopefully today, I've proven to you that you do not need anything more than what you have already.

You just need to give yourself permission to one, download my Bedside to Business roadmap. It's completely free. It's the exact process I take my clients through who are. Building nurse-led expertise-based businesses online with the skills that they already have. It's literally we have like a no certification policy.

Do not go and get a certification until you've downloaded that guide and you've looked through it. The link is accessible in my show notes. That's gonna help you understand the exact steps that you need to take before you even consider during a certification. Thanks so much for tuning in today. I will see you in the next episode.

And if you have any questions about this, hit me up on Instagram at the Nurse Preneur Academy.

 A pay rise bedside nursing could never provide freedom from hospital politics and the flexibility to work on your own terms without the shift work. You my friend, are one step closer to creating your bedside escape plan. I want to hear your insights, takeaways, and questions. Connect with me over on Instagram at Nurse Preneur Academy or email me at hello@liamcaswell.com.

If you're the type of nurse that's ready to explore your options for building a Northside business. Leave us a review, screenshot it, and send it to my email or my Instagram, and I'll send you my bedside to business roadmap, my step-by-step process to building a six figure nurse-led business as a thank you.

Until next week, keep dreaming big, take in bold action and betting on yourself because this is the year you make nursing optional.