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How do you make and maintain professional yet genuine relationships within your private practice? Why do strong relationships with your clinicians lead to success in client retention? When’s the best time to be flexible and when’s the best time to have boundaries?
In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks about why checking in with your clinicians in your group practice is the best use of your time with Carly Fleming.
Podcast Sponsor: Alma
Going in-network with insurance can be tough. Filing all of the right paperwork is time-consuming and tedious, and even after you’re done, it can take months to get credentialed and start seeing clients.
That’s why Alma makes it easy and financially rewarding to accept insurance. When you join their insurance program, you can get credentialed within 45 days, and access enhanced reimbursement rates with major payers. They also handle all of the paperwork, from eligibility checks to claims submissions, and guarantee payment within two weeks of each appointment.
Once you’ve joined Alma’s insurance program, you can see clients in your state of licensure regardless of where you’re working from.
Learn more about building a thriving private practice with Alma at helloalma.com/joe
Meet Carly Fleming
Carly Fleming is a Registered Psychotherapist in Hamilton, Canada and is the owner of a virtual practice called Everwell Counselling. Carly spends half her time in clinical practice, specializing in supporting people dealing with cancer and grief using Emotionally Focused Therapy. The other half of her time is spent running her group practice and developing ways to support psychotherapy students and contractors in this wild and wonderful career.
Visit Everwell Counselling and connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
In This Podcast
- Aim to offer flexibility
- Carly’s schedule for maintaining connection
- Questions to consider
- Carly’s advice to private practitioners
Aim to offer flexibility
Private practices all differ in how they manage their clinicians. You might have hired W2 full-time employees that you are fully responsible for, or your business runs on contractors that come in a few times a week on different schedules.
Whether they are W2 employees or independent contractors, you need to have a system in place to build, maintain, and support the relationships between everyone within the business. How should you do this? What are the have-tos?
What I have come to realize is that … flexibility to participate in [which]ever way serves them is the [best] way through and then being sure that on the back end, we are providing things that serve them.
Carly Fleming
It is important to serve your employees as much as it is to serve the business itself, and there is a balance to that. Remember, when you care for and serve your employees, they will better care for and serve the clients.
Carly’s schedule for maintaining connection
For Carly’s private practice, the cornerstone of the connection between the clinicians is to provide group consultation and supervision through virtual meetings that happen a few times a month.
Even though it is optional for the therapists to attend, it shows commitment, trust, and reliability that Carly regularly provides them and that space to the clinicians.
It is extremely important for me for that to be a place where they can come and be real and be vulnerable and share the things that are hard [as well as to] share their successes, and then model communication within the group.
Carly Fleming
Additionally, Carly and her team check in with each therapist on a regular rotation through virtual meetings, as well as checking in with them to assess whether a potential new client would be a good fit for them or not.
What this system has helped to create is one of trust, open communication, and reliability.
I think, ultimately, [the benefits] show up in client retention … of course, not every client comes and stays for a really long time, but our numbers are really strong in terms of client retention, and so I see there [is] a huge parallel between therapist retention and client retention.
Carly Fleming
Questions to consider
- Am I showing up with flexibility?
- What is necessary and what is optional?
- Am I respecting my clinician’s autonomy as a professional?
Carly’s advice to private practitioners
Find your people! Find the people that you can show up and be real with as a therapist – in your personal life and with your colleagues – because that type of authenticity will carry over into the work that you do.
Sponsors Mentioned in this episode:
- Learn more about building a thriving private practice with Alma at helloalma.com/joe
- Starting a practice? Get the 28-step checklist totally FREE!
Useful links mentioned in this episode:
- Visit Everwell Counselling and connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
- Check out practiceofthepractice.com/invite to join Next Level Practice
Check out these additional resources:
- Becoming Flawesome: The Key to Living An Imperfectly Authentic Life with Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani | POP 889
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Meet Joe Sanok
Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.
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