From Solo Practice to Group Success: Joe Sanok’s Blueprint for Therapists | POP 1359

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Is your solo practice supporting your life, or limiting your potential? What would it take to grow beyond your own time and capacity? How do you scale into a group practice without losing control or burning out?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok discusses how to go from solo practice to group success and shares his blueprints for therapists looking to grow. 

Podcast Sponsor: Alma

As a clinician, you probably chose this field because you wanted to support people in navigating challenges and finding personal growth. But many mental health care providers end up spending almost as much time on billing, insurance, and other documentation as you do in sessions with clients.

That’s where Alma can help.

Alma supports clinicians in building rewarding private practices—with simplified insurance credentialing in under 45 days, enhanced reimbursement rates, and guaranteed two-week payback.

Plus, a free profile in their searchable, filterable directory—making it easy for clients who are the right fit for your practice to find you.

Learn more about how Alma could support you in building a thriving private practice at helloalma.com/joe.

The benefits of a group practice

You might be on the fence, thinking like, “I’m solo, I’m doing well. Do I want to take on a group practice?” And it’s really good that you’re being thoughtful around whether or not you want to do this. (Joe Sanok)

Group practice is not for everyone, and that’s alright. 

However, if this thought has crossed your mind a few times, it may be to your advantage to explore it, because if you try it out and you find it’s not your liking, you can always pivot out. 

If you are considering a group practice, here’s a brief list of benefits that you could step into receiving: 

• It increases your revenue beyond your own time 
• It is a shared workload, so you are not seeing every client coming in 
• It expands your opportunity base to see a wider variety of clients with more clinicians 
• It gives you an enhanced sense of work collaboration 

The sustainable group practice repeatable process

Joe has been using the sustainable group practice process for many years and has shared it with other practitioners, who’ve adopted it in their own practices as well. 

1 – Notice within the practice needs for a specialty 

2 – Create a waitlist for this new clinician position in the specialty that you have noticed 

3 – Post for the job and hire the clinician 

Step three is posting and hiring for the clinician. That kind of goes against what maybe we think. We think we should hire the person first, but we want to have that proof of concept before we really start doing it. (Joe Sanok)

4 – Onboard the clinician and make sure everything is operational and running smoothly 

5 – Ideally, the clinician will have one to three client intakes on their first day with the waitlist you built up 

6 – When this clinician’s client schedule is about 60% full, repeat this process to hire a new clinician 

When is the right time to expand?

Here are a few indicators in your solo practice that you can look out for to know whether now would be a good time to expand from solo to group:

• Are you, as the owner, consistently 60% full or more? 
• Do you have a waiting list? 
• Can you financially support another clinician, if insurance were to pay late, for example?
• Are your admin systems in place? 

The next important part of assessing whether now is a good time to expand from solo to group is about your financials: 

• Do you have three months of expenses for the practice saved up? 
• Do you have a rough plan of fixed and variable expenses? 
• Will you choose 1099 or W2 employee systems for your clinicians? 

How to hire your first clinician 

Now, when it comes to hiring your first clinician to expand your practice, these are some reflection questions you can ask yourself: 

1 – What qualities are you looking for in a new clinician? 

2 – Review your interviewing and onboarding process, such as background checks, reference checks, and others 

3 – Keep track of your process of hiring so that you can polish and reuse it for when you hire the following one! 

4 – Create channels of clear and empathetic communication so that both parties can talk freely with each other if problems were to arise 

5 – Make sure that we know how to give feedback in a way that communicates the issue or update in a way that lands well with them 

But really, early on, you want to meet with people pretty regularly to make sure that it flows really well and you can catch things. (Joe Sanok)

Marketing your new group practice

Imagine: now you’ve hired your first person! It’s now important to take a look at your brand identity. 

The core question is this: What is your practice’s brand identity based on? 

We want to first look at your brand identity. So, really, is it based on you? Is everything about you? We want to move from “me” to “we”, where it’s “We do this … Our team …” Even in your lead-up to it, switching up your website so that it isn’t all, “I started this practice, I’m doing this …” We want to start building that brand identity as something beyond you. (Joe Sanok)

Reflect on your online and offline marketing strategies. Are you going to: 

• Do some organic SEO to help increase your rankings on Google?
• Get some backlinks to your website?
• Do some blogging and content creation?
• Brainstorm creative ways to market your practice, such as launching workshops and seminars in tandem with other aligned businesses or organizations?

Sponsors Mentioned in this Episode:

Learn more about how Alma could support you in building a thriving private practice at helloalma.com/joe.

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

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Check out these additional resources:

• Building Great Lakes Online Counseling: Onboarding a Virtual Assistant with Ubuntu Freelancers Owner Di Luden | POP 1358
• Practice of the Practice Network
• Group Practice Launch
• Group Practice Boss: www.practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss $149 a month
• PoP Group Practice Owners Facebook Group
• Free resources to help you start, grow, and scale
• Work with us
• Practice of the Practice Network 

Meet Joe Sanok

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 who are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

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