When "Ask the Group" Isn't Enough: Expert Counsel for Your Practice

Camille McDaniel (00:02.474)
Welcome back to another episode on Christ in private practice podcast It’s great to be back with you again. And if you happen to be new then welcome It’s wonderful to have you along for the journey We are going to be looking at a topic that I know comes up for people when they are just trying to plan and when they’re thinking through the idea of having their own business their own private practice and so we’re gonna take a look at

being the business to going from being the business.

Camille McDaniel (00:44.81)
Welcome back. I’m glad to have you here for another episode of the Christ in Private Practice podcast. And if you happen to be new, then I’m glad to have you here and welcome, welcome for the journey ahead. We are going to be talking today about going from being the business to owning the business and just how to gain some freedom through different strategic marketing ideas.

Everybody needs a little bit of marketing. We are halfway through our year together. And so if you have started a practice, if you’ve been in practice for a long time and had had to think about it for a while, no matter where you are in your journey, it is good for us to actually go back and maybe reassess, rethink how we are looking at our business. But this one is a really good one because I know that for a lot of us, we

might be feeling like we’re constantly trading time for money. And we might feel very exhausted really by the one-on-one grind that we’re in because we are literally trading our time for the ability to gain income. And we may not really know how to break free from that and really actually build a sustainable thriving practice that actually works for you without you having to worry about trading that time.

And when I think about the idea of even training time and skill for money, I go in my mind to, you know, a lot of pressure on just one individual to make sure that they keep the business going because everything depends on them. So for today, we are going to explore just different strategic marketing ideas that aren’t

They’re not just about getting more clients, but it is about shifting from actually having a mindset where you are the business, you know, you’re the sole deliverer of every single service in your business to owning the business where it’s your expertise and, and everything that you come to the table with as far as your skillset that then

Camille McDaniel (03:13.378)
becomes what generates income and impact even beyond your one-on-one clinical hours. And this really is crucial for longevity, you know, or even if you want to scale your business at some point. And most importantly, it is important for your overall freedom, both financially and your wellbeing. So today, what we are going to talk about is how to leverage your marketing so that you can diversify your income.

And you can reduce burnout. We’re always talking about that in our industry. Burnout, we experience it as mental health professionals. We help a lot of other individuals who come to us who are experiencing it within their lives. And then we want to move from reducing burnout to creating a practice that really supports your goals. Not just a buildup of your client caseload, but just all of the different goals that you might have.

as an individual. So let’s start here with being the business. So we all as therapists, we go through our training, our graduate programs. We have a pretty common path when it comes to that. We graduate and we may work for an organization after we graduate. For some of us, we graduate and then we go right into starting our private practice.

Either way, we all like land in the same space for those of us who are in private practice or desiring to be in private practice where we just really start allowing our excitement to grow. We start visualizing what it’s gonna be like to work for ourselves. And we kind of have in our mind how things are gonna be set up and what it’s going to feel like, you know, in order to kind of think about making your own income, think about.

working in an environment that definitely suits your needs and that feels really comfortable and you wake up and you’re excited to serve the people who come to you, right? And then after all of that excitement gets us going, we are led to the realization that income is directly tied to billable hours. That then is not.

Camille McDaniel (05:34.882)
That’s not the shiniest revelation on the journey, right? But we realize that as we are doing this solo, that our income really depends on our ability to show up and our ability to serve a certain number of clients week to week, month to month. There are some limitations to that. So let’s even talk about that, right? Because we wanna be very real.

about what this journey looks like. So some of the limitations is that there are only so many hours in a week. There are only so many hours in a day and you cannot go beyond that. So you have to sleep, you have to eat because that’s a part of your longevity. I mean, you can skip out on these things but they will then contribute to the deterioration of your overall health. And since you are the business,

You can’t miss out on any days because when you don’t show up, you don’t make any money. So one of the limitations is that you have kind of like an income ceiling because you yourself are the only person who is able to do the work when you’re in a practice by yourself. And there are only so many hours that you can actually work your body. That leads us to another limitation, which is the fact that there is a high risk of burnout.

you know, because as you are having to maybe see more individuals in private practice, then there’s gonna be a lot more administrative work that comes with seeing those clients. But on top of that, on top of like your note taking, you still gotta answer phones. You still have to schedule people. You have to still also advertise and market. there’s just, there’s a lot going on. You have administrative tasks.

You have emotional labor, you have mental labor, you have more clients that you’re trying to see in the door. Let me take a moment to pause here because I know that for some who may be listening, they are kind of thinking, you don’t have to do all of that. I see a limited number of clients and I charge this much and what you probably just have to do is raise your fees.

Camille McDaniel (07:56.32)
Now, I will tell you for some individuals, depending on the services they offer, depending on the locations where they can offer their services, that may be a very real solution, okay? But I always like to put it like this. There are a lot of people in this world who need a car in order to get to where they need to go, whether it’s work, whether it’s school, whether it’s to drop other people off at work or at school, you know, but they do need a car to get to where they want to go.

I know that in some cases, like in some places, the bus doesn’t actually travel everywhere in the county. And so if you’re going to go any further than the bus line, you’re going to end up having to take a cab, an Uber, a Lyft, or have somebody take you. So there are many individuals who are on the roads because they are using the transportation that they need. Now, everybody is not on the road riding a Lamborghini.

I’m not using Lamborghini for anything other than the price point in this example that I know everybody may not like Lamborghini, but here’s the thing. It would be the equivalent of our maybe economy taking a dive, a nose dive, and the auto industry says, we’re really struggling to meet our end of month profits, which is contributing to us missing the mark totally on meeting any of the profits for the year.

And here Lamborghini walks up and says, well, I mean, we’re not really having a problem. You probably need to just raise your rates. I mean, we charge X amount and we’re doing fine. Why don’t you think about charging a lot higher? It’s like, well, here’s the thing. Everyone can’t do a Lamborghini. There are many, many people who need transportation and they get that transportation, but they’re not all going to get Lamborghini.

They’re not all gonna get Maserati. They’re not all gonna get all the other types of, you know, they’re not gonna get Porsche. They’re not gonna get those, but they are gonna get transportation. So just realize that when we do talk about this for the rest of this episode, just keep in mind that it does depend on who you serve, where you actually are located or able to serve, as in where are you licensed, right?

Camille McDaniel (10:18.318)
That is going to be a large contributing factor to how you charge. There are some individuals who serve populations of people who are able to do the Maseratis, do the Lamborghinis and all of that. And those individuals also can do their counseling sessions at a much higher price point. There are some individuals who are not able to do that. And so we want to just keep that in mind.

when people say, you probably just need to charge more. So back to our regularly scheduled program, and that the next thing that we also wanna think about when we talk about like limitations is that there’s a lack of leverage of income. So like when you’re stopping, when you stop work, like we said before, your income stops.

So when you’re not working, you’re not generating any income. And that’s a problem because life does happen. That kind of says like, okay, well, you can’t get sick. You can’t have family emergencies. You can’t have, you know, car trouble. can’t have anything happen that possibly would stop you from getting to a session. that is problematic, right? That creates a, like a financial squeeze.

So making a quote unquote good living often requires then that you have a high volume of one-on-one sessions and that just doesn’t leave a lot of room for self care. And it doesn’t leave a lot of room for long-term financial planning, right? So, you know, the way that it impacts your savings and your building of wealth is that

when all your income is tied up into just offering direct services, just that like one-on-one fee for service, then saving for like retirement or investing or even, you know, taking extended periods of time off can be really challenging because it’s difficult to build financial safety nets or even grow your assets when your income is just like so linear. It’s just only my one-on-one counseling.

Camille McDaniel (12:39.832)
So if I want to take a vacation, that means I have to like not just do the regular client sessions that allow me to take home the paycheck that I normally take. I have to now ramp up those numbers so that I can have above and beyond so I can then afford to take time off for vacation, for maternity leave.

because you’re having to have a medical procedure, because you actually just need mental health days. For any reason at all, you then have to bump up what you’re already doing, because what you’re doing currently is keeping you at the pace or the fees as far as like payday. It’s keeping you at a pay that allows you to like, you know, lead the life that you want. If you wanna do anything extra,

Now you have to bump it up so that you can actually afford to do so. And that becomes a bit difficult, right? So this is where many therapists find themselves. Like they had these awesome dreams. It was like super exciting. We’re gonna have a fulfilling career and we’re gonna do all this awesome work in the world.

You know, but then you end up finding yourself just like stuck in a cycle that really feels more like a demanding job than an entrepreneurial venture. And then you kind of come to the realization that, man, like this is a lot of work. And it is, and it is. But let’s look at how we might be able to market, you know, so that we can kind of like.

have a mindset shift that allows us to go from being the business to owning the business. right, the first thing that we need to think about when we shift our mindset is how we think about marketing and advertising. And we oftentimes are so conditioned to think that marketing and advertising is just salesy. It’s like,

Camille McDaniel (14:59.616)
trying to convince somebody to sign up for counseling with us, trying to beg them, trying to have them feel obligated. And it’s like, let’s stop for a minute because counseling and mental health is not like the shiny toy that you want to buy your child for Christmas.

No one has to convince you that your child really needs this toy that you know good and well your child doesn’t need. But the marketing department for that toy has the task of trying to convince you that this is going to be the thing that gives your child the best joy, the greatest joy. And counseling and mental health is nothing like that at all. Counseling and mental health is a critical part

of existing. Like mental health is a critical part of existing. You have to have right mental health in order to move forward. Counseling is just critical in being able to help people through very difficult times. This is not at all a shiny toy you have to convince people to buy. What you want to do instead

is think about it like this. As it relates to being a mental health professional, marketing and advertising is all about sharing your expertise and offering solutions that people are going to need. So we actually all have some really awesome expertise out there. Some of us help people

who are in the throes of an eating disorder that is just kicking them all around town. Some of us are working with individuals who are clinging on to hope and having a hard time seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and they are trying to find reasons to stay here in the land of the living.

Camille McDaniel (17:23.456)
Some of us are helping people deal with life transitions, alcohol and drug addictions, and so many other things, trauma. mean, so many other things, marriages that are crumbling. These are very real things that people are struggling and suffering through. No one needs to convince those individuals they need help.

You’re not going to do that. You’re not going to convince them. The issue is what it is. It is present. It is there. It is wrecking their world. All you need to do is share your expertise on the topic and offer up some solutions that they can actually put into action while they are thinking about calling you for an appointment to do more work to get to the root of the issue.

and get the healing that they need so they can move forward in their lives without all of the chaos and disruption.

Do you notice how as I talk that through, do you hear how different that sounds than what you’re used to sales and marketing and advertising being about? Right. You being able to share your expertise and solutions with those who need them is really the engine behind owning the business.

there are gonna be some key marketing strategies that we want to start looking at that go beyond just the one-on-one counseling. So first, you want to be able to niche down or niche down. You wanna be able to attract your ideal clients. And so first you’re gonna actually have to think about, who are my ideal clients? As in, what are the challenges that people present with in life that just light me up?

Camille McDaniel (19:25.364)
I love it. just energizes me, excites me. I’m ready to go in the ring with them and help them defeat this giant. Think about who your ideal clients are going to be and who is also in a position and willing to pay for the specialized expertise. So that is going to be who’s willing and able to pay for the specialized expertise, which will help you justify higher rates.

which will allow you if you have higher rates to have fewer clients. Remember, Lamborghini probably does not push off their lots or out of their centers the number of units that maybe like Honda or Ford or Chevy does, but they don’t have to because their pricing is at a point where they actually can still meet their target goals

and push out fewer units of that product. So if we are able, based on the expertise, based on us doing a little bit of research and thought behind who is going to need this expertise and be willing and able to pay for a bit of a higher rate, then we don’t have to be in that cycle of like hunting for clients, if you will, feeling like we gotta.

you know, reach out and spend a lot of time with our marketing and reach out to all the people. Now, again, this is just one potential solution. It doesn’t mean that you have to do it this way, right? There’s other things that you can do as you are thinking about marketing strategies to get individuals to notice and to come to your practice. The other thing is content marketing.

Content marketing literally is just that, it’s creating content and there are different ways that you can create content. One of the things that you can do is to blog and write articles. Again, you are establishing your expertise. What are you good at? What do you want to be known for? As you start writing about it, informing people, helping them understand how this might impact them or someone that they love.

Camille McDaniel (21:51.53)
understanding the cycles and, you know, helping them to understand what they might do to start getting a hold of this. All of this blogging and all of these articles will actually improve the SEO of your website because it literally just creates organic traffic as your articles are picked up and like cataloged by different search engines like Google, like Yahoo. When people go on to those search engines,

and they look things up, sometimes your articles might now just pop up. Now know Google is doing different things where their own artificial intelligence is trying to like ask people or excuse me, answer questions for people. But there are still ways that you can have your information pop up because I will tell you that sometimes when you go to like a chat GBT or if you go to like a Google Gemini,

And if you ask it for like specific articles on certain things, sometimes it pulls up like regular people. Like I know I was doing a little research on some topics and some information and on populations and I was asking chat GPT certain questions and it pulled up a list of people and Christ in Private Practice was one of the people that it pulled up for the information I was asking about. And so, you know,

We don’t know what the future holds for how AI integration is going to use all of our content, but we want to stay aware it definitely is using our content and citing us in some cases as the source. So continue to push that out there so that people who need what you have to offer can be made or can be more informed and made aware of how they can get additional help if they want to. Next is podcasting.

whether you are doing podcasting on like Spotify or Apple or you know other other places where you can have it and it’s just auditory or whether you’re going to use something like YouTube which is visual and auditory. You want to build your community. Showcase your personality. Reach a wider audience. I don’t want people to feel overwhelmed when I say showcase your personality. You don’t have to be anybody other than yourself.

Camille McDaniel (24:16.278)
and you will attract those individuals who totally resonate and feel comfortable with your personality. So doesn’t mean that you have to do anything extra special other than be professional, show up and share your expertise. It allows you to also reach a wider audience of people because you never know who’s listening. They may be not even in your country and they’re listening and taking in that information, which can then lead to something

good for you in the future. There are free resources that can act as like, you know, lead generators. So, you know, you offer these free resources like worksheets. You can do a worksheet. You can do a guide. You can do an ebook. Like, you know, it doesn’t have to be long. And that can also allow you to collect email addresses for like the future when you are going to engage with people about other things that you may be offering.

There’s the other potential of like creating groups. So you can have group programs, you can have workshops. All of this can leverage your time. So you can actually serve more people at one time versus the one-on-one where you may need a lot of, a lot more hours in order to serve and really help the same number of individuals. So.

You have maybe with group, sometimes your price point is a little bit lower, but you also have more people, which overall for the hour, hour and a half that you spend together means that you are getting more per hour. So that can also kind of be a stepping stone for some people to then transition and see you one-on-one for some kind of supplement, know, some adjunct help, all right?

You have the ability also with your expertise to create online courses, digital products. And again, it does not have to be super long. I know that I created something off of a well-known issue that I continued to see over and over and over in my private practice. So much so that I just knew there are a multitude of individuals who are struggling.

Camille McDaniel (26:43.126)
with this particular issue. And for me, it happened to be the woman that everyone leans on. So I created a course about it because I had a multitude of female clients, adult clients who happened to be like the center point in their family for a number of other people to lean on. They were being leaned on at work. They were being leaned on in their family and not always the case that like people just didn’t care about them.

but they were very knowledgeable. These individuals were go-getters and everyone was coming to them for a solution or with an issue that they needed help with and which is still asking for a solution and also putting things on their plate. They were burned out. They did not know how to get from under that. And also they kind of didn’t know how to accept help. They were so used to being in the position to help other people.

They didn’t know how to just allow themselves to just not always be so strong and just actually have needs and have expectations that others can meet those needs. Anyway, it was a whole thing that I was noticing going on in my practice. And so I said, I’m gonna create something so that if other individuals would like the support, it’s available. And I put it right on my website at healingpsychotherapyga.com.

and it’s under like our, you know, our digital online services where they can just click and if they are not quite ready to do, you know, one-on-one counseling, they can start with this online course or I even had a couple of clients who when it was announced in the newsletter, they signed up for the online course and then they took the journal that came with it and they wanted to process some of the points in the journal in their one-on-one sessions with me.

Again, another way for you to extend your expertise beyond you, and it does not have to be really difficult, but instead you are already using what’s in your mind and what you are noticing to create more help for other people. Yeah. So this would be a passive income stream, but obviously it does take some, you know, promoting and sharing, and that’s what you would do. So, you know, you can…

Camille McDaniel (29:04.974)
teach it once if you want to, or you can just have it as an online program, but the idea is it can then be sold many times. There’s many people who know about it and need it. And you can also repackage it and do some other things with it to create some other courses, okay? So these are all things that we want to kind of be thinking about. How can I go beyond having to take on larger client loads?

Because that may not always be sustainable. How can I get from being the business where I have to show up regularly, otherwise things aren’t going to work, right? And so we are going to also, let’s look at this next suggestion. And that’s gonna be strategic networking and referrals. So we wanna build relationships. We wanna build genuine relationships. It does take time, start early.

We want to go ahead and actually get to know other professionals. Keep in touch with them every now and again. Some professionals will be easier to keep in touch with with other than others. know, there are some, like for example, the doctor’s offices that I’ve been able to share information with, I can’t always just call up one of the doctors. They are oftentimes very busy throughout the day to the point where getting a phone call in is very difficult.

But as you continue to share the information, you stay on their list and then they will refer people to you. You may be able to, though, get in touch a lot easier with maybe a school counselor or maybe another therapist in another practice. But either way, you start building these relationships with other professionals who actually serve the people that you are wanting to help.

Then the other thing that we are going to do is we are going to look at automating some of these things that we’re talking about because you can use automation tools. The power of automation, right? so use automation tools for like, know, scheduling emails because you want to keep in touch with all of these people that you happen to be networking with. You want to keep in touch with your clients if they give you permission. So you, you know, put it in your intake packet.

Camille McDaniel (31:31.06)
May we send you, may we use your email in order to send you this newsletter or monthly newsletter or whatever. But if you get their permission, then you can keep in touch with them. And I’ve told you in previous episodes that every time we send out a newsletter, we have clients who we haven’t seen in a while decide to come back. And some of them, like they just need a refresher. Some of them life has just gotten super.

busy and zany and they just kind of fell off but they are like I really need to be back in counseling. you know it just helps in a multitude of ways. And that frees up your time if you can do things automatically. If you can schedule like if you happen to share things on social media for your practice if you can schedule it that helps tremendously. So you don’t have to be there to put every

every different piece of information out there, you can schedule it and it’ll go out automatically. You can send your emails and they’ll go out automatically. So it helps to free up your time. And that is exactly what we wanna do. Cause we want to gain freedom while we are building wealth. So it’s not just about the income though, but it’s also about

having flexibility in our time, having great impact in the work that we do. So there’s less reliance on just the one-on-one. Those are still great. I see clients in my practice all the time and I love my one-on-ones, but there is a comfort in knowing that if I’m not able to do a one-on-one, then there are other things that I have going on that can still buffer.

the time that or the income that I am not making when I am away from one-on-one sessions. So if I happen to get sick, if one of the family members has an emergency, if I have to take off unexpectedly for any reason at all, then there’s some buffer. And that’s all. We just want a buffer so that we can feel really, really relaxed in this journey. We don’t want…

Camille McDaniel (33:54.744)
We don’t wanna be high stressed, worried about what’s gonna happen if I don’t get this client, what’s gonna happen if I get sick. We don’t want that. So we want more time in our personal lives, more time to build a life even outside of the gifts that we have been given to counsel other people. We may even have desires to have other ventures.

Some of us have other things that we do. I know I do. My husband and I have a web design company and he’s like the lead designer and that’s pretty cool too. That kind of exercises something else in our brains because we’re really creative individuals. We’ve had that since, gosh, we have had spectrum sites now since 2017. So there’s just a lot of other things that some of us really love to do. Some of us wanna do the one-on-ones and

then we actually do something on the side totally unrelated, or maybe sometimes we’re doing something that is related but just in a different way, or just offering our expertise in a different way. But when you have freed up time, then you can be that level of creative, and that’s kind of nice. That really is nice. So when we’re talking about the financial freedom, we are talking about multiple sources for revenue. We are talking about being able to scale.

So you have the potential for your income to grow beyond just the direct client hours. We are talking about passive income. Passive income does not mean passive work. So passive income does require that you do work on the front end so that it becomes passive later on where you don’t have to necessarily do a whole lot. And this helps our saving in our investing plan because we can now diversify the way that we…

you know, put our income into use for our future goals. And we don’t have to worry about how many more clients we have to get in order to diversify our portfolio, our financial portfolio gives us a lot of freedom. so, you know, understanding that you’re not just a therapist, but the owner and the strategic director of your business and that this involves delegating.

Camille McDaniel (36:16.16)
It involves outsourcing. It involves focusing on growth. It involves planning. know, this is a business. You’re at the helm. It’s not just the one-on-one. There is so much more that goes into it. And it’s about taking small steps so that you can have big impact. You don’t have to do everything at once. You do not have to do everything at once. Start with one strategic marketing effort. Start with one of the things that we talked about.

and slowly just build from there, okay? So it’s about bridging the gap. We don’t wanna be constantly hustling to sustain our growth and our ownership of the practice. We don’t wanna do that. We wanna be able to rest. We wanna be able to enjoy our lives with our friends, with our family, with our loved ones. We want to work smarter, not harder. So.

I want you to identify one strategic marketing idea from today’s episode that resonates with you. And I want you to commit to taking a small step this week. One small step. Think about what owning the business really looks like for your life and your practice. And I want you to explore additional resources. Some are listed on the Christ in Private Practice website for strategic marketing.

think about online course creation, think about business coaching, your expertise is valuable. It is time to leverage it and not just for your client’s wellbeing, but for your own wellbeing and freedom.

Until we meet again, God bless.