The Therapy Business Podcast
We know how challenging growing a therapy practice can be, and don’t think it should require an accounting degree just to run your business. If you own a solo or a group practice, we’re here to help you build a business that creates more time, makes more money and serves more people.
The Therapy Business Podcast
Therapy Business Gems: Year One Highlights
We celebrate one year of The Therapy Business Podcast by revisiting the most valuable and impactful clips from our most downloaded episodes. These highlights provide concentrated wisdom on marketing, finance, scaling, and creating freedom in your therapy practice.
• Ross Herosian explains how all marketing is content, including your therapy services themselves
• The Profit First system transforms practice finances using five key accounts
• Katherine Parnell shares strategies for maintaining culture when scaling to multiple locations
• Richard Walsh discusses escaping the "owner's prison" many practice owners find themselves in
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.
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*Intro/outro song credit:
King Around Here by Alex Grohl
Do you remember in the 90s when your favorite sitcoms would do a clips episode where they show you clips from some of their favorite episodes and the funniest moments in the show? Well, we are celebrating one year of the podcast and I'm going to bring you clips from the most impactful, valuable episodes, some of the most downloaded, the most listened to, and then the ones I personally if it was an interview found really, really insightful. So trust me, you're going to want to listen to this episode, even if you were around when we released the clips that I'm going to talk about revisiting them, really honing in on some of the most impactful moments in the past year. 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, all right? So this first clip is from our most downloaded listen to episode and it's marketing your therapy practice, and I had my really really good friend, ross Hiroshan, join us. Ross is a marketing expert who is all about getting your message out there speaking to your ideal clients and helping you create a online persona and create content that attracts the right people and fills your calendar. This is something that a lot of therapists struggle with is conveying themselves in a way that attracts the right people and speaks to the right audience. So, without further ado, I want to show you a really, really insightful clip from our conversation.
Speaker 2:All. Marketing now is content. I look at everything as content. I'm a content marketer, right? Like this idea that content, marketing and marketing exists somehow separately. It's not the case. Marketing now is content, is creating content. And whether that content is creating content, and whether that content is in the form of and we're going to, I know, we're going to talk about this but in the form of a video or a blog or a podcast, or even sales materials, even how you conduct a sales call, right, that's something that I myself had to hone over the years when I started my business. I'd never done like sales calls before, right, I had to hone that.
Speaker 2:But guess what? That is really an extension of marketing and, one might argue, the most intense or most important one, because you're talking to someone one-to-one, right? So, putting together proposals, guess what? Marketing? Yeah, I mean everything I look at as marketing because it is saying something about you, and it is. It is putting in the mind of your prospect or your existing customer, um, you know, uh, positioning you in their head. Is this someone I want to work with? Is this someone I enjoy working with? Is this someone I want to continue to work with?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. And I don't think, even with your current client base, as you're saying, that I'm like okay, so even just delivering on your commitments is marketing, because you're, you know, yeah, providing quality therapy to your clients is marketing, in the sense of you're going to keep those clients coming back, um, and it's, it's the telling their friends it's the follow-up of marketing, it's the fulfillment.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, like Right, like. Anyone can put claims out there, but the important aspect of those claims continuing to work and you not being a fraud is that you deliver on those things.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, Otherwise that marketing is going to run out at some point.
Speaker 1:This next clip is from an episode that I did on my own. It is our second most popular episode and it is all about transforming your practice using the Profit First system. Profit First is a system that we teach our clients. It's a system we are certified in and we are huge believers in it. So I'm going to show you a clip that where I break down the system in just a really bite-sized, easy-to-understand way. What we need is a system for our finances, something that can help us stay organized, that's not crazy elaborate, that's not confusing, but something that we can do, that's going to ingrain itself into our day-to-day behaviors.
Speaker 1:We had a business, a practice owner, come to us not long ago who was stressed out, frustrated with their finances. They felt like they could never get ahead. They felt like they couldn't get enough money to get any traction in their business. They felt like every time payroll came up, they were overwhelmed, they couldn't get sleep. Payroll came up, they were overwhelmed, they couldn't get sleep. And here's the thing that happens to so many business owners and with this specific practice, they weren't paying themselves what they deserve to be paid. They were feeling undervalued, working long hours and just kind of feeling stuck, wondering why did I ever leave working for someone else to start my own practice?
Speaker 1:Most money systems, like I said, they're confusing. We're trying to look at a P&L, we're trying to look at a balance sheet and a cash flow statement. We're using QuickBooks and we're doing all these different things and yet they don't really mean anything. What are we actually doing? When we want to know how much money we have, when we want to know how we're doing financially, we look at our phone, at our bank accounts. Does that resonate with you? And just ask this simple question When's the last time you looked at a financial document and did something with that? Now, when's the last time you looked at your bank account? Or how often do you look at your bank account? Most business owners, it's daily, or multiple times a week at least. They're looking at their account. So let's leverage that behavior.
Speaker 1:We need a system for your money that leverages that behavior, and today I'm going to talk to you about Profit First. That is the system that we teach all of our clients. It's a system we use in our own business. It is an amazingly simple system, system that you can just plug and play and it uses your behavior. We recommend for practices that you have five to six accounts. The five core accounts that we think every therapist should have, whether you're a solo practice or group practice, is an income account, a profit account, an owner's pay account, a tax account and an operating expense account. Now, if you're a group practice owner, we recommend a sixth account, which would be for contractors or payroll, because we know oftentimes you are paying your staff, your therapists, either on a percentage basis or some kind of commission split, or even if it's hourly. It's good to have that other account open so that you can make sure that they are covered and that you're got it over here and separated out from everything else. It's not getting mixed up.
Speaker 1:One of the biggest struggles therapists have is going from solo to group practice, and there's no better way to really understand how to navigate that transition than to talk with someone who has lived it and breathed it and then also turned around and helped other practices do the same thing. Catherine Parnell is a practice owner who not only went from solo to group but then also started acquiring other practices as she has grown her footprint across the country. I did an interview with Catherine and it was one of my favorite interviews I did last year because I just I gained so much and got a unique perspective into what it's like to actually go from being solo to growing a team and doing it the right way. Without further ado, let's jump in and hear a really, really valuable insight from Catherine. Absolutely and I'm sure that's an interesting dynamic we were just talking about you had opened a location in my city and when I was trying to find your business, I was like that can't be it.
Speaker 1:I don't think she has an office in Austin which you do now business. I was like that can't be it. I don't think she has an office in Austin which you do now. How is that going from? Because you're in Utah. So is it weird having offices in different states, working with people who are nowhere near you, or does it feel still pretty connected? What is that like?
Speaker 3:Well, it's tricky. There's logistical issues that we have to figure out. There's travel, of course, that we have to do. Our members of our executive team travel out there and make sure that we are staying connected. I always have to do the time zone conversion in my head, which makes it a little bit complicated, but we really emphasize our company culture. That is such a big part of what we do, and so we work every single day to make sure that all of our team members are connected, and we do that in a variety of ways. I think our values are one of the things that we always lean back on to say okay, are we addressing things in a consistent way from office to office? So, even though each office might have just a different feel to it it doesn't always have the same exact structure there is a consistency in the mission of what the company is attempting to do and the attitude of service that we have toward our communities and to our team members.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that. The attitude of service. You know we that's been a huge focus for us this year and we call it. We've said, the theme for us in our company is just client experience and how can we improve that, and that ultimately shows itself through that service.
Speaker 3:It really does.
Speaker 1:Yes, very much so. So with that, you're talking about the culture being an important and valuable part of what you guys do. So how can, how do you connect everyone? You've got the all these people from all in different locations. How are you able to build a culture when you're not sitting in the same office? You know, I think back to when I was teaching and being next to another teacher and we're on our lunch break getting to just talk and connect and in this digital world and not living in the same towns, it's a little bit more difficult to cultivate.
Speaker 3:Right, so the first thing that we do is we have there is our clinical directors in each of our offices are part of our executive team. So we have our executive team that comes together every single week to make sure that we're all on the same page. And then we do things like all of our new team members. I actually do the onboarding with them, and so a lot of that is virtual, but they're getting that consistent message from me as the founder and as the executive director, and I build relationships with them. I make sure that I know about their families and I make sure that I know about pain points in their life. And then we make sure that our practice coordinators at each location are doing the same thing. They're often labeled as the mom of the office because they are taking care of everybody in the office and making sure not just the logistical needs are being met, but oftentimes that the emotional needs that all of our team members are feeling valued.
Speaker 3:We do things like we have, um, we utilize a microsoft uh platform, and so we have things like team chats for tech issues and for, uh, just fun in the offices.
Speaker 3:We generate a lot of fun, uh. We do things like what we call a new view on the town, excuse me, which is where, and usually a few times a year, we'll just have a social gathering of the team members, and the team members get to bring a plus one with them, an adult plus one, and so that pulls their family members into it as well and their significant others, or, you know, the people who are important in their lives, then are invested as well in our team members and the work that they're doing with a new view counseling. So those are some of the of the things that we do. We do a lot of coaching, we do a lot of career development, but I think the main emphasis is just making sure that people feel understood, that they feel valued in the role that they have. We are not seeking to be punitive in any of our measures. We really are about just helping people develop themselves as a professional.
Speaker 1:Richard Walsh joined me last year and he's the author of Escaping the Owner's Prison. It's a book all about helping you get out of that trap that we, as business owners, find ourselves in. We oftentimes start this business with high hopes and pie-in-the-sky ideas and then, after a year, two years, five years down the road, we look down and we realize we are a prisoner in our own business. Richard was a lot of fun to talk to.
Speaker 4:I learned so much during this interview and that's why I wanted to highlight it here. That was it. It was the pattern of these people working so hard in their business and you hear it a lot the in and not on. You want to work on your business but, like a lot of your, the majority of your listeners practitioners, right, people who have a therapy business. I work with an audiologist same thing, multiple offices, right, she's got practitioners always placed. This Same thing, multiple offices, right, she's got practitioners always placed.
Speaker 4:It's hard because a lot of it is based on you Like, or you think it's based on you. Okay, you feel like you're the person You've got the knowledge, you can lay hands on people the best, right, you can do all this stuff, and that's the trap. And you can be a carpenter, and it's the same thing. You can be an electrician it. And you can be a carpenter, and it's the same thing. You can be an electrician, and it's the same thing. You can be a general contractor, there's no difference. It doesn't matter what the business is, the patterns are the same. So I wanted to create a system to get them out of that. So that pretty much brings us up to speed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's spot on. I think it resonates for me, and largely not only myself, but what we see. Uh, cause we work with people on their finances, that we help them learn how to manage cash in their business in a simple way, and a lot of times they're struggling financially and that's so closely tied to how they've gotten locked into this business and they feel this like they've left their nine to five to start this business, for two reasons usually, which is more time and more money. Right, that's our main reason why we go into business for ourselves and they're like well, I'm working more hours than I was ever working before and I'm getting paid less than I was making before. What am I, what am I doing here? Is that kind of the?
Speaker 4:what you're seeing. So, yeah, so what? So what I figured out was okay. So I created the movement. I'm going to help 10,000 business owners create freedom, profit and impact in their business. That's the three things. Freedom, because we're doing it all for our family, we're doing it to get time, we're doing it to make more money and we get none of that. Okay, so it's the it's debate and switch right. You get in there like you could do all this next year, like I said. Next, you know it's 10 years and you're like wait a minute. So it's freedom, profit, impact. So they only work together in the sense of business. You can't make impact without profit. You can't. You can't make impact without freedom at the time to do it. You can't make impact without freedom. You have the time to do it. You can't make profit without freedom. Okay, because you have to be able to step away from the big. If you're doing it all, you can't leverage yourself. So there's no leverage in that right. So all these three work together and if you can dial it in that way, and that comes through systemization, creating process systemization in your business so it can run itself.
Speaker 4:So my goal is to get the owner working on what we call the 5%, that's the 5% of the business only they can do. That's vision, direction, right. That's market share maybe reeling in the big client making the new deals right, that's what they do best, right. Everything else, that's all I call it farmed out, right. You build the lanes, you bring the people in the office. They handle everything Like, let's say, I'll just use like my chiropractor. I've been getting chiropractor work for 35 years, right From boxing and everything else I used to do and you get beat up so you need a little bit of work, right, but you go in and that's to me that's one of those examples of this. It's based around that Cairo, that guy.
Speaker 4:But if they build and they got the assist and they create the process, the check-in, the appointments, the massage, whatever the table is, the traction table, you go on there and then the doc comes in does this five or ten minutes, right, and you have that. That's a system when the other one they this five or 10 minutes, right, and you have that Like that. That's a system when the other one they used to do it all right. So they've learned to systemize that a lot and bring on others right and create a business. So I think that's a big thing about the owner prison is can you let go? Can you let go of that? I have to control everything. I'm the guy.
Speaker 1: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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