The Therapy Business Podcast

The Summer Slump: How to Prepare and Thrive

• Craig Dacy • Episode 49

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The summer slump in therapy practices creates financial stress as client sessions and revenue decrease during the warmer months. Smart planning and specific strategies can transform this challenging time into an opportunity for growth while ensuring financial stability.

• Summer brings disrupted routines for clients and therapists alike
• Clients view summer as a natural time to pause therapy, similar to school breaks
• Proactively communicate with clients about the importance of maintaining therapy consistency
• Compare therapy breaks to the "summer slide" in education where progress is lost
• Get clients' travel schedules in advance to minimize surprise cancellations
• Open your calendar further in advance to secure client commitments
• Consistently enforce cancellation policies during summer months
• Discuss summer plans with clinicians to forecast revenue accurately
• Use extra time during slower months to improve marketing and create content
• Create a "Summer Slump Fund" by saving 5-10% during profitable months
• Analyze your revenue patterns to determine exactly how much to save

Schedule a free call with our team at therapybusinesspod.com to create a money system that eliminates summer financial stress and provides consistent income year-round.


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

Speaker 1:

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. This is the Therapy Business Podcast. Summer is here. It's a time for rest and relaxation and if you own a therapy practice, it's time for financial stress.

Speaker 1:

We all know that the summer slump is real. This is a time of year where business can go down, where our monthly incoming revenue, where our client sessions drops, and it's a part of the year where most practice owners are stressing they're dreading this time. And yet here it is every year and we just kind of go into a hole. We feel overwhelmed, we feel stressed out and we just cannot wait for fall to kick in and for business to kick back in. Well, the summer slump. There's nothing we can do about it, in the sense of it's just a reality that there is going to be a downturn in business this time of year. There are things that we can do to mitigate it, that we can do to get in front of it, that I'm going to walk you through today and some things we can do to prep for the future so that, even if the incoming revenue drops, even if the client sessions drop, you're not stressed about the money, you can take some peace of mind and you can use this time to focus your energy elsewhere to further your business. Now let's just address why the summer slump happens. This is just a time of year where clients are busy.

Speaker 1:

People have a change in routine. You probably feel that too. I know I do. With my kids out of school, my days look drastically different. Where I can typically record podcasts on any day of the week, I have to find days where they are out of the house so that I can get just an hour of quiet moments to jump on here and record. My days don't get kick-started as early, so during school we're waking up at 6 am to get them out the door to school, so I'm starting my day at seven to seven 30. Well, in the summer, you know, I'm not a natural morning person, so I'm not really getting out of bed till seven and so my day is starting later. It's funny I was talking to my therapist about this that summer routines. I'm going, man, it's just summer stuff, cause my routine goes out the window. And he's like, well, how much of the routine do you intentionally keep? And I was like that's true, I guess I could wake up earlier and keep that part of the routine. But it's just the fact of life that I'm not following my routines the way I normally would. And your clients are doing the same thing. Your clinicians, your team members are probably doing the same thing. In fact, you might be finding yourself doing the same thing.

Speaker 1:

We tend to let our foot off the gas with our routine and what we do is we find a lot of things falling to the wayside. Now a lot of your clients feel like summer is a natural pause. You might hear people tell you hey, summer's chaotic, let's look ahead, maybe I'll kick back in in September. I plan on coming back in September. They look at it as a time to pause. This is as kids our whole lives were ingrained. In September to May is the cycle right? And then, if you're a parent, you know that cycle still continues when school starts to when school ends. And so we all still look at summer intrinsic like just deep down. We feel like it is a pause from life. It's a pause, it's a break. So a lot of your clients are going to probably be taking a little pause or not coming in as frequently or again pulling their foot off the gas on their mental health progress, and you might feel that or see that, whether they outwardly say it or not. And then also during this time, it's just summer, it's warmer weather, longer days, people might be just feeling better and so they're not as urgently trying to get in to see you, and so when they look down on the calendar and they say, oh, I have a therapy appointment tomorrow, things are going on. I feel pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and cancel and reschedule that. So there's a lot of reasons that this can happen and what we want to do is try and get in front of it as much as possible.

Speaker 1:

So, as you step into this summer, I'm going to start with the short term. What can we do about this summer slump as we are facing it now here? This recording is releasing at the first week of June, so we are stepping into it, and June, july, august are typically the hardest months for therapy practices. The first thing I would recommend doing is communicating with your clients. Talk to your clients about the summer slump. You can call it out if you want to Call out the elephant in the room that during the summer it's really important that we stay on a therapy schedule, that I know life is going to get busy, that your routine, your schedule is going to get off. Let's make a commitment to keep our therapy schedule on track.

Speaker 1:

When I was in education, we would have at the end of the year obviously we'd end in May and then, when we would come back in August, september, we would have what we would call the summer slide. The summer slide is where a student maybe is at a certain reading level They've made all this progress in their reading and then they go home for three months and they're not practicing their reading anymore, they're not studying, they're not doing those things, and so when they come back in in August they have regressed, their progress has gone back a little bit and we spend a couple months just trying to get them back up to speed to where they were at the end of last school year. This and you know your clients well is likely a reality for them too. If they were to take a month or two off, if they were to miss enough sessions, you might be using sessions in the fall to catch back up. They might regress in some of the work they've been doing. You might be rehashing spending hours and sessions, going over things that maybe you've already done some progress on because time has slipped by.

Speaker 1:

We see that with our clients all the time. If we ever have a client who feels like summer's a natural pause, maybe they choose to pause their coaching with us. We end up spending a lot of time undoing things that happened over the summer and we lose a lot of progress. I'm always really glad they come back, because it's better to come back and have the opportunity to push things forward, but there's a lot of ground lost simply because they stopped working on it over the summer, and so we do exactly what I'm talking to you about. We talk to our clients about.

Speaker 1:

Summer is a stressful time. It's going to be busy, I know it's gonna be chaotic in your personal life and in your business. It's really, really important that you don't let this coaching and the work you're doing on your finances and in your business fall to the wayside. So we encourage them to again we call it out and to lean into their coaching during this summer months and, in fact, if they have extra time, if they're not seeing as many clients, this is a really good time to engage more in coaching because you have the bandwidth to do so. So talk to your clients about it, discuss that regression, discuss the importance of staying on a rhythm.

Speaker 1:

Now, of course they might be traveling and so get to know their travel schedules in advance, if possible. Just say, looking ahead, I know we meet every Thursday morning at 9 am. Are there any Thursdays looking into the summer that you know you're going to be out? So the further out you can look and you can go ahead and accommodate that, the better. This is opportunity for you to maybe reschedule another client. If they're going to be out that Thursday, say, is there a different day that week that maybe we could meet? If they're going to be on vacation that week, then obviously you're probably not going to be able to reschedule them and you're just going to miss those sessions.

Speaker 1:

But the further out we can look, the more you can, almost say, get them into a commitment, into a rhythm of meeting with you on their the current pace they've been seeing you. If it's every week, is every other week, whatever it is that you stick with that as best as you possibly can. And again there may be a week that they have to miss because they're gone on vacation, but that's okay, it's trying our best to forecast that. And then you have the foresight to see it. You know exactly when that's happening and again you can prep for it, or you might be able to slide another client into their place to really make things work and give, make the most of your time so that you're not just waiting around or you're not getting those last minute cancellations. You can also give them your schedule far in advance. So if you're somebody who tries not to book too far out, you can give your clients almost like priority access to your calendar all the way through September if you wanted to. So you could say I'm opening up my calendar for clients in the summer, let's go ahead and get you locked in from now through August so that way they have spots in your calendar. If they're scheduled, they're less likely to cancel and reschedule. So, honing in on, let's make this a priority Now.

Speaker 1:

If they are canceling on you, if you have a cancellation policy, I would enforce it this summer. It's really, I would say, most practice owners that I talked to are not enforcing your cancellation policy. We have compassion. As a therapist, I think that's typically one of your strong points is you have empathy and compassion for your clients, and so if something comes up for them, we feel almost guilty charging them a cancellation fee, but I think it's important that we do that. If somebody's canceling on you within the window that you've outlined is going to be, they're going to owe a fee or they have to pay for their session. Follow through with that. That's going to help with your cash flow stress. At least collecting some funds on those last minute cancellations, all right.

Speaker 1:

The next thing you can do is communicate with your staff. So if you have a team of clinicians working for you, let's get to know their travel schedule, cause this is the other piece. Not only are clients busy and rescheduling your team, your clinicians. They're probably traveling during the summer. They're probably taking some days off, which means they're not seeing their clients, which means that you're not getting the revenue from that. So have conversations with them, get that in the calendar, forecast it. When are they going to be out? What is the plan while they're out, if they can possibly reschedule their clients the week before, the week after. So if they have, maybe, clients on a bi-weekly rhythm, see if they can reschedule them for the weeks before and after get them in there. But if nothing else, it gives you the ability once again to forecast that. You know the second week of July is going to be a tough week because we got this clinician out so they're not going to be seeing clients. It gives you an opportunity to get ahead of it, forecast it. If you don't offer PTO, then you're going to notice that the cashflow is going to balance out a little bit because they're not seeing their clients, so you're not paying them. If you do offer PTO and they're utilizing that, then you're going to notice a cashflow strain and we want to get ahead of that, all right.

Speaker 1:

So the other piece is with your client. As you're talking to your clinicians is have them communicate with their clients. So the same thing we just talked about have them discuss the summer slump, the summer slide, and how it's important for their clients to try and stay on a rhythm, to stay engaged, that the work they're doing is still just as important during the summer months as it is during the fall, winter and spring months. That we don't want to lose sight of that simply because life is busy and chaotic. So really over-communicate, I think, is the theme on this one is communicate with your staff and communicate with your clients. Now you might find that you have a lot of extra free time during this. These months your client load is down, maybe the lead flow is down, so you're doing less consultations.

Speaker 1:

This is a huge opportunity to focus on the business side so you can review your website, review the copy that's written on it, review the flow. If you haven't looked at it in a while, go on there like you're a client and engage in it. Fill out the form, see what the client experience is like and see if there's ways to improve it. If you're creating marketing content, summer is a great time to batch it because you're gonna get busy in the fall. Use this time to sit down. Spend maybe a full day once a week over the summer recording videos, writing blogs, writing newsletters, so that you have those batched and ready to go for the entire fall months, maybe even through the spring, depending on how much you want to get ahead. That you can create videos to post once a week or once a month, however frequently, and they're recorded and ready. You have this time to do it. So this is gonna help you set up the marketing for the months ahead. When you're busy and you don't have time for the marketing, you're gonna have these things going and the beauty of content marketing is it's evergreen. So years from now, this, hopefully, is gonna plant seeds that are gonna generate leads over the summer. That might help offset some future summer slumps if you're constantly and consistently creating marketing opportunities.

Speaker 1:

Now those are some things and ways to take advantage of this year's summer slump. Let's look to next year, because here's the deal we know summer slumps are real. We know they happen. Almost every therapist we talk to feels it and stresses about it, which means next summer you're gonna be facing the exact same thing. What we don't want is, every summer, to go into it with anxiety, stress, financial fear. So we need to set up a plan. So what we want to do is create a fund. I would open up a bank account. Nickname it summer slump account, the summer slump. So you are financially preparing yourself.

Speaker 1:

Now what we can do is we can go back, and I'm going to guide you through some of the numbers and the mindset here. Let's say you go back and let's look at your best months. So let's look at September through May. Right, I know January, december might or November and December a lot of times are a little wonky with the holidays, but let's look at your average monthly income. Let's say, on average you do $10,000 per month in revenue, a nice, even round, number.

Speaker 1:

Now let's look at June, on average, historically. What do you do in the summer June, july and August? What is the average summer revenue that you're bringing in? Maybe it's $7,000. Let's just say that. So maybe the difference is a $3,000 a month income dip. You're usually making 10,. You drop down to seven over the summer every month. So over three months June, july, august that's a $9,000 difference. Three months 3,000 drop in June, july and August. That's $9,000 total. So what can we do during those months where you're making 10,000? We can start setting aside money.

Speaker 1:

Our goal really is, in those nine months that we have that are good months, that we're going to be saving up nine grand in order to prepare for the summer months. So what I would do is I'd be setting aside maybe five to 10% of your income into an account called Summer Slump. Now, I know it sounds like we have to have nine grand set aside there. However, as you know, again, when income is down, when client sessions are down, typically expenses are going to drop because what you're paying your clinicians is going to go down. So it's not an apples to apples. You don't necessarily need the exact same amount as you needed before, because you're outgoing, your obligations are going to be down for what you have to be sending out, what you have to be paying people. So your overhead expenses and your payroll will drop as well.

Speaker 1:

But I like to aim for that $9,000 mark. So there, whatever it is that your, your difference is. That's what we're aiming for. Even if you get halfway there, it's still going to give you a ton of financial relief this time next year. So let's just say, 5% Over the good months. We're going to save 5% of our income into that summer slump account and now you have a cash nest egg that during June, july and August you could take some of that money. You can pull it out. You can use it to help cover your paycheck, use it to help cover overhead expenses, use it to help cover your payroll. It's going to make things feel more level. It's going to make those summer $7,000 months feel more like the spring $10,000 months and you're going to have the extra time because you're not seeing as many clients. So it's a really a win-win Financially, cashflow is healthy, while also you have the bandwidth to focus on your marketing, to engage in other things.

Speaker 1:

This is also a prime time if you are loving what I'm talking about with prepping. But it's overwhelming. You're not sure how to even go about finding those numbers, how to set up a system that's going to do that. That's what we do. That's what my team does. We eat this stuff for breakfast.

Speaker 1:

So in the description below is a link to schedule a free call with one of our team members. This summer would be an amazing opportunity, with that extra bandwidth, to start this system, to get a money system in your business. It's going to make sure you're paid consistently, it's going to give you quarterly profit bonuses and it's going to set you up in a way that next summer you're not stressing about the summer slump. So schedule a time with one of our coaches. I promise you it's going to be one of the best calls you can schedule this year. We're going to revolutionize your business and your money management and we're going to make sure that financial stress is not a part of your summer anymore. 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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