In this solo podcast excerpt, Kelly Alhooie recounts the series of hiring missteps she made when bringing on her first three clinicians for her cash‑based practice. She describes how a lack of HR infrastructure left her clueless about employee classification (W‑2 vs 1099), payroll, and onboarding SOPs, leading to confusion for the first hire. The initial shadow‑training approach failed, causing patient distrust and ineffective learning. With the second clinician she over‑compensated, creating an unsustainable payroll burden. The third hire highlighted the pitfalls of relying on certifications rather than measurable client outcomes, and a poorly drafted two‑year contract allowed the employee to poach clients and promote herself, creating a “hot mess.” Kelly also notes wasted spend on recruiters and the broader financial and emotional costs of these errors. She concludes by promoting her PelviBiz "Power Circle" program, which teaches clinicians how to write contracts, protect assets, and implement outcome‑based compensation to avoid repeating these mistakes.
Chapters
What I got wrong hiring my first three employees. Let's start with the first one. So the first provider I ever hired was someone that she was a nurse and then switched careers, and then she wanted to be a provider, a therapist, let's say. And so she came on, and I remember her asking me like the first one or two days. Well, am I like a W-9 or like, um, or a 1099 versus a W-2? And I'm like, I don't know. She's like, but like, am I paying taxes? Are you making me pay taxes? I'm like, I don't know. Like, this isn't my realm. Like, no one taught me this. So like, I don't know. And I remember her looking at me like I had 3 heads, and I was like, I'm just trying. Like, does she not see that? And mind you, before then I was seeing like 35 patients a week. For three months straight, just completely burnt out. And she came on, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, she's gonna give us relief. Like this is gonna be amazing." Not the case, and it wasn't her fault. It was actually my fault. Okay, it was my fault because I had no systems. I clearly did not even know how to pay her. Okay, I had no like SOPs or like this is what we do here, or this is our culture, or this is the expectations that I expect, or this is how many clients you're gonna be seeing a day, or This is how you treat X, Y, and Z. I had none of that. None. I just thought I would go in there and train her the way I knew how to treat. We would be together, I don't know, for like a week. Maybe she would kind of like shadow me and see. And what I learned is her shadowing me, the patients detested her, like didn't trust her as much because then they saw that she was new. Um, what I also learned is they can also be zoning out while they're shadowing you. Because they're not physically putting their hands on someone. So I'm like, okay, well this strategy doesn't work that well. I mean, it can work in some, some incidents, but like not really going forward. Like that's not a strategy I use at all, just so you guys know. Um, and so basically my first hire, I was highly disorganized and had no clue what the heck I was doing because no one taught me. And I had a business coach, but like still, I just wasn't taught it. I just didn't understand it. I— it was like Mars. It was literally like Mars. So she left. I then got back all of her patients. I am still burnt out at this point, and I'm like, okay, well, let me try to hire another therapist. And by the way, I did not recognize it was a me problem. I thought it was a her problem. I did not recognize that. So then I hire another therapist. She's a mom, and, um, she had like 3 or 4 kids. And I was like, okay, cool. Well, I'm gonna pay her per hour. And I overpaid her per hour. So that was my next mistake. I paid her basically half, 50% of what we were making, and that didn't work out well because I'm like, crap, I still have to pay rent. I now have an admin on I have to pay. I still have to— we have to get profit from there. I have to pay her salary. Um, we were growing at the time, so I had to buy like equipment or stuff that we could use. And ultimately I shot myself in the foot because I was overpaying her. And I, you know, how can you renege on something that you overpaid on? You can't. So I had to leave her at that higher price point. Okay, well now I'm on to a third therapist. Well, now they— if they start talking, now that therapist can be like, well, why are you getting paid this amount and I'm getting paid this amount? Like, it doesn't make any sense. And mind you, it doesn't matter how many years of experience these therapists have. It really does not. I do not care about how many years of experience a therapist has. I care about can they get the result? That's all that matters to me. Can they get the client results? If you can get a result, then you're worth your pay. If you cannot get a result that the client is asking for, you are not worth your pay. I don't care how many certifications you have. I don't care how many letters behind your name. It doesn't matter to me if you cannot get a client through all 3 phases of our method, then to me you're not worth X amount of pay. If you only get them halfway there to their goal and then they're like bye-bye, then, then your pay should go down because you're not getting the result that we actually promised them. So like, just be mindful of that too when you're bringing on people. It's not about the certification. I did have, when I was doing this interview, which I was laughing about the other day, I had someone interview with me And she was like, well, I want $110,000 a year because like I'm about to get my Pilates certification and I'm about to be this Herman Wallace certified. And I literally was laughing in my head and I was like, we're done, this interview is done. Like, we're not— you're on planet Mars and I'm on Earth and there's no way that we are coming together at all on this. Um, so just be mindful of that because they have been preached in school, especially the newer grads, of like, well, more certification, more con ed, the better. Like, it's going to be like, it's the thing that's going to get you more money. And that's not the truth in a cash-based practice. The truth is, if you can get someone to complete the full plan of care, that's how you make— that's how you make more money. Not— and because you actually get the result, not if you have these certifications. And so there's such a disconnect there. There is massive disconnect. Um, and so basically my third hire that I brought on, um, I had her in a 2-year commitment and she was, um, I knew she kind of wanted to start her own company, which I was cool with. I was fine bringing her on. But there I just, you know, what ended up happening there is she started promoting herself to all my clients indirectly, stealing all the emails from the company. She started Going on telling all the clients about her Instagram account and trying to go follow her, and it just ended up a hot mess express. And because we had a two-year contract, none of us could get out of it. A contract is contract, so we had to complete the two years. And that wasn't you know probably fun for both of us. So anyways, yeah, there's just lessons that I've learned with hiring people, and I could go on and on. I've hired a lot of people. And you just learn that. And that's why at PelviBiz we have a program called Power Circle where we teach you how to not make these mistakes and how to protect assets and how to write contracts and how to, um, do certain things so that these things don't happen to you. And then all of a sudden you get in a pickle saying, oh crap, what did I do? And you waste time, effort, energy, money Like so many different things. I've wasted money on recruiters where I paid like 9K to a recruiter and then let that person go 6 weeks later. I mean, I've told so many stories on this, so a lot of experience, um, and I'm happy to share my knowledge that you don't have to make the same mistakes that we did. So if you want more information, guys, just@ me @pelvibiz, P-E-L-V-I-B-I-Z, and be happy to chat.
