[JOE SANOK] A new year, a new you, yeah, how about a new year, a new private practice? If you’re ready to start a private practice this year, or maybe you just got one going and you’re thinking, did I do it right. how do I do it right, how do I leave this full-time job, I have a 28-step checklist just for you to walk you through the initial steps of starting a practice. Just head on over to practiceofthepractice.com/new. Again, that’s practiceofthepractice.com/new. This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 839. What’s up everybody? I hope you are doing amazing. Happy New Year. We’re a little bit into the new year and I am sure that you’ve got goals and things that you’re doing. Here at Practice of the Practice we are continuing to be more intentional around monthly, what are our themes with the podcast to help you start, grow, and scale your private practice, as well as remaining curious. Lots of times we will interview people outside of our field, but bringing it all back in. As we’ve been growing as a team, we’ve been working on EOS, which is the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and really defining who we are, what is our uniqueness, how are we going to do that? We are here to help address the mental health crisis by helping thriving practices grow but we don’t want you to lose heart or your values in that process either. So we’re discovering the way that we talk about what we do, the unique way that we disrupt things. We tear them down, but then we rebuild them. So it’s been a really fun process and doing this Ask Joe today, and I’m actually taking a question that I received from several people and it’s really applicable for this first month of 2023. The question is, how can I manage my time better? How can I manage my time better? This is something that is near and dear to my heart because I feel like it took me a while to really figure out how to manage my time, especially when I left my full-time job, when they pretty much tell you what to do and to say, wow, what do I want to do with my time and on top of that working a hundred percent from home. Like even just five minutes ago I had wrapped up a mastermind group for Audience Building Academy, people that are launching big things outside of their private practice. I looked at the dishes and I was like, I could totally just knock those out. I was like, no. I put in my schedule to record podcasts, to record the Ask Joe’s, and it is time to do that. That is what I put in my calendar. So to hold myself accountable to that and to manage my time effectively and to work on the things that I know are going to move the needle forward for myself, for you so that my team isn’t waiting on podcasts to be completed. We’re going to talk through a number of different tips here. So the first thing is to look at your personal goals. When we look at time sometimes we’d jump right to work goals, we’d jump right to key performance indicators around money and our practices or the things we’re building outside of our practice. But the first thing we want to think about is our personal goals. I had a major medical thing happen back in October and November of 2022 during Killin’It Camp or afterwards. I’m thinking about it, maybe I should rename it because Killin’It Camp almost killed me. I got really bad salmonella and was hospitalized twice, had to have an emergency surgery, going to need another surgery. Like I was knocked out for two months. This is really, as I’m recording this in late December, this is really when I have been able to bounce back. This week is one of the first weeks I’ve really been able to start to feel like myself again. Thinking about personal goals, I’ve long heard that a person who’s healthy has a million goals, but a person that’s unhealthy has bought one. Really like trying to take that to heart that yeah, there’ll be a time when my health is hopefully back to normal and I can start just thinking about other goals. But for me personally, thinking about just all the really basic things that I need to do for my health, that I need to focus on to not let work or other things get in the way of those. I need to start with my personal goals. I need to start with what is it that I personally want to have be top of mind. So there’s certain exercises, there’s certain health things my doctors have said that needs to be in my schedule number one. Then we want to look at your income needs. Say you have a private practice, let’s do a little bit of math here, so say you know that you need to take home $5,000 a month. We’ll just say, okay, so $5,000 a month is what you need to bring home. We’re going to add taxes and expenses and things like that, so maybe we’ll add 40% to this. We’re going to multiply that times 1.4, so that’s $7,000 a month that needs to come into your practice. All right, now say that you charge $150 per session, so you charge $150 per session. Maybe your actual private pay rate is $175, $195 and your insurance rate ends up being $125 but on average you’re at $150. That means that in any given month, you need to do 47 sessions a month to bring in that seven grand. So if we just divided that out by, say you’re going to work four days a week four weeks a month, so 16 on average, sometimes there’s longer months, shorter months or so but just as just a general math, you can always adjust this for yourself, so divide that by 16 days. That means you need to do three sessions a day minimum to reach that, so actually it’s 2.91 sessions per day. So you may say, okay, well I charge $125. Okay, maybe it’s going to be higher, maybe it’s going to be lower, maybe you only do that in three days, maybe you want to work evenings. So knowing just what are the numbers of what you need to bring in? Do you need to bring in 10 grand a month, 20 grand a month, two grand a month? Like, do you have a partner that is the primary income earner and you don’t really have a specific goal? We want to know that before we start to really look at your time because if you allocate time for your practice but you don’t know why you’re doing it’s a lot harder than to say, I know I need to average three sessions a day, or over these four days I need to get you 12 a week in order to hit that $7K and to say, okay, this month I did 12 a week, but I only made $6K. What happened here? Well, maybe a bunch of insurances pay you $89.12 cents a session. You’re like, oh that’s way less than the $150 average that I need. So being able to then know, okay, where am I actually headed here? What are the actual numbers here? Then is going to allow you to know what and when you need to do it. For example, we switched from four podcasts a week to two podcasts a week primarily because of my illness and having to slow some of that down, not having as much pressure on the team to just say, okay, let’s take a breath while Joe is in the hospital and things like that. So we made that decision, we’re going to do that for a little bit and see if our numbers stay the same, but I know that I have things that I have to record, that I have to do on my side so that the rest of the team can edit, do show notes, transcriptions, promote it on social media, do all of that. So now I know that my minimum of two sessions a week needs to be happening so I can look at the schedule and that time and that commitment to that time now feels different than if it was just up to me. So I’ve got something behind it so when we have our personal goals and our income needs, that makes it a lot easier to do number three, which is to block out time for work and for personal. For example, I am doing this on a Thursday right now. I prefer to do the podcast recordings if I’m doing solo shows on a Thursday, because Tuesday and Wednesdays are my really big heavy days typically. Mondays once in a while I’ll have one meeting with either Sam our COO or Rocky, my Profit First professional. For the most part I don’t do a whole lot of work on Mondays and on Fridays I do my very best to take that completely off. So like tomorrow I’m going to be working at a food pantry with my friend Paul. We’re going to be getting ready for making some sugar cookies for the holiday season with my daughters. So blocking out that time and deciding, similar to what I talk about on Thursday is the New Friday, our hard boundaries and our soft boundaries. So what’s a hard boundary? Well, on a Friday, I’m never going to take on a consulting client that says I have to meet every Friday. But if Jess, my assistant texts me and says, “We’ve got a crisis going on, or I really, you missed this email on Thursday before you closed up shop for the weekend and we’ve got to get this in,” that’s going to be a much different thing where yeah, I still have a business to run, so having those hard boundaries, having those soft boundaries around my personal time, so blocking that out, putting things into your calendar that you want to do. For example, when I was dropping my daughters off for tutoring a few weeks ago at the library, I saw this little thing that said there was a tai chi thing with Josh at the library at noon starting on that Friday. So tomorrow I put that right into my calendar and so I blocked it out. I know that on Fridays that’s a personal time and a personal day and I know that I want to, as a value walk down to pick up my daughter from the elementary school she goes to and I want to be able to walk her home and I want to take her to school, pick her up from school. That means that if it’s 9:00 o’clock drop off, the first meeting I want to do is 9:30. I don’t want to be rushing home and not have my cup of coffee and not be able to meditate and not be able to really have my mind be in a proper space. I also know that it’s a 3:55 pickup, so I need to be leaving my house by 3:50, walk indown there, get a couple extra steps in. That means my last meeting of the day needs to wrap up by the latest 3:40, preferably 3:30. Then I now have a range on those Tuesdays and Wednesdays as to when I’m working. Even in my calendar, I put Joe working in there. I make it so it doesn’t block out because with Calendly or other things, I want people to be able to see it, there’s openings, but that’s for me and Jess to be able to look at it and say, okay, that’s free. That’s free to put in things for work. Then when Joe’s not working, that’s on repeat as well so people can’t accidentally schedule on a Monday or a Friday or say that my daughters have early release from school and they get home at 1:30 and I know those dates ahead of time. I put those in right away to block it out. So making sure that we’re blocking out those things that we can do on the regular that are going to be our aspirational schedule. [PoP] Are you ready to leave your full-time job for private practice? Maybe you work at community mental health or at a nonprofit, or you’re at 1099 or a W2 at a private practice already. Is this the year that you start a solo practice or maybe you already started a solo practice but you are really not sure if you’re doing it right? I want to give you something totally free to help you out on your journey. I have a 28-step checklist to make sure that you start a solo practice correctly. It’s totally free, it’s a download, I just get your email and send you other tips that are going to help you be able to grow your solo practice. You’re going to get weekly emails that help you to start your practice correctly. If that sounds good to you, head on over to practiceofthepractice.com/new to grab that 28-step checklist. Again, that’s practiceofthepractice.com/new and you can grab that 28-step checklist. [JOE SANOK] Then the last thing is to make sure every minute of your workday is allocated. It may be that you know that you really want to see therapy clients on Wednesdays from 9:00 till noon and from 1:00 to 4:00, that that’s in your schedule on repeat blocked out so that if any of your assistants see your calendar, if anyone is trying to schedule using some sort of calendar link that it’s blocked out specifically for clients. That way you know what you need to do every single moment. Even right now in my calendar, I had record podcasts, that even though I officially don’t have anything from when that mastermind was over until it’s time to pick up my daughters, that doesn’t mean I just dink around and check email or watch YouTube or go down some rabbit hole. I know exactly what I need to do. I have the Ask Joe’s that I need to record. I have a solo episode, actually the one, I’m going to do, the Ask Joe’s first, which I’m doing right now but the solo episode, that was two episodes ago, the quarter by quarter planning to reach your goals this year. I’m going to record after I do the Ask Joe’s, because the Ask Joe’s, I seem to get in a flow, I get in a rhythm, and then that larger episode is going to be a little bit different. So I know that I need to do that. I know that I need to check on my emails, I know that I need to do particular things because I put it in my calendar or my assistant Jess said, “Hey, I need you to do these things.” So I put that in there. Or she’ll create something for half an hour or an hour that says Joe to-do list and puts things in there. Then if I don’t know exactly what the best use of my time is, I do my best to put things in there or to have a working list within Trello of what I need to do next. Sam, my Chief Operating Officer, she and I meet usually at least once a week if not more often at this point to really implement that EOS. I have a list of things in there that I need to do if I have free time and not just if I have free time, there’s certain things that have dates that are associated with that. Now what we’ve done is we’ve created a basic simple organization where we understand what our personal goals are. We understand our business goals and how much money we need to bring in for our families and for our life and just to be able to run a business. We then have started to block out that personal time so that we save ourselves from ourselves because let’s be honest, if we have businesses we like or love, it’s really easy to jump onto email after the kids are in bed. Maybe that’s something you put in your calendar. Maybe you say on Wednesdays from 8:30 till 10:30, do email. You can do that but I don’t want that to be the default. I don’t want you to work all the time because your brain is going to be more effective if it has that time to slow down and then to kill it, slow down and kill it, which is all about our, what our conferences are about. It’s what the book I wrote about that in on Thursday is the New Friday, that idea of slowing down and then Killin’It it. We’re living that and then we’re putting during our work time specific things that we’re going to achieve during that time. Then when it’s in our calendar, it doesn’t feel as easy to get out of it. We’ve blocked that out by saying, I am going to do podcasts and I am not going to do all these other things. In doing that, it then allows us to feel that pressure from the calendar, from our past self-saying, Joe, you need to do these podcasts on a Thursday afternoon, not the dishes, not the laundry, not all the things that a single parent needs to do, but you need to do what’s most important. Because let’s be honest, as an adult, there’s always things in your house that you could do. Oftentimes, those are distractions from the work we are scared to do, the work that we need to do, the work that may not be as pleasant or it might just be unknown and so being able to do that over and over is so dang important. Well, thanks so much for hanging out with me and thanks for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Want to invite you, if you are starting a practice or if you have a solo practice, would love for you to grab our 28-step checklist. Our 28-step checklist is going to help you be able to grow your practice. This is going to walk you through exactly what you need to do to get going. If you head on over to practiceofthepractice.com/new that’s where you can grab that 28-step checklist. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. 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