One of the first questions I ask therapists and healers is: “What do you want your private practice to look like a year from now?” Perhaps you want to change your specialty, double your income, or start running groups. You need to thoughtfully design a bridge between your current practice and that future practice.
This bridge will allow you to use the success you already have to support your changes. You’ll continue moving forward thoughtfully, neither getting stuck nor rushing things in a clumsy way.
Let’s say you have a general therapy practice now and you’d like to become known for a specialty. Having a specialty is an excellent way to stand out from others and grow a practice quickly. The bridge to your future practice could include adding a page to your site about the specialty and writing articles for your blog about that topic. You could begin talking to your colleagues about your specialty. You can pay special attention to what is working best with the clients who come to you for help with this specialty. Build your expertise with these people while you also enjoy your general practice.
When you are ready to transition your website and your marketing away from reflecting a general practice and towards your new specialty, you will have plenty of content and experience to do the transition well.
Here’s another example: perhaps you want to charge much higher fees within a year. The bridge may be to look at your practice and examine what would need to be different in order to charge more. Look at your practice and how you’re presenting yourself, from your sofa to your shoes to your intake process. Ask for feedback from a trusted and honest colleague. Begin to clean up anything that holds you back from charging more. You might choose to maintain the highly valued clients you have now at their current fee.
As new clients come in to your more polished practice, your average fee will begin to rise.
One more example is moving from a one-on-one therapy practice to a practice in which you facilitate groups. Part of your bridge might be to create a one-day workshop. You could create this workshop around the topics your group will cover, and begin getting the word out to your community. This gives potential group clients a chance to know your work, and it gives your colleagues a chance to think of you in a new way. You can also ethically and thoughtfully build your email lists for both potential group members and potential referral partners as you are spreading the word about your one-day workshop.
What is the biggest difference between the private practice you have now and the practice you’d like a year from now?
If you need some help designing your bridge, sign up for a free 30-minute consultation now.