[JOE SANOK]
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 614.

Well, welcome, welcome. Welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and I’m so excited to hang out with you. It’s another Ask Joe show. Every Wednesday we are doing these. You can submit your question over at practiceofthepractice.com/askjoe. I got to take a sip of water, because I just had a delicious smoothie that had some chia seeds in it and those chia seeds are not sitting where they should in my throat. So give me just a second. All right. Now I’m ready to rock. Let’s do this. All right, so we had over half a year’s worth of question submitted the first day that we released this and we’re bouncing around because some of the questions kind of repeat. So we’re even if you just submitted one last week yours might come up. We’re not doing ’em all in order. So go over to practiceofthepractice.com/askjoe, and you can just fill out the form with your question there.

Got to say I’m so excited. Just around the corner, October 5th, Thursday is the New Friday releases worldwide and we are on track to, hopefully fingers crossed, be a New York Times best seller. It’s so hard to know. I mean it’s crazy when you learn the behind the scenes of books and how, you know if someone drops a huge book, like say Michelle Obama comes out with a book next week on October 5th, that changes the whole algorithm of how many books you need to sell for New York Times’ bestselling status. So go out there, get a bulk book by of 10, would love for you to be in that mastermind group with me., If you end up getting 10 books then you get to be in about six week mastermind all around the book. It’s going to be Q&A, we’re going to go through chapter by chapter. It’s going to be a great time. And it’s also going to be a time to level up with other individuals.

I joined a mastermind group when John Lee Dumas launched his book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success. There was a small group of 10 people and we became so close throughout going through that and connecting with JLD and Kate, his fiancé, and being able to go deeper with people that oftentimes I didn’t have access to. And then when we were at Podcast Movement, we all connected and had this whole cohort of people that were kind of working together and knew each other already. It’s amazing how, when you know those people or know people that it just opens up so many doors. And what’s really cool is, I saw this question, I selected the question and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is my friend Mindy.”

So Mindy Solomon from Mile High Mental Health in Denver, Colorado asks this question. I met Mindy when I was at Killin’It Camp in 2019, when I hosted that and Mindy just is such an innovative thinker in so many different ways. And to see that her question came through, just so excited. So Mindy says, “I love hearing creative and outside-the-box things therapists are doing both to diversify income, but just to keep learning and fresh.” Oh, I love it. And I love that it’s not just like to fill up your client load, but it’s to diversify income. So let’s talk about a few different ways that people are diversifying income that are therapists because that’s who our main audience is here at Practice of the Practice. So a few different areas.

So first some creative ideas in regards to within the practice. So within the practice it’s not super out-of-the-box or creative, but looking at your current client load and saying, what are the needs that they have that I could serve better? I could maybe do a weekend intensive. Maybe I could do some sort of group work that could be short lived. It could be a four-week weekly group. It could be long, long lasting. Are there certain kind of ancillary services that we could offer that go beyond just what we’ve been offering? So that could be, if you need to offer nutrition management, it could be that you add a massage therapist to your practice, it could be a number of different things that then are additional services that go beyond your own time.

So you want to start with where is it easy, in general, where is it easy? I was just talking to a former consulting client and their practice was exploding and they had raised their rates to a rate that they thought was just so high and that rate they felt like they couldn’t keep going past that rate. So they were going to start doing some consulting in a particular field, but for that consulting, they were going to get paid less than their counseling. And it was a harder sell for people and I just said to this person just go where it’s easy. If that takes that much work to get people to consult with you to get paid less, maybe we just need to kind of optimize your practice, join Group Practice Launch, get the group practice going and then make it easy and then we can just start with kind of a blank slate instead of saying you have to start with this consulting. So go where it’s easy.

So next is taking kind of the skills that you already have. So first we’re starting with internal practice, the skills that you already have. Now, we’re looking external of your practice with the skills that you have. So that would be taking the fact that you are a trauma therapist and how do you go beyond your practice? How do you go beyond that, into the world of podcasts, the world of e-courses, the world of membership communities. So each of these things has its own kind of way of doing things and a way of being monetized. So on a podcast, depending on your listens in your audience, depending on the podcast, you can make a hundred dollars an episode all the way up to thousands of dollars in episode depending on the audience size, depending on how clear of a niche you have. That can be a way to earn money.

As well, that can be a good lead magnet as a podcast where if you have a few hundred people on an email list and then only 5% convert into some sort of coaching or course that’s 10 or 20 people that are new customers. If you can do that in more of a group model, then that can start to kind of add up as well. So e-courses can be a great way to continue to kind of sell your knowledge and sell your hacks. We are past the information age and we are in the implementation age. So if you can teach people to implement something faster, they will pay for that. They don’t just want information that they could Google or go watch a YouTube video. You want to say, here’s how you can implement things faster.

So say you teach parenting all the time. How do you help people become a better parent in 14 days? Like what’s the intensive that people could do? It could they pay a thousand dollars and be in a group with 10 other people and for 14 days you just meet every day for 90 minutes and then maybe have some Q&A time or some office hours. So, I mean, there’s lots of creative ways that you can take what you internally know and use it externally from your practice. And then the next area is really looking at areas external of your practice that really has nothing to do with therapy. So some examples of this are looking at multiple streams of income in a number of different ways. So one that I’ve been exploring, and again, I’m not an accountant, I am not a bookkeeper, this is speaking from my own knowledge, my own understanding and I take on no liability for what I’m saying in regards to you making your business choices – so my attorney always makes me say that stuff. And I say it just because I want to protect myself and my business and make sure that you’re making your own decisions for yourself.

So in property, I mean that could be that you have an Airbnb. We have two Airbnb’s and they’ve been great. They gross over a hundred grand a year. After our expenses, I want to say it’s probably 70 grand or so. So that’s a huge chunk of change coming into the family and we were able to automate that with a great cleaning person and a great fix-it person where they are on call, but then also we’re able to understand when bookings were coming through. So for the most part, that’s pretty passive income at this point. And especially if you have someone in your family that is not working like a stay-at-home parent you can talk to your accountant about how to classify them as a real estate professional, where if the majority, they have to work at some certain number of hours per year, and then there’s certain tax advantages to that.

You don’t have to go get your real estate license to be considered a real estate professional. So that’s something that you may want to look into as well. Also if you just think about picking up some kind of entry level properties and having people rent, at least in my market in Northern Michigan, long-term rentals are hard to find. So pretty much if I picked up a property I know that I could fill it with a quality renter pretty quick. I would hope quality, I do background checks and all that. We’ve only done the short-term rentals and so if I was going to move into the long-term rental market, you figure if you do a 15 year loan and someone’s paying rent over that 15 years, I’m not saying that I’m going to buy a property every single year, but if I did every year, that means in 15 years I could be selling one of those properties every year or just have that passive income beyond the mortgage of that.

So looking at that, looking at the risk, those are other creative ways. I would say that the area that’s the lowest hanging fruit for most therapists is to look at clinical or emotional problems and creating products within that specialty. There are so many self-proclaimed coaches out there self-proclaimed gurus. We actually have the schooling, the education, the knowledge, the certifications, the licensure to do the work that can help the world. Whereas a lot of these folks, they just have life experience and they say, “I can do this.” And maybe they can, maybe they really have figured out a system or a hack or a way to do that. And I don’t want to poo-poo people just because they didn’t go to graduate school. But there’s a lot of folks out there that are just selling e-courses and have no idea really what they’re doing. So I think that we as professionals that are licensed can create some amazing content.
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[JOE SANOK]
So kind of the model that I’ve found that works the best if you’re looking at doing that, because I would say that’s the low-hanging fruit for most folks that are listening to this podcast is to first grow a specialty. So what is your specialty that you’re going to go into? And don’t fear getting too niched in because there’s so many people that are say talking about trauma. If you can be the person that specifically talks about trauma from being in foster care and now you’re married, so you’re married and you are in foster care and you talk about trauma, you may only get a thousand people that follow you, but they are going to be the exact clients that you want. So finding those hyper niches, we might want to say we want three different variables, so we want trauma, that narrows it down to about everybody. We’ve all had some sort of trauma, but maybe a certain level of trauma. So we’re talking 40% of the population. Then those that were in foster care, that’ll really limited it. And now people that have been in foster care that are now married, that’ll really limit it more.

So if we can have three variables or so for our specialty, that really helps narrow it down. Then next, after growing your specialty, you want to grow your audience. A lot of people jump to what’s my product, what’s my thing? I’m going to sketch out all of that. You want to wait on that. You want to grow your audience first because your audience is going to tell you what they want to buy. They’re going to tell you, here’s what I want. We and Podcast Launch School over at podcastlaunchschool.com have a whole curriculum we give away for free about how you do this through podcasting. So again, that’s podcastlaunchschool.com where we walk through, how do you grow your audience and then when you grow your audience, once you get to that paying side, how do you survey them to have them tell you what they want to buy instead of you having to come up with it? So you’re growing your audience.

So that could be that you have a podcast. It could be that you’re a guest on a bunch of podcasts. You’re definitely going to want to have some sort of email funnel. I call it an email course because we want it to be more like a course than just a newsletter. So you want to direct people, especially when you’re a guest on a podcast, back to some sort of thing so you can stay in contact with them. So then you’re growing your audience. You want to have at least 200 people or so on that email list before you even think about launching a product. So then after that, then we want to jump into growing an income. So grow a specialty, grow an audience, grow an income.

That’s where we’re going to be serving that audience. We’re going to be talking to them about what do they want. So you’ve got all these people that were in foster care that had trauma that now are married and they’re listening to your podcast or they’re hearing you on other podcasts, they’re on your email list. You want to reach out to them and figure out what do they wish that you would offer? Is that an intensive? Is it some sort of couple’s retreat? Is it some sort of larger online conference or summit? Is it self-paced e-courses? Is it a membership community? There’s so many options. There’s no reason for you to have to figure that out, get your audience to say, “Hey we’re the kind of people that want a membership community. We want to be in a monthly Zoom call to talk about all the issues.” Awesome. So then you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting and trying to figure out what they like or what they want.

So there you go. Boom, we got some stuff covered today. Well, it’s pretty exciting that for this one, just right around the corner, Thursday is the New Friday goes live on October 5th. Make sure you grab your copy of the book. The people that got the pre-release copies like Pat Flynn have said this is like the new four-hour work week that it’s reshaping society. We have Kevin Harrington that supported at one of the original Shark Tank, John Lee Dumas, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman gave endorsement. I mean, the Gottman’s. I got an endorsement from the Gottman’s. Oh my gosh. Rob Bell gave an endorsement. So a lot of really awesome big names, but then even people that are just such good people that have got a copy of it, Gordon Brewer a long time friend and consulting buddy endorsing it and other people that are just amazing out there.

So make sure you pick up your copy wherever you get your books, either your local bookstore have them order it for you or you could go through Amazon. Make sure you do an Amazon review if you do get the book there. That’s super helpful to get a bunch of those as well.

And we want to thank Gusto. Gusto is the best payroll solution out there. It’s so dang helpful. If you over to gusto.com and use promo code [JOE], you’re going to get three months for free. They take out the taxes, they get it all set out. It’s just done right.

So 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. We really like it. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.