[WHITNEY OWENS]
Welcome to the Faith in Practice podcast. I’m your host Whitney Owens recording live from Savannah, Georgia. I’m a licensed professional counselor, group practice owner, and private practice consultant. Each week through personal story or amazing interviews, I will help you learn how to start, grow and scale your practice from a faith-based perspective. I will show you how to have an awesome faith-based practice without being cheesy or fake. You too can have a successful practice, make lots of money, and be true to yourself.

Welcome back to the Faith in Practice podcast. Today is episode 122. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I’m looking forward to this interview that we have prepared. Before we get started on that, I’m going to talk to you about something I’m super pumped about, the Faith in Practice conference. It’s going to be April 21st through 24th on Jekyll Island here in the state of Georgia. If you want to hang out with me and some other amazing practice owners, I want you to consider purchasing a ticket to this event. We’re going to be working on several different items surrounding your practice.

We have faith in action, which is taking steps to integrate faith in an action oriented way with our clients, faith in business, and how to build our businesses in an appropriate and ethical way so that we can market to faith-based clients and to other clients that might want to enter into our businesses. Then also faith in counseling, which is all about appropriately integrating faith with our clinical work. There’s going to be a variety of experts in different fields coming to the conference. If you are a good listener of this podcast, you’re going to find out in our next episode, more details about that conference, but I just want to plug it in your brain right now because tickets are going to go on sale February 2nd.

Once those tickets go on sale, there’s only about 45 tickets available. So I’d love for you to get in on that conference and you can hang out with me. Along with it being an amazing event with some speakers and information for you, it’s also on the beach. So you’ll be able to hang out on the beach in a really nice time of weather, which is April. In Georgia it’s wonderful. There’s also some great amenities at the hotels, restaurants and the rooms are nice. It’s a Marriot courtyard. There’s also bike rentals. There’s golf balls if you just want to go to the golf courses while you’re there. There’s a lot of other things to do on Jekyll Island. There’s a beautiful pool, a splash pad for little kids, lots of fun stuff. And corn hole, by the way.

So I know that several people that are coming are going to be bringing their spouses, their kids, kind of making a vacation. Someone else told me they’re going to stay a whole week. It is right after Easter. So maybe you want, if your kids have spring break that week, you want to bring them. Then they play during the day, you attend the conference and hang out with them at night, whatever works for you. So to get more information or to join the wait list, go to practiceofthepractice.com/faithinpracticeconference to join that wait list. You’ll find out as soon as tickets come available, and those are going to be on February 2nd. If you’re listening to this episode, after that date, head on over to that website and check and see if tickets are still available. Like I said, at the time of this recording, we have about 45 tickets left, so they will go quick. So please make sure that you check that out as soon as possible.

All right, so let’s get into today’s episode. I got to interview Wendy Dickinsen and to tell you the truth, she’s somebody I had been wanting to interview for quite some time. She has a growing group practice in Atlanta, actually called Grow. I had heard about it because she and I have a lot of similar circles with our alumni group because we both, well, I went to Richmont and she was a teacher at Richmont when I was there. So we know a lot of the same people, and I’ve been hearing a lot about her practice. A lot of people that I went to school with actually work for her.

So she has some really great systems and processes for her group. In this episode, she also talks a lot about what it’s like to be a practice owner and how she manages that with her family. So it’s a lot of good nuggets that are going to come out in this episode. Then she also talks about a new directory that she’s working on that you can be a part of. So make sure that you sit in it for the end or a run in it or whatever it is you do when you podcast. I like to run. But be ready for the end of the episode as well so that you can get that information getting on that directory. So we’re going to jump into the episode number 122, Wendy Dickinson on how to grow your practice.
[WHITNEY]
Welcome, Wendy to the Faith in Practice podcast. How are you doing today?
[DR. WENDY DICKINSON]
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here and I’m having a great day.
[WHITNEY]
Awesome. Well, really been looking forward to interviewing you because you have a wonderful practice that I have heard about for years, and so I’m really excited to share that with the audience today. But let’s go ahead and just start with, tell us your background, where you went to school, what made you become a counselor and then kind of take us from there on how you started and grew a group practice?
[WENDY]
Sure. So I started actually at Richmont and 2000 I moved to Atlanta. At the time it was called Psychological Studies Institute. So that dates me a little bit back in the day. They have changed their name. It’s a Christian master’s program in Atlanta. I started there and through a series of events that I won’t bore everyone with I ended up transferring down to Georgia state to do a master’s degree down there. So I essentially ended up with two master’s degrees, which is probably the longest possible way to get a license that there is.

I really intended to finish that, get licensed as a professional counselor and start practice and got really intrigued with the counseling psychology degree at Georgia state. So ended up kind of applying for it on a little bit of a whim, thinking, well I’m going to apply for this and see how it goes. If I get in great, and if not, I’ll just start a practice. Meanwhile, everybody else at the interviews were like sweating bullets, because this was their lifelong dream. So that was an interesting turn.

So I ended up getting in and did a five-year doctoral program at Georgia state, which was fantastic. I can’t say enough about the great training that they do. I got a lot of exposure to trauma work. Really I think when it was kind of on the cutting edge of trauma work and went away and did my residency and at the end of that was trying to figure out what’s next. So I could teach, I could work for a company, I could work in a private practice. I could work in a group practice. Like the world is your oyster, which sounds nice, but it can be a little overwhelming, I think, to figure out what that next step is.

So I had a friend who had graduated ahead of me at the time and started a practice in Atlanta and after kind of surveying different options I thought my community’s in Atlanta. Why don’t I just give us a shot and see how it goes? So I rented a little office from her and really intended to do individual private practice, but after doing it for a little while, found that it was a little bit lonely for me. I had worked on several really great teams where there was great community and there was great culture and there was support and people felt connected and private practice just felt really, really private and very lonely to me.

So at the time I was teaching grad students and a couple of my students needed a place to start out. So I thought, oh, well maybe I could hire them and see how this goes. We could kind of do a little thing. So we started there, sharing my one little office that I was subletting from somebody and we’ve just kind of grown from there. I think what was interesting, so that was in 2007. I’m hoping the landscape of the counseling practices has changed. I haven’t done a survey lately, but at the time it felt like there really weren’t any group practices that were healthy and were really connected. It felt like there was this like collection, some of the practices were like a collection of individuals that they weren’t connected.

Then there were some practices that really felt unhealthy, like they were taking advantage of new graduates and just didn’t feel like an atmosphere that I wanted to be in. So that’s why I kind of charted my own course. We have just kind of stayed the path and it’s been super exciting. Now we have four offices throughout Atlanta. We have Swan, Atlanta, Buckhead and Peachtree City, and we have about 40, they’re independent contractors. We call them team members, but independent contractors that work as part of our team. So we kind of always joke that if you’re between the ages of two and 92, we probably have somebody who specializes in something that can be helpful. So that’s where we are.
[WHITNEY]
So can you talk a little bit about kind of the setup? Like how do you keep a community within your practice when you’ve got four locations and 40 people working there? So how do you keep everybody together and that kind of a thing?
[WENDY]
We work really hard at that. I think if you don’t make it a priority, it’s not going to happen. It’s one of the things that in the interview process, the cast vision for like, hey, you’re going to be a great fit here if you want to be part of a team, you want to feel connected, you want to participate in the community. You may not be a great fit here if you want to be an island. I always joke, like you at least need to be a peninsula. You need to want to be connected in some way. So we start out from the beginning, really casting vision like this is what we’re all about. This is what we value. This is who we are and I think we naturally attract people that want to feel connected.

Then we spend a lot of time thinking about how do we have connection points? I don’t like to think about how do we have meetings, because those aren’t always connection points, but how do we have an environment that fosters connection? How do we kind of cross, link people from different offices to work on different projects or to be in different peer groups? How do we plan events that really foster and support connection rather than just dissemination of information? So we, especially in the last couple years with Covid have overtly leaned away from meetings that feel like anything we could communicate in an email or maybe a video recording and have leaned into doing events that, when we’re able to, that feel connected and more social in nature.

We’ve also, I think as everyone has during COVID, tried to be creative with videos and those kinds of connections, especially across offices. So we like to think, one of the things we say a lot is that we’re one team in different locations. So instead of thinking about each office as a franchise in its own little pocket, we think about ourselves as one big team, even though you may not cross path lot with other people. I think just that sort of framework helps in the way that people approach decisions or relationships or connections.
[WHITNEY]
Definitely. There’s so much to be said at the very beginning, setting the expectation for people when you hire them of this is what it’s going to be like, and this is what we expect of you and showing them that community is like number one, and that’s what we’re here for. So they do go into it with that mindset. I love that. I was kind of giggling when you were talking about the start of it, how you were like, well I might as well get these people together and just do this thing. I think so many practice owners can empathize with you on that. That’s how a lot of group practices start. I obviously, love helping people start group practices. So it’s like, what if you hadn’t? What if you had just been like, eh, I don’t know if that’s going to work and you hadn’t done it. Did you ever think you would be where you are now?
[WENDY]
No, no. I think it’s been very organic. Depending on the group I’m talking to, I may use different language, but very spirit led, very organic. And really, we try to approach these decisions with just this idea of what feels like the next right thing to do? I know that one of the strategies in having a business plan is having vision and goals, but we always just come back to and we want to do excellent therapy. We want to be able to serve our community well and so out of that goal, what feels like the next right thing to do. That’s how we make decisions about opening offices or hiring additional staff or taking on consulting projects. Does this feel like the next logical right step for us?
[WHITNEY]
So you brought up spirituality. I wanted to talk about that because it is a faith-based podcast here. So could you share a little bit about your practice, kind of the values? How do you bring spirituality or faith into your practice and then maybe expand on how does that work with the clinical piece in your marketing?
[WENDY]
So my training, I think I mentioned at the beginning, I started out my training at Richmont, which is a faith-based school. So we did a lot of integration work, a lot of like, how do you meet somebody where they in their faith? What if somebody’s struggling with faith? We did all that kind of foundational work. I think that along the way, especially attending Georgia state, one of the things I really came to value was this idea that a lot of times people want a therapist they feel like they share a world view with, they feel like they share some of those foundational elements of faith with, but they don’t necessarily come to counseling to talk about faith. They come to counseling because they want help with mental health issues and they want good communication skills and they need clarity on their future.

And they really want to know that they’re not going to be talked out of their faith or they’re not going to be told that they’re crazy. But when it comes to talking about issues of faith, they have a faith community for that. They have a pastor, they have a small group, and so really that’s, most of the time where I was finding that people were having those conversations. There is some overlap and occasionally we have people that come in that really want to dive into faith. But for the most part, what I found is that they wanted to know, they weren’t going to be told they were crazy. They didn’t want to be talked out of their worldview. Then they wanted to move on like, “Hey, you are the expert in anxiety, depression, stress management,” whatever it is they needed help with. So from that foundation came my desire to really be able to bridge the community.

The bridge that I see is doing excellent therapy. So whether you come in and you’re a person of faith, or you come in and you’re like, “Hey, faith, isn’t for me,” I want to meet you where you are and be able to do excellent therapy with you and offer you excellent mental healthcare. Within that, we also want to be a safe place and we want to be a safe place for believers who have this world view, want to come in and say, “Hey I want a safe place to explore,” whatever it is. So we have, I would say we are a faith-based practice in that we are believers. We work a lot with churches. We are happy to meet people where they are in their faith journey and conversations about faith, but we don’t advertise like that because we don’t want to limit it to that.

We want to be able to bridge the community and say, “Hey, first and foremost, we’re excellent therapists.” Just like if you went to a dermatologist, you’d want to make sure that they were an excellent dermatologist first, and then if they shared the worldview, that’s awesome, but really you’re going because they’re going to help you with your skincare. So that’s where we’ve landed and it feels like a really great spot for us. So we don’t advertise as to Grow Christian counseling. I would say probably, for my particular caseload, probably 20, 30% are people who want to integrate faith or talk about faith, maybe lower than that.

I do a lot of work with business people, CEOs, CFOs, and they’re really talking about leadership, stress, anxiety, depression, addictions. So we may attach faith in the process of that but a lot of it, they’re just looking for that excellent mental healthcare. I think other people on our staff, you can see on their bios of them are more explicitly focused on integrating faith and doing spiritual development work. So that’s where we kind of give people this opportunity to choose who they feel like they would be a better fit with.
[WHITNEY]
I appreciate you sharing that. You said it so well. I run my practice in a very similar way, so I can appreciate that.
[WHITNEY]
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[WHITNEY OWENS]
Now I came up with another question while you were talking that I’m just curious about. You mentioned your own caseload. So I would be curious to know how do you spend your personal time and your professional time? How do you make that balance of work and life and how many clients are you seeing? Like the idea, I’m actually working on this myself, like decreasing my own caseload because the business is becoming a lot to manage. So I’d love to hear some about that.
[WENDY]
Well, I wouldn’t necessarily put myself up as an expert, so continue your own journey and figure out what works best for you. We have an 18-month-old at home so we are balancing, we’re juggling a lot of things. My husband owns his own business and COVID has been an interesting time to parent and own businesses and see clients and all things. So it has felt very full the last two years, for sure. I would say over the years, the balance has kind of shifted as the practice has grown, which I think is probably intuitive, but I initially, probably the first five or so years of starting Grow was seeing 20 to 30 clients kind of depending on the week. So pretty full caseload and then kind of doing a practice on the side.

After certain point, probably five or six years in I shifted it down a little bit. So I was seeing maybe 15 to 20 clients a week and doing more Grow stuff. Then in the last, probably five years, I’ve shifted down a little more. So I would say, I probably see an average of 10 clients a week, sometimes 12, sometimes eight, but usually around 10. Then I spend the rest of my time doing either kind of team development, things, working on marketing stuff, kind of handling practice issues, interviewing people, all those wraparound things that come with running the business.
[WHITNEY]
That’s great. I’m always trying to find that balance, but there’s something about seeing the clients, not only do I love it, but it’s grounding. We can start running a business and then we forget, oh, we’re running it for this. So I think it’s really great to still be in that place.
[WENDY]
Agreed. I was just talking to a client the other day about how this idea that like, if you’re a really great preschool teacher, really great kindergarten teacher, and then you get promoted to administration and then eventually to being a principal, like that’s so disconnected from maybe where your first passion was or what you really love. It’s not to say that they’re not going to make a great principal. They might, but it’s a totally different shift. It’s not like a logical progression of being a really excellent kindergarten teacher.

It feels that way for me. One of the values that we have at Grow is around ongoing education and supervision. I never want to get disconnected from the hands-on client work and still be in a position where I’m teaching and leading people about how to do it. I want that to always be integrated for me. So I think no matter what the balance looks like, I think I have a hard time imagining not seeing clients in my future. So there may be times when I see fewer or more, but I think that’ll always be part of what I do.
[WHITNEY]
I mean, I think one thing I’m really taking away from this that you’re speaking to is the importance of knowing your culture, your branding, how you speak about your business. Like just how you just shared, what’s important is continuing education and getting good therapy, being a good therapist, good clinical car and that’s part of what Grow is. So it’s so important as people start group practices, and even solo practices, knowing what they’re really all about. Like what is it that you’re bringing into community and really speaking that over and over and over again until you’re blue in the face.
[WENDY]
Yes. I can’t emphasize that enough. I can imagine that it probably has been frustrating for people along the way sometimes because it does start to feel like, oh yes, I hear these values all the time. But I think it’s also grounding. It helps people understand where we’re coming from when we make decisions or when we take on a new project because it just fits with the fabric of who we are. So that’s something that I think has been invaluable, is we sat down at the beginning and said, “Hey, what are we all about?”

And when I say we, it was kind of that core, a couple of people who were really in that core group and have been directors in our offices since then, that really helped carry that vision for who we are and who we want to be. We came up with this list of values that we really haven’t deviated from. It’s probably eight or 10 values that we kind of just keep coming back to, like this is who we are. So I think you see those things really integrated into the small details of our offices and our workspace, but then also into the bigger picture of decision making.
[WHITNEY]
Well, let’s kind of switch gears here. You have an online directory that you wanted to talk about today. So can you talk a little bit about that?
[WENDY]
Yes, I am so excited about this. So this is a project called The Right Counselor. We’re on social media platforms. You can find us online. One of my friends was giving me a hard time about saying www. She said, “Nobody ever says that anymore. You just say therightcounselor.com.” I was like, “Ok, I’m showing my age.” So find us on therightcounselor.com. So we’ve working on this for a couple of years and essentially we decided, I decided and then built a team to figure out how to do this, that there needed to be a better way for clients and potential clients and counselors to connect.

So you and I know being in the industry for a long time, there’s, I don’t know, half a dozen maybe platforms out there. Some of them are more popular than others, but half a dozen really solid platforms. What I felt like it was missing was a way for clients to kind of see behind the scenes of who’s actually really doing good work and how could they make that decision? Additionally a lot of platforms are out there right now, Psychology Today and some others are like really ad-heavy.

So you’re in the midst of a crisis, you’re trying to find a therapist and you go to this cluttery, ad filled space where things are popping up and it’s like pretty chaotic. So we wanted something that was calm, it was inviting, it was intuitive. Maybe it felt more like browsing on Amazon so that the process didn’t get in the way of finding somebody.

Then we wanted there to be this way that clients could kind of see behind the scenes. And one of the things I know is that client reviews aren’t always the most helpful because it seems like a client either loves or hates a therapist. You kind of get a real polarized view. So I thought that’s probably not super helpful. What I’m really curious about and I make referrals is who do the other professionals refer to. If I trust you as a professional, Whitney, you in your area, if I can’t see you, who is in that area that you trust?

So we set out to create this platform where therapists can review and endorse other therapists. So we got it ready to launch right around COVID and as we kind of walked through COVID we thought this is something that the world needs and something that we can offer and we want to find a way to do this for free. So instead of charging therapists for the platform we, we’re still in this process, we’re in the process of figuring out how to get funding in other ways. So they’ll always be a free place for therapists to be able to advertise and free for clients to be able to connect with them.

So we’re super excited. I don’t know when the podcast is going to post, but we’re getting ready to do a full launch in January, social media, and really a push to get people to sign up. But you can check it out now if you hear this before January of 2022. But right now we’re just in the stage where one therapist creates one profile, build it out so that everybody can see who you are and what kind of great work you’re doing. Then we’re going to start launching it to clients. We have some really exciting things in the works for the way that we’re planning to get this in front clients and drive business to therapists. So we’re very excited about the project.
[WHITNEY]
Awesome. Thanks for sharing. You explained it so well, I’m like, I don’t even have a question when you said at all. So the website, if somebody wants to sign up, therightcounselor.com?
[WENDY]
Right, therightcounselor.com.
[WHITNEY]
The Right counselor. I love it.
[WENDY]
T-H-E, the right counselor. You’re looking for the right counselor.
[WHITNEY]
That’s right. We’ll definitely put that in the show notes. So if you heard botch it it you’ll know how to say it and write it.
[WENDY]
That’s good learning point for me. I need to be more clear.
[WHITNEY]
I love it because I just love seeing different, neat ideas within our industry. That’s definitely something I haven’t heard, counselors talking about other counselors. And it’s true. That’s what I do. If I’m looking for a professional in a certain area, I go to someone I know in that profession and I ask them. So you’re right. When I go to a restaurant, I always ask the server, what do you like here?
[WENDY]
Exactly.
[WHITNEY]
You know you’re getting what’s best.
[WENDY]
A little behind the scenes glimpse. So we hope to, the kind of next layer is we hope to start building out some community elements. You can tell my love of community, but building out some community elements for therapists to connect. So we’re still kind of looking at what that looks like and what would be helpful. We don’t want to do something that’s been done or be redundant. But I think that idea that there are a lot of people in private practices, whether they be group, visual, that would love a place to find some resource or ask question or be able to connect maybe with people outside their area so it doesn’t feel like there’s any kind of competition. So we’re still looking at how can we do that but that’s on the horizon for kind of version two or maybe a launch next year.
[WHITNEY]
Wonderful. Well, this episode should come out sometime in January or February. So it’ll be good timing for the launch.
[WENDY]
Okay, very good.
[WHITNEY]
Wonderful. Well, this has been so fun and beneficial for me and I know that everyone listening will benefit as well. So I want to bring up the question that we ask at the end of every episode, what do you believe every Christian counselor needs to know?
[WENDY]
I would come back to, I think that you need to know that doing excellent work in the way that you’re trained is the best thing that we can offer for clients. We could talk about marketing or we could talk about the way to office. We could talk about who to hire, but at the very end of the day I’m just really passionate about clients come to us for help. And I think that we need to recognize and remember that they are seeing us as an expert and we need to do the very best we can to offer the best skills and tools and to stay up to date on our learning and do everything that we can to be the most excellent therapist out there.
[WHITNEY]
That’s so good. I always say that good work is God’s work. We don’t have the face spin on it.
[WENDY]
Exactly, exactly.
[WHITNEY]
I love that. Well, Wendy, thank you again for taking the time to be on this show and you all can check the show notes to get in touch with her and we just really appreciate your time.
[WENDY]
Thank you for having me.
[WHITNEY]
Again, we want to thank our sponsor Brighter Vision today. If you would like to get a new website or refresh your website, head on over to brightervision.com/joe. They’re doing a new deal for $39 a month off your first entire year. That’s brightervision.com/joe.

Thank you for listening to the Faith in Practice podcast. If you love this podcast, please rate and review on iTunes or your favorite podcast player. If you liked this episode and want to know more, check out the Practice of the Practice website. Also there, you can learn more about me, options for working together, such as individual and in group consulting, or just shoot me an email, [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.