The Therapy Business Podcast

My Wins (and Losses) from 2025

• Craig Dacy • Episode 71

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We pull back the curtain on a year of tight cash, hard cuts, and better systems that led to healthier margins and faster growth. We share what broke, what we fixed, and the habits that keep profit steady as we serve more practices.

• losing a key team member and redistributing work
• profit squeeze from upfront payments and payroll timing
• creating a drip account to match cash to delivery
• migrating CRM to ActiveCampaign and automations
• rebuilding the sales process to double close rates
• cutting operating expenses by 20% to stabilize margin
• paying off credit cards and rebuilding cash reserves
• clarifying vision for the next growth phase

If you ever need help getting your finances in order, like I needed, reach out to our coaches. We got a link in our description. Jump on a call with them. They’re gonna help you implement a system so that you can be profitable, that your money is managed the right way, and you have cash for everything you need.
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 the 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

SPEAKER_00:

Today I'm pulling back the curtain on my business and I'm sharing my wins and losses from 2025. 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. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different than normal because I'm just going to be kind of sharing what I'm seeing from my year as I look back. What did what went well and what did I struggle with? I feel like a lot of times when you're listening to podcasts or you're watching a YouTube channel, it can seem like the person on the other side is uh has it all figured out. And uh they're teaching, yes, I'm here teaching you uh about business and finances and and sharing what I've learned and what I've what we teach our clients. But the the reality is we I have my own struggles. There's things that are challenging to me. The reason I do this is because it's something that I need to focus on, it's something that I've struggled with in the past is managing money. And so out of necessity, I needed to create systems. And as we all know, the best way to learn something is to teach it, and so that's why that's how I stay so on top of it, is because, and I say I stay on top of it, as you're gonna find out today. I don't always stay on top of it, but teaching it forces me to keep it front of mind and to constantly trying to learn. Um, and also it creates this this connection in the sense of I know what you're going through. I know what it's like when revenue's down, and yet we don't want to make the tough choices because that that's what I did. Um, even recently, that's that's what I did when when our revenue was down or when profitability was down, um, I dragged my feet on making some really, really tough cuts and and decisions. That it had I been my own client, I would have told myself to do it a long time ago. So I understand uh that that level of knowing what you're going through, walking in your shoes, just know that I'm walking that path too. And that's really what I'm hoping you gain from today as I go through and celebrate some some things too, because I also have a hard time celebrating my wins. I'll hit uh milestones, and instead of taking time to just be like, man, that's awesome! I did it, I'm focusing on what's next, or what did I not do well enough, or whatever it is. And so forcing myself to stop and say, here's what I'm really proud of, here's the wins I had, and then again, I'm gonna focus, look it back at some of my losses. So um, I'm going to start with the negative first. So I'm gonna talk about the the challenges I had this year, and then that way I can end on a positive note with some of our wins in some areas that I'm really, really proud of. So, number one, uh, last year was the first time that I've lost a key employee, somebody that was really valuable to the company. And it was amicable. I mean, it was I'm so happy for her. I know she loved what she did here. It was just it was time. And so for her to choose to move on to do something different for herself and her family. Um, but I've never navigated that before. I've had turnover. Um, a lot of usually it was somebody who just didn't work out, uh, or they were a contractor who I worked with for you know a set period of time, and then eventually we just we just went our separate ways. Um, this is the first time that somebody was with me that I leaned on. I respected highly for their insight into my business. They were with me long enough that I was able to collaborate and uh strategize with them. And so navigating that was a challenge. And so, whether it was financially speaking, whether it was just taking the things that were on her plate and divvying them out. Uh, now that was in the long run, as I go back to when I get to my wins, I'll talk about our profitability and cash flow-wise. Um, it ended up being something that was great all around, in the sense of I'm really happy that that she is doing what she wants to do and needs to do. And while she was so valuable to the company, we were able to pivot some of our focus. We I was able to take on some of the tasks she was doing, and then some of the tasks we were just able to let go. And so, point being we didn't we found that we didn't need to replace her, and so profitability-wise, cash flow-wise, it ended up helping out a lot in some of the areas and some of the other goals that we were focusing on. But it was still tough. You know, if you manage a team, if you've ever lost somebody, uh, when a therapist comes to you, maybe they've been with you for a couple years and they've decided to go start their own practice, or they've decided to um leave it, leave the industry altogether, whatever it is, uh, it can sting. Um, not out of a bitterness or not out of uh hurt feelings. It's just like a uh you're sad to be losing somebody that you respect and that was so valuable to the company. So that was a challenge I went through this year. Um, again, for it was the first time uh that I've had to go through that. And so just how to push through and and it also kind of made me start thinking about just that nobody stays at a job forever. And I don't know if not that I thought that, but it's just I hadn't really thought about when or what to do when that end comes. And so now with my other team members, I hope they stay with me for for years and years. I hope they stay forever. I hope they're they I hope that they break that whole idea of nobody stays forever, and they do. Uh, but also in reality, I do need to think about uh what would happen if this employee left or this employee left. Where would my business be? Would I be okay? Do I need to make sure that we um have a game plan in place so that we're not scrambling if and when that does happen? All right, the other thing, um, profitability so was down to start the year. In fact, uh the first three to six months of the year, probably up to summer, um, were really, really challenging to the point of and even uh towards the second half of 2024, so I'm losing track of what year it is. It was that was probably a 12-month period that was the tightest my business has ever been. Um, our our lead flow was down, we had churned some clients. We are just struggling to get traction. And uh to the point of I every time a friend or a family member was like, Hey, how's business? Uh, my answer used to always be, oh, it's great, we're good, we're great. Uh, this is the first time that actually was allowing myself to say, actually, it's been a really tough year. Like it's been tough. Um, now on the PL, we grew on revenue, so which is funny. I mean, you know, I talk about how tough it was, uh, but even that 12-month period was was still up a little bit. Um maybe, I guess maybe not the summer to summer, but 2024 to 20 or 2025 numbers were up from 24, I should say. So even with that large chunk of time that we were down, it still we still grew. However, cash was tight. Um, and I struggled to make some of those those really important decisions like we talked about. I just kept hoping we'll just close more people, we'll get back to where we were. Um, it took me too long to to make some cuts um on our expenses to make some some decisions. I had to uh let go of our our virtual assistant. It was just um yeah, a tough decision because they were doing a lot for me, but at the same time, uh it was just an overhead cost. And I had to just decide is that something that we can that that was the first thing to go. It was either that or letting go of a coach, and I didn't want to do that. So uh that was a really hard decision that I put off for too long that I had to make. Now I'm so glad I started focusing on it. Again, if I was my own client, I would have told myself to do it a long time ago. Um, but we burned through our cash reserves and we started uh in 2024 to take on credit card debt, which is something I I preach against is you know, don't take on debt. But again, I I know how quickly that can snowball on you that you're using it to cover expenses and you get to the end of the month, and all of a sudden you can't pay off the balance. And then the next month you the balance has gotten a little bigger and you can't pay it off. And before you know it, you're behind. So making these cuts allowed us to start to chip away and get ourselves uh back our heads back above water. Um, over the year, part of that too was I wasn't managing the money uh in the most efficient way in one specific area, which was when people pay up front. So we would do six months, usually or with a client for six months or more. And so sometimes we offer the option to pay six months up front for a little discount, and a lot of people take advantage of that. And so previously uh I was not Alex stretching those funds out back in the day when it was just me as a coach, I didn't really need to worry about it. As a team, when I started getting a team member, if one of their clients paid up front, if I were to go spend that money this month, I still need to pay them over the next six months to work with that client. And I started running into cash flow issues. And in fact, that's a huge reason why we got into the credit card issue was my payroll was get it the percentage was way too high from our monthly recurring revenue. So we solved that by creating a drip account. That's where if somebody pays me up front, I put it aside to an account, and if it's for six months, I divide it by six, and one-sixth of it gets dropped into our accounts uh every month. And so now we treat it like they're paying us monthly, even though they paid up front. And that has tremendously helped with our cash flow, and that's allowed us to get more sustainable. But it was a tough, tough loss this year to have to learn that the hard way. Um, and again, if I was my own client, I probably would have recommended that a long time ago. But it's just we tell this to people all the time, uh, our clients and people who are talking about to us about maybe hiring us, is sometimes we're too close to our own business to see what's in front of us. And that is living proof of it that I was too close to my own business to catch some of these things. And then finally, or not finally, another challenge this year was our CRM overhaul. So we completely changed our CRM system. We moved from one system we've been using for years to a brand new one, and it took me months of doing it. Um, I considered hiring somebody for it, however, at because when we did this, we were back to being profitable. Our cash flow is much better, we were in a lot better place. Um, so I genuinely thought about hiring somebody. However, I wanted to be able to know how it works uh because there's a lot of automations involved, and so I don't want to be dependent on somebody to constantly update things for me or if there's something wrong. So I wanted to know the inner workings. Uh, we we switched from dubsato to active campaign. We've been using active campaign for email marketing, so it's been it's been great now that we're into it. We're still working out kinks for it, but man, setting up automations. Uh, I don't know if you've ever done that. So that, and by an automation, I mean a somebody schedules a call with us, then after the call, um, let's say they sign up. So an automated they get sent the coaching agreement, then they're sent the next steps, they're sent calendar links, they're sent onboarding paperwork. So all of that is automated in our system, so that when they sign the agreement, they're automatically sent the next thing, and so on. So going through that in my head, um, and then we do it for all different avenues. If we get a lead that reaches out to us, then we have some automations. If they schedule a consultation with us, then we have some internal automations that are set up so that they get flagged or marked as a consultation schedule. They're moved automatically in our CRM from um new lead to consultation booked, and then after the consultation, they're moved. So there's a lot of little pieces that just took a lot of mental bandwidth. I was exhausted at the end of some of those days because I just spent so much mental energy trying to think, okay, but if I do this, what's gonna so the CRM was an overhaul, it was an undertaking, it was challenging. Um, and and I guess I won't call it a loss, I'll just call that a challenge because it was overall a good thing and it's something we needed to do. It's something my team has been asking for was a better uh CRM system. And so I'm really glad we made the shift, but it was challenging. And then finally, more existentially, finding direction this year, figuring out what I should be focusing my energy and effort into. What is my vision for this next phase of business? You know, when I started this whole thing and it was just me, I was like, I'm just gonna be self-employed, I just want to make sure I make a good living, uh, helping people, and it's just me. I never dreamed I would have a team, I never dreamed that I would be at this next phase where all of a sudden we're hitting this new new threshold of what's next for us? Like, what is what does it look like? How many people are we gonna grow to? What is our main message? You know, should I be focusing a lot of energy into personal finance marketing or should I be focusing our energy into profit coaching? Um, so really finding that direction was a challenge. And so I kind of felt like I was treading water, and probably a lot of that was some stress around the finances from the first half of the year, but treading water in the sense of what is my vision for this next phase, and how should I be spending my time and energy to get us there? So those were some of our challenges, losses this year. I want to pivot into some of our wins and pull back the curtain on some of the things I'm really proud of this year. The first one is that we really worked on our sales and and we doubled our sales close rate, um, which was super important to me. Um looking back to about a year, a little over a year ago, we were struggling to to close. Um, and there was a lot of factors that we started looking into. And it had never really been a problem before of closing. Not that everybody obviously becomes a client, but I was always very confident that if I had three consultations, one of them would become a client. So that was usually a pretty good rule of thumb. But ours dropped pretty significantly from what I would say, maybe what 33% to below 20% close rate, meaning less than one out of every five were turning into clients. And so we had to stop and say, okay, what is going on with our process? Are we articulating value? Is there something you know in the economy or out there in the world that's just changing buyers' people's minds, that's making them a little bit more apprehensive? Is it us? Is it how we're coming across? Is it a lot of different things? And so what we did was we kind of went through the system, and I I did a whole episode on the tweaks we did to our sales process. So I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty. I highly recommend listening to it because we analyzed a lot of things, and what ended up happening is we doubled our close rate, and that was incredible. Our close rate this year went, so like I said, it was less than 20% last year. This year we were over 40%. So uh that means almost one out of every two people we were talking to was signing up to work with us. Um, that is huge, not only for our business and revenue, that's huge for our our reach. The number of people that we're able to help and serve, that's doubling our close rate, means we're doubling the amount of people we who are getting help, who are getting their finances in order, who are becoming more profitable. And then that extends to their the people they're serving and whatever their industry is, um, and physical therapists, mental health therapists, or we work with a variety of different companies beyond that, they're serving people. So for every therapy practice we're working with, they have clients under them that they are touching. So we we know the the importance of sales, not only for ourselves, but the impact that we can make. Um, we don't take that lightly. And so when we see that close rates are down, it's my job as a business owner to address it, but it's also my job for our mission and for the impact on the community and and beyond to address it so that people can get the help they need. We reduced our operating expenses by 20%. And this was this was tough. Um, I stopped and did a profit assessment on my business at the beginning of the year, and that's when I realized that the reason we weren't uh that the credit card couldn't get paid off every month was because I was our expenses were had inflated too much. Um, a huge part of that was was payroll compared to our monthly revenue, and so that's why I started that drip account, but part of it was our expenses, and that's when I had to make those tough cuts. Um, but our business is in a much more financially healthy place, and we plan on bringing people back. So we cut our VA, we plan on bringing an admin person back this year. We just had to set the financial foundation so that we could we could take some some of those expenses on. I had let things start to roll. I was focusing too much on growing, too much on doing all these other pieces that I didn't take the time to stop and make sure that we were we had a foundation set for this next phase. So the things I was doing basically when it was just me and I was smaller don't work as we scale and grow. I had to set that new precedent. I had to set those new foundational pieces. The next win this year was we we've paid off all the credit cards, so everything is back to zero. We're back to paying it off weekly, not monthly. So that's something that I to make sure that we don't get too far behind, I'm paying off this week's expenses at the end of every week. That's something I recommend clients do. So that way we don't get to the end of the month and all of a sudden it's just this big bill that catches us off guard. Cash flow-wise, expenses, anything that gets charged to the card this week gets paid off on Friday, and then next Friday and next Friday. So we are back into the green there. We have grown our cash reserve. Um, I would say probably two-thirds of the way to where I want it to be. So we still got some some cash reserves to build up. Some we're not quite where I want to be yet with our cash reserves, but we have rebuilt a lot of it. And so um that brings peace of mind into to myself, knowing our expenses are in balance and that we are also putting money into savings every single every single month. And so as I was reducing those operating expenses, I was allocating, I opened up an account and I called it the debt destroyer account, and I put uh all those excess percentages into the debt, and then I switched that percentage over to our vault, and so now every month until our cash reserve is built to where I want it to be, we're putting a certain percentage into the vault every month. Already talked about the drip account, um, and then our revenue, we grew uh quite a bit this year. So we had a 40% growth revenue from 2024 to 2025. And the maybe the pessimist in me, uh I'm gonna say the humble, humbleness in me, uh tries once to write that off as oh well, there's you know uh an excuses here or or whatever, it's not as big of a deal as it is. But um, I need to work on celebrating those things, and so I'm celebrating huge growth in our business. Um, I'm celebrating, if it weren't for that growth, if it weren't for us focusing on the operating expenses, we wouldn't have been able to do that growth. Uh, wouldn't have been able to afford to take on those clients. Um, and then vice versa, with the growth, we were able to build our cash reserves because we got the debt out of the way and the operating expenses down, then we were able to put ourselves in a financially healthy place so that hopefully this year, 2026, we just continue to grow and we can take it on and we can withstand it. And it's going to put us in a better place, not just create more cash flow issues as we go. There it is. Losses and wins for 2025. Um, like I said, a different episode. It's it's less about teaching more, just kind of giving you a glimpse into my business. Business and how I reflect and the things I'm proud of and the things that I struggled with. I would love to hear your wins and losses. If you want to share your losses, please. I would love to hear what's going on in your business. What are you celebrating from the past year? Whether, again, you're listening to this live and here we are at the start of 2026, or maybe it's 2029 and you're listening to an old episode. Shoot me a message and say, here's what I'm really proud of from the last year, the last 12 months that we accomplished. Here's what I've been struggling with, or here's what I overcame, something that was really challenging that I've already overcome. Share it with me. I love hearing those things. And otherwise, we're here to support you any way we can. If you ever need help getting your finances in order, like I needed, reach out to our coaches. We got a link in our description. Um, jump on a call with them. They're gonna help you implement a system so that you can be profitable, that your money is managed the right way, and you have cash for everything you need. 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 the finances or just growing your practice, head to therapybusinesspod.com to learn how we can help.

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Craig Dacy

Host