Ask Joe: 10 Tips to Grow Your Caseload Quickly | POP 874

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Ask Joe: 10 Tips to Grow Your Caseload Quickly | POP 874

Do you want to take a couple of weeks off over the summer? How can you prepare your practice to cope financially and systematically without you being there, hands-on? What are the tenets to boosting your client base and expanding your audience?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok discusses 10 tips to grow your caseload quickly.

Podcast Sponsor: Therapy Notes

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In This Podcast

  • Start with your ideal client
  • Network!
  • Optimize your website
  • Consider offering some free consultations
  • Leverage social media
  • Offer package deals
  • Ask for reviews – ethically!
  • Get listed in directories
  • Offer teletherapy
  • Stay up to date

Start with your ideal client

This is the very first step to increasing your caseload is to know who your ideal client is so that you can streamline your marketing strategy and hone in on the right copy to connect with them.

Identify your niche and your target audience so that you can tailor your market to them. What I really recommend is giving this person a name, an age, and maybe even finding an image that, to you, represents that person.

Joe Sanok
  • Where does your ideal client work?
  • What do they do?
  • What are their weekend hobbies?
  • What types of pain points are they struggling with?
  • How can you specifically meet and resolve their needs?

Network!

If you’re looking to boost your caseload, you want to get out there and meet people. Attend conferences, join local professional organizations, and connect with other therapists in your area.

Joe Sanok

Reach out, follow up, meet up, and nurture a professional connection.

Soon you will both be sending one another referrals and finding ways to support each other’s practice.

Look for therapists both inside and outside of your niche.

Optimize your website

Your website is often the first impression that people have of you. This is where your curious ideal clients will go to get more of a feel of you while they are deciding where to place their money.

By optimizing your website, you can show these curious and undecided clients exactly why you are the right choice and how well you understand them and their needs.

Remember to make your website:

  • Easy to navigate
  • Appealing to scroll through and look at
  • Can direct your clients to where they need and want to go

Consider offering some free consultations

Think about the possibility of offering a free 15-minute chat with a curious client that is interested in working with you.

This can really give potential clients a chance to chat with you and see if you might be a [good] fit. [They can] get a sense of your tone, and it allows them to see if you might be someone that can help them out.

Joe Sanok

Remember this is entirely optional. If this is not possible for your budget or time, then there are other techniques you can employ to boost your caseload!

Leverage social media

What’s your favorite social media? Don’t just be on all of them to trawl through potential clients, and instead be intentional with where you spend your time and how.

Do you love reels? Great, then try to make some!

Do you live to chat with clients and your audience? Then try weekly live videos!

Offer package deals

If you have clients that fit within a specific niche or have a specific need, then consider offering them a package deal with different offers.

The package may include:

  • Some group work
  • E-courses
  • A checklist or weekly track sheet of progress

If you know that people are going to have the most success if they come a certain number of sessions, you may say, “I do six-session packages because I know that if people don’t commit to at least six sessions then it’s [difficult] for them to get the progress that they want”.

Joe Sanok

Ask for reviews – ethically!

Make sure to check your license within your state! For most codes of ethics, therapists cannot ask their clients directly for reviews. However, you can always ask other colleagues or referral sources to review you.

Get listed in directories

List your private practice, or yourself, under a handful of reputable online directories, such as:

Offer teletherapy

Teletherapy is one of the best ways to get new clients because it can help you to reach clients who live outside of your immediate area, in the state that you’re licensed in.

Joe Sanok

Teletherapy can help you to expand your client base to boost your caseload.

Additionally, you can optimize your SEO for towns other than the one that you are based in, allowing you to reach a wider audience.

Stay up to date

Keep your finger on the pulse of the therapeutic world:

  • Attend conferences
  • Keep up with the latest trends and research in the field
  • Read journals
  • Participate in continuing education credits

Sponsors mentioned in this episode:

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Joe Sanok

A photo of Joe Sanok is displayed. Joe, private practice consultant, offers helpful advice for group practice owners to grow their private practice. His therapist podcast, Practice of the Practice, offers this advice.

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

Podcast Transcription

[JOE SANOK] Providing great therapy day after day can be challenging even for the best of us. At Blueprint, they believe that nothing should get in the way of you doing your best work, which is why they created a platform that provides therapists with an array of clinical tools, things like therapy, worksheets, intervention ideas, and digital assessments that are designed to help you and your clients stay connected and confident throughout the care journey. Even better, Blueprint helps streamline your documentation so you can spend less time on your notes and more time on the things that matter. To learn more and request a 30-day free trial, visit blueprint-health.com. Again, that’s www.blueprint-health.com. This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, episode number 874. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. I am so excited to have you here. We are wrapping up specialty month. We covered, for the last month and a half or so, tons and tons of specialties. We talked clinical stuff for quite a while here. I mean, if we go back and we look at, we talked attention span in episode 862, we talked about specializing in the LGBTQ care, in financial stress back in 864, in 869, we talked to Anna about redefining trauma. So many amazing things that we covered and I am just so excited about today, the Ask Joe, about 10 tips to grow your caseload quickly. So one of the most common questions that I get as we enter into the summer months is, how do I keep my caseload up? Well, one thing to think about is do you even need to keep your case load up? Maybe this is a time for you to spend time with your kids, time with your friends and family, do things for yourself physically. If you budget out annually that you’re going to take time off in the summer. If you know that every year you have a dip in your caseload, that’s a great opportunity to work on the operations of your business, to take a deep breath, to rest and relax and enjoy summer. But also that’s not always something everyone can do. So in Prep for Summer, wanting to give you 10 tips on how to boost your caseload quickly, I received a bunch of emails and questions around this from both our Next Level Practice community, but also our Ask Joe submission form, which if you have questions, we’re going to be doing more Ask Joe’s in the future. For a while there we were doing them every single week. We tore through a bunch of those questions and then we dove into some different types of things like we wanted to cover how to start a practice for a while and then growing a group practice and then we dove into Level Up week in March and then specialty Month, month and a half. So covered all sorts of things during that time. But maybe it’s time for you to do a couple things that can help you grow your practice. I’m going to offer you at least 10 tips might do even more. But first we want to start with your ideal client. Your ideal client, so this is the very first step to increasing your caseload and to know exactly who you want to work with, what you want to do with them, identifying your niche and your target audience so that really you can tailor your market to them. And what I really recommend is giving this person a name, an age, and maybe even finding an image that to you really represents that person, so that when you’re talking to that imaginary person, you can really picture them, you can really understand them, you can really think about them. Next, we want to network like crazy, and I don’t mean just like one email a week. If you’re looking to boost your caseload, you want to get out there and meet people, you want to attend conferences, you want to join local professional organizations, connect with other therapists in your area, and don’t be afraid to ask for referrals. You’re not going to start right at the beginning, “Hey, I’m accepting referrals.” But get to know people. Maybe they see the same specialty clients that you see. Maybe they are also a marriage therapist and they’re full or they’re going to be full. Maybe they are ancillary to what you do. Maybe you do play therapy and you decide to work with someone that works just with couples. There’s all sorts of ways that you can network to connect with people. Third, we want to optimize your website, your website’s often the first impression people have of you. They really are able to really get a feel for you, the tone of your practice, who you are, are you a good fit? We want to have the words, therapy, counseling, intake, all those things on there. Recently I was doing a website evaluation for one of our new Next Level Practice members and in this meeting people were bringing their websites and bringing up ideas. And this person’s website, the words counseling were so small, you couldn’t tell them. There weren’t very many pictures of them on it. Ultimately, you are the product. Doing counseling with you is number one and so we want to make sure it’s clear that it’s counseling, it’s clear the transformation people can have, and we want to make sure that it’s visually appealing. Also, we want to make sure it’s optimized for search engines. We want to make sure it’s easy to navigate. We want to make sure it’s visually appealing, all those things to make sure the website is good. So that’s number three. All right, number four consider offering some free consultations, so just like a 15 minute chat. Some people don’t want to do this, some do. This can really give potential clients a chance to chat with you, see if you might be a fit, get a sense for your tone and it allows them to really see if you might be someone that can help them out. Other people are like, you know what, in the medical field, it’s not like doctors oftentimes do free consults before you switch over to work with them. They’re so busy. That doesn’t always have to be the case that you do that. All right, number five, leverage social media. So thinking about social media, thinking about what’s your favorite social media. Don’t just be on all the social medias because oftentimes what that ends up being is it ends up being that you’re just like doing them all poorly. We want you to be able to start with the ones you like, you understand, the ones that have the same culture and the way that you think about things. We want to do that and we want to make sure that you’re having fun with it. If you don’t get the d n a or tone of a social media, you’re going to stick out like a sore thumb. One thing some people have been trying is to offer package deals. Especially if you help people in particular areas, so to say that there’s like a parenting package, so it’s maybe a six client offer, I’m sorry, a six-session offering and you know that people have great experiences when they come with you for six sessions. It may even include some group work. It may include that you’ve recorded some e-courses or some eBooks that go along with it so that it builds some value upfront. But then there’s also that commitment. If you know that people are going to have the most success if they come a certain number of sessions, you may say this is, I do six session packages because I know that if people don’t commit to at least six sessions, then really it’s hard for them to get the progress that they want. All right ,number seven is to ask for reviews. But you also want to look at your code of ethics and your license in your state. For most codes of ethics, we don’t ask our clients directly for reviews, but you can always have things like ask other colleagues to review you. You can have other referral sources review you. You could even say find us on Google Reviews. You can have that little sticker that says that. If you do your annual survey, you can say did you know that we have a Yelp site? You’re not directly asking and you want to think about your own ethics around that, if that feels good to you or if that feels like maybe you’re not sure. Asking for reviews can in a way encourage your satisfied clients to put positive reviews out there. But again, we want to look at your code of ethics. Make sure you do that in a clear and straightforward way that doesn’t violate any of your ethics. [THERAPY NOTES] Is managing your practice stressing you out? Try Therapy Notes. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and tele-health a whole lot easier. Check it out and you will quickly see why it’s the highest rated EHR on Trustpilot with over 1000 verified customer views and an average customer rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars. You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support seven days a week so when you have questions, you can quickly reach out to someone who can help. You are never wasting your time looking for answers. If you’re coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will import your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away. Use the promo code [JOE], J-O-E to get the first three free months totally free to try it out, no strings attached. Remember telehealth is included with every subscription free. Make 2022, the best year yet with Therapy Notes. Again, use promo code [JOE] to get three months totally free. [JOE SANOK] So yeah, we’re tearing through these. We’re at number eight. Get listed in directories. So make sure your practice is listed in online directories like Psychology Today, Good Therapy, TeleWellness Hub, onlinecounseling.com. All of those really good directories that are out there helps new clients be able to find you so much easier. I mean, these businesses are putting so much money into being able to rank high. You want to be able to rank high as well. In TeleWellness Hub, Marta is actually a consulting client of mine, someone that came to Slow Down School, she’s rocking out the therapy world and the therapy directory world, and you get free CTV ads with that when you get the premium TeleWellness Hub. CTV ads are those ads that go directly to people, like on Amazon or on other things on any of those like digital TVs. So you can choose exactly who and what zip code you want to be in. Number nine, if you’re not offering teletherapy, offering teletherapy is one of the best ways to get new clients. Because it can help you reach clients who live outside of your immediate area in your state that you’re licensed in. It can expand your client base, can help you figure out more caseloads, you could even do optimized SEO for other towns other than your own. And also maybe you’re not in a high income area and you’re private pay. It allows you to expand much differently in that area too. And then number 10 is to stay current. So keep up with latest trends, research in the field, attend conferences, read journals, participate in continuing ed, stay on top of your game, do anything you can to step forward in your field. I was actually just today about half an hour ago in a networking meeting for Michigan therapists. I thought, well, I’ll go to this. I was invited to it and there, didn’t look like there was many people in the business consulting side of it and it was mostly clinicians. I thought, well, I’ll show up and we had a chance to talk for a couple minutes about what we do and I shared about Practice of the Practice and all the good work that we do here. Well, I just asked a question like, how are people using AI in your field? How are you using AI to help with treatment gaps? And literally of the 20 people or so in this, nobody even was thinking about AI and its application in mental health, which to me, I didn’t mean to say that as like a positioning thing, like, look at me, I’m thinking about this, but it became that where people said, well, what are you seeing? I was able to talk about the work John’s doing and the work that our team is doing and the work that a lot of you are doing that are in our membership communities. Even our first Wednesday of the month for Group Practice Boss, Group Practice Launch and Next Level Practice and Audience Building Academy, all of our membership communities get to come to our Tech Wednesday where Jean is helping people with their websites and SEO and talking AI and all these things. And so it’s one of those things that we want to be the forefront in regards to talking about AI, talking about technology and ways to use that or not use that in the field. So the more that you can be doing those 10 things the easier it’s going to be to fill your caseload. So, thank God, I’m leaving that in. Mitch, leave that in. That yawn, can it snuck up on me. It’s, I’m recording at this at almost 2 in the afternoon and tomorrow morning I’m actually leaving for Jazz Fest. So I know this doesn’t come out till later in the month but taking a week off to go with my partner Claire, down to Jazz Fest and tomorrow morning we have to leave at 4:30 AM am to get to the airport to fly out at 6:00 AM And so I decided, okay, I’m not going to drink any coffee after 10:00 AM this morning and it’s starting to catch up with me but I’m human. I’m leaving that yawn in because, you know that’s just how it is. All right, so let’s go through those 10 again. Define your ideal client, number two, network like crazy, number three, optimize your website, number four, consider offering free consultations, number five, leverage social media. Number six, potentially offer package deals, seven, ask for reviews from colleagues, number eight, get listed in directories, number nine, offer teletherapy, and number 10, stay current. There we go. Boom, tore through all of that. That is your list of 10 things. Thanks so much for asking, Joe. If you want to ask me a question that I will potentially answer here on the show, head over to practiceofthepractice.com/askjoe. That is where you can submit your Ask Joe questions. Also, if you are not getting our free resources over at pillarsofpractice.com, you absolutely have to. We have so much coming up, so many great things that you’re going to want some free trainings on growing your practice and in scaling it that are coming up. You aren’t going to want to miss any of those things. So make sure that you’ve signed up over at pillarsofpractice.com. We could not do this show without amazing sponsors like Therapy Notes. Therapy Notes is the best electronic health record out there. We would absolutely love for you to go check them out totally for free. You can get a discount if you just use promo code [JOE] at checkout. Again, that’s therapynotes.com, use promo code, [JOE] at checkout. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.

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