- Onboarding
- 4 mins
As a seasoned therapist, you’ve undoubtedly seen a world of different clients with different needs. You know the right questions to ask, how to correctly read reactions, and how to guide conversations to make them as productive as possible. You’ve helped many and want to help more, and if you’ve reached this point you may be considering going out on your own and launching a private practice—granting you more direct input into how things are done, and a more direct reward for the outcomes you produce.
Like any new professional endeavor, launching a therapy practice can be an intimidating prospect. Taking this leap, though, can absolutely be the exciting new professional adventure you’d hope—with the right approach.
Whether you’re just now considering going into practice on your own, or if you’ve already been running a practice for a while but still feel like things are more hectic or less effective than they should be, the following secrets to success can help. Understanding them can allow you to be just as confident running a private practice as you are when you’re sitting in the therapist’s chair.
Always Remember: Running a Practice is Running a Business
The business of helping people, while human-focused, is a business nevertheless. As a business owner, you must be aware of many things that are handled, partially or entirely, by others when you’re working for someone else. This means capital expenditures, operational expenditures, taxes (yours and any obligations to employees), and more. You’ll have to decide if there are elements of your operations you want to delegate by, for instance, hiring an accountant, or if you want to save financially and take on the responsibility (and stress) yourself. If you’re running a small group practice, you’ll have to make decisions about hiring contractors vs. W-2s and the degree of scheduling autonomy that you give them, and decide how much therapy work you want to do on your own.
With your own practice, what you offer and how you offer it is your choice: for instance, if you want to provide telehealth services, you’ll have to either build out a solution or bring on a vendor and navigate the contracts that go with that. You’ll also have to manage some mental health-specific regulatory demands that might not have been on your radar if you worked in a facility with a big administrative staff. Finally, if you’re running a small group practice, you’ll also be managing other clinicians (and their personalities).
Being aware of all of these new responsibilities—anticipating them, understanding them, and working to master them—will help you get far in managing your own practice.
Marketing Strategy Requires Serious Thought
Marketing is as much a part of running a business as operations. You’ll want to put some thought into how many clients you’ll need to stay afloat, how you’ll meet their needs, and how you’ll continue to attract them. If you’re considering bringing over clients from a practice where you previously worked, be aware of any contractual limitations (or the possibility of stepping on any toes) to navigate the move tactfully.
Think carefully about any paid advertising you do and make sure it follows all applicable regulations. Be definitive about the areas of therapy in which your practice excels and target your outreach accordingly. Promote your therapists, and enable them to promote themselves, based on their skills, successes, and good reputations.
Word-of-mouth, through clients that find their experience of therapy helpful and clinicians who are set up to see progress in their clients, can be your most powerful way to attract new business. So aim to create an environment that values and supports satisfaction and improvement.
Good Colleagues Can Be A Great Source of Knowledge
If you’ve been providing therapy services for long enough to consider launching your own practice, you probably have a big personal network. Get coffee with others who have made similar moves. Discuss what they’ve seen, what they’ve done, where they’ve succeeded and where they’ve made missteps. Get a concrete feel for what you can expect, what pitfalls you can avoid and what strategies you can employ, as you launch, scale, and do business. And if you’ve been at it for a while, keep that line of communication open to discover new strategies and paths to helping clients.
Your colleagues are one critical source of information. But there is another, just as critical to your success, that you might not yet know about. When starting or running your own therapy clinic, you need a good virtual onboarding solution. It’s a new kind of tool that makes some of the most problem-prone parts of running a private practice a snap to manage.
Onboarding is Critical: For Your Clinicians, Your Clients, And You!
Virtual onboarding solutions are online repositories of video content tailor-made by therapy experts to train both incoming clinicians and clients on everything they need to know about succeeding in therapy.
Using virtual onboarding, you can:
- Make sure your employees understand everything from intake to scheduling to client care best practices;
- Make sure your clients understand the parameters and the expectations of the therapeutic relationship, so they can make the most of every session;
- Make sure that you yourself are always on point regarding regulatory and operational demands.
With a good solution in place, you can view onboarding resources any time, to make sure you’re always on the right page. By building onboarding into your operations for every employee and every client, you can make sure they are too.
Organization is critical to succeeding with your own private therapy practice. Virtual onboarding is one of the most powerful organizational tools a private therapy practice can implement. Many seemingly insoluble problems that arise on the business management end, the clinician end, and the client end are matters of people not knowing, remembering, or having access to the right information. With virtual onboarding, you never forget the important stuff. Neither do your clinicians or your clients.
Virtual onboarding makes sure everyone involved with your practice is organized, appropriately informed, and moving in the right direction. With a foundational source of knowledge, a whole pile of problems that tend to arise in the course of building a business are addressed before they happen. This way everyone can work—and live—better.
