Joe Sanok (00:00:00) – Are you looking for a way to make a real difference in mental health? Thank you. Life is here to help. They are a nonprofit dedicated to making Evidence-Based Mental Health Therapies accessible to those who need it most. And thank you, life. They provide financial assistance for ketamine assisted psychotherapy, helping individuals struggling with treatment resistant depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Their mission is to eliminate financial barriers to these life changing treatments and ensure everyone has the opportunity to heal. And the results speak for themselves. Their data shows that the average beneficiary experiences a 55% reduction in symptoms, which is on par with the broader ketamine research that we see. If you’re in private practice or own a business and want to learn more about how you can help your local community, connect with them today. Thank you. Life. Org or email them at partnerships at. Thank you life org again that’s thank you life. Org or email them partnerships at. Thank you life. Org thank you life healing through accessibility. This is the practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sarna, accession number 1034. Joe Sanok (00:01:27) – Welcome, welcome, welcome. So excited that you are here. I’m really glad that you are here, hanging out, that you are going to be learning with me today. We’re going to have a lot of content in this session, and we are also going to have, just a ton of Q&A time as well. So, really excited to dive right in. I’m Joe Cenac, and I’m the founder of practice of the practice, where we’ve helped thousands of therapists, coaches, and counselors to build thriving private practices they absolutely love. as well. I have a podcast called Practice the Practice and written a book called Thursday is the New Friday. as well, I have a book on work life balance coming out with Harvard Business Review in May. so that’s going to be available all over the place. and it’s going to be in airports, you know, those little like, like Harvard Business Review books. I’m excited. I’m going to be traveling to New Orleans in May. And so I’ll pick one of those up in the airport. Joe Sanok (00:02:24) – That’s going to be a crazy experience for me. I also have two amazing daughters that are nine and 12, and just so fun to be with and to hang out with. we love playing board games, stand up, paddle boarding, travel, all sorts of different things. So really excited that you’re here. we’re going to be talking about return on investment today. And so when we’re talking return on investment, there’s a few different things that we’re talking about. So we’re going to be talking about how your time is a finite resource and why it is critical for you to return have a return on investment over the time that you invest in anything. So let’s dive right into efficiency and productivity. So when we think about being productive, one way that I think about this is that every single moment that I’m working is time that I could be doing something for myself. I could be doing something for my kids. that if I’m choosing to take a break during my day, which we all need breaks in, the neuroscience says that you need to have those breaks to be the most efficient and productive person. Joe Sanok (00:03:24) – We need to slow down all the things that I frequently teach. But if I am wasting time, that’s time that I’m stealing from my family, that I’m stealing from my own health, that I’m stealing from other areas. So really making sure that we’re looking at efficiency through that lens. efficient time management leads to that increased productivity and ability to accomplish more in less time. So even little things like putting to do lists into your calendar, blocking things out that you know you need to work on, and viewing it like as a client that you’re not going to no show on, can be really helpful in boosting your efficiency and productivity. Also, we want to look at resource allocation. So for resource allocation in the context of your time like why are you doing something that you could pay someone $25 an hour to do when you could go do extra sessions? Starting to think through things in that way and understanding your time. Your return on investment helps in allocating your most valuable resources to activities that yield that highest return. Joe Sanok (00:04:20) – So we’re going to be digging into just some of these mindsets. Then next we’re going to go into some very practical tips that you can have. Then we’re going to have plenty of time at the end for some Q&A. We also want to look at strategic decision making, so knowing your time and return on investment enables strategic decision making to start to say, well, where am I spending my time? So for example, there’s this researcher named Parkinson. And Parkinson’s Law says that that time that the task will expand to the amount of time given. So remember back in college when maybe you had two months to write a paper? You took two months to write a paper, whereas if you remembered the night before you had a paper due, you would hustle. You’d pull an all nighter. It wouldn’t be your best work, but you’d get it done. Parkinson also noted the natural bloating of organizations, and when he looked at the British Navy, he found that when you put something into a system, it’s near impossible to pull it back out. Joe Sanok (00:05:15) – So if you put in a check, a balance, a sign off, some new policy, a procedure into your private practice, unless it’s pushed back on it, unless you find ways to evaluate that bloating. Most organizations naturally bloat over time. So one of the things we can do is we can just start to give ourselves less time to do things, and then the things that matter most will rise to the surface. If we work four days a week instead of five, you’re not going to be able to do the same amount of stuff that you’re doing in a typical week. But we will then start to see what’s the best use of your time, because you’re going to spend your time doing your top counseling. You’re going to spend your time working on marketing for the practice. You’re going to spend time maybe working with your assistant to make sure things are streamlined. But then there’s going to be all sorts of other things that nobody pays attention to that fall off the map that really we don’t need to be doing, or we need to start automating and outsourcing. Joe Sanok (00:06:06) – We want to start to make informed decisions about where to focus our efforts and resources for the maximum impact. You know that switch from when you first start in your bootstrapping and you’re trying to make ends meet and you’re trying to do it all? I know that for me. I remember when I first started my practice, you know, the people would call it would go to voicemail. And I had a full time job. And, you know, during the lunch hour, I would run out and I would go, and return phone calls and do all sorts of things myself. I’d take out the trash myself. I’d vacuum the office myself. I’d pick out the music, I’d go, you know, often over to Costco or Sam’s Club and get a whole bunch of drinks for the refrigerator. I did everything. And when I started to hire my first contractors, it was hard to get out of that bootstrapping mentality. And even when I had an assistant, it was like, why am I doing this still? and part of it is, you know, taking out the trash isn’t a big deal. Joe Sanok (00:06:58) – You know, it doesn’t take a lot of energy. And it was on the way to my car in the parking lot. So I would do those little things and justify a lot of these things that took up energy, took up time that really, if I looked at the big picture, I should have been outsourcing. So when you start to know your return on investment, it helps you make better strategic choices to say, what is the very best use of my time right now, and how can I do more of that? So even just thinking if you’re charging 150 or $200 per session, you know, at 20 bucks an hour, that’s ten hours that you’re buying even with, you know, taxes and stuff like that. You know, maybe, you know, maybe, you know, less hours then maybe it’s five hours. But to just say, okay, for every one hour that you do a session, you could be buying five hours of a virtual assistant. Think how much could get done if that person were calling around town, setting up networking appointments, calling media locally to try to get you on local radio or TV, writing blog posts or using AI to do that for you to give a final sign off. Joe Sanok (00:07:55) – You know, you’re then having now a 45 hour workweek, a 50 hour workweek as a company. You have more hours that are going in, but your personal hours aren’t changing. Also, when we know ROI, we start to understand our time and ROI helps prevent burnout so we know what the boundaries are. We can then think through, okay, I understand this a little differently. I know what I need, I know what I don’t need. I need to be able to understand where my burnout is. When we’re working on the things that really light us up and that we enjoy, then it’s like we can do it all day long. Now We don’t want to do it 6 or 7 days a week, but it’s a lot easier then to really focus on the things that we want to focus on. So, for example, for me, I know because I’m a single dad raising my kids primarily on my own and have them 90, 95% of the time. I know that every day I want to walk my nine year old to school. Joe Sanok (00:08:50) – The middle schooler now rides the bus and goes across town, but I get up with her in the morning. I then go back and snooze for an hour. It’s like this light kind of sleeping. And then I get the elementary student off to school, and I know that I want to walk her to school every day, and I want to pick her up. So that defines what my schedule is, that I don’t see anyone before 930 when I’m on days that I’m working, and I know that I finish by 330. So even today, you know, as we’re doing Level Up week, you know, I have this webinar till two and then have a half hour break and then 230 to 330 is the last one. It ends at 330. So I can walk two blocks down, get my daughter from school and walk her home. I’ve defined what’s going to make the best use of my life, not just my work life balance. There’s not a balance, there’s just your life. And so when we start to think about, okay, what do I need out of life now, we can start to look at the ROI so I can look at my own time and say the highest use of my time during the week is meeting with my top team members and making sure all the plates keep spinning with practice. Joe Sanok (00:09:50) – The practice, doing some pre consulting calls. We looked at having salespeople do that. We looked at having consultants do it. But when I talk to people and they want to do consulting and we convert at about 85% because we just have a conversation and someone says, hey, I want to do consulting, and we talk about it and figure out who the best fit is for them. And then I hand them off to that consultant to work with that person, to work with that framework. That’s a really good use of my time doing the podcast. When we look at people that, you know, end up in our level up week or end up in our communities, almost always they say, you know, the podcast was what first got me. So those are good uses of my time. Bad uses of my time are scanning through the hundreds of emails we get every single day. That’s not a great use of my time. Now I have an amazing assistant, Jen, who does that, and, you know, organizes it and keeps everything going. Joe Sanok (00:10:38) – And having a Jen in your life, having an executive assistant or someone that that glue, that is where that next step is for you, for you to then put in your energy into the best things that you enjoy, then burnout isn’t even on the table. It also helps us avoid over commitment to low impact activities, which reduces their stress and promotes overall well-being. And so if we think about what are low impact activities, it could be a bad insurance that you’re on that you’re paying getting paid $87 a session. People no show at twice the rate. they’re slow to pay you. It’s like, okay, do we even need to be on this insurance? Or maybe we just have some sliding fee where, you know, it’s not even worth it for that. Thinking through, you know, do you have staff members that are just sucking the life out of you and that maybe aren’t a great fit for your team? All those sorts of things are so important to start to evaluate. Next, with ROI, we want to look at the opportunity cost. Joe Sanok (00:11:31) – You know, this is something that oftentimes we don’t think about. Like imagine your practice doubles in size in the next year. So you’re making five grand a month, maybe a year. For now. It’s ten grand a month. Now, what if the reason that that happens is because you hire an assistant, you hire a couple extra clinicians. You know, you get some some good advice from people. Now every month that you’re not at that ten grand a month on the other side, it takes you 13 months or 14 months, or you just take your time with it instead of really going towards that. That’s opportunity costs that over the lifetime of your business, you’ve missed out on that income. And so we want to try to get to those goals as quickly as possible. Being in community with other people, getting good advice from experts, you know, outsourcing as much as we can that we’re not good at. So, you know, maybe that’s pay per click, maybe that’s our marketing, maybe it’s our website. Joe Sanok (00:12:20) – maybe it’s having a good consultant that can give you one on one advice. Or maybe it’s being in community to be able to understand what to do next so that you can do it quickly. The opportunity cost in relation to time is that every month that you’re not at that point, you could be a year from now, two years from now, that’s an opportunity that you missed out on. And choosing one activity often means that you’re going to say no to other things. Early in my career, I don’t know where I picked it up, but somebody said to me, when you say no to one thing, you say yes to all sorts of other things. So if I say no to working on Fridays, I say yes to being able to have the house ready for my kids by the time they get home. To feel like we have a more robust weekend, to be able to cook more dinners here at home and have a healthy meal for myself and my kids. When you say yes to one thing, you say no to a lot of things. Joe Sanok (00:13:10) – And when you say no to one thing, you say yes to a lot of others. So understanding that and starting to think through our opportunity costs in that awareness. So if you just think about it, if you spend ten hours a week doing something that does not directly bring in money or expand the business, and you work 48 weeks a year, that’s 480 hours a year. Okay, so over five years, that’s 2400 hours. So at a clinical rate of $200 an hour, that’s almost half $1 million in opportunity cost. You lost. So just let that sink in for a second. So if you’re dinking around trying to sort out things and figure it out, and you spend ten hours a week doing something that doesn’t directly bring in money or expand the business, that’s an opportunity cost of almost half $1 million. Now, do I think creative meandering can bring beneficial things? Absolutely. you know, when I was writing Thursday’s The New Friday, there were times I scheduled in to let myself just go down rabbit holes and to understand all these different ways of thinking about things. Joe Sanok (00:14:10) – Sometimes our best things come out when we’re just going for a walk or slowing down in some way. I’m not saying that every single moment, we always have to be making money or we always have to be expanding. But sometimes when we look at our time, folks aren’t looking at their schedule. They’re not saying, what am I doing today? How am I being most efficient when I am choosing to work? I would much rather have you work fewer hours and do it full tilt. And no, I’m running full tilt than to have you be working all these hours and just like you know, I have to work a 40 hour work week because that’s what people do. That’s the expectation. But then to be doing it half, I’d rather you go unload the dishwasher or like think about date night with your partner or something like that. Then, you know, just half ass it through a day. So when we start to think through things this way, to say, what’s the missed opportunity? That’s a huge missed opportunity over five years that you’re that you’re missing there by just wasting ten hours a week. Joe Sanok (00:15:07) – So I want to go through a couple of trends that we’re seeing right now. we’re going to have plenty of time for questions on ROI after we go through a lot of this right now, trends that we’re seeing across the board in our one on one consulting is most people that have 1099 are switching to W-2s. So a shift that we’ve seen in the market in regards to the best use of your time is that in general, people that are 1099 are probably wanting to go do their own practice at some point. So you’re going to spend time and money training this person, building up their caseload, only for them to probably leave you in a year or two, whereas W-2s tend to attract better clinicians to stay longer, not necessarily better clinically, but ones that are a better fit for you. So in one sense, 1099 is often times the competition is or the discussion is okay, why should I work for you and get a percentage when I could go work for myself? So your competition is their own private practice, and there’s lots of great resources, ours included, on how to leave being a ten, 99 or W2 to start your own practice. Joe Sanok (00:16:04) – So we’re seeing that that attracts that type of person. Whereas a W-2 employee, even if they’re just paid per session, a flat fee, they tend to their competition is, well, I could work at CMH Community Mental Health, I could work at a nonprofit, but this place has better hours. I’m not on call. I get, you know, a set amount of money. So we’re seeing that fixed rate and salaries are attracting people that want to stay longer. And so when you think about this, when you’re first starting out, you’re probably going to have people that are maybe a flat fee of, you know, say 50 or $60 per session. probably about 30 to 40% of what the rate is, so that you account for taxes and all the other things. And I have a calculator we’re going to walk through in just a second to look at that. And then, you know, as they grow, when they’re at about 15 sessions a week, we might want to do a part time salary where we say, okay, you’re working 20 hours a week. Joe Sanok (00:16:56) – 15 of those are clinical. That gives you time for paperwork and a few other things. you know, maybe they have a few projects they work on. and they get a certain rate and that’s maybe five, 10% higher than what a part time person at CMH would be getting. And then when they’re at about 25 sessions a week, we have them be full time. So give them about 35 hours a week to 40, depending on if you want to do a four day work week or things like that. and then, you know, paying 5 to 10% higher than what a CMS is paying. and over time, you can start putting money into health insurance. You can put things into, you know, like retirement to just have a more lucrative package. also, if you end up selling, if you have w-2s, that most buyers like W-2s better than contractors because it feels like they’re more a part of that culture. So I want to show you the staff wage calculator. this This is something we’re going to be we’re releasing to our members right now. Joe Sanok (00:17:49) – But anyone that signs up during Level Up Week 2024 for one of our membership communities, you’re going to get access to this as well. So I’m going to bounce over to our staff wage calculator. So this is a calculator that I was using. just in a, in just a spreadsheet that then we ended up turning into a it’s behind a password, But all of our members that are in practice the practice and you know, next level practice, group practice, launch group practice, boss audience building Academy will get access to this as we release it. So I’m going to walk you through how we use this. This is something I was running these numbers with my consulting clients and then just decided I should just make this for somebody. So, imagine you have a total full time staff of five or the equivalent of, and so we want to think through, you know, if you have a bunch of part time people like what’s that equivalent. So total full time staff say this person has five full time staff on average, they’re getting $150 per counseling session and on average, 25 sessions per week over 48 weeks. Joe Sanok (00:18:46) – That means the total net revenue of that clinician is $180,000. All right. If we then, say that times, so then the total net profit. So the profit per clinician is 180. Total net profit right now is 900. Before we add anything else in here now for an admin with, a five person full time practice, maybe we’re doing $25 an hour. hours worked. I mean, probably not full time with five people. So maybe we do 25 hours a week and let’s have them work 48 weeks as well. So that’s going to tell us overall what the results are of how much that is going to be per year. Now maybe we have some supervision at like 100 bucks an hour, maybe some clinical supervision. Maybe they work two hours a week or so. to do some of that supervision. And then they work 48 weeks a year as well. Then your own time, like, what would it take to replace you? So you figure the average CEO, you know, for that small kind of business, maybe they make 100 K a year if they’re a non-owner. Joe Sanok (00:19:51) – So that’s about 50 bucks an hour. So say 50 bucks an hour. to replace you. We’re not saying how much you want as the owner because all the extra profits will go to you. Hours worked. Maybe it’s, you know, kind of more part time. And so, we do, you know, ten hours a week of actually, like, owner time that you’re, you know, putting into running the business. So that gives us some, some of those numbers. Now we can start to add in here, like your annual marketing budget, say it’s, you know, $5,000. and then it’s going to say how much. So we have five clinicians. So then it breaks down our cost per clinician. So a thousand bucks per clinician or so say we build some insurance. So or maybe we’re entirely insurance based. so maybe 150 is too high if that’s the case, but, you know, 6%, it’s pretty normal for an insurance billing company that’s, you know, just over ten grand a year. Joe Sanok (00:20:41) – Our rent per year. You know, maybe we’re doing three grand a month. So 36, thousand a year. maybe our it cost per month is, you know, 200 bucks. So 2400 bucks, a year. and then are we providing any health insurance or things like that? so maybe we aren’t offering any health insurance at all. and then miscellaneous. There’s all sorts of other things like Wi-Fi, internet. You have to pay for the gas, or so say it’s an extra. Let’s just say, like ten grand a year. Okay, so now we’ve got some of these numbers where it says, based on these numbers so far, your net profit would be $689,000. All right. but that’s before paying anyone. So what we can do is we can say, okay, if we pay them per hour, so we pay them $60 an hour. so let’s give them, like, a $80,000 salary. That’ll tell you what it is per hour. So, so $80,000. So then that’s going to pull off our profit up top. Joe Sanok (00:21:37) – And then we can also toggle this and look at our salary percentage. That’s 44%. So say we wanted to do 33%. then that’s going to change it to a 59. So that changes our profits. So then we can start to look at also retirement extras, things like that. When we start to use numbers to define things now we can start to say, okay, I want to see if I raise everyone’s rates because they’re more professional to 175. What’s my final profit is it was 392 oh, it’s now 533. So now we can start to run numbers and actually have us define how we’re doing based on numbers. All right. So that’s the way I think through it. That’s a really quick and dirty version of that. We have a full video training on there to help you start to use that staff wage calculator. Next we want to start to look at the ROI on our ad money. So our profit per session, we want to know, okay, for every $150 or $200 that comes in, what’s your profit? Is it 15%? Is it 20%? 30%? I would say most practices depending on their size and scale, fall between 10 and 30%. Joe Sanok (00:22:38) – Smaller practices that have less overhead tend to have a higher percentage. But as you scale, you know you’re going to be putting more into a lot of other things as well. We want to start doing some AB testing. So AB testing is where you’re doing marketing and you’re running this ad against this ad, same amount of money we’re putting in and we’re looking at which one is getting more clicks. Which one is doing better? You may run an ad in one local magazine and then another local magazine, and maybe it’s $800 to do it, you know, in one and 800in the other. Which one gets you the most people coming in? We want to know that customer lifetime value. So when a clinician sees a new person, do they see them an average of 12 sessions. So they see him an average of 20. Is it, you know, over five years? Is that the average And at that hourly rate, what’s the amount that that clinician is bringing in in how much is that customer lifetime value. Joe Sanok (00:23:30) – Because then if we know that the average client brings in about $2,000 gross, we can start to say, okay, well then if we do ads and say we spend $200 on ads for every new person, we can then run that math to know, okay, when is this worth it? What’s it worth it? In regards to our pay per click? I want to share with you another calculator. We haven’t made it look as pretty as that first one. but it’s our when to hire calculator and the when to hire calculator. And we’re going to end up putting this and making it look pretty like the other one and launching that to our membership communities, too. But I put this together for a number of my consulting clients because they had that same question over and over, like, when, when do I hire? And so the way this works is we’re going to look at intake calls per week. So say we’re a smaller practice. We get five intake calls per week. Of those five intake calls only 50% even schedule an intake. Joe Sanok (00:24:20) – And then of those, only 25% show up. Let’s say the average clinician, let’s say that they’re full time. So 25 is full, cost per session. 150. oh. I’m sorry, this is the average total sessions the client complete. So say the client comes 25 times on average. So they come weekly for half a year, every other week for a year ish. and full is 25. And then you as the owner maybe have 22% of your revenue, is ends up being your profit. So with this math that would take this person 40 weeks to fill up and once, once profit per week. How how much is your total profit per week? Once full, $825 per week when they’re full. Now, the customer lifetime value. That’s going to be just this total client sessions times the amount per session 3750. And then if we just say that that’s 22%, then that’s going to be that 825 now we may say, oh my gosh, that’s going to take forever. So if we look at our 12 week forecast, you know, it’s going to tell us each week how much you’re making off of this clinician. Joe Sanok (00:25:26) – That’s really not that good. so if we just say what if we did some pay per click advertising, we just got add ten more people a week calling us on. What would that do? Okay, man, that brings it down to 13 weeks now 50% schedule an intake. If we look at our website and our and we say, wow, we could do a better job to have less, less kind of things to click on. And it’s like not super clear. Like, what if we increase that to even just like 75%? Oh wow. Like things really start to change their full in just under nine weeks. Now, if only 25% are showing up for an intake. What if we had some text reminders and had maybe even a phone call of the day before? Just had like someone you know that for an hour they did that. And maybe we boost this up to like 75% also now in three weeks are going to be full. Then we can start to say, well, okay, 150 like what if we raise their rates to 175? Then we start to see all these things start to change. Joe Sanok (00:26:19) – So it helps us think differently about our predictions in regards to how we’re running our practice, how we’re making decisions as the CEO. You want to have probably no more than three big numbers that every month you have on a dashboard that your assistant or you gather to say, what are the three most important numbers here? And then from there, what decisions can I make based on those numbers? Because if we know, okay, I want to know how many intakes came in and how many converted. I want to know that ratio. so for every intake call, you know, if it’s 5050, you know, we get one actual intake show to every two calls. Okay. That’s something to know. Maybe total intakes we want. We might want to know, you know, what percentage is the entire practice full. Are we running at 40% full in regards to everyone’s capacity? If everyone can see, you know, 15 people and we have ten clinicians and we have the opportunity to see 150 people, but we’re only running at 100. Joe Sanok (00:27:15) – We’re only 66% full, like what’s going on there? So we might want to have some of those kind of numbers, profit and loss things that you can make decisions on. So let’s talk a little bit about content marketing strategy when you’re thinking about the ROI of your time. We wanted to develop high quality, relevant content that provides value to your target audience, which is, you know, your clients to think about what is the pain people are dealing with. And just yesterday and I said this in another webinar, we were talking I was talking to a lady who is a couple’s counselor. We went in Google and just typed in, why does my husband and just had it list out, Google list out all the things that people type in for? Why does my husband? And it was like, why does my husband hate me? Why does my husband give me the silent treatment? You know, why does my husband fart so much? Why is my so all these things that it’s like, if you had the clinical lens to write blog posts about that, to write micro content, to do short TikToks about it, to be able to just create ways to engage with people that are searching for that content that’s going to make you set. Joe Sanok (00:28:15) – It’s going to set you apart so much faster. We want to use a lot of different content types blog posts, videos, both long form for YouTube or more short form for, for TikTok or for Instagram or for for Facebook. Using a mixture of stories and reels, using even some of the Instagram, templates. there’s a great thing where if you’re not very good with video, you can make templates within Instagram that look beautiful. there are these really cool looking videos, infographics, you know, being on podcasts or starting your own podcast. These are all things that, as you think about leveling up, can really help you. one of my consulting clients is launching a podcast, and it’s all about chronic illness that’s going to make her practice explode, but it’s also going to help her go to a much higher level in regards to national speaking, book writing, creating an audience of support around that topic. Then we want to distribute that content on multiple channels, including our social media. We may have e-news letters to other therapists on your website, all sorts of other areas, especially seeing how last week Instagram and Facebook went down. Joe Sanok (00:29:23) – There was a great reminder yesterday. as Steve Cherney from the Mental Health Marketing Conference and I were talking where he said, just a reminder, you’re on leased land. Most of the time if we are on social media, we’ve built all that up. that could go down at any point. They could change their algorithm at any point. So that’s where we want to get people onto an email list. We want to get people coming to our website. We want to be able to directly communicate with them. As a therapist, I can tell you from experience that having the right EHR is an absolute lifeline. I recommend using therapy notes. They make billing, scheduling, note taking, telehealth, and e-prescribing incredibly easy. Best of all, they offer live telephone support. It’s available seven days a week. You don’t have to take my word for it. Do your own research and see for yourself. Therapy notes is the number one highest rated EHR system available today, with a 4.9 out of five stars on Trustpilot. Joe Sanok (00:30:28) – Com and on Google, all you have to do is click the link below or type promo code Joe on their website over at Therapy notes.com and receive a special two month trial. Absolutely free. Again, that’s therapy, notes dotcom, and use promo code Joe on the website. If you’re coming from another EHR. Therapy notes will also import your demographic data quick and easy at no cost, so you can get started right away. Trust me, don’t waste any more of your time and try therapy notes. Just use promo code Joe at checkout. Speaker 2 (00:31:02) – So also we want. Joe Sanok (00:31:02) – To as we’re talking about ROI, we want to talk about measuring effectiveness. So tracking your website traffic using using analytic tools to see that impact of content on audience engagement. Monitoring social media metrics like likes shares, comments. If you put something on Facebook or Instagram, do you actually see people call you? So is there even engagement or great, you got all these likes and shares, but like, nobody even engages or makes money off of that. Joe Sanok (00:31:27) – Like, why are you doing it? Then? You can do it just for education and awareness. That’s fine. But you know, if we’re putting a lot of time and money into it, our hope is that that’s going to help grow the business and not just be a drain on the business. We want to use conversion tracking to assess the number of leads generated through content. Even just the other day, I was talking to a consulting client and they were doing this big email marketing campaign and Facebook ad campaign, Google ads, all these different things, and they were sending them all just to their Contact Us page. So once they got there, it was just like pouring, like coffee and salt water and juice all into one spot and it just all was getting blended together. Instead of if you’re doing a Google ad campaign, there’s lots of ways that you can track that, even as simple as just duplicating that contact us page. And then when that form comes through, having it say Google lead or something like that, so that your, your, assistant can then keep track of that. Joe Sanok (00:32:21) – There’s even just asking, did you hear about us through a Facebook ad newspaper or things like that can help you measure that effectiveness? We want to calculate the customer lifetime value by analyzing how content contributes to customer retention and repeat business. Do people refer friends and family members? Do people stick with us? Do you have clinicians that maybe, you know, they only see people 3 to 5 times and everyone else is at 20? Like what’s going on there? is that person just really that good, or are they doing things that people don’t want to come back? So doing surveys, doing ways to follow up can be a good thing of finding that return on investment for your time and money. And we want to assess that ROI by comparing the cost of content creation and distribution with the revenue generated. So if we are, for example, making a, you know, say, a Pinterest infographic for every single blog post that we do in our in our practice, it may look beautiful, it may be great content, but is our ideal client on Pinterest? And are they making therapeutic buying decisions? By going there, we want to know that we want to know are there leads coming from those those infographics to our website and looking at those metrics to say, maybe we don’t need to pay a designer to do that, maybe we should put that money into something else a little bit on social media marketing. Joe Sanok (00:33:39) – A little bit about that strategy is we want to create some targeted and visually appealing ads for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. TikTok really has a lot of professionals on there, and it has a great algorithm to to start testing and playing around with. We want to utilize your audience targeting options to reach specific demographics of your counseling clients. So thinking through who is my ideal client? Like, who do I really like working with? Where does that overlap with my skill set and what people need? And running again, those AB tests to optimize our ad copy visuals and targeting parameters so we can start to do really small, say, Facebook ad campaigns aimed at different subsets of people, you know, people that, their status, their relationship status changed in some way in the last 60 days. Those people may need some therapy, whether they just got married, whether they just, you know, said it’s complicated. those are things that we want to maybe target in our advertising as well. Throughout that, we want to measure our effectiveness. Joe Sanok (00:34:37) – We want to track those key measures, clicks engagement while analyzing the sales that come through. And look at that social media advertising. So a couple of things to consider as we’re talking about ROI is the customer lifetime value. I’m going to go back to that because so often people don’t even know this really basic business principle of knowing how much money do your new clients spend when they come in? Because oftentimes we’re cheapskates unnecessarily. Where if we knew, okay, every new person is $2,000 over the lifetime, if I have to spend $500 in Facebook ads to get somebody in there, I’m still making money off of that. And so instead of just saying, oh, an ad spend of X number of dollars just seems too high, we want to be able to think through those numbers and make sure they’re accurate, because you don’t want to spend a whole bunch of money to get people into, say, an email list or, you know, reach out to you and then they are a really poor fit for you. Joe Sanok (00:35:31) – and then we want to calculate the ROI by comparing the advertising spend with the revenue generated by social media driven conversions. Now, when we talk email strategy, there’s a few different things that we want to look at. when we’re doing email strategy, we want to really separate and segment your email list. So for example, you’re not going to send the same type of email to people that have opted in. Say you do anxiety work like eMDR, post-traumatic stress trauma. So you do that kind of work. You may have an email list that is automated that, you know, is a, you know, ten ways to calm your anxiety. And maybe once a month you do a video you send out or you send out some tips on ways to reduce anxiety. Maybe you even have some, like meetups in town. and so it’s aimed at them. That’s very different than if you have your colleagues, your referral sources that you’re maybe saying, here’s some big things coming up at our practice. We want to make sure it’s personalized. Joe Sanok (00:36:26) – So using a platform like a Weber, that’s what we use to personalize it. So it says Hey Joe. So so it says my name in that email instead of just like, hey user or hey there or hey, audience. we want to make sure it’s personalized. and we in that want to look at a B testing, looking at what gets people to schedule those counseling appointments. and how does that add extra value? We want to measure effectiveness there by tracking our open rates. So that means how many people actually just open it then our click through rate. So if you put a link to say a new therapeutic group you’re launching, what percentage of people click on that. and then how many of those people actually convert? So knowing if I send an email to 100 people, five people click on the link. One person signs up for my group, but I need to have like eight people in this group. We got to have a lot more emails if that’s going to be our primary way of targeting. Joe Sanok (00:37:16) – We want to look at our subscriber growth and engagement over time. We want to see that it’s growing. If that’s effective now in a lot of practices, having someone opt in to an email list right away when they’re looking for therapy might not be the best use of your time. So really making sure that we’re figuring out those drip campaigns to help people grow and scale over time, and that it doesn’t distract from your core thing, which is therapy. We want to evaluate that customer lifetime value by looking at those email campaigns and again, looking at that cost compared to actually getting clients. So overall, we want to regularly analyze and adjust adjust our strategies based on the performance. We want to have tracking throughout. We want to look at that lifetime value. So by incorporating these strategies and measurement techniques, you’re going to gain insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts that make data driven decisions to maximize your return on investment. So we’re going to take questions in a minute. So feel free to start putting those into the chat area. Joe Sanok (00:38:15) – You can also virtually raise your hand if you want to do a little bit of laser coaching, a little bit of back and forth with me. Okay. So and Anna, I would love to ask you a couple of questions about your practice. If you’d be up for that. we’d love to bring you on camera. If not, then that’s totally fine, too. but I do have a couple questions where we could run some actual numbers of yours, if you want. Speaker 3 (00:38:37) – Sure, that’d be great. Joe Sanok (00:38:38) – Cool. Awesome. let me see you. There’s a lot of people. Do you mind turning your camera on? Speaker 3 (00:38:44) – Yeah, maybe one second. Yeah. Joe Sanok (00:38:47) – Cool. And then I’ll put the spotlight on you, and then we can all be seeing the same thing. Thanks for letting me put putting you on the spot. Speaker 3 (00:38:56) – Sorry I had to move my computer there. Joe Sanok (00:38:59) – All good. Oh, there we go. Okay, let’s put the spotlight on. Yeah! Boom! It’d be a little easier. Joe Sanok (00:39:05) – Welcome. Cool. so tell me just a little bit about where you’re at, and then we can run some of the numbers. Speaker 3 (00:39:11) – Yeah. we are a group of five therapists right now, and we have two more coming on next month. Okay. and I would say we’re like, a little over half full. Okay. Joe Sanok (00:39:30) – and then, do you know what your customer lifetime value is for the average client that comes in, how long they come, how much you charge? Speaker 3 (00:39:40) – Let’s see. So I would say most families stay about a year. Okay. Joe Sanok (00:39:47) – Okay. So 50 or so sessions okay. Speaker 3 (00:39:50) – Yeah. Joe Sanok (00:39:51) – And then what do you what’s the average reimbursement rate or amount that you charge per session. Speaker 3 (00:39:57) – it goes from like 175 to 200. Joe Sanok (00:40:01) – Okay. So I’ll do let’s do 185. Okay. So that means your average lifetime value for each family that comes in is $9,250. So of course you have costs and other things that go into that. but we just want to remember that it’s just under 10-K for what each family kind of is worth. Joe Sanok (00:40:19) – Obviously they have emotional worth in life, human worth and all that too. so if we just said, like, say you hired an ad specialist for, say, seven, 50 to $1000 a month and say you had like $1,000, $1,000 spend. So 1750 per month on Google Ads is just like a start. Let’s dip our toes in just under two grand. then that would mean that, you know, if we just look at your intake as 185 to just pay your back yourself back for that. Oh, I did that wrong. 750 plus a thousand. So I’m going to divide that 1750 by just your intake rate of 185. So we would, from that ad campaign need to get 9.45 ten people to pay yourself back in one month right away. So then kind of the question to ourselves would be, okay for, you know, $1,700. Like how many clicks do we need to have to to warrant that? So let’s just say, okay, for you to get ten new clients. How many people would have to come to the website from just the general things that you know about your business? Speaker 3 (00:41:24) – How many people would have to come? Joe Sanok (00:41:26) – Yeah. Joe Sanok (00:41:26) – I mean, like, you know, for anyone that ends up on your website, on the contact us page, how many end up converting into being an intake? Speaker 3 (00:41:36) – I think we’re at like 65%. Okay. Joe Sanok (00:41:41) – Okay. So even so with Google ads it might be lower. Let’s just say even if it was 25%. you know that would mean that we’d need to have to get those ten people. We’d need to have 40 people get there. So if we just divide like 17, 50 by 40 people, that cost per lead would be about $43.75 for you. So that’s including your click cost as well as, you know, someone managing that. So I mean we pay per click right now about $1.90 per click. and you know, I think the highest we’ve paid at $6 per click. Granted, we’re in a different industry and kind of consulting and stuff, but that’s very reasonable when we’re running these numbers. I’m looking at is this reasonable. And so to me, if you’re dropping two grand a month and you’re even just getting, you know, ten families like those ten families are each going to be just under ten grand. Joe Sanok (00:42:31) – That’s like an extra 100 grand coming into the practice from just that one month. now, obviously we aren’t we’re not doing profit percentages and all those things. So to me, kind of to answer your question, after running those numbers, I would say like yesterday, like I’d want you to like doing it as soon as possible if you want to fill up. Speaker 4 (00:42:48) – Okay. That’s awesome. Speaker 3 (00:42:50) – Is there anything like to think about with like, website readiness or like things like that before? Joe Sanok (00:42:57) – I think it’s more asking the right questions to someone that’s managing a pay per click, kind of advertising. so like how involved are they going to be? So, like our person, she’s looking every single week on how many people, you know, are clicking which ads are working. Like, she discovered that pictures of me with my partner’s dog clicked through way better than other things. And so it’s like, she’s like, I need more pictures of you with Izzie. I’m like, okay, I can do that. and so it’s like, she’s like, we’re trying these 20 ads and we’re trying to find the 3 to 5 that work best because we want to just get there faster. Joe Sanok (00:43:28) – We don’t want to have one click here, one click there. If there’s one that’s going to give us 100 clicks, like I want that to happen. and so are they going to do that? Are they going to be doing the design or are you doing the design. You know, are they going to match your kind of tone and your logo and your color scheme? Like how much of that are they doing versus you and your team? Because those are all extra costs if you have to do it or extra time. you know, ideally you’d have someone that kind of manages all of that. And that also is, you know, looking at, you know, the code to make sure we can track it. So are you just duplicating your contact Us page? Are you having something else going on there? you know, are we doing different kinds of lookalike audiences? Like, we’re not necessarily uploading all of our clients emails, but, you know, saying, you know, this is the type of this is the type of person that we want to focus on. Joe Sanok (00:44:12) – So those are the kind of questions that I would want you to definitely be talking to, like an ad specialist on. Speaker 4 (00:44:18) – Gotcha. Thank you. Joe Sanok (00:44:19) – I think tomorrow, Amber, I would definitely come to hers. She is a Google ad specialist. That’s really good. She’s who we actually used for hours, so she’s going to dig in even deeper tomorrow. Speaker 4 (00:44:27) – So great. Joe Sanok (00:44:29) – Awesome. Thanks for your question. All right. what other questions we have? You can also, just virtually raise your hand if you want to come on camera and, and chat a little bit about where you’re at in your practice. next question. As we’re evaluating pay per click experts, what are the top metrics they should be monitoring? Any other questions we should be asking? I mean, really I would keep it pretty simple. You know, if you just think about each step along that line, like what’s your cost per click? you know, the management fee for you. That’s the total cost of that campaign, even though that’s not going into the click. Joe Sanok (00:45:04) – I would want to then know, do we see people scheduling that are appropriate? And so, you know, if you’re a private pay based practice and then you’re attracting 95% people that want to use insurance, and your front desk isn’t trained to help convert those people to use something like mental fire or something like that. how are you doing with with the conversions? Because, we want to be able to compare, okay. When someone organically finds you, they come to the website, they’re referred by a friend. You know, if you’re at 90% conversion into coming into an intake and then you do a pay per click ad campaign in 1% come through like that’s a lot of money to spend to just get one person. And it still can be worth it. But you just want to know those kind of metrics. I would say, you also want to see if is their lifetime value different. And so do in some way be able to keep track of who internally, were Google ad clients versus who you know, our organic clients. Joe Sanok (00:46:02) – so over time, if we see that, you know, someone that’s referred by a friend or a doctor or a pastor or yoga teacher, they tend to come 50 times. So, you know, just what Anna was talking about, of coming for a year. Whereas all of our Google ad people, they only come about ten times. Well, that changes the lifetime value differently. And so you’re just going to be cognizant of that so you can make good decisions. It doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong. It just means we want to make better decisions based on those analytics. Right. Other ROI questions any any other ROI questions. All right. Another question coming in. how do you recommend we find these pay per click experts? so Amber, tomorrow is one that I would definitely interview. actually, I was at parent teacher conferences, talking with my friend Nick, and, he is a pay per click expert that I thought he was full, and he let me know that he has some openings. Joe Sanok (00:46:51) – So I’m going to actually just put his information, his cell phone number here. I got his permission for you to just text him and he’ll give you a quote. that just speeds things up. So, there’s Nick’s information. He said that I can share that with you all. he’s an awesome paper clip person. He’s started working with a number of my consulting clients. so he’s anywhere from 750 to 1000 bucks a month? for management. So really, in that range of what you reasonably pay. Other questions? I see the chat here. it’s just a thank you. So awesome. Well, keep up the good work, everyone. we’ve got these recordings going through. Thanks, everybody. Also, we could not do this show without our sponsor support. Therapy notes is the best electronic health records out there. They’ve been a supporter for years, but even more importantly, they can help you grow and scale your business with their EHR. They have embedded in their system their own virtual way, similar to zoom of doing HIPAA compliant tele therapy. Joe Sanok (00:48:00) – They’ll help you move from your current billing platform over to therapy notes. They have amazing customer service. A lot of these EHRs only have, you know, text support or chat, but you can actually talk to a real person that will help you out if you get stuck. a couple years ago, I remember I had a client that had switched over and the old company wasn’t releasing the things, and therapy notes did such an amazing job of coordinating it so that that therapists could get back to doing therapy instead of worrying about her EHR. they’re an amazing company. Head on over to therapy notes.com. Use promo code Jo-Jo at checkout to get a couple months for free. 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 that intro music, and 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 guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. Joe Sanok (00:49:00) – If you want a professional, you should find one.