We were lucky to catch up with Katie Peters recently and have shared our conversation below.

Katie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

When I attended physical therapy school, pelvic health wasn’t a course offering. We had a one day inservice on the topic and I will never forget that there was one girl in our class who was interested in pursuing pelvic health… and we all thought she was crazy! I stated my career as an orthopedic physical therapist. A few years in I sustained a very stubborn hip injury that traditional physical therapy wasn’t fixing. One of my co-workers urged my to try pelvic floor therapy as a solution. After a while, I begrudgingly went. After the first session, my hip pain had improved, I could move better and had a major change in symptoms. This is when I realized that I had been doing so many of my patients a disservice. There were so many patients with hip and back pain that no matter what I did, I just couldn’t get better.

I pursued my pelvic health education through Herman and Wallace and quickly changed practices and began my career as a pelvic health provider. After having my first son in 2019, I learned the value of pelvic floor therapy during the perinatal season of life.

I started BeachMama Wellness in 2020, inspired by my own birth experience. Any person who is pregnant for the first time really has no idea what to expect. Advocating for ourselves is intimidating and frankly, what the heck do we even advocate for? Is peeing your pants normal just because you’re pregnant? Is there anything I can do for my breech baby? What is it like to be immediately postpartum? How can I improve the way my body feels and optimize healing. These are all questions that most OBGYNs don’t answer or even skim the surface on. There is a major lapse in care when it comes to Women’s health and our goal is to close the gap. BeachMama Wellness exists to make you feel confident, empowered, heard and taken care of whether you’re pregnant, never been pregnant, postpartum or even going through menopause.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

BeachMama Wellness is a women’s health practice specializing in pregnancy, postpartum and beyond. We treat common pelvic floor symptoms such as incontinence, constipation. prolapse, painful intercourse, diastasis recti abdominis, pubic symphysis pain, low back pain, etc. We offer prenatal treatment plans to optimize your birth and recovery as well as birth preparation sessions for women and their partners. Our goal is to see every postpartum woman at 6 weeks post birth whether they’ve had a vaginal birth or c-section so they can have a better understanding of what is happening in their body, what is normal and what is not, and how they can integrate safely back into sex, exercise and more.

BeachMama Wellness is a practice full of moms. Between the 4 of us, we have experienced infertility, loss, pregnancy, vaginal births, c-sections and lots of postpartums. When we tell you that we understand, we truly understand. We are right there in the trenches with you every day. This is what makes us great pelvic health therapists and one of the reasons we stand out from the rest. When a person feels heard and seen, feeling better is much easier. With our business model, we get to spend 90 minutes with you on that first session. That means we have time to sit and hear your history and what you’ve been through and where you want to be. We connect with our women and that really does bring us so much joy. Our follow up sessions are 60 minutes 1:1 which means that each session we have time to assess where you are that day, the progress you’ve made and what your body needs in that session. We have time for hands on treatment, education, conversation and therapeutic exercises. The BeachMama Wellness experience truly is unique compared to other practices.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Throughout the process of building BeachMama Wellness, I have had to build a streamline of referral sources as referrals are how I get 75% of my business and patients. One would think this would be quite easy in healthcare; you go market yourself to the type of physician that you want patients from and voila! Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case in a pelvic health practice and especially in a pelvic health practice that is also cash based. I would estimate that about ninety percent of my referrals come from word of mouth or less traditional referral sources such as doulas, chiropractors or other people working in the birth and women’s health world. This process has taken time and patience but we have been able to build a reputation in this women’s health, South Bay world of giving quality care, hearing our patients and treating with empathy, knowledge and empowerment.

Throughout this process, I have given away more free sessions than one could imagine. But I know that if I can show just ONE person what we can do and how we do it, they will fall in love with our practice. And it works. How can someone refer one of their clients to us if they have no idea what we do? Our best referral sources are our believers; people who have benefited from our care and techniques and want to make you believers too. We are so lucky for our network of women, patients and local birth world as they have truly helped to build BeachMama Wellness.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Managing a team, including myself, has been one of the hardest parts of being a business owner. I am constantly learning on the fly, improving how I manage my other therapists, how I communicate with them and trying to do better. I have never had a business before and this is all new to me and there is constantly a learning curve. My advice would be give yourself grace, learn from your mistakes and improve upon things when you see the need.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.beachmama-wellness.com
• Instagram: @beachmama_wellness
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeachMamaWellness-rb

Image Credits

Chloe Moore Photography