Joe Sanok 00:00:00 The group practice boss. Conference tickets are on sale now. We expect them to sell out in just a couple days. There are only 120 of these available. Head on over to practice of the practice. Com forward slash conference to read more and grab your ticket. This is the practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sarna, session number 128. Welcome to the practice of the Practice podcast. I’m Joe Stanek, your host, and I am so excited that you are hanging out with me today. Today we are giving you behind the scenes in regards to our membership communities. And so a lot of our consultants are doing teachings every single week. every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we have live teachings going on in our membership. So we wanted to give you a little behind the scenes. So we’re going to be hearing from Nicole Ball talking about what to do when referrals are slow. HR basics with Andrew. Client retention with Ashley, scaling with Nicole, Ball, choosing the right project management systems, and all sorts of other things over the coming weeks. Joe Sanok 00:01:15 I can’t wait to dig into this with you. If you want help from one of our consultants, please head on over to practice of the practice. Com forward slash apply. I’ll chat with you for 30 minutes to determine if one of our membership communities or consulting might be right for you. Now let’s get started with this episode. Ashley Mielke 00:01:32 Hello, everyone. Before we get started, we’re going to be talking all things Trello today. And I’m very curious if any of you do use Trello or there are other, sort of project management tools that you currently use because there’s always so much to learn and share as a group. So before we do that, I would love to hear a recent win in your business. So if you want to put it in the chat, that would be great. If you want to unmute yourself and share even better something exciting happening in your practice, something you’re looking forward to. Speaker 3 00:02:10 I think we’re about to onboard two new clinicians, so that’s excellent. Ashley Mielke 00:02:15 That’s exciting. So have you had the interviews? Where are you at in the process? Speaker 3 00:02:20 So we had we typically will do a phone screening, then a virtual interview. Speaker 3 00:02:27 Then we give them like a case study to reflect on. And then we do a second interview. and during that we sort of get into the nitty gritty of like, this is what we can offer. kind of give them the information and then we ask them to come up with their questions, and then if they are interested in the position, they respond with, we’re interested. And like let’s talk detail. so they both verbalize and interest and planned to respond this week with like their availability to go over like the actual details and then they’ll get the actual offer. so I think it’s going to work out. I guess anything could happen at any time, but they both seemed really enthusiastic about it. And one of my like sort of cheat sheet hacks is I work in a school district full time. as a school social worker, I’ve been there 22 years. So, I often take on interns. I think it’s a nice way to give back. And so sometimes when I have a really amazing intern, I get to hire her in my group practice. Speaker 3 00:03:26 so she’s one of them, and I’m just hoping she says yes because she’s phenomenal. Ashley Mielke 00:03:30 Amazing. Wow. I love the rigor of your process of hiring. Speaker 3 00:03:36 Yes, we because we have the most incredible team and there’s very little to no turnover. And they don’t complain and they work really hard and I’m very proud of that. So I think that’s part of maybe because we make it such a rigorous process, I’m not really sure why. Or maybe we’re lucky. but we do kind of drag it out a little bit, to be certain. Ashley Mielke 00:04:00 That’s wonderful. Well, congrats. I hope it works out. How many people will be working for you then at that point, if that works out for you, Kimberly. Speaker 3 00:04:07 if they say yes, officially it’ll be 12 and 13, so they’ll be. That’ll be 13 clinicians. Yeah, about half or full time and about half or part time. Ashley Mielke 00:04:15 Good for you. Outstanding. Definitely. Keep us posted on that. Yeah. Speaker 3 00:04:19 Thank you. Ashley Mielke 00:04:19 Thank you. So Brent has put in the chat that he recently got an increase in an ERP reimbursement rate. Ashley Mielke 00:04:28 That’s exciting. Amazing. Thank you for sharing. Brent. Elizabeth. Michelle. Christina. Hi, Christina. Love to hear a recent win. Whoever wants to go first. Oh, Elizabeth I’ll go first. Speaker 4 00:04:43 we just hired a clinician. Well, to 99, we do 1099 that speaks Arabic and French. So that is like a huge win. and then we’ve sort of changed our processes with our admins, and we’re seeing a real uptake in intakes and getting new clients. And so that’s been a real positive as well. Ashley Mielke 00:05:05 Amazing. There’s great momentum happening. That’s very exciting. Thank you for sharing. I would like to go next. Yes. Speaker 3 00:05:15 Hi. Yes. Ashley Mielke 00:05:17 so. Speaker 5 00:05:17 It might seem small, but I have like an actual like, so I one clinician hired on, and I would like to hire a lot more people. but I have not been getting any applicants for my job posting and even on indeed, it says that like, we’re competitively priced for pay. so I’m like, okay, where are all my people at that I need? And like, I finally got one candidate that I was able to look at and be like, okay, this person could be a really good fit. Speaker 5 00:05:45 so just like having that, and we’re also about to get a school contract. for one of our clinicians that we have on board. so that would be great to I already have really good rapport with the person. She doesn’t like the company that they’ve been using anyways. So like I think it could be a really good fit too. Ashley Mielke 00:06:05 That’s amazing. Wonderful. So when you have a someone working for you and a school. So what does that mean? The referrals come in to your practice. Do they go into the school? Speaker 5 00:06:17 so the way it is, is the school funds the therapist to go into the office. I did it last year myself with a different school, but I don’t have the availability with all the staff. so I talked to my clinician about it because it’s only one day a week and she’s already done school based therapy. So they pay our full session fee and they’re all, I’m also going to have them pay travel time, and then she’s going to go into the school. She’s going to have an automatic 7 or 8 clients a week through that, that are full fee of sessions. Speaker 5 00:06:47 so it’s going to be a really good one. Ashley Mielke 00:06:50 Wow, that is fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing, Michelle. We are in the process of bringing on two interns, and, we decided we’ve been a cash practice, and we’re deciding. We think we want to do some insurance work, and we, as we’re talking about this, the. Speaker 5 00:07:11 Very next day. Ashley Mielke 00:07:12 Someone reached out and was like, hey, I’m interested in joining your practice. What can you tell me about it? So yeah. we’re our biggest problem is right now trying to just keep up because we hired our first person in January. So we’re trying to keep up with building our systems, actually. And so I feel like. Speaker 5 00:07:30 That’s an exciting problem rather. Ashley Mielke 00:07:32 Than what it could be. So. Yeah. Yes. Oh that’s wonderful. Congrats, Michelle. Thank you for sharing. Well, thank you all for being here. Hi Sabrina. Nice to see you. Are those new pants I love. I’m like. Ashley Mielke 00:07:48 I instantly noticed a change. What do you think? Are you loving them? I’ve had them for a long time. Oh, okay. Going going back to them after a break. Speaker 5 00:07:59 It’s like, yeah, okay, feel more like me again. Ashley Mielke 00:08:02 It’s so fun. I love the change. Nice to see you. Okay, so we are talking about Trello today. So there’s some really great, what I call tutorials on YouTube. So there’s a couple that I’ve linked in the PowerPoint that I do recommend if you want to dive in deeper and you’re really interested in using Trello to use that. is anyone using Trello right now? No. Okay. Yay. So this will be new. So we started using Trello probably three years ago. And it was we had hired an admin person that became, our operations manager, and she said, this is a really great tool for managing tasks, projects, workflows, literally anything. And the great thing is for the level that we need it as like, unless you have a massive corporation, it’s free, which is really great. Ashley Mielke 00:08:59 So this is a tool that we use for planning out our social media. We’ve used it in the past for planning out our newsletter, and we use it for workflow for our admin team, our leadership team. we’ve used it for goal setting. I use it for consulting with my one on one clients through pop, and it’s something that I use for my workflow as well. So I’m going to share my screen and I’ll take you through the PowerPoint and as well as walk you through, some of our boards. And then what we’re going to do together is we’re going to create a project together. So we’ll set up a basic board and we’ll kind of get some ideas about, some different, cards that we want to create checklists. So you can kind of get a feel of what that would look like. Okay. So our first, slide here. So, Trello is a very user friendly visual project manager project management tool with the option for multiple workspaces and boards. So the great thing is you can create a workspace. Ashley Mielke 00:10:07 Say for example, we have one that’s for our team. So we call it like the Grief and Trauma Healing Center Workspace. You can have a workspace for social media. You can have a workspace for projects, or you might even have one for a workspace specifically for your admin team. You literally the the options are endless in how you can use this tool. So on the basic end, it’s great for managing, like I said, projects, goals, workflow and tasks which I will show you how we’ve done that and it’s a very easy system to collaborate with team members. So you simply share your boards or your workspaces with people on your team so that they have access. You can tag people, you can, create reminders and deadlines. you can label boards specifically for people. So I’ll show you how that looks. to keep you very streamlined, organized and on task. The fun thing, it can also be used for non-related, work, sorry, non-work related projects as well. Like if you’re planning a wedding or a vacation or family schedules, setting personal goals for yourselves. Ashley Mielke 00:11:20 Maybe it’s, around like books that you want to read or podcasts that you want to listen to, meal planning, time blocking, literally anything. So a big question is always what? What are the plan? So as I said, the free plan, which is what we use, is really great. It’s, it provides all of the, sort of accessibility that we need with our team. But if you did want to have a bit more options then these, this is kind of what you would be looking at. so for smaller teams, $5 US per user per month, if you’re getting a little bit bigger, $10 per user per month, and then for large organizations with the full meal deal, you’d be, spending 1,750 USD per user per month. You can do a 14 day free trial. And here’s a little link if you want to check out that information as well. So ways to use Trello for free. let’s like thinking about even like your admin workflow. You can use it to create daily, weekly, monthly and annual tasks for yourself. Ashley Mielke 00:12:31 If you have a leadership team or a business partner, your admin, and even your clinicians Conditions, like if you have employees that work for you and you’re creating a workflow for them, or access to documents and tools, that is really great. As I mentioned, social media, blog, podcasts and newsletter planning, so I’ll show you how that might look. Team meetings tracker as well so you can put notes in there. You can have a schedule there. You can have links to documents. It can also be a resource hub for clinician. So once I show you what that looks like basically you can have information uploaded directly to Trello so that your teammates can access the information, can also be a team personnel information managers where you where you have all the personal information of your therapist. So if that’s their contact information, it could also be team favorites list. It could be all sorts of fun things that you collect, to, you know, ensure that you’re on top of that information. it can also be a tool used to plan a team retreat or team building projects, current and future projects for your business and future planning and goal setting. Ashley Mielke 00:13:48 And that’s just like, honestly, skimming the surface. I haven’t even used it to its full potential. So there’s a ton of ways. And like I said, I included some links to some really great tutorials if you want to dig deeper. after we kind of get started and I show you what, what we’ve got. Okay, so, share this tab instead. Can you see this workspace? I don’t know what you guys can see, right? Yeah. Okay, so this is how we’ve created the workspace for our team. So when you set up Trello, you create workspaces. So this is just simply what we call the grief and trauma healing workspace. Here is where you would invite workspace members to the workspace where they can access all of the boards. Or when you’re creating different boards, you can invite people to those specific boards. So here is an example of a board for our admin workflow. As you can see, we have all of these cards here. And when you start out when we create a project you will see it’s a blank. Ashley Mielke 00:14:57 It’s kind of a blank screen. You get to pick the background image and then you add cards. So if we were to add a list over here, this is how it would look. So we can title the card and then we can add to it. So it looks something like this. And then what you can do is you can actually click on these little cards and you can you have more detailed information. So when we create a little project we will go through this together. But that is simply all we’ve done to create. And I’m just going to archive this list. So let me show you how we’ve done this. So we have our to do list here for our admin team. We’ve got just a list of some company updates. We have our new intakes procedure here. So it’s just basically everything we need to collect and do when we’re doing a new intake. So this is really helpful for our admin team because they don’t have to look in five different places. Right. So for example, if we’re doing insurance and direct billing we click this and we just have a little list here, a description that we’ve added of for specific insurances. Ashley Mielke 00:16:10 What is actually required from a new client. Okay. And that’s we’ve just kept it really really simple for that information. so anytime you see a little like these lines here, it means the card has a description on it. So again, we’ve kept it very, very simple. Then we have another list that’s email requests that come in and who to forward that information to ongoing tasks required of our admin team. I’m trying to find one with a link to a folder. So right here we just popped in for group therapy. Wait list management. We we just plugged in a link that’ll take them to another spreadsheet. So again we’re using this quite basically. But this works great. And any time there’s an update with our admin team I just get them to update the Trello. So here’s the daily tasks from walking into the building to what tools they need to open and get started with access to our RingCentral phone line. and that’s literally all we’ve done is just this step by step process of their day to day tasks. Ashley Mielke 00:17:25 Okay. Then we have their weekly and bi weekly tasks. With certain dates, we could label these with different colors. There’s all sorts of things that we can do, but we wanted to keep it fairly basic for the admin team working at different locations, and then we have monthly tasks as well. So certain things to do on the first of the month, the first Tuesday of the month and so on. Does anyone have any questions about this admin board specifically? Okay. Then we have here each one as well where it says CEO. Yes. Someone okay. Thank you. So here’s where the only person who has access to this one and this one is a bit outdated now is like for me, I said, okay, what are my 2024 goals? What are some projects that I’m working on? Weekly tasks, sort of a note on contracts and things that I have to take care of with my contractors. First of the month tasks, mid-month, annual and then some professional development. So just some books that I wanted to read. Ashley Mielke 00:18:28 I’ve got everything on here. Of course, it’s a list of books that I’ll just probably never get to because there’s so many of them. But again, just another simple way to use the to create a workflow for yourself. And then you’ll notice here, so I’ve got just lists of how I do things. Okay. So here’s my SOP for contract renewal. How we get that done I could even create checklist with this, which again I will show you when we start a project together what that would look like. So now I want to take you to a different workspace. This is our social media. So this is how we use Trello for our social media planning and scheduling. And it keeps us very organized. So you can see here for June here’s everything that was scheduled out. So here’s a post. Here’s what the post will look like. Here is the caption for the post. That’s where we will put it. Okay. And then we have a little checklist for each post. So our social media person, her name is Andrea. Ashley Mielke 00:19:35 She’s wonderful. She will put this out and then I approve it by checking off these boxes. So when you create a checklist you can see the checklist is 0% complete. And then the line like it increases as you complete the checklist. And then when you’re done it turns green. And if there’s any questions we tag each other. So if I were to write a comment to her I would tag her name here. I would write her a comment. She would get that notification. And that’s how we communicate in our social media. So right now we’ve got everything that was scheduled and published so far in July. Then we’ve got July planning, so this one would go out today and then same thing. So we’ve just got the one card for the rest of the week here. And Zandra will just continue to build cards under August planning. And I check them off as we as I get those notifications. And then over here, this is where we’ve just created cards for different ideas that we’ve had some strategies. Ashley Mielke 00:20:48 yeah. Just some planning, a spotlight mood board. So kind of some things that we wanted to plan in advance before we started using Trello and working together for social media. Any questions about this? So now I’m going to go back to my workspace here for my business, and we’re going to create a project together. So the only the only issue now that’s been new with Trello is there’s only a certain number of boards that you can have in your workspaces and a certain number of users until you have to start to pay. So you do have to be mindful of I believe it’s ten users per workspace. So if you are having multiple people in one workspace, then that is something that you have to be mindful of. and then if you go above that you will have to pay. So we’re going to create a board together. So I would love if someone has an idea about maybe a project that we want to pretend that we’re going to create. any thoughts on a project that we can create together something basic, maybe even something you’re working on right now that we could create a little template for? Speaker 3 00:22:09 I have two ideas, but feel free to scrap them. Speaker 3 00:22:11 I mean, I have to do a major website update, so I need to go through different like sub like different categories I guess to update my website and get to my developer. Ashley Mielke 00:22:21 I love that, I think that’s a great idea. What’s your other idea? Speaker 3 00:22:26 we. Ashley Mielke 00:22:28 Would. Speaker 3 00:22:28 Like to start, like a newsletter, just like a monthly for our current client base. Ashley Mielke 00:22:35 Oh. Speaker 3 00:22:36 So we have the software, but no content yet because nobody’s gotten around to it. Ashley Mielke 00:22:41 Okay, I’m wondering what would be more valuable for the group right now. Is anyone okay? I’m going to. I’m going to stop sharing so I can actually see you all right now. Does anyone have a newsletter going right now or sort of planning for a newsletter? Because that could be a fun one for us to create, even just how you might consider your workflow. Who here has a. Speaker 6 00:23:06 Blog that goes out each week? Ashley Mielke 00:23:08 Okay, so you’ve got something. Brent. That’s great. What do you use for planning for that, if anything, right now? Speaker 6 00:23:15 my admin, there’s all of the like, I go out of here at a time to do different things in my admin. Speaker 6 00:23:22 I have a blog writer that helps me with that, but then I use constant contact to schedule and do all the emailing stuff. Ashley Mielke 00:23:29 Okay, okay. And in terms of do you have a document where you plan out different ideas and things like that? Speaker 6 00:23:36 Yeah, I just have a, a Google doc that that’s shared. Okay. Ashley Mielke 00:23:42 Great. And who else just with a show of hands, has got a newsletter system kind of set up. Okay, so let’s do that. And whose idea was that, by the way? Because I couldn’t see that was me. Speaker 3 00:23:55 Yeah. We have constant contact as well. I just don’t actually use it yet. Okay. Ashley Mielke 00:24:00 So let’s see how we might use Trello to set us up to streamline a newsletter process. So, let’s go back. Okay. So I’m going to create So essentially this is what’s going to happen, right? You’re going to have this. We could easily go in here. We can change our background. it could be images that you upload. Ashley Mielke 00:24:23 It could be pictures. So okay so we do this one instead. We like that. That’s inspiring. Beautiful. Peaceful. Now the first thing we want to do is if we’re kind of brainstorming what are going to be the important lists that are going to help us to plan, brainstorm, gets ideas and then organize our scheduling thoughts, and you can just shout it out. Speaker 3 00:24:50 I guess, like a list of I’m trying to think of like a list of topics, but I think in my mind each newsletter would have like 2 to 3 different topics consistently. So my thought was there might be like a clinician spotlight, right? And then and then it might be like a book, like a book resource or a community event. Do you know what I’m saying? Like. So I don’t know if we need a board. I think those are called boards, right? Or are those cards there? Ashley Mielke 00:25:22 This is considered a board. So we could call these cards. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I’m curious. Speaker 3 00:25:29 How would. Ashley Mielke 00:25:29 You. Speaker 3 00:25:31 Separate them out by topics. So like for example Clinician Spotlight, would you then have a card for each clinician and have their highlights or book reviews. You know what I’m saying I don’t know I. Ashley Mielke 00:25:42 Think what I don’t what what other people think I have an idea, but what other people think it might be. Maybe you would create. Speaker 7 00:25:49 One where you’re brainstorming everything you would want to include. Not necessarily the topic focus, but what all of the things you would want to include in a newsletter, like highlighting clinicians and DTD. And then once you have all of your ideas there, then you may narrow it down. So it sounds like maybe that’s one of the things you’re looking at, which would be a little bit different than topics right. Ashley Mielke 00:26:12 So that could be a great start is really just figuring out what is this newsletter outline and flow. And you could literally add cards. So it could be we start out with an introduction and then we start okay. like an introduction welcome for the first thing in the in the newsletter. Ashley Mielke 00:26:30 And then what you could determine is who writes out the introduction and welcome. So then we could say we could add particular members to this board. Right. Who have access to that workspace. So this could be maybe it’s an admin person, maybe it’s you. And then maybe you create a label for yourself and you could even name the label, right. so if I like say that’s something that I would do. Love the color pink. Okay. So that could be something that I would create. then we would keep adding. So that’s what we would do then. What we could also add is what’s included in a welcome introduction. Is it talk about, a theme for that month, maybe it’s like Mother’s Day or something. right. So we could create a checklist here of what goes into each part of a newsletter, if that makes sense. So we know what we’re doing each month. You could also I’m just thinking this. I’m thinking this flow would be probably duplicated for each. what you could do is duplicate this for each month. Ashley Mielke 00:27:49 So then maybe if you’re planning like August 2024, you could simply, duplicate the outline that you’ve created. Who does what, what are the checklists? And you can even put, deadlines as well, which is really cool. So this would have a deadline. It’s due on this day. It’ll turn red. There’s a checklist, and once everything is completed, it would turn green. Does that make sense? Speaker 3 00:28:20 That does make sense. It’s a nice visual. I used to use Trello a lot in the past, and I stopped, and I’m not sure why, but. Ashley Mielke 00:28:27 Yeah. And it’s it’s really fun. So okay, let’s say for our newsletter outline, let’s keep let’s keep building on this for fun. So we do an introduction. Welcome. What would be like the next part of a newsletter that we would want to include? We know one of them was a did we say therapist spotlight. That’s what we include. Yes okay. Perfect. So let’s say we would invite whoever to this. Ashley Mielke 00:28:53 so this is what Sabrina’s responsible for. Okay. We set a deadline. We write a checklist. What? What is included in a therapist spotlight. So name, And you just click and enter. Designation, location, maybe. Specialties, niche clientele they serve maybe, like a fun fact. I’m just thinking. Speaker 3 00:29:20 Contact information, I guess. Yeah. Ashley Mielke 00:29:23 Right. Maybe booking link and then it’s sort of done for you. Rinse and repeat every month, and as those things are checked off again, you can set a deadline with a date. We know who is responsible for it. We will see when those items are completed. And yeah. Joe Sanok 00:29:51 Something always comes up when you’re running a private practice. Well, gusto is payroll and HR services can make it a little easier. Gusto was designed for you, the small business owner. They take the pain out of running a business, automatically calculating paychecks, filing payroll taxes, setting up open enrollment. Gusto. Does it all want more time tracking health insurance? 401 K onboarding commuter benefits offer letters, access to HR experts. Joe Sanok 00:30:20 You get the idea. With gusto, you can focus on the joy of running your business. It’s super easy to set up and get started, and if you’re moving from another provider, gusto can transfer all the data for you. It’s no surprise 99% of businesses said the value they get for gusto is worth the price. And here’s the best part because you’re a listener, you get three months totally free. All you have to do is go to gusto.com/joe again. That’s gusto.com/joe I’m telling you you’re going to love gusto. Get started today. Ashley Mielke 00:30:58 What else might we add. Speaker 3 00:31:00 How do you duplicate a card? Ashley Mielke 00:31:03 So this is where. Speaker 3 00:31:06 So copy I c copy it or make it a template. Ashley Mielke 00:31:09 Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And then the other things we can we wouldn’t change this one. But you can always like let’s say we’re doing like what we do in social media. It might be or already done something. So planning done. So you could actually have something here. You don’t have to do this. This wouldn’t be necessary for this particular thing. Ashley Mielke 00:31:33 Oops. But you can always drag things over as well. So if there was something that you wanted to move you could you could do that for something is I think simple as this. We wouldn’t necessarily need to do that. We would just copy and paste and redo. And then when you’re done you just close the list. You just archive the list. Right. When it’s no like, no longer, needed. Yeah. Any questions about this. I’m just trying to think if there’s there’s so many things, that I’m definitely missing, but and again, this is where you could comment and say, okay, at Sabrina, you know, we’re ready to go here for the next month and you can communicate right on the board and you can upload. So maybe you have this is where you would upload their photo, right. For the therapist spotlight that you want to go on the newsletter or if there’s particular PDFs that you’re wanting to share in a newsletter, you could upload them to those as well. There’s the the links that I sent to you with the, sort of beginner level introduction to using Trello or people that use these like really in-depth. Ashley Mielke 00:32:45 And it’s really fun to see the different kind of creative ways that they, implement this tool into their online businesses. So I do encourage you to watch the There are only 15 minutes. So, that is also linked in the PowerPoint that I’m going to be uploading to this live as well. So you can check that out later. Any questions about how you might use this as a part of your business? Speaker 7 00:33:11 Getting started I like the idea that you had, when you were showing us earlier, getting started of the using it for social media. but one of the things that I had a, an intern doing our Instagram and I passed a bunch of ideas to her and we were just using Google Docs, but just peeking out the way you had it set up, it looks like a really cool way to have that in terms of, because my plan is to basically have our interns do social media until we decide to spend money on it. So I think that’s a cool thing that I, I’m thinking about how to start actually in the next month or so. Speaker 7 00:33:48 Yes, it’s. Ashley Mielke 00:33:49 Organized and you can have conversations on there and you can see the visuals. Yeah. So we do use Canva to create our images. And then those are just uploaded. And sometimes Zandra will say okay here’s three different images. Which one do you prefer a, B or C. And then we choose that. We have the caption in the description section, a little checklist that way. Like honestly the communication is basically nil. Like we don’t have to communicate. It’s there’s no back and forth, there’s no emailing of things. It’s everything is communicated in the Trello board. Even ideas like or a certain like those little cards. I will put certain things that I know I want to happen that month. So I’ll be like, oh, it’s Mother’s Day. So we want to have a couple posts on that. I will pick the dates and then she will create the content. So again, it’s like there’s no need to communicate. It’s very efficient. Speaker 7 00:34:44 Well, I love that you, it didn’t even occur to me because we were just using shared Google Docs. Speaker 7 00:34:48 But the fact that you can have the image in there too, just as it puts it over the top. I like it. Ashley Mielke 00:34:54 Yeah, and it’s free. Like you can’t beat it. Honestly? Yeah. Are you using any tools other than Trello that might be helpful for us to know about, even as something else to explore as an option for workflow, project management, anything like that? Speaker 3 00:35:12 I mean, we rely very heavily on Google Chat, you know, just to communicate. We have a lot of different, spaces, I guess it’s called. So there might be for this example, there might be like newsletter ideas. Right? So anybody who has an idea or says, hey, I think we should add this or I found this community resource, can we put it in the next newsletter would be posting it in just that space. So only individuals who want to be part of that project of newsletter would even see that. And it won’t get mixed up in other Google Space chats like intake or billing questions or something like that. Speaker 3 00:35:52 So we rely really heavily on the Google Space, the Google Chat features. Hey, like a lot of different threads. Ashley Mielke 00:36:01 And can you upload anything or it’s mostly just chatting like what is that again? Speaker 3 00:36:05 Yeah. So we have our team does a book club once a month. And so there is a book club thread and if anybody has an idea, they can actually put an image of the book or the Amazon link and say, I had like to recommend this for our next month book club. And again, anybody who chose not to participate in the book club wouldn’t get a ding because they’re not in that thread with a group chat. Almost. Right. Ashley Mielke 00:36:31 Okay. Very fun. Thank you for sharing it. That’s one thing I just had never explored was the Google for everything. Yeah, I hear I see other practices and people doing that and it’s just not something we ever did. So that’s very cool. Thank you for sharing. Anybody else. Speaker 5 00:36:48 Use. Yeah we just use Google Drive for our stuff and having different folders, but I think I like this design better. Speaker 5 00:36:56 It feels a lot simpler and like easy to find those things. And even I think being able to link back to the Google Drive, it looks like you’re able to do that. So that way things are simpler and easier to find because like sometimes whenever you’re scrambling, like you need something like really fast, like it’s hard to like scroll through like the folders and find the right one and click all the buttons. But that seems a lot simpler. So I like that a lot. Ashley Mielke 00:37:18 Yes, absolutely. We do a ton of that as well. The linking back to Google Docs, for ease and access for sure. And even thinking like say taking if you’ve got a Google folder full of therapist resources, that’s like kids and trauma and grief and whatever else, you could even create separate lists of like child resources and like link them or upload them directly. right. So child and adult and then all sorts of anxiety, depression, grief, trauma. Like you really could there’s just so many different, endless ways you could use it, for accessibility and organization. Ashley Mielke 00:38:01 And it looks nice, too, like it’s just looks organized as opposed to just trying to dig things through files. So, yeah, I mean, really, it is endless. Awesome. Well, that’s all I had today. like I said, I definitely encourage you to watch those tutorials that are linked. They’re really awesome and really inspiring about all the the different ways. So because we’ve got time today. Oh, okay. Thanks for coming, Michelle. Take care. because we still have time. We can do some laser consulting. So if there’s stuff happening in your business right now that I can support you with, whether it’s around organization, project management or otherwise, let’s use that time to connect. Speaker 6 00:38:45 Actually going back and forth on CRM things. Ashley Mielke 00:38:48 Oh, okay. Tell us about it. Speaker 6 00:38:52 Well, I’m just trying to decide do I need to invest in one? because I feel like I’m in this weird, like mid growth section, like me and two other clinicians I’m about to hire. The third one hopefully this fall. Speaker 6 00:39:06 But system wise, like we’ve had a decent system. we use therapy noses. Our EHR clients can schedule directly admin follows up, confirms the appointment and gets payment method on file, sends them the forms and the patient portal. So we’re basically pretty paperless. we also have a Google spreadsheet where she kind of tracks where the referrals are coming from. So she’s having to do that on a regular basis. Yeah. So we’re trying to figure out what a CRM make it better to easily track those things. So she’s not having to manually do that for her. if we did use a CRM and like were thinking about using their SaaS. So based like they said, like doing a form on our website as clients fill out instead of scheduling themselves. I’m not sure which is the better option. Ashley Mielke 00:39:58 So I’m assuming therapy notes. Is it a pretty basic EHR system? Like it doesn’t allow for tracking, like where referrals are coming from? Yeah, I feel like when you introduce more programs, that complicates things. What I would do is look at an EHR that is robust enough that tracks all of your reporting, like we use Jane. Ashley Mielke 00:40:20 Everyone knows I love Jane and it provides all of the tracking for referrals, reporting, retention, all the stuff for our month end for our bookkeeper, like, you name it. Yeah. I’m not sure that I personally would invest in a CRM outside of that’s just going to complicate things. And as you grow what, you want to make sure that your systems are scalable. So even her tracking things right now it’s okay on like a spreadsheet. But over time is going to be too hard to do that. Any other feedback or thoughts from the group? Speaker 5 00:40:56 I think I mean, we’re also looking to use our or switch our EHR because we use therapy notes also. And it’s if I feel so frustrated with all the time and I just there’s so much more I want to do. I had simple practice before, which was good and more user friendly, and it had a lot more data. so I am missing that. And I as Jane, is that like just a Canada based company or do they also cover us as well? Ashley Mielke 00:41:23 They do. Speaker 5 00:41:24 Okay, yeah, because we’d like more information to kind of inform like, you know, brand, I haven’t even thought about that stuff just to inform our process, you know? Ashley Mielke 00:41:35 Yeah. And it’s often cheap. I think it actually is more cost effective than some other US based programs. So definitely set up a demo. Highly recommend. Their customer service is immediate, like they are phenomenal whether you call them or email them. It’s like someone’s there. It’s I mean, our experience has been great. Of course, it’s not perfect. There’s always things they need to tweak and do better. But in terms of monthly reporting, having multiple locations, just it’s amazing, right? Accessing a client list or your retention or looking at referrals. Every month we track all of those things. Intakes. How do they book online or manually? Like it breaks down everything. Speaker 6 00:42:17 Do you have to pay for? Do you have like different tiers for that type of stuff, or is it just a flat rate and you have all the things? Ashley Mielke 00:42:25 Yeah. Ashley Mielke 00:42:25 So you have all the things and it’s basically based on, I think, the number of members. But once you hit a certain number of members, it’s like you could the sky’s the limit and it won’t your price won’t go up. Yeah. So we pay like maybe 450 a month Canadian. So that would be like, what, three something us 350 us. and that’s with like multiple like over like maybe 25 users or something. So it’s I would say like a really good investment. And again, their customer service is great. And we don’t have to invest in something else like HubSpot or whatever CRM are out there. What was the one that you were mentioning? Sara something, Sara SAS and doing one. Speaker 6 00:43:16 On one consulting with Andrew, and he mentioned that because he just started, using the process or he’s in the process of getting signed up with them. Ashley Mielke 00:43:25 Okay, let’s check that out. Speaker 3 00:43:26 I just signed up for something called Practice Vital. Anybody use that or heard of it? Speaker 6 00:43:33 I did a demo with them. Speaker 6 00:43:36 It was okay. The. I feel like for what I was paying, I would want more reports. That’s why I didn’t sign up. Speaker 3 00:43:44 Yeah, I agree, I, I it’s pretty affordable. So I’m going to just take what I can get from them at the moment. I use therapy notes so it will integrate with therapy notes. And therapy notes will give me more of the revenue side of information where I can pull from like insurance company or, each clinician in terms of monthly revenue bring, you know, bringing in. But then the practice vital does more, data in terms of like note count and total number of clients and retention rates and churn rates and cancel rates, because I usually pull that from like their time sheets. And then I put it into spreadsheets and it’s very kind of labor intensive. And their time sheets are sort of on the honor system. So there’s like really no way to know if it’s even accurate if they’re putting in, you know, I had 25 sessions and two cancellations and whatever. Speaker 3 00:44:36 this will actually pull the data right from therapy notes based on their what they’re coding and how they’re writing their notes. so for me, I think it’s a little bit more of like an auditing tool at the moment. And just like a time saver. Hopefully down the road they can do more with like revenue and numbers. But, it’s a little bit more than what therapy notes can provide for me. But I agree, it’s not quite the whole picture yet. We’ve really never tracked where anything is coming from, which is probably not great, but we just I don’t even know how or where. And right now we’re like, so busy that I don’t think it’s a huge priority. But down the road it will be. Speaker 7 00:45:12 Yeah. Ashley Mielke 00:45:13 Yes. another thing with Jane Kimberley is they do track all the sales revenue. Who? Where? What what’s collected, what’s not for each clinician and each location. And, we use that for our like when they send in their invoice, we compare their invoice to Jane on a basic report, and we’re able to know immediately what is incongruent. Ashley Mielke 00:45:36 So it’s another great thing that it offers as well. If you wanted to look into that just in terms of tracking revenue, accounts receivable, all of that. Speaker 3 00:45:46 That’s great. Thank you. Speaker 6 00:45:49 One of the reasons I was looking at a possible CRM, like I said, my admin tracks referrals. I work with a marketing agency who does Google ads for me. Okay. Of course. They’re like, we need to invest more in Google ads. Well, when my admin, she’ll ask, you know, how did you find us here about us? They say Google. Well, is that a Google ad? Is that you found me on Google Maps just organically on Google. So is my am I getting my return of investment from the Google ads before I invest in more Google ads? Ashley Mielke 00:46:22 Yeah. That’s tough. Are they able to send you some numbers that say, here’s the ones that we were able to track that went from Google ad to your web page to the contact at all. Speaker 6 00:46:33 They’re not able to do that. Speaker 6 00:46:35 They’re able to tell me, like, how many people have seen the ads and how many people clicked on them. Ashley Mielke 00:46:39 Oh, but not what happens after that. Yeah. Speaker 6 00:46:43 Yeah. Ashley Mielke 00:46:44 Interesting. Speaker 6 00:46:46 Which I’ve been told when I talked to their staff, they said if I had a CRM, they could do that. do the tracking that way. but if as long as I kind of use the form because they would, like, click the book now and it goes into a form right now when you click book now, it takes you to the therapy notes patient portal to book an appointment. Right. Ashley Mielke 00:47:06 Yeah. It is tough because it’s not quite a perfect system like what is actually happening. And are they booking or are they just creating a file. Like one thing that we see is a lot of people will create files in Jane to book online and then they don’t actually book. So we’re always like so interested about that. And we do reach out to those people. Anyway, we look into all of that to say, hey, we notice you created a file. Ashley Mielke 00:47:29 Just checking in. You know what’s happening here? Speaker 6 00:47:32 How does Jane handle billing? Like with insurance companies? Ashley Mielke 00:47:35 So that will be that would be questions you’d have to to explore with them because our system is a little bit different. So there are integrations though with certain insurance companies that we build directly through Jane with the integration like Canada Life for example, they’re billed directly. Once we hit like pay go, it goes to them. Otherwise we do have to most of our insurances through an external site like for Blue Cross. We have to like go into their site and do the billing again. It’s a very different system here. but all of that is tracked. So the client, we would say paid through insurance, say $210, $220, then that would become a part of the accounts receivable. Once we receive that money, we then check it off as paid, match the invoice. That’s how we do it when we can’t pay directly through Jane, but it all aligns and we know what’s outstanding every single day. Ashley Mielke 00:48:31 Who owes us what’s outstanding beyond 30 days so we can like follow up. So that’s helped a lot with the accounts receivable just in terms of like, oh, this isn’t good. There was one point where we just weren’t tracking it well and we were like over. It was like crazy, like 35,000 in arrears or something with insurance and whoever. So once we got a better system going, it’s like now day to day, it’s like more like 10 or 12,000, which makes sense. It’s okay because we’re still collecting, right? You know, it takes a little bit of time. So but it’s been an awesome EHR. What are y’all using right now for EHRs other than the therapy notes, folks? Speaker 5 00:49:14 Simple practice. Ashley Mielke 00:49:16 Okay. And Serena, it doesn’t quite have all the things that Jane does or does it? Speaker 7 00:49:21 No, I was trying while you were talking to go through and see. Ashley Mielke 00:49:24 And. Speaker 5 00:49:25 Some of the. Speaker 7 00:49:25 Reporting things don’t show up. And one of the other things is it’s a little bit pricier. Speaker 7 00:49:31 Jane seems a lot more economical. Speaker 5 00:49:33 For a group practice. Ashley Mielke 00:49:35 Yes, which is like surprising to me. I’m like, it has all the things, but it’s cheaper. Like, what’s the catch here? But it really is that good. Honestly, we’ve been with Jane for like four years. It’s a little complicated at first because you have to set everything up, but once it’s all automated, like the intake forms and blah, blah, blah, and you kind of get a lay of the land, it’s so easy to use. So definitely something to think about before you get too big, where you’re just overwhelmed with just all the appointments and everything that you would have to switch over. Definitely recommend. It’s great for scalability. We don’t use any other tools or reporting or anything. And then our bookkeeper, she gets all the reports. We delete the client information off of the reports. Super easy. She reconciles the bank account and the credit card and everything, and it’s like a very efficient system. Speaker 7 00:50:27 And this is Rachel I use simple. Speaker 3 00:50:28 Practice to my camera is frozen. I don’t know. Speaker 7 00:50:31 Why. So I kept it off. Ashley Mielke 00:50:34 Oh no problem. And how do you like it? Speaker 7 00:50:37 Well I it’s the first one I’ve used. Speaker 5 00:50:39 So before I used like Office. Speaker 3 00:50:41 Ally, which is. Speaker 5 00:50:42 Super basic. Speaker 3 00:50:43 Okay. so I think simple practice is. Speaker 7 00:50:46 Amazing, but. Speaker 5 00:50:47 It is expensive. So kind of hearing. Speaker 3 00:50:50 That there are other. Speaker 5 00:50:51 Options. Speaker 7 00:50:52 I’d never heard of Jane. Speaker 5 00:50:53 Until today, so I’ll check. Speaker 7 00:50:54 It out. Ashley Mielke 00:50:55 Awesome, awesome. I started with Simple Practice as well. That was my first EHR and really, really enjoyed it. Until again, sort of like you like it just wasn’t really working for us anymore. And then we wanted to have a Canadian system, which worked really great. So that’s kind of why we made that transition. but yeah, they do offer it in other countries as well. So definitely check it out. Speaker 5 00:51:18 Okay. Speaker 7 00:51:18 Thank you. You’re welcome. Ashley Mielke 00:51:19 All right. Ashley Mielke 00:51:20 So in wrapping up today, what is sort of one thing, one take away, one call to action for yourself that you’re going to do, whether it’s around looking for a project management tool like integrating, checking out Trello, doing a 14 day trial, reaching out to chain, or some other task I’d love to hear in the chat. Awesome, Sabrina. Love that. Yes. Checking out Trello. Speaker 7 00:51:48 Looking into chain. Ashley Mielke 00:51:49 Yes yes yes. Speaker 7 00:51:51 Oh that’s awesome Kimberly. Ashley Mielke 00:51:53 Great. Well, I look forward to seeing how you use this. If you have any specific questions. Yes, definitely. Rachel, check out Jane for sure. if you do have any specific questions, pop them in circle. I do get notified for every single question that goes up in group practice, boss. So if there’s anything that I can support you with or anything at all relating to this conversation today, definitely let me know. Send me a DM as well on circle if you’d like or send me an email. Ashley at practice of the practice. Ashley Mielke 00:52:22 Com. All right everyone, you take care. Enjoy the rest of your day. And, look forward to seeing you all very soon. Speaker 7 00:52:29 Thank you so much. Ashley Mielke 00:52:30 Bye for now. Speaker 7 00:52:31 Bye bye. Joe Sanok 00:52:40 Well, thank you so much for listening to the practice of the Practice podcast today. These trainings are available in our membership communities. 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