Beyond the Solo Practice: Steps for Expansion

Camille McDaniel (00:09.992)
Welcome back for another episode, Christ in Private Practice. I want to jump right in and talk to you this episode about expanding your practice and what it means to expand our practice because there some of us who are actually feeling called to grow and we may not even necessarily be super clear quite yet.

And some of us might be very clear on what that growth looks like. So are you being called to actually grow by adding more clinicians to your practice? Are you being called to grow by adding some digital services or other products? Digital might be a course that you create or it might be some online training or workshop. Some other service might be a workbook. It might be a book.

you you might have them both together, you know, there are a number of different things that you can do to expand. I know that mostly we are probably a little bit more aware of expansion when it comes to adding clinicians to your practice, but there are other ways. And so when we are called to grow, when we feel as though the father is just saying to us that we need to increase our impact in the world.

Just know that there are multiple ways to increase your impact and you just want to prey on what seems to be the path that you need to take at this particular season in your life. And then you want to take a look at what are the potential challenges that might pop up to make this a little bit difficult along the way. Because there is again, also the fear of failure, the fear of success we’ve talked about in other episodes.

And sometimes I kind of add some doubt, some doubt about whether or not we have the time to do it, whether we’re going to have the resources and the knowledge, are we going to mess up or what if this grows fast and then what do I do? You know, so there’s a lot of different things that could stand in our way. And if you are aware of that at the onset, you can start to challenge it now, start to kind of work through it now so that you are able to move forward in doing what it is that you’re supposed to be doing.

Camille McDaniel (02:32.374)
So let’s go ahead and like I was saying before, expansion can mean a lot of different things, but let’s look at what it could look like for you. It could mean that we are going to increase clientele, as in like the one-on-one client sessions that our practice offers.

It might mean that we diversify our services and we have impact in other areas, for example, like mentorship or clinical supervision, being able to specialize in helping certain populations, like niching down. It might be that we are, you know, leveraging our time and expertise in order to create courses or to create workshops or write a book.

write a workbook to accompany the book or just a standalone workbook. There are a multitude of ways that we can then expand our reach and to help whether it be helping the next generation of mental health professionals or whether it be helping individuals who are coming for counseling support or maybe a bit of both.

So we want to look at, while we are growing, make sure that it aligns with our vision and our mission and lines up with our ethical codes always. So that’s just some practical things that we want to consider as we are thinking about what it’s going to mean to expand for our business.

You know, as you’re doing that, you also have to make sure to take note of any ethical or legal considerations. Like, let’s say that you feel called to expand by adding more clinicians to your practice. And if that happens to be the case, then there are some things that you’re going to want to think through. Do you desire to bring on to your practice, like bring on board associate licensed clinicians?

Camille McDaniel (04:51.062)
or fully licensed clinicians. If you happen to bring on fully licensed clinicians, then there’s not so much of the concern about clinical supervision, but you definitely are going to want to be very intentional in the hiring process, and I’ll talk about that in a quick minute. If you happen to bring on associate licensed clinicians, then you are going to want to

have consideration for who might be offering them clinical supervision. And even if they are getting supervision outside of your practice, in order for their hours for state licensure to count, then they still need to have a director at the practice that they are checking in with that can vouch for how they’re doing. And so you are going to want to have still an idea of what this is going to look like.

if you have individuals who are associate licensed. You want to make sure that like if you happen to be a practice that accepts insurance, for example, are you going to be able to have your associate clinicians actually see your clientele? Some insurance companies are fine with associate licensed clinicians seeing their members.

Some insurance companies require that you have a special contract or additional stipulation in your contract. So you would need an addendum to your contract. And then there are some insurance platforms or insurance companies that do not allow it at all. So you’re going to want to double check with your state.

insurance carriers and then there are, for example, there’s some as far as I know, like Medicare, Medicaid do not allow associate licensed counselors to see their clients. However, however, that very well may differ depending on the business structure that you have. So if you happen to be a private practice where you have

Camille McDaniel (07:12.866)
mental health clinicians, no one who happens to be like a medical physician as well. There are some contracts that will possibly allow an associate license to see their members if there happens to be a doctor on staff and some accompanying medical professionals in addition to that doctor. So you have to really ask the insurance companies the questions.

make sure that you do your due diligence so that you do not commit insurance fraud and get yourself into any kind of trouble with with regards to that. Then there is like I was mentioning like the hiring process you want to be very intentional when you happen to be bringing people on and not necessarily just asking questions about how they help certain clientele with certain challenges.

you want to not only know if they are aware of the challenges and how to help them with the right theoretical orientations and the right process and all of that, but you want to actually get from them what is their operation as far as notekeeping? What are their ideas of proper notekeeping and timeframes that they think are reasonable to get notes in and how have they usually handled that in the past? And you know, and

start to kind of think through some of the things that might be administrative and how do they handle if they happen to be running late as it relates to clients and what are their thoughts on you know taking vacations and self-care and how do they take care of themselves and those things are important because if you’ve ever been in a group even if it wasn’t your own group because you’re just considering expanding but if you’ve ever been in a group practice

where individuals don’t take care of themselves and they work until they’re burned out, you know how that can then impact the whole practice. That can impact a whole number of clients who are on that person’s caseload. That can impact whether or not that individual’s able to rightly assess what needs to be done for their clients and then implement that. There can be a lot of different unfortunate domino effects.

Camille McDaniel (09:30.722)
person does not have some awareness of balance and be willing to practice that in their own lives, in addition to then other administrative tasks that might need to get done in a timely manner. So you want to ask some questions. You also want to ask questions that might give you an idea of that person’s personality. Why? Because when you happen to be creating a team, you do want to make sure that the atmosphere flows as nice as possible.

I mean, we don’t have a crystal ball, but these are things that sometimes go overlooked because we are focusing more so on their ability to see certain clientele. Do they have the skills? Do they have the training? Do they have the degree needed? And we might be overlooking some of the other things that make it a comfortable place to work that allow it to be a team approach. If you have more of a practice where you want there to be team and togetherness and helping one another.

versus some practices where that might not necessarily be the main focus and the main mission. It’s okay if everybody works independently, if people don’t really see each other and they don’t get to learn who’s on the team as long as they are helping the clients with a certain level of client satisfaction rate. So you wanna be clear on.

what your vision, what your mission is and does this individual that you’re bringing on fit into that mission, fit into that vision that you have for your practice? In addition to some of the the requirements for a licensure and you know keeping up to date with all of that, you want to ask yourself what structure of employee do I want to implement in my private practice? Do I want to have a W-2 employee?

Do I wanna have a 1099 contractor? There are some key differences between the two. You absolutely need to know this. So take a look at the IRS website because they break that down. Take a look at the Department of Labor website so that you don’t find yourself treating your 1099 contractor like a W-2 employee. That happens actually quite a bit where a 1099 contractor is brought on

Camille McDaniel (11:46.786)
but then they have like stipulations for certain meetings they must attend, certain hours they must work. Sometimes they’re even given certain perks like they’re an employee and you have to really be careful not to do that because you can find yourself in some trouble. Yeah, and in some trouble and find yourself possibly even in a way where you end up having to give the person certain benefits because you have been treating them.

under the wrong classification for a period of time. So yeah, go ahead and make sure to do the legwork when it comes to that as well. When it comes to insurance, and we’ve talked about that already as far as like, you know, the billing and what is allowed and how you have to do your research on that. Just also, you know, double check in about like credentialing. Do you want your clinicians to do their own credentialing?

completing all of their paperwork, keeping up with all of the needed, what liability insurance is and licenses and turning that into somebody, or will you be doing that for them? Some practices have people do it for themselves, some practices offer it as a, know, a courtesy, I guess you could call it. And so, and they will do it for them. So you just wanna be thinking about that, you know, in addition, when you’re talking about like, okay, what am I going to do?

if I bring people on and we are a practice that accepts insurance. That’s something to think about ahead of time. One of the things that also doesn’t really always get talked about, but we’re going to kind of reflect on that right now is your leadership style. As the owner of the practice, what is your leadership style? If you are not sure, take a self-assessment because this is

your ability to lead, to support, and to manage a growing team. You want to ask yourself, so if you’re an individual who does not really like having to talk to people and counsel them when they are kind of off track from the mission and the vision, because that feels too much like conflict for you and that really feels very uncomfortable and you would rather not do it, then you want to ask yourself if you want to expand in the way of

Camille McDaniel (14:11.006)
adding more clinicians. First of all, are you hearing the father correctly? And if you are, then he’s trying to kind of push through then something that might be a roadblock for you. And so you want to ask yourself, how am I going to work through this? And one of the ways that you want to probably start is

not looking at it like conflict at all. You’re not doing anything negative. It’s not conflict unless you’re talking to people in not so nice ways. We do want to make sure that we are addressing people as though they are our fellow human beings, right? And especially when we’re running faith-based practices, we want our light to shine, the light of the Lord to shine. We do not want it to look like we are walking contradiction.

So when you happen to be working with individuals, you want to reframe that it’s not about conflict. This is not about, even if the other person does feel a bit upset, this is about being able to not only protect the individual who’s working for you.

from missteps that could lead to trouble for everybody. But this is also, this is protecting them, this is protecting the clients, this is protecting the practice and the vision and the mission. So you are counseling them, you are providing guidance to them. Now sometimes that guidance comes with some rerouting, right? Some suggestion, some correction, but it’s not a negative. It may feel uncomfortable to the person receiving it.

But if it’s coming from a place of true caring, it really shouldn’t. We can lay down boundaries, we can add some insight into things that we saw that the person might need to work through or some corrections that they are going to need to make. And what you wanna do is you just wanna offer up what you need to. You want to document the date and the time that you offered up the corrections, the things for consideration.

Camille McDaniel (16:08.306)
And you want to put that away in the person’s file. Now, again, this is not, you might not have a W-2 employee, but this is very important because sometimes things do occur where you may have to mention things to people on the team, things they need to do or not do. And then time passes and maybe it comes up again, but you know what, it’s been a while and you don’t remember, did you ever address it or when you addressed it and how the, how everything worked out?

Because if you have to address it again, then you know, it’s good to have notes from before so that you can then show, hey, this is starting to become a pattern. Because we kind of talked about this before and let’s see what’s going on, you know, let’s see what’s happening. Let’s see if we can correct this. But if this is something that is really crucial to the business or it’s something that’s dealing with ethics, then you know, this also lays the foundation in case you

you know, we don’t like to talk about it, but in case you have to part ways from somebody in the future, because maybe it’s just not a right fit, maybe your practice is just not a right fit for them. And they’re not a right fit for the practice. And sometimes that does happen. Okay. So we want to take a look at what your leadership style is and how you feel comfortable addressing those things or how you can prepare yourself to get a bit more comfortable if that is what you desire to do.

Even if you don’t desire to add more clinicians to your practice, but you do expand your reach in other ways where you might get feedback from people like workshops or like it might be teaching courses or a book or workbook, you still want to make sure that you feel prepared. Like how do I do with feedback? How do I do? Because we do great with feedback and feedback is good, you know, but when the feedback is a little bit more constructive,

You know, do you feel prepared for that? Do you feel like you can accept that? You can hear that. You can take that into consideration. And if there are certain changes that you need to make, then you’ll go ahead and do that. We want to look at going back to if you happen to be considering bringing clinicians on, you just want to make sure that you have a structured onboarding process so that it’s just clear and is consistent across the board. So start actually

Camille McDaniel (18:30.19)
putting in writing if you hadn’t already, what are your processes and procedures for note taking and or not necessarily note taking, sorry, for documentation of clinical sessions and how do you handle if somebody happens to be called into court or record requests and things like that? Start just documenting how this will be processed. Is all of this gonna run through you as the

director of the the practice, is this going to run through like an admin assistant that you already have? You know, start writing down what your processes and your procedures are for how things are done at your practice if you plan on adding additional people. And if it’s not additional people, but it happens to be courses or it happens to be workshops or you know, anything else, again,

what is the process? How are you going to implement this? What are the procedures if somebody happens to have a complaint or a question or concern? How are you going to handle those things? then if it happens to be things where maybe like a book, a workbook, and how are you going to register the name? How are you going to protect your intellectual property? All of those things. You just want to kind of be able to consider.

It is important that we just know when we are expanding and it has to do with adding more people, we also want to, and this may not be a policy that’s for everyone, but just for yourself as the director, as the owner, you just want to have a communication and conflict resolution policy. How are you going to regularly check in?

with the members of your team to address any challenges that might be coming up for them? How are you going to just make sure that everything is still aligned? Everyone is in alignment with the vision and the mission of the practice. You want to be able to have a way that you can, know, professionally and empathetically like maintain a healthy work environment. And what does that look like for you? For some people it is just that, just checking in with people.

Camille McDaniel (20:51.576)
For some, it’s like acknowledging birthdays or it might be, you know, something else that, you know, is maybe little things that are brought to the office. If you’re virtual, what does that look like? If maybe no one is coming to an office, how do you kind of still keep in contact? So those are some things that you just want to kind of take a look at. And again, just make note if you plan on expanding as it relates to adding additional people to your practice. So.

whether it’s additional people or whether it’s a digital product or a physical product, what are some of the benefits of expanding? And so, well, you know, one of the benefits of expanding is that you are going to be expanding your gift. If you, you get to just help more people and, and whether you have additional clinicians or whether you have additional services in other ways.

you just get to help more people and it doesn’t have to be just you doing it. Cause there’s only one of you and there’s not enough of you to go around, right? So if you add to your mission and your vision, then you can have greater impact. And if you happen to have like a location where you operate out of, like I am in my counseling office, and if you have additional people in the office or

If you happen to have an office and you don’t expand with additional people, but you have different services that are going to be going forward, just like I’ve kind of talked to some of you about, or I’ve talked on certain episodes about how I wanted to be able to offer some additional trainings in the future, my summit, the summit that’s going to be happening in September is going to be able to offer continuing education. And I wanted to be able to continue to offer other.

opportunities for continuing education. That allows me to then expand my reach where I don’t necessarily have to specifically be there all the time because sometimes it may be live and then sometimes it may be recorded. And all of this, one of the benefits is that it can then start to lower overhead costs because you have now more than one stream of income.

Camille McDaniel (23:16.47)
in order to basically secure your vision and your mission, which allows you to actually do a bit more. You have a little bit more to work with. Right now, for example, we have a certain percentage that we say out of our, average number of our caseload, we then will take a certain percentage of that and be able to offer sliding scale or pro bono. Well, you know what, if your business is doing better,

you can then offer more for those who might need a little extra help, especially in this economy. So there are ways that being able to expand can definitely help you financially to just expand your mission and expand your impact and what you’re doing in your personal and in your business life. This allows you to support the community. That’s another benefit, right? Because when you happen to be, you know,

creating things that give more impact, whether you’re working with a team of people, more people, more clinicians, or whether you happen to be able to do things that help people like through a workshop, so you are still helping more people, but you you don’t necessarily then have the one-on-one, but the topic and the information allows more people to be helped all at the same time. Then you are participating in the health of

communities, wherever individuals are coming to you from, which means that then healthier communities can trickle into healthier individuals, trickle into healthier families, trickle into healthier communities. So this is one way for you to support not just the individuals, but influence families and communities, which is pretty cool. If you happen to expand, like even with your digital products, you can, you

you can find that like creating the digital product then can allow you to reach the right audience no matter where it is. So you don’t necessarily have to fly all the way to London, but you might be helping someone in London, you don’t have to go all the way to, you know, Persia, but you might be helping somebody there. So it’s really cool how like digital products can just, I mean, they can travel and physical products to books, know, workbooks or

Camille McDaniel (25:38.358)
or just the book alone, all of that, those are the benefits really of being able to expand your reach. Which is why maybe many of you are being called because whatever it is that you are doing can really reach with some creativity and how you’re going to get it done, can really reach people all over. When I take a look at Christ in private practice and like who’s listening and where are they listening from,

it’s really cool to see places like pop up like Ireland and you’re like, who in Ireland is listening? Like that’s so neat, you know, all the way in the United States. And so it’s like, who in Ireland is listening? Or one time I did see, I think I saw, I saw Ireland, I saw Jamaica. I think I definitely, I saw Canada because we have some Canadian colleagues who chime in.

definitely in the United States and in different parts of the US. I even saw Russia once and I’m like, this is so wild how sometimes it can just creep out all over the place. I think that’s really cool. So you definitely have the potential to create impact in spaces that you might not ever go to yourself physically, but your voice and your skillset is traveling there still.

So that’s really neat. If you happen to be building some digital products, I just will throw out there and let you know just a couple of things that I have looked into or I have used, and these are kind of platforms that you could consider. It just depends on what you’re trying to do. So when it came to digital products, as in the podcast that I’m on, for me, I use Riverside FM.

actually is riverside.fm and I find it to be really great for a lot of my needs. There are a lot of other places that people, you know, record their podcasts but that’s what I happen to use for my recordings. And then when it comes to like online courses, like I have a course or then I have the summit, I’ve used Kajabi, I’m using that for the summit. I’m not going to use that long term. Kajabi is a higher

Camille McDaniel (28:01.166)
price point that really unless you have your your stuff already rocking and rolling regularly and this is just my point of view but if you have your content rocking and rolling and it’s bringing in a good amount of money every single month then I think Kajabi can be a really great resource because they have a a platform that involves like you know you can do a podcast on it, you can do

your newsletters on it, you can also then the way that they have the newsletters, they have all kinds of AI integration. So it can help prompt you how to write certain things and send them out and when to send them out. It just kind of gives you a lot for for what you are paying. But if you happen to be in the building phase, for me, and I’ll and I definitely want to say because it depends on your your ability to kind of put these things together.

yourself. So you could easily have a newsletter list where you are already creating your own newsletters, you’re making them dynamic, you are you know you’re making them engaging, you already have a place where you might be offering courses for example like Teachable or like Thinkific. I used Thinkific, I actually have Thinkific for for one course. So

you can already kind of use those together. And then I think moving forward, I’m actually gonna even use something different altogether to just kind of keep it on my website and a little easier to manage. So you have a few different things that you can look at, but I would probably say again,

unless you have something rocking and rolling already doing really well with the income every month, then you might look at something like a Kajabi. But if you’re just, you know, just starting out and you’re like, okay, wait a minute, I just want to kind of see, then Thinkific, I think has really good price point when you don’t have but like maybe one, one course that you want to get started with. Teachable is, is another one that you can consider, not used them, but they’re out there. And then there’s some other

Camille McDaniel (30:08.554)
other things that people prefer as well to use. So always something to to kind of think about. You know at the end of it you really want to, you just want to first make sure that you’re hearing correctly from the Lord. So don’t rush yourself. I mean don’t be paralyzed but you know don’t rush yourself. Pray, make sure you really are getting the green light to use your gifts and talents in the ways that you feel called to.

Make sure you’re not doing it just because you saw other people expanding in different ways. It’s like, that’s awesome for them. That is always awesome when people are like, you know, allowing other people to get their knowledge, get their gifts and talents in dynamic ways. But don’t let that cause you to feel pressured. You’re on your own journey.

The Lord has you on your journey, just like he has me on my journey, just like he has the next person on their journey. So just stay focused on your lane and congratulate people as they are doing their thing. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what you’re called to do. So just make sure that you’re hearing clearly and that you are staying focused on your lane and not comparing yourself to anybody else’s lane. And he’ll get you going, right?

whether it happens to be with a podcast episode or whether it happens to be with something that you’ve heard in a consultation group or a buddy of yours online or somebody in person, you will find the information that you need. If you ask the questions, the people will help you and you will be able to then start growing and expanding your impact and your message, which is really awesome. So I hope that you have enjoyed.

this message today. I hope that you are going to be joining us for the summit because we don’t have much more time, only like a couple of weeks. And hey, the summit doors are going to close the day before the summit. So the evening of September 15th, the doors are going to close. And so I want for you to go ahead and make sure you get your ticket so that way you do not

Camille McDaniel (32:21.514)
miss out. I have actually had the had the ability to already hear like some some of the speakers have a pre-recorded presentation and I was like my goodness I could I could definitely I can I can feel the Lord all in that like this is is this is phenomenal and so information is going to be really dynamic and helpful so helpful to to counselors who are integrating their their faith.

into their practice, Christ-centered faith. So I look forward to seeing you there. I look forward to hearing from you. Again, if you have any questions about this episode, please drop information, share information. If you’ve already taken the journey and you want other people to know or to learn from some of the lumps and bumps in the road that you may have experienced. And if you have not already found us in the Facebook group, then you know where to go.

head on over to the Facebook group. Please complete the questions and we would love to see you and talk to you there too as well. So until next time, God bless.