(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hey, our Live Ask Allison's are an opportunity for you to get free live conversational support from me. You're hearing an excerpt from one we did recently. I'll give you details on how you can join our next Live Ask Allison at the end of the episode. So I've talked about therapy notes on here for years.
I could talk about the features and the benefits in my sleep, but there are a couple of things I want you to know about therapy notes that doesn't typically make it into an ad script. First is that they actually care if you like their platform. They don't only make themselves available on the phone to troubleshoot so you don't pull your hair out when you get stuck.
They also take member suggestions and implement those that there's client demand for, like therapy search and included listing service that helps clients find you, internal and external secure messaging, clinical outcome measures to keep an eye on how your clients are progressing, a super smooth super bill process, real time eligibility to check on your client's insurance.
In my conversations with the employees there at all levels, they all really believe in their product and they want you to love it too. Second, they are proudly independently owned. Why should you care about that? Because as soon as venture capital becomes involved, the focus shifts from making customers happy to making investors happy. Prices go way up, innovation plateaus, making more money with as little output as possible becomes the number one focus.
With over 100,000 therapists using their platform, they've been able to stay incredibly successful and they don't have to sacrifice your experience to stay there. You can try two months free at therapynotes .com with the coupon code ABUNDANT. Well hi y'all. Today is just like full open Q&A, whatever you need. Like we can go all over the map from mindset to scaling to how to get your first client to whatever. So who would like to start us off? I can. Okay, great.
We'll go you and then we'll go Holly. Okay. So I was just listening to the podcast you recently did about whether to take insurance or not or just keep taking insurance. But it felt a little motivational interviewing, like a little bit. You know what I mean? Like it's okay, keep taking insurance.
And you had mentioned something about the confidence to market yourself and how it's important for therapists to be able to work through that if that's a little bit of a stumbling block or holding us back. And I was wondering some advice about that. Yeah. So this fear of being seen, it's a pretty big deal. And when we're starting our practices, we often feel like the imposter syndrome is really strong.
And so then it makes it really hard to feel like, great, let me put myself out there when I've got both these things going on. I'm not sure I even know how to do therapy or have ever helped anybody anyway. We can get really insecure when we're starting our practice or when it's plateaued and we need to build. And so part of it is acknowledging the imposter syndrome for what it is, which in my mind is like, it's you doing something new, period.
Every time I do something new, I get imposter syndrome every single time. At this point, because I like doing lots of new things, I'm like, oh, here it is. It's just because I'm doing something new instead of letting it take me down with it. The fear of being seen is sometimes rooted in that. And sometimes it's rooted in like, what if what I say I think is right, but it's not right. And everybody tells me how wrong it is. And I am.
And that's less imposter syndrome and more like, what if I'm actually wrong, which is scary and hard. And that could be anything. That can be the way you do therapy, but it could also be like the way you look. What if I do videos and everybody tells me you look stupid in some way, you know, and all of our insecurities are going to come up. They're just going to, um, when we're doing this hard thing.
So part of the thing that makes putting ourselves out there feel worth it is when it works and we get clients. But if we keep holding ourselves back and we don't just do the damn thing, then we don't get the opportunity to have that positive reinforcement for it. So long story short, the advice is do the thing that feels least scary consistently. So like, if that's networking, it's like find the least scary people to network with like old coworkers that you've got along with.
You don't need to go to like the scary psychiatrist or the scary PCP go to the people that feel like, oh, I can have an easy conversation with these people. And that's most therapists really. Not everybody's going to be a great fit, but I would say too, there's clarity gets in the way of marketing. So if you don't have an extremely clear niche, then it's really hard to create content. So of those things, like which one are you struggling with the most or something else?
Yeah. Um, I think, you know, the niche is one, and also I know it sounds weird, but also like believing that it will work. You know, there's this sense of like, what if I try all these things and I fail and I don't get any good results from doing all these scary things. Yeah, that's fair. Here's the thing though. People don't usually fail private practice if they keep trying.
Right now it's taking people a longer time to get full than it has in a really long time right now feels like, I don't know if anybody was in practice. Adam, I think you might've been in practice in 2020. But right now, these last few months have felt like April and May of 2020, when there was this collective breath holding and clients weren't reaching out and therapists were freaking out and then the damn broke. I don't know why everybody just broke at the same time.
I think we all just need to exhale. It's not like anything really changed in June, but that was probably the busiest summer. Many people have had in private practice. And I think for a variety of reasons that I can speculate on, there are a lot of reasons people are holding their breath and not spending any money right now. On therapy, I think there are some people who are also just kind of afraid of being cracked open when they feel vulnerable and scared.
And I think that there will be a similar exhale. It might not be quite the intense one that we had in 2020, but what I'm seeing is some people getting like they're working, they're doing the right things. And because it's not happening as quickly as it has for their friends who started practices two years ago, they're like, maybe this isn't for me and I should just stay in my job. And that's the last thing I would rather you work slow and steady.
You don't have to go super hard, but like slow and steady to get where you want to go. Because if you keep doing like whatever marketing strategies you're doing and you're doing them the right ways, you will get full. It'll happen. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for starting us off. I see Holly, you were next. I'm realizing that my ideal client has shifted from when I first developed my ideal client. So my niche is anxious, overwhelmed millennials who struggle with their self-worth.
Um, I think even more niched down is that that comes from their religious upbringing, not necessarily trauma in like a big way from, you know, like a cult or something, but just purity culture and women's roles in society and things like that. So that one more layer of specificity. Um, and so I'm wondering how I should incorporate that into my marketing. I feel like I don't want to redo my entire website because I just did my entire website.
Well, I moved it from Wix to Squarespace and did some revamping of it, but I don't know, should I add it as an extra specialty? Like right now I have anxiety, self-worth and EMDR specialty pages. Like, should I add a religious or spiritual trauma? The problem with that is that, um, my ideal client doesn't label it as trauma. So I don't want to use that word.
Another thing I've been playing with is like religious or spiritual deconstruction, possibly, or since my ideal client does have this like religious upbringing component, should I redo how I present my marketing on my website and obviously other everywhere else too? Well, everything else is the same about your niche, right? This is just a layer underneath. So I think you can keep the vast majority of your website up because what they're looking for is the same, like it's the self-worth stuff.
They're not necessarily, if they're not identifying it as trauma, they're not yet making that connection probably of like, I need to divest from some things that I was taught in order to be able to feel like wholly human. And so I think in that case, you could do a specialty page and maybe it also depends on your ideal client. Are they still wanting to be of the faith they were raised in, just like a different denomination or flavor or what have you?
Or are they like, I want nothing to do with religion. I'm like, where are they with that? They want to figure out how to continue incorporating faith into their life, but figuring out what they want to bring forward and what they need to leave behind. Got it. Okay. So then the deconstruction and the word divesting probably aren't the ones to use either.
Okay. What you could do is on your homepage, you could either do one paragraph or you could do like a couple sentences on a couple of paragraphs that already exists on your website that say something like many of my clients realized that some of the messages they were given in their religious upbringing no longer fit.
They're still people of faith or they're exploring their faith, but they find that some of their self-worth is rooted in this idea that they were supposed to play these specific roles, which don't feel aligned for them. Okay. Yeah. So just adding that layer of specificity to, I think, probably my homepage, but as well as my anxiety and self-worth pages. I'm just finishing up a blog about EMDR where I do weave in the religious upbringing stuff into how I'm explaining it.
So probably adding that to my EMDR page as well. And then not necessarily, I guess, maybe I need to decide for myself if I want to like separate it out as its own specialty or just keep it as part of the history and cultural context of my ideal client. Do you think it, or how would, how would I decide if I want to have add another specialty? I think it's like, is your ideal client looking for that? Is that what they would search up?
Is that something they've already identified is causing some of their turmoil? Or is that something they come to and exploring things more deeply with you? My ideal client already knows that that's part of the problem. Then I would definitely have a specialty page about it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like that distinction, I like your confidence and saying like, you're really clear.
Cause what we often do is hedge and we're like, well, my ideal client knows, but there are all these people who don't know. So I'm not, I don't know if I should, right. If your ideal client has a clear perspective, I want you to mark it to that clear perspective. So awesome.
Yeah. So I would do a specialty page and I would link to it when you mentioned these folks in your homepage so that you've got those links throughout your website that go from, go from page to page, each other, you know, make it a little spider web makes Google happy. Okay. I have not done that. So I will do that. Yeah. So you can do that with your self -worth pages too.
And you can also do it between your specialty pages of like, sometimes this impacts self -worth on your religion page and vice versa. So. Okay. Yeah. That's helpful. Thank you. Absolutely. Good to see you. You too. All right. We'll go Evelyn and then Sarah. Hi. Hi. So it's my first time here. I'm so excited. I've listened to so many, so many talks and like, like episodes, but I don't know exactly what to ask, I guess, because I'm stuck. So I just want to describe it really quickly.
So I'm in group private practice right now. I'm a contractor and I want to build my own thing, private practice. And I'm kind of like in the middle. I did a lot of research on like how to start. Like I've done it, created spreadsheets and everything. And I don't have any new clients coming in for a long time now. Group private practice is like not doing anything at all. And I'm, I'm only teletherapy. So I don't even use their office.
So I, and I don't have like that chunk of money that I calculated to start, you know, kind of like just like, like take off. Right. So, and I have some clients who might transfer, but it's only like three. So I don't know, like, am I gonna, do I just sit and try to save money, which is like minimally coming? It's coming like almost nothing. Cause I only have like five clients, which is ridiculous. Like, so I don't know. I don't know any ideas or how to just proceed or not proceed.
Are you, have you signed anything that says you won't start your own practice while you're working at the group practice? Uh, I don't think so. It's been so long. It's been like 2017. Okay. She's fine. My, my boss is, is fine. Okay. Well, and you're a contractor. So legally you're supposed to be able to have another job. So, um, they can't actually limit you from that actually. So what I would do is start your own practice on the side while maintaining your group practice.
If they're not feeding you clients into the group practice right now, you've got the time and energy hopefully to be able to start your own thing without significant investment. Yeah. Isn't that going to be like a conflict of interest? Because I didn't tell her that I'm starting. I will obviously have that conversation one-on -one once I'm ready to launch. Cause that's the right thing to do, but not yet.
So, so it's just like, if, if she sees like, oh, my new website, if I get the money to launch a website, but like, it's just, I don't know, it can get messy or I don't even know. Well, I mean, as a contractor, and this is, this is a thing where so many group practice owners, they want employees, but they don't want to pay the taxes on employees. So they hire contractors instead. And then they get all up in arms when a contractor behaves as a contractor does, which is to have multiple gigs.
So, I mean, you can have a really frank conversation with her and say, I'm not able to get enough clients through the group right now to sustain me. So I'm going to be starting my own practice on the side. Mm-hmm. And you can just have a really open conversation about that, or you can just start, you don't owe her an explanation of what you're doing. That's not the nature of your legal relationship.
It might feel better interpersonally to be talking about it, but you don't legally owe that to her. So, yeah, I would start your own thing on the side. I would really market well. You said, if you could get enough money to get a website together, you can do it for $20 a month on Squarespace. Squarespace. Yeah, I heard that you recommended that. So I'm really looking into that. But I know I need to have simple practice. Then I need a physical address.
Then I need so many things that are mandatory, like liability insurance. And together, it just turns out, I don't know, $700 at least, which from the top, I don't have that. Right, right. So I did not grow up with a ton of money. So right now, what I always do is I look at like, okay, well, what's my mind now goes to, okay, well, what's the optimized situation for, say, having a landscaper come and fix the yard or something. But then I go to what is the I'm broke version look like?
So the I'm broke version, like, let's say you do have a virtual practice. So you don't need a physical address. You use one of the EHR systems that is not as expensive, or you do paper and pen. You don't have to use an EHR. As long as it's behind two locks, like a door and a filing cabinet that are both locked, you're good to go. So you can be old school from a from a records perspective.
I do strongly recommend a practice management system once you have a few clients because things become chaos quickly. But you can start off and get to a point where you can afford to do that. Yeah, you need to pay liability insurance. But as a sole proprietor, that's going to be a lot less expensive than if you were an LLC, you don't need to be an LLC right now. So there are all these like, if you absolutely had to start now, how could you do it the most bare bones way?
And if you're keeping your group practice job, then you're able to continue to have at least the income you've got from them. And then every single dime that you make from your own practice, I want you to sock away, like don't spend it on anything except overhead and then savings so that you can eventually make that shift over. Okay, thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you so much for these ideas. Thank you. All right, Sarah. Hey, thanks. So I am new to private practice.
I launched my practice about three months ago after 15 plus years running treatment centers and so needed to make a change. And I'm loving it. And it's all the things of starting now. And so I have kind of a two part question. So I am private pay, fully virtual in North Carolina, eating disorders therapist. Love it. Hello. It's my twin. Hi. Within that, the population I love most are the clients who have gone to treatment, done the things they could teach you DBT. They know all the skills.
They need more. They would be in that bucket that many folks might call chronic or severe and enduring. That is who I love to work with. And so I know the eating disorders therapist. I know people I am struggling to figure out how best to kind of market that specific nitric in front of those particular clients. And then I think in parallel to that, many of those clients have sunk a lot of financial resources into treatment.
And so as a cash pay therapist, I'm trying to figure out how to either think about what some sort of reduced rate model looks like, or if that's not really the way to best reach those people and serve them. And so I think I'm trying to figure out how to best reach that particular niche in my niche and be financially successful for myself as well as financially achievable for clients, which feels like a big question. I'm curious for your thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. OK.
So the fact that you work with the more chronic, the harder clients, we'll just call them the harder clients because they are. Most of us in the eating disorder world, we would like to stay more in the disordered eating and mildly, but I don't need to go to treatment population. You are who we all want to know. OK. So I want to be really clear that you're not stepping on any toes networking with other eating disorder therapists and saying, I love the ones nobody else likes to work with.
Like, I want the folks who've been to treatment four times. I want the ones who can tell you about Marsha Lanahan's entire life story and how to do DBT backwards and forwards, but can't seem to make it happen in their lives. Like, those are my people. Talk to all the treatment centers because they have their frequent flyers. They have the ones that maybe they've only been here once, but they've been everywhere else twice.
And they really want them to land with somebody who isn't intimidated by their struggle. OK. So a so much of what's going to bring people into you is going to be networking. OK. And you got to be super explicit about loving the hard ones. OK. In your website copy, I want you to be so like you've been to therapy. You've been to treatment. You could teach me how to do therapy. I have no doubt. And your life still sucks. And it's this is still driving you.
But lucky for you, I know how to help you get where you want to go. And so it's instilling confidence instead of them seeing like yet another therapist. It's helping them trust you before they even take the step. OK. You're going to get so full, Sarah. I'm going to get so full. And for the financial piece, let's talk about that, because that's very real. And if they can continue to pay these treatment centers, they can pay you.
OK. And so it's not sacrificing your financial well -being for people who would find some way to make it work if they had to go back into residential. OK. Because you're going to keep them having to go back into residential. Ideally, like that's the goal. So keeping your private pay model, I will say if for those of you who are interested in like sliding scale, a model that is new to me that I've learned through some of my students is the green bottle model. Where is that? And it's interesting.
It's basically like if you offer sliding scale, it has three different. I don't know why it's called the green bottle model, but three different green bottles. And it's basically like, you know, if you can go on vacation once a year, if you can do X, Y and Z, like you're in this bottle over here. On the other side is like there's no way you could grab a coffee from Starbucks on your way to somewhere like that's just not able to happen.
You're often worried about making your rent or your mortgage. You don't have a car or if you do, it's breaking down a lot. Like it's the people who actually really, really need sliding scale. And I think the beauty of that model is that when you show that to a client, they realize, well, yeah, I do get a Starbucks every morning. You know, I do X, Y and Z. I do have hobbies that I can afford to pay for that. If this is my priority for a time, I can pay for therapy out of pocket.
So it kind of helps them see that, well, it might not be comfortable and there will be sacrifices. They can pay your fee. That is one way to make it work. But this is, you know, this is a population who's likely relying heavily on parents, on partners, on other people in their lives who are helping support them. And so everybody in the whole situation wants this as resolved as it can be.
And if you can show them through your confidence and through your competence that you can make that happen, then they're happy to pay you. Residential is way more expensive than you are. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Who's next? I do have one quick question, Allison. Yeah, of course. So I have considered going up on my rates a little bit. I'm currently at 160 across the board for all of our therapists. And my therapists don't mind me setting the rate.
I've thought about going up to 175. I wish I had done that when I increased last time, but I didn't. So I've wanted to honor that. The problem that I'm running into is this kind of, it's not my scarcity mindset as much as the scarcity mindset of potential clients because of the climate that we're in politically and all of that where everything's more expensive.
And I don't know if this is the right time because I'm not personally scared to go up on rates as much as I want to make sure that it makes sense for the environment that we're in. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so to me, my thought is like, I appreciate you wanting to be very accommodating of clients, but everything is more expensive for all of your therapists and for you too. So if y'all can make a little bit more, because typically the people who can afford 160 out of pocket can afford 175.
And if therapy is a priority, which often if you're paying 160, it's a priority, then that extra $15 is doable. But I don't want you to sacrifice your therapist's financial wellbeing and your financial wellbeing because things are crazy economically. So yeah.
Matter of fact, I'm not sure how to even figure that out because if people really are kind of struggling to even get the 160 and then we bump it to 175, I'm afraid of potentially losing a few, which I wouldn't mind if it was just me, but I'm also considering the other people involved in this. Yeah. Well, you could do something like, because since it's private pay, like these folks are, you can do what you want. It's your practice, right? So you can say, you know, we're raising our rates to 175.
If this creates significant financial hardship for you, let's set up a time to talk. And then if they're like, I'm barely making 160 work, you can be like, no problem. We'll keep you at 160. Yeah. That's cool. You don't have to unilaterally raise everyone. It's your practice. You can do what you want. So, but there are people who are like, I mean, it's fine. Yeah. 175, I can do that. And so we don't want to make assumptions about them that are going to make it harder for you.
We've literally had some clients that have said, I don't know why you don't charge more. Right. Yeah. So I think it's safe. I think it's safe to go up. And then if really it will cause hardship, do have them have a conversation with you about it. Don't just be like, email me and let me know, but say like, let's schedule a time to talk on the phone. Because the people who were like, well, it'd be nice to not have my rate changed. Aren't going to hop on the phone with you.
They'll just pay the 175. Right. But the people who were like, oh God, I don't want to lose my therapy. They'll hop on the phone with you. So, all right. I appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely. We'll wrap it up then. Thanks for being here. I hope that you got some good value and I will talk with y'all later. Thanks for listening in on a live Ask Allison sponsored by our friends at TherapyNotes.
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