Grace Lohrli: She was growing a business and a baby. We made sure only one of them needed her full attention.

Gabby Toro
May 21
5 min read

The story of a founder who was holding everything together and now has a strong backend that supports her business.

Meet Grace and Be Well

Grace Lohrli is the founder of Be Well by Grace: a functional health practice where she and her team help clients get to the root of what's going on with their gut, hormones, fertility, skin, and energy. She runs 4-month and 6-month programs, one-off testing, and genuinely life-changing work for the women who find her.

She's by far one of the nicest people we have ever worked with and her hear is SOOOO in the right place!

Oh... and she was 10 weeks pregnant when we kicked off.

Growing a business and a baby at the same time. No pressure.

WHAT WE FOUND IN THE AUDIT

When Grace came to us, she had 40+ active clients, two practitioners, a DM setter, an enrollment specialist, and a marketing manager. From the outside, it looked like a real operation.

From the inside, it was holding together with good intentions and a lot of open Notion tabs.

The business had real, undeniable strengths: deep trust-based client relationships, strong clinical outcomes, practitioners who genuinely cared about their clients, and a founder with a clear vision and sharp clinical judgment. Her clients loved her. Her referral rates proved it. Practice Better was working well as the client-facing hub.

But underneath all of that, the business was running on Grace's presence, not on systems. And with a baby due in September, that was no longer something she could afford to ignore.

Here's what the audit actually found:

The client journey had no structure. Onboarding was thorough but overwhelming lab instructions hitting inboxes before clients even understood what the program looked like. No defined phases or way for clients to know where they were or what came next.
Everything lived in parallel . Notion, Practice Better, Slack, and email, all running in parallel, none of them talking to each other. 40+ active clients with no single source of truth.
The team was capable but directionless. because of missing documentation and unclear ownership. Grace was the connective tissue between every person and every decision.
The financial and compliance side had real gaps. No W-9s, no NDAs, outdated contracts. Stripe and Practice Better completely disconnected, every single purchase entered manually by hand. An $80/month time tracking tool just to monitor practitioners' hours.
Practitioners were doing the wrong work. Skilled, experienced clinicians being paid hourly to do lab orders and data entry tasks that should have never been on their plates.
The risk was clear. One person holding everything together is not a system. With maternity leave on the horizon, the business needed to be able to run without Grace in the middle of every single thing.

The goal was to organize her backend and to build something that could actually hold with or without her in the room.

WHAT WE BUILT TOGETHER

We came in with one clear intention: protect everything Grace had built, and give it the structure it needed to grow without her having to hold it all.

Over 8 weeks, we gave Be Well by Grace a real operational home. Here's what that looked like:

✔The foundation - Migrated all 40+ clients from Notion into a custom-built ClickUp workspace : dashboards, capacity tracking, and sales data all visible in one place. Got rid of the $80/month time tracking tool on day one.

✔The client journey - Rebuilt onboarding from scratch with a clear program roadmap, defined phases and milestones, and an offboarding process that felt as intentional as everything else. Clients finally knew what to expect and when.

✔The tech - Connected Stripe and Practice Better so every purchase flows automatically. No more manual entry. Built a shared Google Drive, set up LastPass for the whole team, and got compliance in order : W-9s, NDAs, and updated contracts.

✔The team - This is the part we're most proud of. We built a system and the team around it.

Practitioners onboarded into ClickUp with clarified roles no more hourly admin tasks on their plates. Marketing manager integrated with a clear testimonial workflow and leads tracker.

Enrollment specialist replaced with someone more experienced who also took on the DM setter role. And we created a brand new role Program Ops Coordinator the first hire built entirely through our TBS training structure.

✔The leadership - Moved Grace from reactive to preventative. Set up a monthly leadership meeting connecting all departments, a biweekly admin cadence, and a monthly marketing sync. For the first time, no one was siloed.

The team had the skill all along. They just needed the structure to match it.

The Real Shift

Grace came in overwhelmed, pregnant, running 40+ clients out of Notion, with a team that had no real system holding them together.

She needed to know that when she stepped away to have her baby, the business would still be there. Still running. Still taking care of clients. Still moving forward without her hand on every single thing.

In her own words:

"Within just a few short months, everything changed. My day to day feels streamlined, my team has clear processes to follow, and I'm no longer stuck in reactive mode. I have the systems, visibility, and support I need to actually lead and grow my business."

And then this, the part that stays with us:

"This experience didn't just improve my operations — it gave me my energy, creativity, and passion back as a founder. I only wish I had found them sooner."

That's the shift. Not the software. Not the dashboards. The moment a founder gets herself back.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Grace left this process with a better backend. She also left with a business that could hold her through a pregnancy, through maternity leave, through whatever comes next.

And when we say left, she didn't really leave. Grace onboarded as a TBS Team Care retainer client. She's still with us. We're still building together. And that might be the best proof of all that this work actually works.

"Gabby and Manu are incredibly thoughtful, kind, and genuinely passionate about what they do. You can feel how much they care — not just about the work, but about the people behind the businesses they support."

"Working with Gabby and Manu at The Blissful Step has been one of the most transformative investments I've made in my business."

This is what The Blissful Step does. We build the operational backbone that makes it possible for a founder to step away, breathe, have a baby, and come back to a business that didn't fall apart without her.

If your business is running on memory and good intentions. We got you!

We can help with what comes next.