105: Private Practice Sustainability: Profitability Creates Balance
How to Grow Your Therapy Practice
Growing your therapy practice isn’t–in my opinion–about moving into a group practice, 3x-ing your fees, or paying for ads. Growing your practice is about ensuring it’s full, and sustainable, and you have the inner confidence to trust that you’ll have consistent referrals when current clients graduate from therapy.
To grow your practice in this way, you need to be clear on who you serve, have a marketing method aligned with your values, and be charging enough of a fee to keep your practice in a place of sustainability.
Profitable Private Practice
Profitable private practices are businesses that have money left over after covering their financial obligations such as business expenses, payroll (including paying yourself!), and taxes. The formula to measure profit is quite simple: your business income (also known as revenue) minus your business expenses. Many private practice owners struggle to create profit and create a business that is essentially living client-to-client.
To create a profitable business, it’s important to ensure you are charging enough to sustain your practice. This doesn’t mean you have to leave all insurance panels or stop offering a sliding scale; instead, it’s about ensuring that your practice can afford to extend those financial discounts. Having three months of business expenses saved in a business savings account is a good starting point to help have enough of a cushion. To calculate this number, total your monthly business expenses (including paying yourself) and multiply it by three.
Balance In Business
Balance in small business or private practice isn’t just about how the company is doing; it’s about how well you are doing. As small business owners, we are our businesses. Profitability also means you as the private practice owner has more spaciousness and opportunity for balance. This means we need to be pouring into ourselves as much as we give of ourselves.
Some questions to ask yourself to assess how balanced you are in your business.
Am I . . .
Charging enough to take time off?
Nourishing myself with movement, food, and rest regularly?
Able to give back to my community in ways that align with my values?
Working a schedule that aligns with my energetic needs?
Outsourcing parts of my business that aren’t the best use of my skillset? (Think: billing, copy-writing, website design, etc.)
Pouring into other parts of myself outside of my therapy business?
My Successful Therapy Business
Having a successful therapy business is one that is sustainable and profitable. I’ve learned the formula that works for me, but I don’t preach it as the ONLY way to grow a profitable therapy business. I’ll share it here to give you a look at what works for others, to see which pieces might work for your successful therapy practice.
Money Mindset. Working on my relationship to money through my money mindset. For me, this is a blend of financial literacy education, sociological and historical learning and unlearning about money, and releasing money shame.
Fee-setting. Setting and adhering to sustainable fees. This meant for years that my version of a sliding scale was being on panel with one insurance provider, and having all of my other clients pay out of pocket. Now, I only do fee-for-service and I extend two sliding scale spaces to folks in financial need who are also of marginalized identities. I also raise my fees at least annually.
Passive Marketing. Having a beautiful and hardworking website that consistently drives aligned clients my way without the need for social media marketing. I use social media, but I use it as a supplemental place to hang out and connect with others–it is NOT my primary method of finding clients. To learn more on whether or not therapists need to be on social media, read my thorough blog post on social media here.
Reducing barriers for clients. Making it easy for new clients to book an appointment that doesn’t involve them having to book a “free consultation call.”
Boundary-setting. Setting and adhering to firm boundaries with clients. This means having time that I “clock out” of the office (even though I work from home), being clear on communication outside of therapy sessions, and liberally referring out for clients that aren’t a good fit.
Grow Your Private Practice
Growing your private practice in alignment with your financial goals, energetic needs, and values is the way to grow your business in a balanced way. It can be hard for therapists in social justice or of marginalized identities to find other private practice owners with similar lenses through which they view the world. In my five-month small group coaching program, we’ll find a sustainable way to set your fees, have a beautiful and hardworking website that speaks to your ideal counseling clients, and implement the foundations of values-based marketing. Learn more and apply to Grow a Profitable Practice From the Inside Out here.
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So last month's theme, we talked all about self doubt, we talked about it specifically through an episode on impostor syndrome, and then a separate episode on visibility and vulnerability. And this month for July, we are talking about balance. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how profitability creates balance and sustainability. And then later this month, I'll have a guest to talk about how niching actually helps with balance.
So as I said, at the top of this episode, we're going to cover private practice sustainability. And let's just think about sustainability outside of our practices and think about the way in which it shows up in other areas of our life. If we're thinking about the sustainability of our garden, I'm not a gardener so bear with me, we want to make sure that the soil is nourished that we're not planting too many things in one area, that we're planting things in alignment with the climate that we're in or the seasons that we're in, and that we are feeding it appropriately. And that allows us to till that soil and create regenerative practices there. Now contrast that to just putting in whatever seeds you have lying around watering it when you feel like it, going out of town and forgetting to water it, not you know tilling the soil, not feeding it, and your results are going to be very different. And so when we think about sustainability, in our private practice, we have to think as business owners about the importance of taking care of ourselves. Because as we take care of ourselves, we can pour into ourselves, and thus we are allowed to show up fully restored and sustainable. In our practice, I wrote an incredibly comprehensive if I do say so myself, blog post about whether or not therapists need social media and how a lot of social media is draining and extracting from us and of us, and how it can lead to more impostor syndrome and more feeling like we're hiding. So I encourage you to check out that article. If you're finding yourself feeling like that's something that you need, because in my opinion, it's supplemental or complimentary, but it is not necessary at all. So I want to talk about a couple of things that led me to view social media in a way of nice to have and not a needs to have in my private practice. So in February of 2021, for those of you who remember, I guess it was January. I am, as most of you know, I am half Filipina, and depending on the time of the year and the communities that I'm in, I can either pass as an ethnic white person, or it's pretty clear that I am Asian, but for a lot of my life I've been able to pass or get by. And that was a way to create safety for myself in many, many situations. And when everything happened in early 2021, with attacks on folks who look like me and look like parts of my family, it was no longer okay for me to align with whiteness in the way that I used to. And I really was verbal and vocal about the importance of, of being visible, being visible as a human who has a potentially invisible identity, or potentially ambiguous identity. And during that time, I was sharing a lot, not just about my experience, but I was also kind of standing on the privilege that I had as being able to pass and being really clear with people in my life, on Facebook and on Instagram. So people I know well, and people I don't know well at all. And it was incredibly hard. And that led me to dropping Facebook because I think on Facebook way more so than Instagram, people are much more comfortable just being blatant assholes to you. And so for my own mental health, I had to hit pause. Now back up to why the hell I was on Facebook in the first place while a business coach told me that I had to be and when I was starting out in my private practice business, I felt like I had to follow somebody else's lead. And prior to that I didn't have a Facebook account. It wasn't my jam. It isn't where I like to hang out, or maybe I hadn't I never logged in. At any rate, it didn't matter. The point is my soul. My intuition told me that was not a place for me, but I disregarded it. And I went on there because somebody else told me that was the only way to grow my business. So when I finally came to terms in February, March of 2021, that it was time for me to leave Facebook, it was such a huge relief. Fast forward a couple of months, I am burning out on the social media activism over on Instagram, I am feeling really drained from Instagram when at times I felt really energized by it and I felt deep connections with other humans. And so I deleted the app for like, a month, let's say.
And so why I bring this up is that after I deleted Instagram, which is where I have far more followers, or far more people kind of engagment than I ever did on Facebook, I thought great, my business is going to tank I'm going to lose out on potential clients, I'm going to lose out on potential coaching clients, this is going to be a nightmare, but like I have to take care of my mental health. So for me, it was like taking a step back thinking it was going to be a big blow to my business. Well, spoiler alert, my business did not suffer literally at all. Since summer of 2020, my practice has been full with a waitlist and then sent summer of 2021, my waitlist has been incredibly long. And at the time of this recording, I think there are 140 or 150 people on it. And trust me, I provide all the resources I tell people to go elsewhere. That's not the point of the story. The point of the story is, I didn't need Instagram to keep my practice afloat. And what that taught me was that these platforms that I did not really feel super aligned with, I got to decide how I wanted to use them, I got to decide whether or not they worked for me, I got to make the decisions about when and why and how I show up. And I felt much less beholden to them. And that realization, which some of you are like duh, but for me, it was a new realization, because I was new to the world of business several years ago. And here I am a few years in and I still have this voice in my head that in order to be successful, however you define it. In today's day and age, especially if you have a teletherapy business, you need to be on social media. And deleting Instagram for a month gave me the freedom and flexibility when I came back to realize like, Oh, actually I don't. So later on in 2021. I deleted it again for a month. It is currently July when I'm recording this, I plan on deleting it again, probably mid summer, and we'll just see how long I delete it for. But the point of these stories is not to say you should go delete Facebook or Instagram or Tiktok tomorrow, but you can if you want to; but it's to say, why are you doing what you're doing in your business? Is it because somebody else told you that was the only way to do it and you feel beholden to somebody else? Is it because you are fearful you are kind of in this space of scarcity that if you don't have it, then your practice won't be successful? So get curious about why you feel like you have to be in those places.
So let's shift into sustainability, right, the subhead here is profitability, creating balance. So let's talk about profitability. Profit, when it comes to your business, is income or revenue, minus expenses. And taxes, I would include taxes and your expenses. whatever is leftover is your profit. Just like if you're thinking of a household budget and your income minus your expenses, and you have leftover money, that's what we want at the end of each month, right? We want leftover money that we can put towards savings accounts, paying down debt, whatever your financial, your personal finance goals are, the same thing goes in your business, we need to have a cushion. And having that cushion does a lot of things for us. For a lot of therapists, they'll just let that cushion kind of sit there and never touch it. But you can use that cushion for many things. Right now, as the talking heads are telling us the sky is falling, we're entering into a recession, I think it's probably pretty wise to have a few months of business expenses in your business account as profit as a nice cushion in the event that you have fewer clients than you did in the past. I also think it's just good business sense to have a business emergency fund available in the event that you need time off, right. So that's one thing that it can do is it can provide a buffer in the times where we have fewer clients so we don't feel like we have to rush out and we're not entering into the space of trying to get clients from this frantic pace. But we can enter into it from this place of my bills will be paid. I do need a new client but I don't need them today or tomorrow. I can get them in two months and three months and it'll be okay. So that's one way that profitability can help to create some balance. But profitability can also create some balance in that it dials down that anxiety around our money and allows us to decide how we want to spend our time and how we want to spend our money because time and money are connected in that they are both exchanges of energy. No, I just went there. But let's just be really clear. When we think about when and how we spend our time we are giving of our energy to whatever task hobby chore we're doing. Same thing with our money we give of our money, or we get all of our money in exchange for our time. So they're all intersected here. So when we think about profitability, when we have leftovers, we get to decide how we want to use it in our lives to create balance, we could use that leftover profit to donate to causes that matter to us. I know right now, a lot of us are feeling extra heat with the many different SCOTUS decisions that are impacting our lives right now or will impact our lives in the future. For some of us, having that extra cushion gives us the spaciousness to maybe reinvest into ourselves. Maybe we reinvest in a yoga retreat, or a group coaching practice, or somebody write the copy on our website, maybe we reinvest into ourselves and into our business. Maybe we pay ourselves a little bit more, how about that? Maybe we pay ourselves a bonus. And all of these things, there's not one right or wrong way. But it gives you the spaciousness, you need to create balance, because when you are burned out, when you are burning the candle from both ends, you are not going to be your best self. So for me what has tended to work best going back to how I am getting clients in the door. And how that helps with my balance is I'm being really clear about who I see who I don't see. And when it comes to the marketing that I use, I think about what works best for not just my energy, but also what works best when I'm looking at my numbers. A part of profitability means we have to be tracking what's coming in and what's going out. So we know whether or not there's a profit there at all. And for a lot of therapists looking at the money side just brings up a lot of discomfort. And so I want you to get comfortable having a CEO date or a money date with yourself, where you can look at how much money's coming in how much is going out, making sure you can pay yourself a salary, cover your taxes, pay all of your expenses, and then start brainstorming what do you want to do with that profit? What do you want to do with that leftover money? And that can help to fuel you and invest in you, the therapist, or it can invest in other parts of yourself, you the caregiver, you the dog parent, you the artist, you the runner you the niece, whatever your other identities are, you can pour into yourself when you have that additional profit. So that's kind of what we want to be thinking about when we are working towards cultivating balance. And for some people, the word balance just doesn't resonate, because we think of balance as a 50/50. But I really kind of think of it as those old school scales where you have two, I don't know, they're like trays, and you have the weights on one side. And so on one side, you might have like five or six or seven weights. And on the other side, you have one weight, and they're balanced, but they're not 100% equal, in that you might have more of one thing and less of another but they even out. And if that doesn't work for you at all, then you can imagine music and think of harmony. Think of things that align think of things that fit into your values and into what feels best for you. And that's another way to cultivate balance in your business.
Let's talk about balance, though. Because obviously my business is called Mind money balance. So thinking about other ways that you are engaging in pouring into your own version of balance, I want you to take a look at how much you're working right now. You can hit pause, you can grab a sticky note, you can grab a pen and paper, you can get an Excel sheet out, I don't care however you want to do this is fine. Or if you're just like walking and you want to visualize it, that's fine, too. But I want you to kind of visualize an empty calendar. Just a week, a week of it Sunday through Saturday, actually, let's make it Monday through Sunday. That's just easier for my head. And I want you to imagine for every hour of work kind of dropping in like a token or let's call it a green token. And each green token represents one hour. So as you imagine kind of filling up your days, how many hours in your day are green right now? How many hours in your week are green right now? And then I want you to imagine the color blue because I'm looking around me and I'm surrounded by lots of greens and blues. And I want you to imagine the color blue, for restoration, joy and self care. I would count sleep in there, I would count eating in there, I would count movement in there, I would count sex in there, I would count anything that brings you joy, restoration and rest. And just imagine dropping blue tokens one blue token for every hour, again, into all of your days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday? And if you were to look at that, what is the balance of green to blue? What is the balance of work, output? Extending, giving? What is the balance of input that blue? Receiving rest filling up? And is that balance? Is that ratio working for you? And if it's not, how can we change it? How can we make it so there is less going out and more pulling in? That may mean you have to work less. That may mean you have to intentionally sign up for a dance class or a yoga class or a Couples Retreat, I don't know. But we want to get more comfortable instead of just extending out and pushing out in giving of ourselves also thinking about how are we regenerating? How are we cultivating sustainability for ourselves?
Okay, so I know this was kind of like a little different style of an episode for me. For those of you who have been here a long time, I'm a Virgo son. That means I like rules. I like guidelines, I like spreadsheets, but I'm also a Pisces Moon, which means I'm very into feeling into what I need, feeling into those around me; flow, right? Pisces is a water sign, right? So there's a lot of water and a lot of flow there. So I'm trying to kind of harness that today. Because I love me a spreadsheet, I really do. But sometimes it's more about feelings and emotions. And that's what this episode is about. And I want to invite you to just kind of reflect on a few questions right now, as you think about your relationship with your business, in your relationship with your practice. Are you feeling like business in therapy are in conflict with one another? Like, either you can be a therapist, or you can be a business owner, but you can't be both? And I want you to kind of think about why that is? Where does that come from? Where does that binary come from? That you can be a therapist, or you can be good. Or you can be a therapist, or you can be profitable? And what would it take for you to shift into both, and? I'm allowed to be a private practice practitioner who generates sustainable living, for myself and for my community. Because every time you have therapy, you are hopefully helping to heal in whatever way in whatever language feels best for you, your clients, so that they can have healthier, happier, more well rounded relationships with the loved ones in their lives. And that hopefully causes a beautiful ripple effect within your community. So every time you're giving of yourself in therapy, you're also creating this nice ripple effect, hopefully, in your community. And in order as you give of your time, give of your knowledge, give of your space holding, give of your care and compassion. Hopefully, you're getting something in return. And it's not just the feeling of doing good work. I love that. But also we live in a society that makes it necessary for us to have money for the things that we do. We have to make sure that energetic exchange comes back to us and we are pulling into ourselves or pouring into ourselves both financially, spiritually, energetically, emotionally, physically, however, you need to be restored. Okay? So I want you to think about that. Do you feel like you're stuck in this binary of I can be a therapist or I can make money? And if so what would it take to get to the both and I'm allowed to be a therapist who makes a sustainable living.
And if you're finding yourself kind of more in that first bucket of businesses bad, then it might impact other parts of your private practice. Like keeping yourself small, or feeling like you can't invest in yourself. You can only do free things. And I love a free thing. This is not me shitting on free things at all. But I want you to be really honest with yourself. Right? Like is chasing all of these free resources, actually moving the needle in your business? If it is great, I love that for you. Keep reading all of the blog posts, I've got a lot of good ones, if I do say so myself, I've got over 100 podcast episodes for you to listen to, I've got plenty for you that you are welcome to take important to yourself for $0. And if that is helping you move the needle on your business, then great. But if it is overwhelming you or you're struggling to implement, that might have to do with this fear that you're not allowed to invest in yourself. Other fears that might be coming up if you're stuck in this binary is that in order to be accessible, you have to charge as little amount of money as possible. There are ethical ways to extend a sliding scale in your practice, that doesn't mean that you have to become a martyr yourself to give up that sliding scale. Okay? This Binary of businesses bad and I'm a therapist also might be making it hard for you to pour into other areas of your life, it might be really challenging for you to reclaim your energy or to find your energy or to even allow yourself the space to take care of yourself. And if you're finding yourself there, I really do invite you to apply to my small group coaching program Grow a Profitable Practice From The Inside Out. Applications are officially open right now. And I will be accepting applications through July 14. It is a five-month program specifically for therapists in private practice, who work in social justice or are of marginalized identities. And what we will do throughout our time together is uncover where your money thoughts come from. And learn how to release them. The ones that don't serve you, in community with others without any shame. We will also learn how you can set sustainable rates, and that includes if you want to do a sliding scale, and stick to them so you can give back to your community and will allow you we will learn how to set sustainable rates and stick to them so you can give back to your community in a way that doesn't drain you. And we will figure out what are the ways that I want to market my practice and that I can mark it by practice that feels good for me remember the top of this episode where I said, I deleted Facebook for good. And now I give myself lots of permission to go away from Instagram as needed. Because my marketing plan really relies on this, hi, podcast, and also on regular blogging. And I know people like, blogs wasn't that 2007? But we talked about it because writing a blog post versus putting out 30 posts on Instagram, when we look at the amount of energy you're putting out versus what you're getting back. You have to decide if that works for you. And it's not about shaming you. If you want to do social media, I'm on social media, you know, it's not I'm not shaming you there. But it will help you dial down that anxiety around chasing shiny objects. And you will learn how to reclaim your energy. You will learn how to pour back into yourself you will remind yourself that to be a good therapist means to be taken care of. And giving to yourself the way that you give giving into yourself the way that you give to your clients. Does that make sense?
I hope that makes sense. Anyway, I'm kind of floating around here quite a bit that Pisces moon like I said, But if that sounds good to you, if you're interested in it, please make sure you head over to my website MindMoneyBalance.com/ProfitablePractice you can apply right now. And because I'm so adamant that websites and blogging or search engine optimization matter and are less time-consuming than all the other things that we're being told we have to do like Google ads and Facebook ads and tick-tock lives and YouTube lives. It's like shit, I don't have the time for that. I know you don't if you're here listening to this because I know if you're listening to this, I know my therapist runs--you're multitasking right now. You're probably on a walk, you're probably folding laundry, you might be driving to drop off a kid at swim lessons, like I know you I know you're trying to squeeze this in between other things. So anyway, the whole point what was my tangent was we don't have we have limited energy and limited resources is tech talking how you want to spend your time if yes, totally cool. If not, you don't have to truly and because I'm so adamant that having a beautiful and hardworking website matters, every single person who joins will get one of Monica at Hold Space Creative pre-designed Squarespace websites. You can check them out on her website and kind of peruse. You can look at my website. It's built on her Andrea template. I would love to have you!
Oh here's something that came up the other day I was on Instagram talking about this program and somebody said, What does it mean to be a therapist and social justice? Or how do I know if I'm a therapist and social justice and I thought, wow, we have started gatekeeping, who is allowed to say they are or are not in social justice. Social justice can mean activism, right? It can mean literally marching in the streets, calling your state representatives, making sure people are registered to vote, driving people to the polls, any of those things are absolutely social justice activities. But as therapists, a lot of us, if you're listening here, I imagine you and I have similar values. A lot of us believe that mental health is intersected with race, gender, religion, identity, politics, national origin, immigration status. And if you include those things in your work, then I believe you're a therapist who's in social justice. I also think you're in social justice, if you're working with neurodiverse, folks, and you're helping them to advocate to get the services that they are entitled to through the ADA. I also think you're in social justice, if you are helping couples stay together who are curious in dabbling in polyamory or who are ready to open up their marriage and would rather stay together than get divorced. I think you're practicing social justice there, instead of forcing people to stick in relationships that don't work for them. I also think you're practicing social justice, if you work with specific marginalized identities or clients, because the bulk of therapists continue to be white women, no offense to white women out there. But it's so important to have folks out there who aren't in that particular demographic, or who serve people outside of that demographic, right? People of Color, men, trans folks, just thinking about the ways in which you can show up and serve. That is social justice. So you don't have to be a therapist who only helps activists in order to be in social justice. Social justice is a broad term, and it just means you believe in equity, and you will fight for it. And we can fight for it in our therapy rooms. So I should have clarified that earlier because I forgot that somebody had asked me that question.
So anyway, I hope this episode helped you to kind of think about where you're in and out of alignment with your energetic needs and financial boundaries. And I hope it helps you to think about how can I grow my private practice sustainably? How can I start embracing profit as being the leftovers that I'm allowed to decide where those monies go? How can I grow my therapy, practice in alignment with my values, how much of my time is going out and how much of my time is I am pouring into myself? And I hope all of that helps you to start cultivating some more balance in your business. And again, if you're ready to work with me and a small cohort of other like-minded therapists, head over to MindMoneyBalance.com/ProfitablePractice and get your application in by July 14 of 2022.