The Therapy Business Podcast

Creating Simple Systems in Your Practice

• Craig Dacy • Episode 39

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Learn how to enhance your therapy practice with essential systems that streamline operations and enrich client relationships. Craig shares actionable insights into various software solutions that fit therapy practices of all sizes.

• Discussing the critical role of systems in business 
• Exploring the keys to effective client relationship management 
• Overview of Dubsado, a recommended CRM for therapists 
• Outlining task management tools like Asana and their advantages 
• Analyzing communication best practices using Slack and Google Chat 
• Reviewing effective email marketing strategies to keep clients engaged 

If your practice needs help getting organized with its finances or just growing your practice, head to therapybusinesspod.com to learn how we can help. 

CRM Softwares: 

Task Management Softwares:

Communication Softwares:

Email Marketing Softwares:


**Some links may include affiliate links.

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*Intro/outro song credit:
King Around Here by Alex Grohl

Speaker 1:

As you know, in business, systems are vital. We have to have a system and a process in place for pretty much everything we're doing Now. There are tons and tons of softwares out there that help and assist using these systems and putting these systems in place, but sometimes it can be overwhelming knowing where we should turn, which softwares we should be using and how to even know which ones are the best. Today I'm gonna walk you through some key systems that you should be using in your business and I'm going to give you two or three options as far as softwares go that you can use to put these systems in place. My name is Craig and I'm the owner of Daisy Financial Coaching. Our team is on a mission to make your therapy practice permanently profitable. If you own a solo or group practice, we're here to help you build a business that creates more time, makes more money and serves more people.

Speaker 1:

This is the Therapy Business Podcast. Now, usually once a year, I'm going through our processes and the softwares that we're utilizing to see is there room for improvement? Can we consolidate? Is there a better option out there to really ramp up what we're doing or maybe a cheaper option to where we can help cut some costs In doing so. I have spent a lot of time researching different things that are out there and because I just finished doing that in my own business, I was going. While it's fresh on my mind, what a great opportunity to share some of the things I was looking at, some of the key features I really liked and, ultimately, which ones we are using in my own business. Now, this is for therapy practices. So whether you are a mental health practice to a physical therapist, some of these may pertain to you and some won't, I know. In the mental health space, simple practice is a great kind of overarching option. It's going to give you a lot of features that may cover a few of these systems that we're talking about. So if you are a mental health practice, if you're not using simple practice, I do recommend checking it out and seeing what boxes get checked by doing these.

Speaker 1:

Now, the problem sometimes with using one software for everything is it does some things okay. Like you know what I mean, it doesn't specialize in one thing. It's like we can do this, we can do a little bit of that, we can do a little bit of that, and you find that it's lacking in a lot of areas. So what we find is, even in the mental health space, they're using simple practice, maybe for billing and for their sessions, but they're using some of these other softwares for a lot of their other processes and systems. All right, so without further ado, let's jump in.

Speaker 1:

I got four key systems that we need to be implementing into our business and then some softwares you can use to help with that. Number one is a CRM. This is a Customer Relationship Management System. So this is a way for you to track where you are, where you are in that journey with a client or a potential client. This is vital. Now, what we want to remember is that the relationship with a client starts at first contact and goes until long after they are already working with you. So this is not necessarily a sales system where we just track when they came to us until they become a client, and then we're done, and nor is it just on the other side. We we just track when they came to us until they become a client, and then we're done, and nor is it just on the other side we're just tracking once they start working with us and on way forward. This is from start to end, till the day they say okay, we are done working with you. This is in place to do that. That may mean this is for outreach. If they reach out to you, having a CRM is a great way to track. How are we getting in touch with them to get them on our calendar? How many follow-ups are we doing? Do we want to automate some things, automate some outreach? There's a lot of ways we can do this to get them on that initial consultation call or into your office for initial consultation. Then from there it's making sure they become a client. So, following up with that, if they do become a client, maybe there's some automated onboarding that you're wanting to implement so you can see how having a software can help with this.

Speaker 1:

My team and I we've been really honing in on our follow-up processes and what we're finding is sometimes people slip through the cracks. What we find also is that automating everything doesn't always work and sometimes we need a little bit of a human touch, because when somebody needs a follow-up or why someone needs a follow-up may be different from person to person. So, for example, we just had this recording the California fires just happened a couple months ago and we had a potential client who came to us and she was very interested and then a couple days later she's evacuating her office because the fires hit. Now if we had an automated system that's going to be following up with her automatically, it could come across as pretty insensitive, because we know what she's dealing with, what she's struggling with. And here we are saying, hey, you, are you going to hire us? Come on, hire us.

Speaker 1:

So at that point automating the follow-up just doesn't make sense. And so we want to go in and manually follow up, check in with her, put a note in there that, hey, let's give her 30 days or so before we follow up as far as business goes. Now we want to be in touch because we care about her. We care about what's going on in her life and what she's struggling with. Regardless of whether she hires us to work with her or not, we want her and her business and her life to be okay. So this is where it's important to not automate everything, but we do want some automations For us. We automate if somebody reaches out to us let's say we get a lead from a referral, or somebody fills out a form on our website Then we are going to automate some outreach. That's just saying, hey, here's who we are and here's a link to our calendar. Here's the next steps to getting you help. And over the next seven to 10 days it's just going to automatically drip some emails out to them to encourage them to get on to a consultation call. We have a whole episode on this email sequence, the follow-up email sequence that you can go check out. That is so important. So I'm not going to get too in-depth with that.

Speaker 1:

But going into the systems and software, so some softwares that we see and we love and recommend, so number one, one that I've been using for a few years, is Dubsado. So Dubsado is a pretty affordable, all-encompassing CRM. Really that's the purpose of it is to track all of these things, everything I'm just talking about. It can do workflows, it can automate some emails, it can automate tasks where it flags you to do something, maybe call or email or text someone. It can do your onboarding. It can have contracts. It can have questionnaires, different forms, that you may want them to fill out.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of things that come into play there. One thing I do love about it is you can organize it into what we would call a board, which means there's these columns so we can go from new lead to maybe consultation booked, to follow up to lost, to one to onboarding. So there's this whole process that they can work their way through. Then, when they're a client, we have a current client tab and we have different things that maybe flag us to shoot them a gift, to celebrate a milestone or to do different things. So a CRM is huge. This is also a place where you can put notes, so internal notes that maybe you checked in with them, somebody called and somebody emailed or somebody followed up, maybe they responded with something and you want to make a note of that.

Speaker 1:

One thing I love as far as managing a team goes with Dubsado is you have email. You can do emails inside of there, meaning I can correspond with these leads inside of Dubsado. It's going to give me some red receipts, so if they've seen the email or opened it, it's going to let me know. It's going to be a one-stop shop so I can look at email correspondence. So let's say, one of my team members has been following up with this prospect and I want to go in and see. You know what does that correlation or correspondence look like? I can go and see their email correspondence. How have they been interacting, what's been said, what's been shared? Where are they in that process? Now?

Speaker 1:

Dubsado is lacking as your team grows and we are starting to find that, and so this year we're likely going to be shifting into a new CRM, and the reason is because Dubsado only connects one email account per brand. So inside of Dubsado, you can have multiple brands, but what that means is you're having to re-enter client information into each of these brands. The way I use the brands is I have one Vanessa on my team has one Alicia, christine everyone has their own brand so that they can email back and forth. They can start workflows and have them come from them. If I could ask for one thing from them to make it the perfect CRM is that you can add multiple email addresses into one brand, so that way, if Vanessa wants to email them some onboarding items, she can do that in one account, not us having to go and enter all this new information into the separate account.

Speaker 1:

So because of that, we're starting to outgrow it and we're going to need to look at other options. One of those options that I've looked at is mondaycom, and I've heard some great, great things about it. It does a lot of the things that we were talking about, but also allows you to have multiple email addresses and to do multiple correspondence inside of there. Now, monday is very, very similar to Dubsado. Again, I haven't used it personally myself. There are some features about it that I like a lot. There are some different ways to track and different things you can do with emailing. The workflows and automations are not quite what I would hope for. Whereas Dubsado is really easy to use and navigate, monday is a little bit more of a learning curve Because it's so robust, it takes time to learn.

Speaker 1:

Now the third software for CRMs is one that we are likely going to shift to. I have not had personal experience with it on the CRM side, but it is ActiveCampaign. The reason we are probably going to switch to that one is because that's where we do our email marketing is in ActiveCampaign, so it is a really simple correlation From what I can tell outside. Looking in, there is going to be some learning curves, especially if you are not already using ActiveCampaign. Now I know my way around ActiveCampaign already because of our email marketing, so I know how the automation functions work. So I have a feeling I will be able to hop in there and it might take me some time, but I'm going to be able to implement it pretty quickly.

Speaker 1:

If you're brand new to ActiveCampaign, just if you're going to look at this as an option for a CRM, it might take you some time to get it up and running. The downside of ActiveCampaign as a CRM is you have to have a pro plan with them on the email marketing. So, depending on the size, depending on how many emails you have, that may just be more money than you're wanting to spend if you're not prioritizing email marketing. And if that's the case, I would highly recommend a Dubsado. Or again, if you're a mental health practice, look at Simple Practice, because they do have CRM features inside of that platform. All right.

Speaker 1:

The next system that we need a software for is task management If you are managing a team, if you're just managing yourself, or if it's you and an admin having some kind of software where you can have task management's going. So this is where I can log in every day and see what is on my to-do list for today, what is on my team's to-do list, what can they assign to me? What can I assign to them to make sure that things are getting done, the ball is not being dropped and that we are all on the same page. Now for this we use Asana and I use the free plan. So Asana has a free plan that is really, really robust. Basically, the free plan lets you do a lot of things. It takes away automation, so we don't have automations in there. Everything is manual. You can go on to paid plans where it incorporates a lot of different things like workflows and automations, but for us we are just using it on the free plan.

Speaker 1:

Now I have heard Asana can be used as a CRM. So, going back to the CRM side, it could be used for that. I think what it's lacking is probably that email functionality where you can email out to clients and send out all those documents via email. But Asana and Mondaycom are very, very similar programs. As you get into those paid tiers, I'm a big fan of Asana. Again, the free side is fantastic. We have different project boards. We have a lot of our things we're tracking. In fact, we even are tracking our follow-up. We've used it as a CRM before, where we have the board of who are we following up with. Now we just have to manually enter it.

Speaker 1:

So it's not a perfect system on this free plan, but it is a great, great option for task manage it. I log in every day to see what I've got going on that day, what tasks I need to take on and, again, anything that my team is asking me to do maybe send a video to one of their clients. It pops up there and I can go ahead and take care of that in a timely manner. Another option is Trello Now I have. I used to use Trello a long time ago I don't. At the time they had a free plan that was pretty good. When I left, it's because they were moving more towards the pay to play kind of option, meaning the free plan lost a lot of its functionality because they were wanting people to move to a paid, tiered program. So I don't know what it looks like today, but very similar to Asana. You can have these boards, you can create tasks and you can assign them to people. You can create almost like the CRM board where you can move things down to assigned in progress, done with your tasks. However you want to organize it whatever makes the most sense to you.

Speaker 1:

Lastly, is ClickUp Now. Clickup is really really robust and complicated, but a lot of people like it. A lot of people really like all the functionality that it has. So if you're somebody who is looking for a lot of bells and whistles and different things that a software can do, clickup is a great option. If you're just looking for something simple that you can jump into that's not too complicated, I would probably steer away from ClickUp. It's probably overly complicated for what you're looking for. But again, this is really up to you. I want to give you the range of simple, free, too complicated, maybe more expensive, but can do a lot more things for you.

Speaker 1:

The third software we need is something for communication, a system to communicate internally with your team and maybe even with your clients, depending on who you're working with. Now. Mental health this is not going to be the best way to go about it externally, but internally with your team, 100%. Now we use Slack. Most likely you've heard of Slack. If you've had a nine to five, maybe you use Slack then too. Slack also has a free plan that we use and it's perfect for what we need. The only downside of the free plan is as we're messaging each other. So Slack is a messaging system. We can message one-on-one, I can message Alicia on my team, just the two of us. We can have these channels, like our channel for our personal finance coaching, where all the personal finance coaches can engage One for profit coaching. We have a channel for client wins and team wins so that we can celebrate when something good happens to one of our clients. So we have a lot of different channels for us to engage.

Speaker 1:

What I was saying about the bad thing and the negative on the free side is, after 90 days you lose all your correspondence. So if you want to make sure you can go back six months from now to see what did we talk about regarding this thing, then you'll want to have a paid plan. But to be honest, I have not necessarily needed it. There's been, on one hand, in the past few years, the times I've gone to search to find what did Vanessa say about that and it was past the 90-day mark and then I just had to ask her again. So it's not a big deal for me, but the free plan is really, really helpful.

Speaker 1:

Slack is open on my computer at all times, so when I'm when I'm working, I have it open so that I am accessible to my team. Now for my clients. It's something if they are utilizing it. I give them access to me there too, because it is a value add. They can message me. It's just like texting. It's easier than email. There's just something a little bit more personal to it than if you were to just be emailing back and forth. So consider this for your in-house communications. If you manage a team of clinicians, slack is great. It does have an app on your phone.

Speaker 1:

I tell my team all the time to turn off their notifications on their phone, because sometimes I might be sitting here nine o'clock at night and an idea pops in my head and I just want to get it down so I don't forget it. I don't want them to feel like they have to respond, so that's why I tell them don't ever feel like you have to respond after hours. Sometimes I'm just throwing it on there, so I don't forget in the morning to ask you this question or to send you this information. All right, another communication option is Google chat. I don't use this personally, but I just want to give you another free ish option. Or if you're paying for G suite already for your emails, this is one that may already be included in there If you prefer to keep everything in house with your email. If you're using Google meet or anything like that, then Google chat might be a good option for you to engage with team members and engage with each other.

Speaker 1:

All right, the last system that needs a software is email marketing. I already told you the one that I'm using, which is ActiveCampaign. It is fantastic. I'm a huge fan. I love all the things I can do. I love that I can automate. I love that we can send out lead magnets. There's tags that we can do, so you can go really in depth with email marketing.

Speaker 1:

Now the surface level. If you are somebody who's like I don't have an email list, I'm just trying to maybe start build one up, then I would probably start with something a little bit more affordable. You know there's mailchimp, which is a lot cheaper, as I cannot remember if there's a free option. There used to be whether there still is or not, I don't remember but I know they used to have it free until you reached a certain number of emails and then you moved into a paid plan. So MailChimp is a great, great starter option is what I'm going to call it, although I know a lot of larger businesses that are still using MailChimp. So it's a great one to start with. Where you can, somebody can opt into a ebook on your website and it's going to automatically send them that email with the link and then it might be able to send them four or five follow-up emails trying to get them to reach out and schedule a consultation with you. So email marketing is also perfect for your newsletters.

Speaker 1:

I schedule out in ActiveCampaign my newsletters a month in advance. So I sit down and I do about four or five weeks worth of email newsletters, schedule them out. I can look at reports. I can see open rate, click rate. It allows me to do A-B testing, meaning I can tweak the subject lines if I want to see which one performs better. There is a rabbit hole you can go down with this. So, depending on how in-depth you want to get, activecampaign is a great option.

Speaker 1:

Mailchimp again, it's been a while since I've used it, so when I did, it was not as robust. In fact, that's one of the reasons I left was because I needed to be able to do more things and separate and tag, and it was just a little bit more clunky. That has been probably five, six years ago, so there is a good chance. Their software is updated and it's a really, really good option. Again, I know a lot of businesses that use it.

Speaker 1:

The third option is another one that I've used, which is GetResponse. Now, I say the third option. There are a ton of email marketing programs platforms out there, so I recommend doing some research. These are just the three that I've had experience with. I would say MailChimp is the cheaper, getresponse is kind of middle and ActiveCampaign is your more of a long-term solution. So that's when I shifted from GetResponse into ActiveCampaign. I needed something that would last for years and grow with me. Getresponse is gonna do pretty much everything I just talked about that ActiveCampaign can do. So the only thing I don't know and again, unless they've added it since I used it was I don't think GetResponse had a CRM option in there, and so just bear that in mind. We switched to ActiveCampaign when we were doing some marketing with our quiz. We have a quiz on our website that asks some questions and then it'll also tag that person so that we know what things they're interested in. Also tag that person so that we know what things are interested in, and at the time, getresponse just wasn't able to do all the things we needed to do, which is why we switched over to ActiveCampaign.

Speaker 1:

The main thing is having some way to send out emails to large groups of people in a way where you're sending out a newsletter. Now I don't think you should be just sending out emails from Gmail. The reason is people need a way to unsubscribe. I mean, that's legally. They need to be able to click unsubscribe, otherwise it's spam. So that's where email software is going to be your best bet, because they will inherently have an unsubscribe button where somebody can click it and remove themselves from your list. So find an email software that you can use to nurture these people If they do a consultation with you and don't end up signing up. A way for you to nurture them and send them valuable tips, information, stay in touch so that when they are back to looking for a therapist, you are top of mind.

Speaker 1:

There we go. I know there's a ton of systems, a ton of softwares. I'm going to try and link all of these in the show notes for you so that you can check them out for yourself, see which ones are the best way for you to go. Regardless, as long as you have a system in place, I say start with one of these If you're feeling overwhelmed, I just threw a lot of softwares at you. Start with one If you don't have a. Are nurtured, that they're not falling through the cracks Again.

Speaker 1:

We have a whole episode on follow-ups and the number of follow-ups it takes, because too often therapists are. They get an inbound email. They respond with hey, let's book a call, and they never follow up and that person never schedules and then they're just gone and they're not getting the help they need. So it's important. It's our duty as the business owner to make sure that we are staying on top of them, getting them on that call. If you need help building out these systems and processes, we are a team of profit coaches who help with money systems, but all of these things are systems and processes we help our clients with. So if you are hearing man, a CRM or a sales process or a communication process or a task manager, all these things sound amazing.

Speaker 1:

I don't even know where to begin. Schedule a call. In the show notes we'll put a link. We can help you out with that. All right, happy hunting on the systems and softwares you are looking for. We are here to support you in any way that we possibly can. Thanks, for we are here to support you in any way that we possibly can. Thanks for joining us on the Therapy Business Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with a practice owner that you may know If your practice needs help getting organized with its finances or just growing your practice, head to therapybusinesspodcom to learn how we can help.

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Craig Dacy

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