Success Interview with Nikki Roy

Welcome to success interviews. These are where I chat to fellow female business owners and find out more about why they started their business and how they measure success. In this post, I’m joined by Nikki Roy from Body Mechanics. She is a corporate health and wellbeing specialist. You can either watch or read the interview below. 

Interview Transcript

I met Nikki back in 2019 when she was referred to me for some support and I’ve been working with her ever since. I’m really excited because I love how she’s developed her business over the last few years.

Why did you start your business?

It was a way for me to right what I saw as a perceived wrong from my own personal experience. I was working in sales. I was doing very long hours sometimes, there was a lot of travel and I injured my back. I slipped two of my lower discs, which anyone that’s experienced that pain knows, it’s quite something. 

I wasn’t able to work for six months and then two years later, the same thing happened again. This obviously caused a lot of disruption to me personally but also to my career and I didn’t feel at the time that there was enough support given to me that would allow me to stay in the workplace. That’s not necessarily a criticism of my employer, I don’t think corporate health and wellbeing was really a thing then.  This would have been 2009/2010 and they took issue with me taking time out of work to go to appointments. I  then had to find cover for my workload or stay late to hit deadlines. It became really contentious and pressurised. 

I thought this seems silly. There’s a better way of doing this, surely. So, I decided that I was just going to walk away from my corporate career and look at providing health and well-being services on-site. 

If I had access to a massage therapist, for example, just to give me half an hour, to ease that pain. I could have then stayed at work and carried on instead of having a couple of hours out of the day and then travel, parking all of that. I just thought start Body Mechanics, see if I can fill a gap in the market.  It’s going well. It’s been tough but I wish the injury had happened earlier so I could have had longer to do this. It’s been a blessing in disguise. 

How do you measure success?

That comes in two parts really. On the business side of things, the overarching success for me is having the autonomy and flexibility to do what I want to do when I want to do it. It can be as mundane as making my own decisions, setting my own schedule, working with the clients that I want to work with, that’s really key.  

It’s also being able to have that work-life balance and being able to travel, which I love doing. Taking time away and just working more flexibly, the conventional 9 to 5 just doesn’t work for me. I don’t like it so having that flexibility, if I’ve had a really busy week one week, having a lighter one the next. It just helps me personally stay on track. Then I feel like I can give more to my business as well because the energy is there. The focus is there. 

Then the flip side, success comes from being commercially resilient. I have had a lot of challenges and a lot of things to overcome and the fact that I’m still here and I’m still going, I take as a big success. So, I think being able to roll with the punches, being able to adapt, it’s not always easy, but to keep moving forward and just grow as a person and a business. I think that those are my success points. 

What one tip would you give to your younger self? 

There’s two actually. I think the main thing would be to just ask because I think we make lots of assumptions about other people’s perceptions of what we’re asking for and a lot of the time we talk ourselves out of things because we’re concerned about the response but I’ve always been pleasantly surprised with people’s responses and the things that I’ve almost dismissed entirely have actually come good.  

The other one is, don’t shy away from the scary or the difficult. I think they tie in with each other. Push yourself, you have to push your boundaries.  

When you do that, you get that commercial and personal resilience and you learn new things. You meet new people and it can only ever be a good thing. 

If they say no, it then gives you an insight. Are you asking the question in the incorrect way, it guides you as to where you should go next. 

Watch the Interview