Winnie Wu was doing everything right.
As a qualified physiotherapist with her own thriving clinic, she had patients who needed her, a team forming around her, and a vision she believed in. But she was also stuck in a business model that required her to trade every hour of her life for every dollar of her revenue.
And then two things happened at once: she fell pregnant, and the world shut down…
Here’s her story.
From Hong Kong to Sydney: a practitioner with a plan
The daughter of a psychiatric nurse and a firefighter, Hong Kong-born Winnie developed an early interest in movement, dance, and the human body. “My dad taught me discipline; my mum taught me empathy. Together, they shaped how I lead today,” she recalls.
She trained as a physiotherapist, moved to Sydney, and built up her practice. But the economics of healthcare – trading one hour for one patient for one fee – created a ceiling she couldn’t burst through, no matter how hard she worked.
She had ambitions. She had expertise. What she didn’t yet have was a model that could grow without her.
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Maternity leave, COVID, and a business that only ran if she did
While on maternity leave, with the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering clinics across Australia, Winnie wanted to ensure her business kept running – but every system she had required her hand on the wheel.
“Everything was done manually,” Winnie recalls. “I had to control so many relationships with different platforms.” Processing payments meant navigating Stripe links that felt clinical and impersonal. Selling courses or events through her healthcare CRM meant a checkout process with as many barriers as booking a specialist appointment – patients had to input details like they were entering a medical facility. She’d tried Humanitix and Eventbrite for event hosting, but they couldn’t handle digital courses or meet her requirements.
She was juggling platforms the way a new parent juggles feeds and naps.
The seven months that changed everything
This is the moment where most entrepreneurs either burn out or break through.
For seven months, Winnie sat in what she calls a “generative phase” – uncertain, dissatisfied, and searching. “I didn’t know what I really wanted, and I just felt dissatisfied,” she recalls. She wasn’t failing – far from it. But she wasn’t free to grow the business the way she wanted to, either.
The math was simple yet stifling. If every dollar earned required her direct time, that was a ceiling she couldn’t break through. She couldn’t be present for her newborn at 5PM if she was manually processing payments at 5:15. She couldn’t take Fridays off if every system in her business required her attention. She couldn’t grow beyond herself if she was the system.
“One of the things I really want healthcare to become is a hybrid health model,” she says. “In clinics, we don’t want to just provide one-on-one consultations – we want to provide group programs as well.”
But wanting it and building it are two different things. Group programs require infrastructure – a way to accept payments, deliver learning content, manage enrollments, handle payment plans, deal with international tax requirements, and automate follow-ups. Winnie needed a platform that could handle all of this without her.
This is the crossroads that many entrepreneurs in her position face: survive or break through. Scale or suffocate. Stay stuck behind a ceiling that keeps getting lower – or find the infrastructure to blow past it entirely.
For Winnie, she’d finally found her infrastructure.
By the numbers Two seven-figure businesses (Movement Laboratory and Papaya Clinic) |
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ThriveCart: the infrastructure that made the pivot possible
Since 2023, ThriveCart has been the engine behind Winnie’s entire online ecosystem – not just a checkout tool, but the system that made her business model possible in the first place. Here’s how it gave her back her time, her Fridays, and her life.
1) She can launch anything, in 20 minutes
Winnie runs what she calls “CEO Weekends” – intimate, high-touch events for fellow clinic owners. She’s hosted five so far, growing from 18 attendees to 60 at her most recent event.
“I use ThriveCart to sell in-person CEO Weekends at $1,300 AUD each, plus clinic owner retreats in Australia. I create a simple checkout page with the checkout at the bottom – all in ThriveCart,” she says.
The real unlock? Speed. “If I have a new idea that I want to launch, I can just put it into ThriveCart. Within like 20 minutes, I can actually start selling. ThriveCart is really simple and user-friendly. I have all these ideas floating around all the time, and if I want to test anything, I literally just have to create the checkout page, do a bit of a blurb, and there you go – I can sell it.”
2) Her courses run themselves with Learn+
Winnie’s flagship program, Set to Scale, is a four-month, 12-module online course that teaches allied health clinic owners how to grow their businesses and escape the “messy middle” – that grinding phase of being both a working practitioner and a business owner at once.
She launched it with zero email addresses on her list, one Facebook post, and made $27,000 AUD.
“I put all the training content in Learn+. I love the bundle option – I can create lots of different courses inside the LMS and have different offers. Different offers have different bundles, and I like the fact that I can quickly set up a checkout and then just give the correct bundle for the customer,” she says.
Her favourite Learn+ features? Conditional access and course bundles. “I can track progression or make sure people complete something before they get access to other things. With bundles, I don’t have to manually assign student access. That’s a big time-saver.”
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3) Her team trains without her
In addition to hosting customer-facing courses, Winnie uses ThriveCart to onboard and train the staff who work in her brick-and-mortar clinics.
“ThriveCart is our onboarding platform and team training platform because it’s such a good course platform. There are so many different components in it that I can segment different audiences for those courses. I like the fact that ThriveCart allows me to easily separate the course content for different businesses and audiences,” she explains.
4) Flexible payments, zero friction
Winnie uses ThriveCart’s no-code checkout pages to offer one-time payments as well as split pay options. “It’s great that you have the option of letting people choose the payment options in ThriveCart,” she says.
5) Global taxes, handled automatically
“Being in Australia, there’s a lot of GST that we need to charge, but I also have international clients – Canada, Singapore, the UK, and New Zealand. If I don’t use ThriveCart and just use Stripe, it becomes really hard for me to monitor all these tax rules. It’s really good with ThriveCart that handling tax is built into the platform,” she says.
6) More revenue from every sale
“I definitely use the ThriveCart upsell function. For example, if I’m selling an event, I can have a one-day option and then upsell it into a coaching option – people can have a one-on-one session with me after the event. And that does generate a lot of revenue,” Winnie says.
7) Automation she finally trusts
“ThriveCart is a really good platform because it has all the automations – abandoned cart, order bumps, upsells, downsells. I feel like I can just set everything up in there and then forget about it, and it will still run behind the scenes,” she says.
The result? “With ThriveCart, I love all the notifications and automations, and it links up to my email platform as well. Whenever there’s a payment default or any sort of notification, I get it straight away. I don’t have to worry about manually chasing people or doing all those things – which means I can get all that time back and focus on my family, holiday planning, and running all my businesses in four days.”
The results: freedom, scale, and a 10-year vision
Winnie’s success isn’t just financial – it’s about designing a life on her own terms.
Financial results:
- Movement Laboratory: Seven figures in 18 months – during COVID and maternity leave
- Papaya Clinic: Seven figures in year two
- The Clinic Project: Six figures as a “10% side hustle”
- Team growth: From 8 to 30 people in two years
Lifestyle results:
- Four-day work week (Monday-Thursday, 9 to 5)
- Fridays off for family time
- No weekend work
- Present for her two young kids after 5PM every day
“I have a very strict rule that I only want to work between 9 to 5. I do not want to work at night. Sometimes I have to, but I definitely do not want to work on Saturday or Sunday. Having good time management, being transparent with your partner, and making sure you plan things together – especially when you’re both business owners – means that we don’t have to bring work into Saturday and Sunday. I think that’s a great achievement because I know a lot of business owners basically work 24/7 and feel like they’re still not doing enough,” she explains.
And the horizon keeps expanding. “My ten-year plan is to run my businesses remotely, whether it’s my brick-and-mortar clinics in Sydney or my online business. I want to be like a nomad business owner, travelling around with my family and running the businesses, knowing that I have the tools and the people to hold everything together. That’s a big dream,” Winnie says.
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Advice for entrepreneurs: speed, simplicity, and big-picture thinking
We asked Winnie to go deeper into the secrets of her success, with advice for both new and
growing entrepreneurs.
What six-figure creators need to do to hit seven figures
Winnie is data-driven: “I work on projections. I work on what is the maximum capacity of what I can provide without hiring people. Or if I want to hire people, what is the maximum capacity of that – and I look at how I could maximize that,” she explains.
“Go back and have a look at your service suite – the ecosystem of what you’re providing – and make sure you have projections. Ask yourself, ‘If these are the products or offers that I have, how does this combination make seven figures?'”
Her advice? Instead of creating more products, dedicate your time to the things that will actually get you to your goal. “Have a very clear metric on how many people you actually need to enrol, how many people you need to sell to, how much ad spend you need to have. And don’t care too much about what other people are doing.”
On speed and decision-making
“The most successful people move quite fast and make really quick decisions. The decision might not be perfect, but the faster you make decisions, the faster you get the data. A lot of people sit in a perfectionist mode where they need everything to be well thought out, and all the funnels need to be prepared before they launch anything. So they waste a lot of time in that period, they gather no data, and they cannot make any decisions or pivot really quickly,” she says.
On the generative phase
“If you know what you really want, then just go and do it. If you don’t know what you really want, sit in a generative phase to figure it out. I sat for seven months when I was setting up my last two businesses – I didn’t know what I really wanted and I just felt dissatisfied. Once you figure out what you want, just go ahead and do it. Don’t procrastinate,” Winnie says.
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Final thoughts: building a thriving ecosystem
For Winnie, sustainable, scalable, seven-figure success is about building an interconnected ecosystem – not a collection of isolated businesses.
“The reason why I have three businesses at the moment is because there are industry problems. To solve those problems, I built a second business, and then to solve the other problems, I kept building other things around it. Your ecosystem exists so that it all makes sense and they’re all interwoven together to solve each other’s problems,” she adds.
If she was once the bottleneck in her own life, now she’s the architect of a system that runs without her – every Friday, every evening, every time she’s fully present with her family.
ThriveCart didn’t just change her checkout page. It changed what was possible.
Ready to build and scale your own coaching business? Join Winnie and thousands of other successful creators who use ThriveCart to power their sales, subscriptions, and courses.