Multiple income streams for mental health professionals

Okay. Good evening, everybody. I think I'm actually live. This is my first time ever doing this, so we will see how it goes. I probably know a few of you in the Facebook group, but for those of you who may not have seen me commenting, My name is Dr. Jennifer Sweetin and I'm a licensed clinical psychologist here in Kansas. My practice is in Olathe and I've been out here for about. It'll be a year in February. So I've been out here almost a year and opened up practice in April. So I'm still fairly new, but always excited to network with people and get connected in the area and have been enjoying being out here. I was actually raised in this area and I went to Olathe East High School. So this is a familiar area and I'm happy to be back. I'm here tonight to talk about multiple income streams, which is a topic that I get really excited about because I think there's so many opportunities. If we start to think about different ways to make money, different ways to make a living, I think it can really open us up and provide us with a lot of freedom. So that's what I'm here to talk about. And the first thing I wanted to start off talking about is a little bit about my background and what led me to be so interested in this. So probably like a lot of people, I found myself at the beginning of my career in an agency job, multiple agency jobs, and not always super happy with it. Always kind of feeling like I was being boxed in. I was definitely the student in high school that wanted to skip school, not because I didn't like school, but because I just wanted to do other things. And I kind of wanted to do things on my time. And I think that never changed. So. So I know a lot of people have different reasons for wanting the multiple income streams. Maybe extra money, money for kids, college, getting burnt out on clinical work and needing to kind of balance it with something else. Or maybe you're just entrepreneurial by nature. A little bit of all the above has been true for me. I was actually, before doing this tonight, actually, when I was making my goals for 2018, I looked at. At my kind of like my business plan essentially for the year. And I was looking at the different. Different things that I want to prioritize and different income streams. And I didn't realize it, but I have more income streams right now than I thought. So I currently have 16, 14 or so of them are more active. Two of them, not so much so yet. But it really highlighted for me just the importance of having multiple ways to be able to make a living. So let me tell you a little bit about myself. So I got licensed in 2013 as a psychologist. I began as a psychologist at the VA and then later became director of Behavioral Health for Indian Health Service. I was working in my job probably 40 hours a week, maybe a couple hours more. 25 or so minute commute each way. Okay, maybe pushing 46 hours a week, something like that. And then life happened. A few different things happened that really changed the way I thought about my life, I guess you could say. So one of the things that happened that was pretty big is that my daughter was born and. Hi, Amanda. I know Amanda is expecting right now, so a baby. Congratulations. And just kind of got me thinking about my little girl. So one of the things that really changed me was that having my little girl and I had her in 2014, in October, and that was the beginning of the change for me. So I had her and all of a sudden I stopped saying yes to everything. Because, you know, in grad school you're just supposed to say yes to everything that comes your way and you just never say no to anything and you just do it all. So when I had her, I started saying no to a whole lot of stuff, a lot of opportunities, projects. And when I said yes, I said, heck yes. And it was a very emphatic yes. When I said yes, that was kind of my first experience trying to, I guess, starting to live a life more in line with my values, I guess you could say, not just because I wanted to spend time with her, but also my career values, which are kind of different. So that happened. And then a couple of not so great things, a few not so great things happened. A friend of mine, who name is Allison, she was a co worker with me at the VA and she was 50, she was young. One day we got a phone call from our boss and she had lost consciousness. She had an undiagnosed brain tumor and she pretty suddenly died within like two days, very suddenly. And this really shook, of course it would shake anybody, but really shook us because she was so young. Of course, when you have some sort of experience like that, it does get you thinking about what you're doing with your life. And it's just a good time to check in with yourself about whether you're happy during that time too. In the particular agency that I was in, I can't say that I was extremely happy. Again, just kind of feeling controlled and kind of put in a box but there was also some not so great stuff going on with sexual harassment with a whole lot of people was a big mess. Long story short, I ended up getting in the middle of essentially like a two year lawsuit about sexual harassment in this setting. Multiple people were on my side of like it had happened to them too. So multiple people were involved and it was basically like a two year, two year battle. And that too was eye opening. A lot of times I would ask myself, what am I doing here? And is this what I'm wanting to be doing with my life? But through that process, had great friends. One of my friends there at the agency, her name is Lauren. And Lauren was one of those people I know we all probably have those friends like in school or at work where you go to some staff meeting and somebody's like just talking about some shenanigans and being ridiculous and you look at them and they look at you and you make eye contact and it's like you're networking. Essentially you look at each other and you laugh and you're like, oh my gosh, you kind of roll your eyes. Those friends at work, so very, very, very good friend, really supported me and others through the process. And eventually everything actually worked out really well with that whole thing. It had the best ending I could hope for. Kind of breathed a sigh of relief. And then things started to get good again in my life and I thought, well, you know, I really want to, I want to be moving up in my career. I want more authority and you know, like responsibility and I'm going to be a go getter. And ended up getting this position, director of Behavioral Health actually at Indian Health Service. And super excited about that. And everything was good with the whole lawsuit thing. Calmed down. And immediately after I took that job, I texted Lauren one night with something mundane. And the text back was from her husband and he said that she was in the hospital. They weren't sure what was wrong. Long story short, I wouldn't believe the coincidence, but turns out she also had a brain tumor that was not diagnosed and she ended up passing away, never regained consciousness and passed away a few days later. And she was 33. Good friend left behind, a 4 year old and a 21 month old. So at this point, just with that loss and some of the other things that had happened, I took a really good look at my life and the way I was living it. And there was nothing wrong about the way I was living it and nothing wrong with people who love agency work, but I really started to take a close look at it because there were things that were not fitting with it with me. I was this fairly new mother. I had gone from a 25 minute commute to an hour 15 each way commute to take that new position now pushing more like maybe 55 hours, maybe a week, something like that. So I sat down and I wrote down a list of my values and what, what I thought I was here on earth for. These things bring up some pretty big existential questions. Then what I did is I started logging the amount of time I was spending on the things that I said I valued. And what came up for me was that I was not spending a lot of time on the things that I said were the most important things to me. So there's a mismatch that was happening in my life meanwhile. And if you haven't read this book or listen to the audiobook, I highly recommend it. I started listening to Tim Ferriss, his book Four Hour Work Week and he had a perspective that was really good, really different perspective on life than he talks about how if you save it all for the end, it's not really good living. So I started to think, well, you know, how can I make a good living and quite honestly prioritize money that is a value for different reasons for me, but also value time and time with my family and doing things that I like and things that are good for my health. How can I do all of that? And I think that's really hard just in general, but especially somebody who's early in their career, you know, if you don't have accumulated wealth from the past 25 years, then it's even more difficult. So that is what set me on this path to really figure out different ways to make a living on my own and without relying just on one income stream or just even two income streams. So I have some recommendations about that. I want to say a little bit about how these past two years have gone because it's been exactly two years since I jumped ship and I've been on my own trying out different things. So I'm going to tell you how it's worked for me and then give I guess like five recommendations including ideas for additional income streams just to get you thinking about what might work for you. Okay, so first year, let me look at my notes here. So 2016, I jumped ship. 2017, I looked at what that year was essentially. So as I'm doing stuff for taxes and I had been logging work hours along the way, so I looked at how many hours I'm working and then what Happened to my revenue. So after one year I worked an average of about 25 hours a week for money. So instead of working 40 something hours a week for money, I worked about 25 for money. I spent the rest of the time with my daughter. I didn't miss her events. I did yoga, I learned things about online marketing, worked toward income streams that were going to maybe take some extra time and effort to get off the ground. So kind of worked, kind of took a long range view of things. So worked about 24 hours a week. Increased revenue by about 30% in that first year. So I was increasing revenue by 30% and I worked between 38 and 50% less hours. So great, on the right track after two years. So at this point it's been exactly two years, still at about 25 hours a week, still have a lot of flexibility. Revenue's gone up now to 50% higher than what it was in my agency work. And I think what that reflects is that some income streams, some different revenue streams take a while to get off the ground and then they can really build over time. So if you can set things in motion, they can really build to be something. You know, maybe in three or four or five years they'll be tons bigger than they are in the first year. So all of that I think has been really promising to me. And I'm not going to sugarcoat it and say that there's not down times too or really scary times, kind of depending on your tolerance for risk. Some things are going to be risky and scary and you have to think about that as you're making decisions. But I thought where I'm at now is I'm thinking, wow, this is actually going pretty well. And just recently now my daughter's three, I was able to take her out of daycare entirely because she goes to preschool in the mornings. But I'm able to save us more than $1,000 a month now because she's not in daycare and she goes to public school to preschool. And I do a lot of my clinical work in those morning hours and then when I have to do clinical work in the afternoons, I usually choose one or two and then do just a few hours with like drop in daycare or when my husband works from home, he'll watch her. So if you have flexibility can not only lead to you making more money, but it can lead to you saving more money, which is kind of like making more money. So things are going really well with this. And I find that a lot of the work that I do Day to day is not necessarily work for money. It can be. I have those streams that's just, you know, the way that I feed my family, essentially and make ends meet. But I also have a lot of flexibility. Since I'm not working, you know, 50, 60, 70 hours a week, I have a lot of flexibility to also do work for free, to volunteer. There's a book coming out that's being published by Pessy. It comes out in May. I was able to spend about six months writing that. So I've been able to do other things and other projects that are really important and meaningful to me. I would not have been able to do if I had stuck with the agency work. Okay, so let me give you kind of a breakdown of essentially what my process was and maybe some things to think about as you're thinking about adding income streams. Okay. First thing that I think is really important and any, any coach that you go to is going to really probably emphasize this first piece, which is the why. The why you are doing what you're doing. So if you're wanting to add other income streams, first of all, others know that such thing as actual passive income. So we talk about passive income all the time, and that's like the hot topic right now. There's no such thing. So you're going to have to put work in one way or the other. So understanding that why I think is really important. So being value driven and if you have the time and the energy, maybe actually listing out those values and doing a time analysis and looking at what you're spending time on your life, and if that's actually syncing up and when it comes to adding multiple income streams, asking yourself why you would want to do that. So if you're seeing clients and that's what you want to do, and that's all you want to do, and you make a great living doing it, what would be the why behind it? We don't want to add more stress, just to add more stress. Ultimately, we want to do this to take stress off. So that's one thing, I think. Another thing, second thing is to consider something broader than revenue or income, which is to think about life design. This was something that I definitely had to do before I ever exited an agency job. It can kind of be hard to do. But thinking about what money is necessary, of course, for your survival and for also a high quality of life. But think about what amount that looks like and think about maybe ways that you can live. I want to be careful how I put this in a More simple way. So how can you streamline something? So if you're going to add to your plate two income streams, which are going to take some effort, it might be hard to do that. Keep your current income stream. Be a spouse, be a parent that's present. You know, like, when you're just adding stuff and it just accumulates, then it can get out of control. So be careful about just adding just to add and, like, continuing to add. That's also kind of a grad school mentality that's really hard to get out of. We're just expected to work, like, 24 hours a day in grad school. And it's actually really abusive. But it's almost like those clients that come to therapy and they're like, oh, you know, I just realized that maybe there were some things that were kind of messed up about my upbringing and it was kind of abusive. You know, those people who kind of, like, realize that and they're like. But I never realized it. I feel like that's what grad school does to us, is it really sets us up with these, like, weird, distorted expectations of how we should be working and that we should be working 24 hours a day. So be careful about that trap of just increasing. So as you're going to increase, think about where you can also decrease. So that might be. And I know these are very, like, privileged assumptions to even think that we could think this way about things. But if the money is okay coming in, instead of getting maybe extra money for extra stuff, maybe you spend it on a house cleaner so that you don't have to worry about, I don't know, washing dishes or vacuuming the carpet while you're also trying to think about these other things. So think about how to simplify life and offset things. So I can tell you one of the things that I did during my husband and I did during this time of thinking about me jumping ship and weren't really sure, I mean, if it was going to be sink or swim. But I was really dedicated to changing my life. One of the things that we did is I said, let's sell the house. I don't. I don't like doing yard work. I don't like yards. This is just me personally. I just. There's nothing really exciting for me about a house. It's a status symbol. I think it's just, you know, you're raised to just kind of do what everybody around you did, and you think you've just got to do that. But I realized I actually don't Value that. So we sold the house. We sold about 70% of what we owned. We started following the minimalist movement. Even now we live in a very modest place compared to how we used to live and are much happier with it. So not that that's going to be everybody's thing, and it doesn't have to be, but what I found was that by really considering Life Design and how I was setting things up day to day, it's allowed me a lot more flexibility. It's allowed me to take actually some pretty substantial financial risks and put money in places that I wouldn't have felt comfortable putting it if, you know, I had a mortgage that was $4,000 a month or something like that. So thinking about that, that part of it. And of course, along with this, you can also consider just your tolerance for risk. There's going to be some income streams that are a little more solid, but as a general rule, the more stable an income stream is, the lower it's going to generally be, with some exceptions, but that's generally how it goes. If you're looking for a lot of potential upsides, a lot of potential money, then you're going to have to take more risk. So you have to kind of weigh that too. And so I think Life Design can kind of play into that, because depending on how you're living, you may or may not be able to take as many risks. So thinking about that, and also just for your emotional health, I mean, some people really can't sleep at night if there's, if there's substantial risk. And other people get super, super excited by it. And, you know, they become multimillionaires, like three times over, and they've lost it multiple times, and they just kind of roll with it. So you have to figure out kind of who you are with that. So being value driven, making sure that you know why you're wanting to add streams, is that value that you're looking for more time? Is it. Is it more money? Is it something else? Is it writing that book that you always dreamt of writing? What is the purpose? And then how is your life set up? And make sure that your life is set up to be able to handle that. The next thing that's kind of related, I think, to the Life Design is just to consider your realities. We all have this medical bills, maybe your spouse's job is super flexible, but they don't make a ton of money. Or maybe it's not at all flexible and they make a lot of money, but it means that, that you don't have maybe childcare mostly falls on you because they have an inflexible schedule, something like that. So kind of thinking about these realities that you're in and everybody has them. So thinking about the streams that are going to work within your reality. So do you need to be at home? Do you have three kids that you have to be with most of the day? On most days that's going to mean that certain income streams are going to be better for you perhaps than others. So kind of thinking about that piece, the fourth piece is to think about your niche or niche or however you want to say it, but your niche. So this is important, I think where I've seen a lot, I do some coaching of especially early career mental health professionals. And when they add streams that the biggest mistake I see is that they add streams that don't necessarily have anything to do with anything else that they've done. So it looks like an income stream that might be low hanging fruit, which always beware the low hanging fruit because sometimes it's harder than you think to get these things up and going. So they'll just kind of stack things and it's not related to their purpose in life, their life mission statement, if they have that or even the work that they love necessarily. So we want income streams to be linked to other income streams ideally, and hopefully they're all linked, linked to why you're on this earth. So they're all meaningful. So the first step with that is to really know what your niche is. And I'm thinking another speaker has talked about this already. I know this is another pretty hot topic about how you identify your niche and how do you get going in it. So I won't spend all day on that, but I will say to make sure you know what that is. So if you work with 5 year old children with autism, I mean if that's like your thing, then you know that's your thing. So for me, I'll tell you what mine are and I think it's okay to have more than one, but you don't want to have like 50 kind of the thing, which is hard for me because I always want to have 50, but mine right now. So mine are that I work in a therapy context. So with clients I work with usually female survivors of sexual violence between the ages of about 25 to 55. And I'm helping them function better in their relationships. And I know that is like super, super, super specific and it's okay if yours is not that specific, but that's who I work with in therapy. And for me that does have to be super specific because the therapy aspect of my work is a very, very actually small piece of my career. So when I do that, I want to make sure I'm doing that with exactly the type of population that I want. So that's usually what I work with. A little more broadly than that, I would say trauma and PTSD is my area. So that's one niche, you could say another one is mental health professionals. So we can identify the niches based on who you work with. So demographics, it can be the conditions that you treat or it can be like modality that you use. You can identify them in multiple ways. So for me, female survivors of sexual violence. And then also the other part of my career is mental health professionals and this is actually a bigger piece of my career. So within that, what I'm doing with mental health professionals is a few different things. I'm doing workshops and seminars usually on brain based therapy, so taking a neuroscience based approach to therapy. So I'm doing that, I'm doing coaching, coaching and then I'm also on the CE side of things. So a little more broadly helping mental health professionals who need to get their ces. So if you've seen any of my emails about continuing at events, that's because that's my passion, that's what I really love to do, is help get those set up, help get speakers for those. So those are the things that I really, really focus on. And so I said I have 16 income streams, which is what I have right now. They're all related to these things. So I don't have like some income stream like that. I'm like a watercolor painter also, or, I don't know, something, something totally unrelated or even related to psychology that's outside of those niches. Everything falls within that. So I would say be really clear about who you are targeting, who you are really passionate about working with, whoever that is, whatever population that is, you need to think that they're totally awesome and you get energized by working with them and you can't wait to see them when you work with them. So just make sure it is a passion. And I think when it is, it's a lot easier than to add some strengths. So let me see how many minutes I've been talking. I've been talking 26 minutes. Let me dive into just some ideas. And these are just going to be ideas I want to offer you and maybe I'll write a little note about this after if you want to talk to me more about this, I am happy to offer a free 30 minute consultation. Like if you just want to run some ideas by me, I tend to coach on this a fair amount. If you want to do that, just let me know. I will. I'm just thinking of how to do this. I'll probably put my email like in the comments section so that you can just let me know if you want to just bounce some ideas off me or see how something might fit in as an additional stream. Let me get to some ideas here. Okay, so we want income streams that are related to your niches that would make you excited at least a little bit. Like to some extent. Like it can't be stuff that you, that just sucks that you hate because then there's just more in your life that sucks that you hate. So we want you to be obsessed with the life that you're living and we want to make it so that you are excited about these things. Ideally you're thinking about them when you're going to bed at night, you wake up, you get a new idea, you get excited. But here are just some ideas. Okay, so one is to come up with something that's kind of like, I guess like a startup essentially. So something which is like a new idea. I think I saw somebody is either on here or helpers, helping helpers. They were coming up with this thing where it was like a therapy box and it's like this box with all these like self care items in it. Awesome, right? Totally awesome idea. Exactly. Something like that. So a new idea, a new business, if it can be one that solves a problem, that's even the better one, right? If it solves a problem, fills in a gap, which I'm sure like this therapy box does. Another example of this is a friend of mine who, and this is kind of an extreme example, this is like an example that will make you millions of dollars, which is easier said than done, I'm sure. But he created this electronic medical record system, which I know there's a lot of those out there, but he created it specifically in the state of Oklahoma to meet all of the auditing criteria of every single insurance company. And as information is updated, he has the whole system updated. So when you go in and you do your note, you have to do your note before it'll bill insurance. And each note is crafted to the specific insurance you're using with the exact information that they would require. So if you are ever audited, you submitted those claims like automatically, you're like golden, right? You're good to go. So he's taking a lot of the fear, I would say, of working with insurance. Take a lot of the fear out of it. So that's an example of a company that was built to solve a specific problem. So thinking about that, what are the problems and what solution would you have? So for those of you who are creative, this could be really good for that. Something else that can be good is blogging. I know we all always talk about this, right? You need to be blogging. You do for SEO. You need to have however many thousands of words per page and you need to be updating it so that Google doesn't think you're dead and doesn't put you up anymore. I'm talking about blogging actually for money. There are some different multiple ways of doing this. The best I know of that I'll throw out there is getting a Psychology Today. Blogging Psychology Today has great readership. They pay you if you post three times within a cycle, within a quarter. And how much you get depends on how many views you get and also just how the company is doing. If anybody is interested in my experience with this, I've definitely gotten extra checks that I wasn't counting on, which has been really helpful to me. Not to mention that it really increases visibility. You can have a link to your website from. Makes you look like you have some credibility. It's a pretty cool thing. It is kind of tricky though. You have to make sure you set it up right to actually get paid. I don't know really how people can become bloggers on there, but I do have an email address of my editor. So if anybody is wanting that, I can give you their information at least and you can see if maybe you can ask to get a blog, see what that process is. I got mine like years ago. I was in grad school before this was even a thing, which is why it's easier for me. But think about blogging for money. Let's see, the other thing is of course books. I mean, if you can get a book deal, get a book deal. I think I said earlier I'm publishing a book with Pessy. A fairly long standing relationship with them as a speaker, which kind of made that process easier. But if you can get a book published, that would be really great. I know a little bit about dealing with book agents. If that were something that you had questions about, I might be able to answer them. But you know, aside from books, I would really more encourage ebooks anyway than books. Ebooks I know. That's another hot thing. I'm not even thinking that you need to get them on Amazon. If you have a good website, decent SEO, you have pretty good traffic, your analytics are showing up pretty good. And you have, you can build a decent audience over time. Ebooks can be more lucrative than you know. And when I say ebook, I'm not like talking about something fancy. I'm talking about like, you know, all those worksheets that you've probably created for clients over the years. Well, you know, you have them in some word format. You just like save it as a PDF and you number it and put like a table of contents to make it, you know, more like legit book, little picture on it. That PDF, that's an ebook. Really easy to get it up on a website. If you're using something like Squarespace, super, super intuitive, you can set it up to a stripe account and money goes just directly into your bank account. And I have made a lot more money doing that, just ebooks over the past year. And that does become passive. It's been a really big shock to me, and I think it's one of the reasons why my income is actually so much higher, is that a lot comes in from that. And there's something very satisfying about waking up in the morning and checking your email. If you do like I do kind of like from your phone and you see like, like three orders have come in in the middle of the night, and then you go look and it's like something from France and then something from New York, and it's like, totally random, but it's very, very cool. So ebooks. And I can definitely answer questions about that and tell you if you're ever interested, how I went about the particulars of that, but highly, highly recommend it. Next one. I know you've probably heard about presentations, workshops, webinars, lectures. This can be client facing. This could be clinician facing. Again, who's your niche? If your niche is the certain type of client, then it needs to be with them. If you also work with other clinicians or attorneys or dentists, whoever, whoever you consult with, then something that faces them. This can be for money, Definitely for money. But I also encourage people to think about doing this stuff for free, to build your email list to get more visibility, to get traffic to the website, they can buy the ebook. So you start to see how all these streams can come together for you. So presentations are great online course. This is not one that I'm an expert in. I have not done this yet. I Am throwing it around right now, but I know online courses, you know how to's, how to do this type of therapy, how to work with this kind of population. Can be a self help course, stress reduction, whatever. I have ideas about this, but I haven't actually done this one. But an online course requires a tremendous amount of work up front. But then when you're done, you're done. And then it does become passive. So that can be an idea of course. Group therapy. So if you, especially if your practice is full and you're like, gosh, I really don't want to add any more hours, but you're willing to add maybe one hour a week, group therapy can be a good way to get some extra money put in consultation as well. Consider a consultation. This is a tricky one. We always throw around this word consultation. Like we're all consulting and nobody really knows how you get these gigs or how this works. It's kind of like coaching. Like there's no like just like set way to do it. But I would say if you are interested in consulting to really try to get out there and find whoever those people are that you want to work with and start offering them some value, some free stuff, get them to your website, give them some free stuff, give them some free stuff and seminars or workshops and start to then hopefully generate some business from that. So consultation is not like one of those income streams that's gonna just appear overnight. Excuse me. For you. Another one that I don't know as much about is affiliate income. So this would be like you have a link on your website to somebody's stuff and then when it's clicked, if somebody buys that stuff, you get some cut of it. I'm not that cool. Like I don't have like hundreds of thousands of people coming to my website where that would actually really matter for me. But if you do or if you know somebody who does, affiliate income can be a thing. Of course, supervision, supervision groups is another thing that's I know everybody kind of lists as another way to make money. Something I want to throw in there too is to consider, consider online, doing some online therapy. This could be a great way to add an extra stream. Again, that tolerance for risk kind of has to be there for this because it's still kind of wild, wild west with online therapy. But something like BetterHelp. I'm on BetterHelp. The way I use this is like a faucet. So you know income streams are going to increase, they're going to decrease a big income stream for me. Is assessment. I really like doing PTSD evaluations with veterans, and they pay really, really well. But you know what? Sometimes it drops off, so you get tons, and then, like, it goes down to nothing. And then when that happens, I have to know to calibrate my other ones to go up. So what I'm saying is that you want income streams. You want at least a couple of them to be, like, faucets that you can turn on and off, that you're not totally at the mercy of other entities. So, like, with these evaluations, wow. Like, when it's good, it's good, but I can't unilaterally keep that going. Or same thing if I'm doing, like, some assessments with the faa, like, they're right, but I can't just materialize them. And to some extent, private practice and seeing clients is also the same thing if you're relying on a certain number. So as things go down, especially maybe around the holidays, everybody pieces out to have some streams that you can increase. Great ideas for this are, of course, EAPs, which are not going to pay anything, but, you know, like, it's something and you can get clients from that. I would also strongly recommend the online stuff, like BetterHelp. Talkspace is another one that's out there a lot. I've not heard as good things about them. I've been with better help for like, a year and a half. They don't pay well. Be totally honest about that. But what I've found is that I get to work with some super, super, super interesting people. I've gotten more international exposure, and there have been multiple people who have eventually left BetterHelp and then, like, contacted me for therapy, so that basically they actually end up paying a little less and I end up getting paid a lot more. So sometimes that even can happen. So don't underestimate that and don't underestimate the power of being able to do the online stuff when, like, it's. It can be live. It can be kind of like what we're doing right now, like on, like, video teleconferencing, but it can also just be messaging. And so you're getting paid by those words that you're writing. So I found that to be really helpful if I've been sick or I've got to watch my daughter. It's just still a way that I'm still bringing in money, even if it's not the big bucks that assessment brings. Yeah. So it's a faucet that I can turn on and off. Coaching, of course, if that's something that you're really into. Some people have really done a great job with this teaching online or in person. This is another one of those where you can actually do a lot of it online. So if you have to be around for little ones, that. That can be a really good one. I also put here, this is not going to apply to most people, but I just want to get you thinking as creatively as possible. I have a friend who got really good at getting his stuff copyrighted and then licensing it. So what he's retiring off of is that he made a Venn diagram. Three little, you know, little Venn diagram. Three circles, easy, easy peasy. And he was a postdoc when he made this. And it relates to substance abuse treatment. He's like, he. Substance abuse treatment involves these three things. And here's like a picture of the Venn diagram, super easy. Ended up copywriting it, licensing it for specific use for a specific hospital system. And I don't even know how much he's made. I mean, he's retiring off this. I mean, it's incredible. Slight alteration to said Venn diagram, sells it to another hospital system. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. So just know that intellectual property can be a big thing. And if you know what to do with your own intellectual property and it doesn't have to be, you don't have to be a genius with this to really make something from it. Yeah, consider it. I do have a person that I consult with about intellectual property and I can give you that name of that attorney if that's something that you're interested in. Okay. I know I've thrown a whole lot at you. I'm just going to throw one more thing at you just to think a little bit about, maybe in a different way. So when we talk about income streams outside of the context of like, mental health professionals, real estate always comes up 100% of the time. Everybody's talking about real estate that can be something that, like, this is way outside my specialty. But it is something that I'm in some ways sort of dabbling in with my group practice. So I started Kansas City Mental Health Associates in October, took over this building. I haven't actually. It's for sale. I haven't actually bought it at this point. I don't know if I will. But just. I guess the message I'm trying to send is that you can consider again kind of sometimes combining streams or merging them. So the reason why I open the group practice is that I want to help people who are trying to build their own practice. So I'm setting this flat rate per hour use of furnished office space. So I'm removing most of the barriers to entry and private practice and making it less scary. So that's what I'm really passionate about. I'm offering free CES and all this other stuff. So I in consultation groups and that's what I really want to help them do. But it also has occurred to me that, you know, that building being for sale, if I bought that and you know, essentially use that as an investment. I'm not a real estate person, but that could be kind of another way eventually of maybe seeing something come back from that like if I bought it and then someday eventually actually paid it off. So just kind of think about how you could merge these, these different types of income streams. I'm going to go ahead and stop talking because I've been talking a lot. But I'm going to put my email address in the comments section. I have said so much, but if you are interested in any of the stuff that I've talked about and I think I can give you additional info, will and again, I'm happy to do a free 30 minute consultation for just whatever's on your mind related to this topic. If I don't know about it or what I'm talking about, I'm happy to tell you that I don't know what I'm talking about. I'll try to get you to somebody who does. So feel free to follow up with me if you are interested. And this has been a really cool experience. I'm really glad that I did this and I'm going to end here, but I will put my email down in the comments. So have a good night and thank you Amanda for inviting me. Okay, bye.