How to Get More Clients in Private Practice | PoP 268

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How to get more clients in private practice

In this episode, Joe Sanok speaks about how to get more clients in private practice.

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Confused by all the advice on starting a private practice? I’d love to help. I put together a checklist of the top 28 things to do to launch a private practice.

In This Podcast

Summary

If you are in private practice and are under the $60 000 mark, this podcast series is for you! Joe is going back to the basics and running through the various phases involved in setting up a practice that is going to thrive! In this episode, Joe speaks about how to get more clients in private practice.

Why People Keep Coming Back to a Practice

People want to get better and feel happier. If their emotions are hurt, they think about getting better for months and months, but often back the decision to go for therapy in a moment.

Therefore, you want to ensure you have a quality logo, website, and color scheme. Make sure it’s easy for the person to make an appointment through CTAs (call to actions) that stand out on your website as well as visible contact details.

Once connecting with the person, find out why they are coming to counseling in order to pair them with the right therapist.

Useful Links:

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

 

 

 

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

File: PoP-268: How to Get More Clients in Private Practice
Duration: 0:11:10:08

[MUSIC]

Joe Sanok: This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session #268.

[MUSIC]

[INTRODUCTION]
Joe Sanok: I am Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. We are here to help you start, grow and scale your private practice. It’s amazing to see how things are growing. We keep getting more and more international clients, people that want to work with us across the globe, just got an email from a doctor in Kenya and we’ve got some therapists down under, down in Australia. They have been tuning in and emailing us, and it’s just been really exciting to see how applicable our work is with you and to see all of you being so successful as you listen and implement what we are talking about. Well, today we are going to talk all about how to get more clients in private practice and I want to walk you through the exact steps that people take going from the intake to getting scheduled to getting money. Because that flow, we often don’t talk about just the basic flow of kind of an intake, getting the person in, getting the money, moving on and rescheduling them. And so today we are going to be walking through that. Now, if you are wanting to move from being overwhelmed and confused to getting more organized and launching your practice faster, I would highly recommend that you sign up for our free e-newsletter and it’s not just newsletter. It’s a whole training course where it starts with the 28-step checklist on how to start a practice. You get a 5-minute video that walks you through how to assess your area in private practices and what to look for online to see what the competition is. And in most areas, the competition is not very strong, and to rock it out and get on the first page and really get a lot of clients is really fairly easy from what we have seen, having helped now thousands of people with their private practices. And then you are going to get phased out emails that are going to walk you through that setup phase, the attracting clients phase, and then systems to grow phase, which is going to naturally lead you into kind of that sections, past the startup phase and that’s the growth phase, and then eventually the scaling phase. But, we want to walk you through that startup phase to gather and guide you through what we have learned from working with and interviewing thousands of different people. So again that’s www.practiceofthepractice.com/start and you can sign up to get that checklist video [00:02:43.07] emails all 100 percent free. We would love to have you jump on that list to be able to learn how to start a practice.

[WHY PEOPLE KEEP COMING BACK TO A PRACTICE]
So let’s talk about why people schedule, why people keep coming back to our practice. You know, I was over at my daughter’s school the other day and it’s sort of like an outdoor education style school. They don’t have hallways. They have these like cabins and it’s got woods and they get muddy. We just love it. And we have to walk up and down these steps and every morning it is like so many steps, but it’s up this hill and it is sort of this like morning endeavor that you just conquer. Well, the other morning I saw that they had Higher Grounds Coffee at the bottom of the steps for the parents, and I thought, oh my gosh, like I had my cup of coffee, but like to have an extra cup of coffee and Higher Grounds is this great local roaster that works directly with farmers and has relationships with them and makes sure that their kids are going to school and fed and all this. It did really good work. So I dropped off daughters, and come down the steps and head over there to get a cup of coffee. And lo and behold! It was a marketing effort. They were actually doing a fundraiser where you buy these $12 bags of coffee which is about the same price that you pay in the store, except $5 that goes back to the school. And I thought about how smart it was because it wasn’t just that they had some coffee up. But they had all of the Higher Grounds. It was this big black table cloth with their bright red logo on it, and I knew right away it was Higher Grounds. They had this big sign that said Higher Grounds Coffee. They had each of these three different variations of coffee. They had light roast which I prefer because it’s higher in caffeine all the way to a darker roast. The person that was talking was knowledgeable. She was one of the Pathfinder teachers, but she also understood coffee, understood how important it was to have it roasted close to the time that you buy it. So she talked about how they are going to roast it on the day that they are bringing over the school. She was knowledgeable. She was an expert. She was a guide. And I knew that it was going to be a successful fundraiser. Because it was something people were already using. People naturally allready had this desire for coffee. They wanted good coffee with something they are purchasing. And then they could it, and had those extra layer of helping the school.

Now, when we think about private practice, we often don’t think about it in those terms, but really people want to get better. People want to feel happier. In the same way that you go to your doctor if your finger hurts and then he or she helps make it not hurt, if people’s emotions are hurting, if people are struggling in their marrirage, they want to feel better and they think about it for months and months and months and months, but often times they make that decision in a day. And so first on the front end, we wanted to start with that. We want your branding to look good. Even if you are just starting out, this is one of the biggest differentiators that you can have. So having a decent logo. So I recommend 99 designs. If you go over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/99designs, you get a discount there on your logo. It’s a great way to get a cheap logo for whole bunch of different people. There’s other ways you can do it. But having a website and having a good looking logo, clean colors. You are starting with either kind of a khaki palette. So having a browns or kinds of tans. I don’t prefer that one. I prefer more of the whites and grays, and then having one color that pops. And usually in private practice, you want that to be a blue or a green. You don’t want it to be a red, unless you have really unique branding that matches that. So then come to your website. Then you want to have it be really easy for them to schedule. So we want to have your phone number clearly in the header on every single page . You also want in the upper right to have a schedule in the intake. They then make that phone call. And you really want to try to have someone that answers that phone call. So it maybe that you have a virtual assistant that answers the phone and maybe that you answer the phone, but you really want to move towards having someone answer that phone live [00:06:51.03].

(Yawn) Will you excuse me…. and it just took me over… and follow that yawn up with a sip of coffee. It’s a grey overcast day in Northern Michigan. It’s like almost 9:30 and it is still dark out because of the amount of clouds and it just got that, like film of tiredness… So anyway…

So, you are going to want to make sure that it’s really easy for them to schedule. So they are either going to send a contact form, they are going to email you. They are going to call you. And then when they get on the phone with someone, you really want to start with connecting with why they are coming to counseling. And unless they leave with you take my insurance, which if you are out of network is a good sign that they probably are just shopping off for someone that takes their insurance. But most people, they want to start with the person that’s going to be best for them or best for their family. So you are going to want to start with well, tell me what’s going on and then you are going to match your skills with those issues that they are dealing with, and then typically we will move into what day of the week works best for you and then we will talk about how we don’t directly bill insurance.

The one question that I get frequently is as you grow a group practice which is little more advanced than what this series is but I may as well talk about here. How do you add extra people? If you have been known in the community and everybody wants to see Joe Sanok, how do you switch that? Well, I have my intake coordinator Emily. She says, Joe has handpicked this team and found specialists in areas that really aren’t his specialty areas. And so based on the people that Joe has selected, Sarah is going to be the very best fit for you, or Steve is going to be the very best fit for you. And let me tell you why? Here’s a couple of bullet points about Steve’s work or about Sara’s work. If you ever feel that that person is not a good fit, you can always talk to Joe. We can figure out who is going to be the best fit for you and your family. And, I can’t think of any time that someone has wanted to talk to me to switch therapist. But giving people that option to switch is really important.

So then they schedule the appointment. They then get an email from Emily and it CCs the the therapist, that says here’s where we are. As we discussed, the rates are this for an intake and this for the sessions. Attached is the intake paperwork. Please bring that with you. Here’s your directions to our office. Please come a few minutes early and help yourself to some drinks that are in the refrigerator or the tea that’s on the counter. So then people come . They sit down. They come to the session. We again go over, however out of network. So then we have had on the paperwork. We have talked about on the phone. It’s in the email. We have also talked about in the sessions. We always make sure that people know what that means if we are out of network. And then at the end of the session, we make it very easy for them to pay. We have Square. Lots of people use other things. If it’s a kid or you know the parent is out of town, we may use PayPal or we may use a Paypal subscription where then it automatically bills them each week. I have had kids that were from out of State. They came to boarding schools here in Traverse City and it makes it really easy if it just bills them every single week. And then if they are on vacation, you can always refund that.

[CONCLUSION AND LINKS]
And so from search to finish, you wanted to be easy. You want to make it easy for your client to schedule, easy for them to come. That is really a no-brainer that they are going to come, they are going to experience success and then overall it’s going to be one of the best decisions to help their mental health.

Thanks for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Next time, we are going to talk about blogging and systems around blogging. Then we are going to wrap up this series and talk about really your big next steps in regards to kind of some big things that we are planning for the future here. Hope you are doing well and I will talk to you soon.

[MUSIC]

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for Intermusic, and this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It’s given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guest are rendering any legal, accounting, clinical or other information. If you need a professional, you should find one.

[MUSIC]

[END OF PODCAST 00:11:09.21]