Scaling a Group Practice While Being a Mom with The Entrepreneurial Therapist [Ep 58]

Hello and welcome back to the thriving Therapreneur podcast. I'm your host, Carly Hill, and today I have a very special guest joining me. She is a therapist. She's a mom. She's a podcast host. She is also a business mentor for therapists. She's known across the industry as the entrepreneurial therapist. Maybe you guys have heard of her. Welcome, Danielle, to the show.

Thank you, Carly. I know we've been talking for many years, so this is really cool to actually be on your show and be able to talk to you in this way.

Yes. I admire your work. I think a lot of people would think we're kind of competition in one way or another, but I really hate that word. And I think that anybody who is on the same mission as me to help therapists grow, have freedom, have flexibility, have security in their life, impact more lives, you are in my corner. I admire you and our work. We were just talking off recording overlaps in a way, but also you specialize in helping therapists grow their practice, scaling to a group practice, possibly creating courses as well. So let's start with an introduction first, and then we can get into what it takes to scale as a therapist. So go ahead. For anybody who's listening, who's maybe never heard of you, give us a little bit of background of how you even got into this work.

Yeah, I mean, it's really cool. I actually wish there was more of us, like, doing this kind of work. You know, I. I really respect your program and what you're doing in helping therapists, and I do believe there's going to be more of us moving forward as online platforms continue to grow. And so I just love the collaboration that we have on things. So for anyone who's never heard of me, you know, I started out in just solo private practice and pretty quickly realized I wanted to scale beyond one to one. I got pregnant with my daughter. I didn't feel that good first trimester, and I realized it was hard for me to do more sessions when I was super nauseous and tired. And that was the first time I hit that plateau of like, oh, I'm not going to make more money because I'm not in the chair doing sessions. This is going to continue to be a problem throughout motherhood, throughout different life events that were going to come my way. So that was the first aha moment of I want to do more. I'm also a very creative person, and I just knew I was going to be an entrepreneur, even pretty young. So I just loved the idea When I was listening to other therapists and there weren't many at the time who were doing like online courses, group practice work. And so my first revenue stream was hiring an associate to come into my practice and see clients when I wasn't able to see clients. And that went well. And then I started an Instagram account called Entrepreneurial Therapist and I literally just started teaching, like on stories and on posts. This is before there was even reels about what I was doing. And I really attracted. My main goal with starting that account was to attract a community of therapists who were ambitious and who like wanted to get excited about the same things I did, like how I plan my week, the books I'm reading, how I can build my business in a way that aligns with motherhood, because that's always been a big thing for me, how we can align it with freedom and flexibility. I was finding a lot of accounts and I'm sure you've seen this Carly, where it's very like bro hustle culture and they're like very successful entrepreneurs are like these men flying on private jets and waking up at 4am and doing cold plunges and I'm like, cool. I am like up at every two hours nursing my baby. But I still have these goals to build a business. So I wanted to find people that were like me, that were still achieving big things and that I could identify with. And in the process, I was really lucky to build a community of other therapists that were following along. And thus Entrepreneurial Therapist was born from there. So that's, you know, that's where a lot of my revenue streams are right now, where I do coaching, similar to yourself, mentoring of other therapists. And it's just been a really cool way for things to blossom and creating a platform where I get to connect with people that I literally would be friends with in real life and I get to talk about their business with them. And it just brings me a lot of joy.

Yeah, it's such an honor to do this work. Truly. I'm curious, what are some of the habits that helped you stay grounded and organized as you grew, especially as a mom? Because I am in the thick of motherhood now with a four month old and the lack of sleep and I could talk about the habits that I have developed. And I, I've often said on the, the last, like few podcasts, what the hell did I do with my time before I was a mom? Because now I am so much more conscious and productive with my time. But a lot of the listeners that I'm attracting now are moms. I know you said there's a lot of moms in your audience, but even if you're not a mom, right. We're all busy. What are some habits that have helped you stay grounded and organized?

Yeah, I mean, I struggled in sleep deprivation. I was nowhere near as productive as I am now that she's five. You know, and there's still kinks that come up at every age. But the one habit that has helped me the most is my executive functioning is pretty good. Like I'm just naturally like the eldest daughter. I'm just very organized in terms of business. And so planning my week and being able to have time where I'm deciding what I'm going to be focusing on this week that is different from my implementation time where I'm actually executing on what needs to be done. Because what my problem was is I have limited childcare. A lot of moms do. Right. And so if I have a three hour block and I'm spending the first hour figuring out what I'm doing and what moves the needle, I'm wasting so much cognitive space and a lot of time. So normally by Sunday night I have the whole week planned out in terms of like, what are the needle movers that's gonna bring in the most revenue, that's gonna bring in sales that's gonna make the biggest difference. And I like to do the hardest things on Monday. If I can, you know, eat the frog on Monday and do the things that I really don't wanna do, it gives me momentum and motivation for the rest of the week. I know I start to slow down Friday, I'm not gonna be as productive. And sometimes I'll even take Friday off and I'll do a really good work session. Sometimes Saturday or Sunday, if I'm able to get into a coffee shop for a few hours and just move things around like that. But planning really does. It's a habit that I've always had and it really does help the business. Especially when you have multiple pieces and projects going on at one time. When you start to scale.

Yeah, really helps with the sustainability and not being burnt out. Setting boundaries around your time, not necessarily time batching per se, you can do that. That's not for everyone. But just having a checklist of your whole entire week and then organizing it in, you know, what is the hardest thing. Usually do the hardest thing or the most annoying thing or the most tedious thing first and only do that until it's done and then you can move to the other things. But I really like how you said you chose the ones that we're going to move the needle forward in your business. First, the revenue driving task. I think so often when you're outgrowing the office and you're scaling or you're growing as a therapist, there is so much work that goes into it. There's so many floating pieces. We can do a lot of busy work and we need to prioritize our, our task into what's going to actually bring us in revenue, what's going to move the needle forward. Let's talk about that for a second. I know you're really big on SEO. I'd love to talk about that. But what are some of the moval, the needle moving tasks that therapists need to do if they're moving into a group practice? And I know that's a loaded question, right?

Yeah. I mean, there's a couple different avenues, but typically if we're just looking at marketing, if we're just talking about, you know, I've had a lot of therapists come to me that are like, okay, I got full pretty much on my own from referrals I've never really had to market and now I'm going into a group practice model and I'm scared I'm not going to get enough referrals to fill up my associates caseload. So if that's where we're really, you know, if that's where you're starting, then we really want to come up with a clear marketing plan. There's so many different marketing strategies and I'm going to tell you something that's kind of controversial, but I don't actually love Instagram for group practice owners or even for solo private practice therapists. I love Instagram. If you're going to do coaching, if you can work with people all over the world because your content is going to go out globally and Instagram is so much time and effort. And I think a lot of therapists aren't making the money that they want to be making because they're spending so much time on Instagram. So I actually never start with just Instagram unless we're talking about like selling a course online or an online workshop, then let's talk Instagram.

Right.

But if we're talking group practice, I really like SEO because it's so targeted to the places you're actually licensed in. And we need targeted marketing for therapists specifically because you can only do what you're licensed to do in those states. So I really like SEO. Now that's a long game. Now we're talking if you haven't done any SEO work that could take six, probably 12 months before you even start to be like, oh, this is really working at this point. So it is a lot of work. It's a long game. If we're talking a shorter term strategy, like we want the longer term to really be able to produce results. But then it's just community marketing, like making sure everyone who already knows you exist knows that you're hiring someone. And this is where therapists get tripped up because there's a fear of being seen and there's also like people pleasing that's happening where they don't want to tell people that they hired someone. They're worried about ruffling feathers, they're worried about needing to set boundaries with the new hire because they don't like to manage people. I hear that a lot of people. And so there's just a lot of mindset work that needs to go into developing that CEO role of now you're managing people. Now you don't actually just. It's not about, do you want to be seen? It's you need to be seen. Now you're the leader of this group practice. So there's a lot of identity shifts that come along with the marketing that we're going to be doing as a group practice. And then I like to also say, you know, what is the vision? Is it hire one associate so that we can, you know, make sure you're making an extra, let's say 6k a month if we can set that up correctly. And then we scale back your caseload because now you want to go into coaching and now you want to do the online course. Or is the vision, you know, a 10 person group practice that maybe eventually one day you sell and there's no right or wrong answer. It just depends what the therapists want. So I just like to go into like long term vision and then we scale back to what we want, you know, the next year to be for marketing, for revenue, and really have them go from there.

Yeah, reverse engineering it. It's totally an identity shift. I'll tell you. When I had my private practice, I hired two associates and started to move into a group practice. And I didn't love it and I was just recording an episode with someone else and they were like, well, maybe you didn't love it because of the managing a team piece. And I never really thought about it, but I was like, I don't think that's it. I Have no problem managing a team. I have a team of 17 to 20 people now. I think my issue in hindsight, reflecting on it was kind of the liability piece or more so the identity shift of letting go of control. Like I was afraid that they weren't going to be able to do client work as good as I was. And part of that comes with hiring associates. Right. So do you always recommend that you do hire an associate or do you recommend that you hire a licensed therapist? And what do you see most people doing? What are the pros and cons there?

Yeah, I mean there's lots of pros and cons. And to your point, if you're scaling, you're going to be managing people regardless. It just depends on what format. So like you're saying, you know, you have 17 to 20 of people that you're managing, so it's just a different way that you might be managing it because it's clinical. And so that's where we can get nervous and want to make sure we have a really good hire that's representing the practice well. So I tend to side with your first hire, being a licensed therapist because it just usually is less work, not always, but they just are more experienced. You don't have to worry about all this stuff with licensing and they're not as green. Now you can. A lot of people do have associates or pre licensed therapists that they end up hiring too. And those can be great hires. But the therapists that I have done one to one coaching with, the group therapists that run into the most problems have these greener associates underneath them and they're like, I don't know what to do. They are not keeping clients, they're not retaining clients, they're not building rapport. We're obviously not in the therapy room with them, so we don't really know what's going on. Now they're costing me money because they're still on the team and I really don't know how to handle this. And so that's where I see a lot of problems come up, which is why I like to err on the side of caution. And if we can build up your muscle as the CEO, as the manager of the group practice for a while with a licensed therapist, then you might be able to handle a pre licensed therapist and they might be great, but they also might not. And so we want to get like really clear on your systems for onboarding, how you're hiring, how you're training, keeping that leash really short in the beginning, especially if they're pre licensed with how they're doing things. And then we have metrics for how to track their retention so we have data. We're not just coming to them and being like, you're not doing a good job. We can pull up a spreadsheet sheet and be like, this is the number of sessions that you've done. These are the number of people that have dropped out. We need to get it back up to this percentage. How can we help you do that? And a timeline of like, if it's not done by this date, we need to have another conversation about what's going on. So we don't just have, you know, a C minus player on the team for three or four years. That brings down the whole culture and hurts the reputation of the practice. Right.

Kind of having KPIs, if you will, or a scorecard.

Right.

You know, metrics. The data does not lie where you can track their progress and have a baseline to go off of. And that goes hand in hand. Like you said of stepping into that CEO role, that different identity when you move from a solo practice to a group practice. I want to go back to marketing for a second because we talked about SEO six months to a year long game important. I like the controversy where you actually don't recommend Instagram for, you know, moving into group practice or maybe even solo practice. And yes, you can get clients from Instagram, but SEO is maybe a better route for this because Instagram does take a lot of capacity. What about Google Ads? Do you use those you recommend?

Yeah, I'm not, I'm certainly not an expert on Google Ads. I'm not as familiar with them, so I don't tend to talk about it a lot. Now that being said, I've worked with a lot of group practice owners who are making, you know, I think the most successful group practice owners that I've worked with are using Google Ads and they're using them successfully. So I think, you know, whether you hire someone to manage the ads for you or I've had people learn the systems themselves, which can be a little bit dicey because it's a lot of work to learn Google Ads and make sure you're not just throwing money, money away. I think if we compare SEO with Google Ads, if you can do those two things at the same time, you're just going to get a lot of traffic to your website, which is going to be great for business, especially because Google Ads can be very targeted as well. And so it's not just throwing money at nothing. So with every marketing strategy, I just want it to be very strategic and how you're spending your money. Anytime someone says ads, Facebook ads, whatever, I want it to be, like, very strategic with how you're doing it instead of just like, you know, doing a thousand dollars here or. Or let's have a strategy around how we can really ramp it up and make sure that it's a profitable system that we're using for Google Ads.

Yeah. I think before you move to any sort of paid advertising, whether it be Google Ads or meta advertising, is to test it out organically first. This is what I teach my clients. Right. So we're not flushing money down the toilet, and we're really seeing what's working, what's not working. It's just as important to see what's not working.

Right.

What's landing with our clients, what's getting good traction, what's getting crickets, and then what does. Well, all right, let's put some dollars behind that and start to test it out, and then we can start to really become omnipresent in the online world. But not everybody can handle the capacity. So if you're not fully into that CEO role and you don't have those good clinicians under you, you don't have the data to track properly, if you just fill yourself up with clients, something's going to break.

Right.

So scaling in a sustainable, smart way, I think is wise, right?

Yeah. And I like to just pick. Pick a couple strategies, like don't be doing Instagram, SEO, Google Ads, a newsletter, like, all of these things until you really have a team to help you manage it. You know, I am just so protective of your time as a group practice owner or as an entrepreneurial therapist, because we often don't realize how incredibly powerful we are just as humans and entrepreneurs. Like, we have so much power and intelligence that we do not harness because we pile on all these nonsense tasks like admin work, you know, spending hours answering the phone, like, doing things that somebody else could be doing, and it really burns you out. And this is why so many entrepreneurial therapists start to feel burnout, is because they're doing things that are draining them instead of staying in, really their zones of genius, which is, like, their strengths and the things that they're best at. So we just want to be very protective over your time. So when we're talking about a lot of different marketing strategies, feel free to implement if you have the money to do so, if you have the team to do so, and if it's making sense But I just want to be very protective over how this is going to impact your work so you're not feeling anxious and stressed out, because then it bleeds down to everyone underneath you too.

A hundred, 1,000%. This is making me think of productivity. So you said that at the beginning of the week, doing the hardest things on Monday, setting your task, like task lists for the week is helpful for you. Is there any other tools that you swear by for productivity that go hand in hand with being protective over your time?

Yeah, I'm very protective over my energy. You know, I can't work in a way that somebody else might be able to work. I'm not someone that can go, go, go a thousand miles an hour and not burn out. Like, that's just not me. And so one exercise that I really like to do for myself, and I have a lot of the therapists that I've worked with do it, is just going through your week. And we can definitely do a time audit of where your time is. But I also like to audit where the points of tension are. And I want to know points of 10 throughout my entire day. So even if it's dinner time, if it's bedtime for my daughter, if it's, I need more help with laundry, if it's, you know, I would feel more supportive if there was a dog walker coming in. I want to know, where am I feeling tense? Because what I'll tend to do is just like, push through, not really even feel it or realize it until it bubbles up and it's too late. So if you can just do a couple days in a row where it's a normal work day, and like, actually put. Put it in your phone where there's different points of tension, and then brainstorm how we can help those points of tension. So maybe a point of tension at work, you know, for an entrepreneurial therapist would be like, you're feeling really stuck on content, or you're feeling really drained after Instagram. That's often a point of tension. You know, what can we do around that so that that's not a constant Monday through Friday point of tension for you? Or maybe it's somebody on your team, you're feeling really tense with them. This is something that needs to be addressed. So we don't just have you, like, white knuckle every point of tension, and we can strategically start to, like, help energize you throughout your week. And really, this exercise can make a big difference if we're tracking it well. And then we start to brainstorm Solutions to every point of tension.

Right. And then you can maybe do the harder things during your most productive times during the day, like taking note of your energy. Are you more energized in the morning? Are you more energized at night? When do you need to do those tasks that you need to have the most energy? And you can kind of time back to your schedule in that way when you're aware of your energy. I love that so much. And that's really going to help with the productivity, just as being an entrepreneur, not only as an entrepreneurial therapist, but no matter what type of business you're running. I don't know if you're into human design, but that's something that's helped me tremendously in business. It's just understanding my design. I think that oftentimes we can so easily make things wrong when we're comparing ourselves to other people. And some people can. One thing that has really helped me in business was human design and understanding my design, because I think so often we can easily compare ourselves and make things wrong. And we look at people who are going, going, going all the time, and we're like, damn, we should be going, going. But maybe that's not your design. And if you can function in line with your design, you can really take the path of least resistance. I know you didn't ask me, but for anyone who's listening, the. What do you recommend, Carly? The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It's talking about the upper limit. Because oftentimes we put this glass ceiling on ourselves. And even as a high achiever, right, we. We set this limit in our mind of what our capacity can be. And if we can break through that invisible ceiling and push past our upper Limit, we can 10x and Quantum Leap and collapse timelines in a. A way that is least resistance. Right? Amazing. Well, this was such a wonderful conversation. I feel like I could talk to you for hours. Danielle, I want to drop your information. I know you have some freebies. They can find you on Instagram, on the. At the entrepreneurial therapist. Well, you guys know where to go. All of that information will be linked in the show notes. Thank you again for being on the show, Danielle.

Thank you.

And I'll talk to you soon. Take care, everyone.