- Therapy
- Private Practice
- 5 mins
After months or years of thinking about it, you have decided to fly solo and provide mental health services from your own private practice. Maybe you are aiming to see clients in a particular niche where you excel at providing care. Maybe you’re moving from a large state-run facility, or maybe you have already been working in a private practice environment and want more control over the day-to-day operations. There are countless reasons why individuals decide that starting a private practice is the right choice, but private practices all have one thing in common: they are all businesses.
Running a therapist’s office is running a small business, and the first year of doing it, as is the case in any business segment, will be packed with excitement, along with new, unanticipated forms of stress. But you don’t have to feel overwhelmed!
Yes, there’s a learning curve to running any business, and it can be even bigger when the services you offer are so deeply personal. But the following tips for your first year running a private practice can help you navigate this new experience, so you can focus on helping your clients, and building your presence.
Marketing Will Be More Important Than You Think
If you’re at the point of launching your own practice, your track record of providing quality care, combined with the frequently reported current spike in need for talk therapists, might make it seem like attracting clients will be the easy part. But your professional acumen might not immediately translate into bringing people through the door.
Especially in the first year, you will have to work to establish your client base. That means a lot of promotional marketing.
- Using every appropriate channel you can, online and in-person, to get the word out;
- Finding a niche, and;
- Developing a personal brand that highlights your seriousness and reliability.
Do not shy away from marketing, or think of it as being somehow “inauthentic.” People who can benefit from therapy won’t know that you can help them if they don’t know you’re there. Getting your name out there and promoting your services through the relevant channels is the only way to get clients in the door, and start helping them.
Prepare to Stay on Top of The “Business Side”
The thrill of launching a practice and the satisfaction of all the work you are doing with clients can be wonderful, but in all the excitement you can’t forget about the business basics.
While it might seem like providing services directly through a private practice should be as easy as just making yourself available and helping the clients, in today’s world, there’s more to it. You take on a lot more responsibility when you run the office. Taxes, tax responsibilities to any employees, billing, insurance, compliance, and any number of other things that may have been dealt with by your employer in a previous role, are now in your hands.
If you have spent time as a contractor you may already have experience with some of it, but likely not everything. Start thinking about these things early and know what’s expected of you. Your first year will go much more smoothly if you do not get caught off guard.
You’ll Want, And Need, The Right Tech Tools
Having your own private practice is an opportunity to improve on inefficiencies you might have experienced in earlier professional settings. You’re starting fresh, and that means you’ll get to set up your operations in a way that is up-to-date and meets your needs. In the first year, you’ll be asking, and answering, questions like:
- Which platform will you use to securely manage telehealth?
- What features do you need in a client portal?
- Which therapy solutions or suite of therapy software solutions will best serve your needs for scheduling, billing, and the like?
Get acquainted with the industry-standard technology for managing every aspect of your business. Try out therapy solutions, see how they work for you, and when they do, establish best practices and standard operating procedures throughout your business to get the most out of them.
Structuring your practice in a way such that the administrative tasks move as smoothly as possible will work to your advantage, whether you are providing care alone or bringing additional therapists into your practice (or are doing the former, but plan to do the latter after you get a feel for running the office on your own). Having your operations organized, on point, and running smoothly will mean more time and energy you can put toward both helping the clients you have, and finding new and creative ways to improve and scale your services.
And one element that is essential to keep the operations of any therapist’s office functioning like a well-oiled machine is a digital onboarding solution.
Onboarding: For Year One And Beyond
Onboarding solutions provide a repository of short instructional videos that train both clients and any staff you employ on everything they need to know about their role, responsibilities, and expectations in a therapy environment.
So when it comes to those new things you’ll need to take on? Clinician onboarding provides the perfect preparation, giving your staff or even you, yourself a clear, easily accessible, expert walk-through of all the administrative and regulatory best practices you need in place to run a therapist’s practice right.
And for clients, onboarding teaches them everything they need to know to make the most out of their sessions, so the experience is more effective for them and fulfilling for you and your staff. This is important for any practice, but especially so if you’re the owner. There is no more important factor than satisfied clients when it comes to attracting more people to help via word-of-mouth.
Onboarding helps everything run better, so give yourself a head start in your first year of practice! The right onboarding solution helps set your practice up for a long, successful run.
The first year is always a rollercoaster, but with planning, strategy, and organization, you can navigate it successfully, and make sure you’re focusing your energies on what’s most important: your clients.
