The Therapy Career Path Most Clinicians Are Never Shown

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Thriving Therapreneur Podcast. I am so excited today because we have an alumni of the Therapist to Coach Accelerator, now the Coach Intensive, and a fellow therapist with us. She went from therapist to coach and she now helps therapists build nonprofit businesses. You're absolutely booming in the space. You are helping so many clinicians with things that they didn't even think was possible for them. So Lauren, I want you to introduce yourself, but then I would love to dive in and talk about your experience going from therapist to coach, what being in mentorship was like, how that helped you get a kickstart into what you're doing now, thriving in this space. I wanna hear all the updates cuz you and I haven't talked in quite some time. And before we hit record, I was like, I just candidly wanna hear Lauren on recording, like, what have you been up to?. And then I'm going to ask you some questions too about, you know, what I hear most often, and you do as well, therapists building nonprofits. Like, is this possible? Is this attainable? Is this legal? Can I really make money doing this? Can I, can I pay myself? Uh, do I have to be licensed? So buckle up, y'all, if we are in your earbuds today. Thank you for tuning in. And Lauren, I'm going to pass it to you. Uh, Do you mind introducing yourself properly?

No, that was great. No, thanks for having me on. Um, Dr. Lauren Lawson. So I'm licensed in Pennsylvania and California, and I have a unique setup as a therapist that many people have not heard about. I have a nonprofit group therapy practice that I started in— really, it started blooming in 2011 in California. I was an associate, didn't even have my hours. I was still in grad school for my PsyD. And, um, it turned into, you know, my life's work. I still worked in community mental health, ran it on the side, and then I moved back to Pennsylvania, started a branch here. So I started your program in 2024, and it was— we laugh about this all the time— it was with a completely different niche. And then I said, it was, I kind of do this. What was it? Um, it's actually a really heavy niche, and I cannot be more grateful. That you like changed my path with the coaching. I still do this under my nonprofit, but it is, um, therapy, family therapy with adult children who are estranged from their parents, which is really nice work. And that would've been so heavy to do in the coaching world. Still needed, but very, very heavy. This is like a whole other fulfilling element that I didn't know was missing.

So, and I think that's why we changed it too, because you were coming to calls talking about how kind of burnt out you were and the heavy work that you were doing.

Yeah.

And intuitively, I just felt like there was something else there. I was like, is there something else? And you started talking about your story, and, and this just came out, you know. I would say 90% of us are our own ideal client, and this was something that you got asked all of the time.

Yes.

But just had not thought about actually monetizing.

I never thought about, well, I had thought about at some point years ago, you know, can I do a consulting business? But then when I, you know, found you and connected with you, it's like I forgot that I did that. It's like I forgot that I had all this knowledge about running a nonprofit, even though I was doing it every day. And it just like clicked when we talked about it. And I was like, oh, this is what I'm meant to do. This is why I was meant to join Carly's program, and this was a niche. And after that, I mean, we hit the ground running, literally running.

Yeah, you hit the ground running. I mean, I just gave you the blueprint, but you took off. Yeah, you took off fast. So let's start here and let's talk about, because it's been 2 years since you made this transition from therapist to coach, you went through some niche changes. What has this journey been like for you? Uh, there's a lot of mindset work that goes into it and it's a big business learning curve. So for everyone who's listening to the show now who has not yet started or at the beginning stages of starting or possibly has started and been at it for a while, but is on what I call the revenue rollercoaster. What words of wisdom can you provide about what this has been like for you?

I mean, going back to, you know, a DBT kind of saying is like, two things can be true at the same time. It can be a wild ride. You're right. It is a whole other language skill set, right? To learn that's different from doing therapy. And at the same time of learning all that and jumping into it headfirst, there's amazing results from it that are invigorating. For me, it's, it's brought out this creative side that I didn't even know lived in me, despite, you know, having to have this huge learning curve and the tech side of things and learning what automations are and, and all that stuff, right? That we don't typically do in therapy practices. It's also been incredibly rewarding.

It is. And that's what I say too. It is absolutely a learning curve. You are going back to school. It is a short-term sacrifice, but holy cow, if you can roll up your sleeves, buckle up your seatbelt, get yourself a mentor or a guide who can show you the floating pieces and the steps and take the path of least resistance, then what is waiting for you on the other side is so rewarding and it is so fun because It's creative, like you said, and it's this extension of you that we don't often get to share when we're just a therapist in private practice. Like, we get to share our own journey, our own stories. We get to self-disclose. It makes sense to do so, and we can express ourself in so many different ways.

Yeah. And I feel like investing in coaching or a mentor is key because we don't know what we don't know. I didn't know anything about coaching or setting up like a consulting business. I needed someone to show me that roadmap, just like in the way therapists who have— tons of therapists who have a dream of setting up a nonprofit, they need someone who that they can trust and show them the way. And after— I know, I remember exactly how I got connected to you. I saw you in a Facebook post. Your book then came up on my feed. I read the book front to cover and I was like, I'm booking a call immediately. And I knew before going into that call I was going to do the program because I knew I wanted to do something else. Like I knew that there was something inside of me, but I couldn't figure out what it was. And I followed your blueprint step by step. I mean, I literally remember grinding it out for weeks going into each lesson. And what I did was I did a lesson, I executed it. And I remember when, and this still works for me today, you've, you've probably seen it in the last couple of weeks of going into ColorBlock, doing ColorBlock posts in Facebook groups.

And I still do it like here and there, you know, like that's not what I rely on, but you know, the organic marketing that I teach, the foundational principles. I mean, that's a tool in your toolbox that forever, Ty.

You can always pull that out. Yeah. But it worked immediately because therapists showed so much interest in, yes, I've thought about a nonprofit and I didn't know anybody else thought about that too. Let me find out what you're doing and, and what I need to know in order to start one. It just blew up like literally overnight. Overnight. I mean, I was manually entering in people's email addresses and you were like, you need to automate it ASAP.

We can automate that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about your success, if you don't mind bragging on yourself. And I'm genuinely curious now that you've been outta my world and thriving on your own, like what's going on with your revenue? Uh, you took off immediately inside my program because you followed the steps, right? And you were, you know, grinding for those weeks. I mean, I don't know, you got your first client within Oh, I think it was 8 weeks, at least 2 months. Yeah.

Yeah. It was very short.

8 weeks of working together.

I mean, I had 5 clients within 8 weeks, I think. Um, I, I signed 5 clients like right away as soon as I announced my program before I recorded a single thing. Uh, yeah. And then the first 3 months I made $18K. That first year I ended, I think around $40-something thousand.

And that was half a year.

That was half a year. I was already halfway through the year when I started your program. The next year I—

and at the beginning you literally didn't even know your niche.

Like, this is exactly starting from scratch, new business while still running my nonprofit and having two little boys.

Yeah. So not to mention, not to mention, a little busy.

It's possible if you follow Exactly. I don't know if it's still the same setup, but when it—

oh, it's the same but just on steroids. I mean, you know me, I always am adding, right?

And then, you know, you have the, the amount of advancement with AI that to think about what we didn't even have in 2024. We had some of it, but yeah. So we— I doubled the next year, and this year I'm launching some new programs. So over the past 3 years, I've really honestly have talked to hundreds and hundreds of therapists who wanna start a nonprofit, and I've learned the insides and outs of what makes them uncertain, what holds them back in doing this, and how do I truly help them launch this in a way that leaves them feeling comfortable. Because as I'm sure you've experienced, so many people get burned with certain coaches or firms. Like in my case, it's like CPAs or lawyers that they've paid tons of money for and they don't have anything to show for it. So I've refined my offer to like let them walk away with an actual operating nonprofit.

Yeah. Let's talk about this for a second. So the therapist who is listening right now, who is curious about starting a nonprofit, I started off the show by saying, you know, is it possible? Is it attainable? Is it legal? Uh, can I really make money doing this? Can I pay myself? Do I have to be licensed? Can you answer some of those? Common questions right now for everybody who's listening, and maybe walk us through the process. Like, what, what are the first 3 steps that you would have to take if you want to start a nonprofit?

Yeah, well, first and foremost, I think we are taught as therapists we have 2 paths. There's that— there's a dichotomy of like what we can choose to do with our career. You can work in community mental health, be underpaid, undervalued, burned out seeing 30 clients a week, or you can go into private practice and charge premium rates, see your ideal clients, which people choose either of those paths. That is great. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's a whole group of us in the middle where we want the best of both worlds, and that's where the nonprofit structure comes into play. People hear nonprofit and they think it means no profit, but it's actually just a business structure. Private practices are set up as for-profits, but you can set up a private practice as a nonprofit. And so what that allows you to do is to access additional revenue that you can't access as a for-profit. And that you're from grants, from grants, donations. Yep. Fundraising. Um, all kinds of things, all kinds of discounts on things like QuickBooks, for example, your EHR. Google Ads, you can get $10,000 a month in Google Ads free, like free as a nonprofit is a grant. That's $10,000 a month that you can't do in a for-profit.

So just by setting up your infrastructure in a different way that nobody really teaches us how to do.

No one teaches you how to do. Yeah.

But think about like, okay, I think about when I was back in community mental health at a nonprofit.

Yes.

The higher-ups and what they were actually getting paid compared to what I was getting paid at $18 an hour, like, they were killing it, right? So can you make money in a nonprofit? Absolutely, yes.

And what the difference is, because people ask me this, well, what do— why am I different from community mental health? Community mental health is wonderful in so many ways. It's needed. But oftentimes community mental health is a jack of all trades They do every program under the sun and then they need all this hierarchy and then a lot of their revenue has to go to that hierarchy. And so you see these big discrepancies in pay of like the staff doing the actual service and then the higher-ups getting the bigger bucks, right? And so this is on a smaller scale, a much smaller scale where you can pay yourself well and give back to the community at the same time. And that's all.

So what is well? What do you see therapists making in nonprofits?

I always use myself as an example. So my nonprofit, we have about 15 therapists across both states. Our annual income right now is around $450,000, and I work part-time. I am a part-time employee seeing maybe 10 clients a week. The rest of the time I spend in my coaching business. And growing the nonprofit, and I make $123,000 salary. That has nothing to do with the coaching business. $123,000. I never made that in community mental health as a regional director overseeing 27 programs. So I would take $123K any day.

And that is 10 hours part-time. That is salary.

Like that is not, you know, in a private practice that would be like Maybe you bring in $123,000, but then you have your expenses, then you have to pay your quarterly taxes. I'm an employee of the nonprofit. My taxes get taken out because it's on salary, because it's on salary. And I qualified for public student loan forgiveness. So in 2024, I got— that's huge— $363,000 forgiven because at that time I worked full-time in my nonprofit and I qualified.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that's like, right, that's a house.

Absolutely. I mean, you're just scratching the surface, it sounds like, of all of the perks that you can get. I think that truly therapists just don't know what is available to them. The point that you said where therapists think that it's community mental health and/or private practice, and private practice is the end goal right? Like, that's what we're kind of taught in school and fantasize about, and it's the self-pay private practice, and this is the end goal. But you can do so much. You can do coaching as a therapist, you can be a podcaster, you can be a speaker, you can be a course creator, you can be an author, you can have a nonprofit. I mean, there's just a million things that you can do with the knowledge that you already have. But we just don't know about the options that are available for us, which is why we're having this exact conversation right now. I remember being in community mental health, being like, I'm just paying my dues, there's nothing else available for me. Then when I moved to my 9-to-5 therapy job, I'm like, I can't start my private practice, like, that's gonna be too hard. That's the end goal, then starting my private practice, and I'm like I don't know, like, is there really anything else available for me? This whole coaching thing, like, can I really do this? It's, it's just about those baby steps of first educating yourself that this is possible. It is attainable. Let's go there for a second about it being legal. Why do people think that it's not legal?

Because they get told this by CPAs and lawyers. I have had more therapists tell me that. And it is misinformation that is wrong. It is 100% legal. And in some states you have to be a nonprofit in order to have an intern in your practice. And so what happens is you get these experts, but they're not experts in mental health and they don't actually know what it means to operate a mental health nonprofit. And they, they then get into this scarcity mindset of like, I'm gonna risk my license. And because it's a nonprofit, your license actually has nothing to do with the nonprofit. You might use your license under the nonprofit to see insurance clients, but that's as if you were working in private practice or community mental health. They're, they're all set up for fee-for-service.

It's the same thing I hear with clients coming to me and they're like, but Carly, my CPA said that I didn't have to have a separate bus— business entity from my private practice and my coaching business. I'm like, yeah, well, your CPA doesn't know about you being a clinician that needs to protect your license, and they're trying to make their job easier and not do two set of taxes. Yes.

So, yes, that's exactly right.

Yeah, yeah, the CPAs are trying to make it easier on themselves giving misinformation. And let's talk about, do they have to be a licensed clinician?

No, anyone can start a nonprofit. There are tons of nonprofits that exist out there that have nothing to do with clinical services. The point of a nonprofit is to find a gap in resources in your community and then provide that resource, whether that's clinical, case management, workshops, coaching, even, um, anything that you can think of that is a gap in service in your community, you can do under the nonprofit umbrella. So you don't have to be a licensed clinician. I was pre-licensed when I started, and then I became licensed under it. And so clinicians who are pre-licensed can start a nonprofit and they can provide clinical services under that nonprofit as long as they have the appropriate clinical supervision and they are following their board regulations.

Mm-hmm.

So it's absolutely possible. I have clinicians that do it all the time who are pre-licensed.

Okay. So somebody's listening and they're like, all right, my wheels are spinning. Maybe I wanna think about starting a nonprofit. Getting myself a mentor who can help me. If they were to say yes and go down this path, what are like the first 3 steps that they would have to take?

So the first 3 steps I would say is to really understand what the nonprofit setup is, and that's something that I can offer people. I give out that information on a consult call because I want people to make an informed decision. You need to understand the difference between a for-profit entity and a nonprofit entity. LLC. And then if it feels like the right fit from there, it's really about registering in your state, registering with the IRS, and that's it. Your business structure.

And how fast can that happen?

Within 4 weeks.

Yeah.

People end up getting rejected because they get wrong information and fill out the applications wrong, or they do it in the wrong order. So that's what I teach is the correct phases that sequencing of it. And people can either do that through DIY, through my Therapist Nonprofit Framework, or my done-for-you where I do it for them, because we all know therapists are strapped for time. They get to choose which one they want.

I was just gonna say, I remember from years ago when you were building this out that you helped them do the paperwork and help them go faster. So there's really no excuse to not bring this idea to fruition. And also with the peace of mind knowing that it's gonna be done the right way.

Done the right way. That's the key. Done the right way in the right order by someone who's done it. I mean, at this point I've done it hundreds of times for people over and over again. I've done this, so I almost know every single state at this point.

That's so amazing. Yeah. I mean, truly, really not have blown up.

Yeah.

You've been doing this for yourself for, How many years now? It was like 13 years when you, yes, right? When you first met me. So like 15 years you've been—

years. Um, and I've been doing it, you know, I work simultaneously in community mental health. So since 2023 is when I stepped down from my regional director job, cause I did both for a long time. And then I put all of my effort into expanding my nonprofit. So we have grown my nonprofit. Exponentially over the last couple years. So I'm not just telling people to do this. I am literally also doing it. I am showing them that this is possible because I do it every day. We've doubled our revenue in our nonprofit in the last year, doubled in the last year, because I put into implementation what I teach people.

Of course, you're proof that it's possible. I always say this, I'm proof that it's possible. My clients are proof that it's possible. And if you hang around long enough, You will be proof that it's possible. And that's the same exact story for you.

Yeah. You're commitment.

You're living it.

Dedication.

You're walking the walk. Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, I'm so proud of you and excited for what's to come. Where can people find you? You have a ton of free resources, uh, for people who are just getting started in this and want more information. Where would be the best place for them to go?

I have a free Facebook group. It's Nonprofit Therapy Leaders. They can join that group, and when they join, they get on my email list, and there's tons of free trainings, tons of free guides. And like I said, I always do a 15-minute free consultation with people. There's no pressure to work with me. It's, you know, me giving them the information so they can make an informed decision for themselves so that they have the info. So that's the best way is through the Facebook group. Then they can connect with me one-on-one if that feels right for them.

Perfect. I'll include all of that in the show notes. And Lauren, before we hang up today, is there any piece of advice that you would give to anybody listening who wants to go down the, the coaching path and has not yet made that leap of faith like you did and created this beautiful business that you now have?

I think, you know, for whether they're thinking about your program or my program, because both of this, I think you'll understand that this is relevant, that uncertainty isn't gonna go away. It's gonna be there. And so you invite it along the ride with you and you really work on your mindset stuff. If that's showing up, the uncertainty, the doubt, the negative self-beliefs, they're gonna show up in our work and we have to be willing to work through that and address it directly because that's only gonna hinder us, right? That's gonna stop you from getting a coach in order to start a coaching business or getting a coach to start a nonprofit. Mm-hmm.

It's 80% of our business. It is the mindset. Yep. Right.

Yep.

And that is what's gonna take you to the next level, whatever that looks like. Like you said, whether it's starting a nonprofit, becoming a speaker, starting a coaching or consulting business, uh, options are really endless for you as a clinician and everything that you can do. So. If anything, I hope that this conversation expanded your horizons on what you can do as a therapist and that you don't have to stay stuck in a box. And there's so many different options where you can impact more lives, you can make more money, you can have more freedom and white space on your calendar and flexibility and be more present at home and travel and save up and all of the fun things. It is just all possible for you. So thank you, Lauren, for being on today, and we'll be in touch. I can't wait to continue to see you shine in this space. Thanks, Carly.

Appreciate that.