Inside this short 15 min free training video I’ll show you:
1. The road map for building a thriving counseling or coaching private practice
2. Different strategies or creating clients and you should apply them
3. How to build a system for client creation that will serve you and your clients for years to come
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About the 6-Figure Practice Program:
The Six Figure Practice with Sasha Raskin, is an online program and community for helpers such as counselors and coaches, who are building their private practice. If you’re looking for a clear, step-by-step road map for creating and marketing your private practice, you’re at the right place!
My name is Sasha Raskin. I’m a Number 1 Best Selling Co-Author in 12 Countries, a Doctoral student in Counseling Education and Supervision, a coach, a psychotherapist and an adjunct faculty at a graduate counseling program at Naropa University.
One of the things I’m enjoying the most is helping other therapists and coaches build their successful private practice so that they could actually help the clients they were taught to help, and thrive themselves. I’m almost always fully booked, so my ability to work with individuals is limited. That is why I’ve created this program to deliver powerful results and create a community where you will feel supported by each other!
This program’s primary goal is to help you build a thriving private practice, in a fun and authentic way. Counselors and coaches invest an incredible amount of time, money, and effort into building their helping skills. However, when their training ends, they usually find themselves lacking the business skills that are needed to start and run a successful private practice, feel isolated, discouraged and not knowing where to start.
I believe that to be truly helpful to others, therapists and coaches have to learn to thrive themselves and definitely know how to get clients whom they can help.
This is where this program comes in. If you’re willing to learn and work hard, a 6-figure private practice is within your reach in a year – 2 years. This program will give you a clear outline, and detailed instructions on how to get there.
Private Practice Marketing | How To Create A Thriving Counseling or Business Private Practice
If you want to build a six figure private practice where you constantly earn more than $100,000 a year which is totally doable by the way, in one year to two years you can just make it happen even if you’re starting from scratch. You need to have a system though, which is a predictable step-by-step plan with automated things in place that lead potential clients to you consistently. And not just clients, your perfect clients, the people that you actually would enjoy working with.
Now I had 15 years of marketing agency experience, that’s a marketing agency that I had, and even with that experience when I graduated from my master’s program I still had to take countless programs and trainings and literally hundreds of books that will give me the necessary skills to really understand sales, really understand marketing, understand how marketing works for when talking with potential clients in such areas as counseling and coaching where it’s so important to be really authentic. And really understand how to write a marketing copy that actually sells because honestly no one really cares about your trainings or about you so much, right? People only care can you help them with their problem and do you have what it takes to do that, right? And do you really understand them.
So I really wish that I had this one program that would have it all back in the day that will teach me mostly what to do, the one thing to do every time, right? Not this overwhelming amount of information but, okay, first you go and you build your website, then you do that, then you do that, then this is how you get your first client and what are the next steps. So that is what I did with the Six Figure Practice program, and I’ll tell you about the whole framework right now so you could right after this video can go ahead and start creating that system.
So in the program we talk about three things, it’s a pretty simple system – first you need to be found, then you need to attack and connect with your potential clients, and then you need to turn them into clients.
Now I asked so many times what’s your biggest challenge my potential clients before we started working together and the participants in the program, it’s always the same thing, it’s more of the first part, at least they think this is the most important thing – how do I get clients actually, how can I get found, right? I kind of I can wing it and maybe I can do a phone consultation, but at least I need someone to call me first. And that part is what we are going to cover today. So the easiest way to look at being found online is using the hunter-farmer framework, and I’ll tell you what I mean.
Back in the day there were a few ways to get food, so if you think about getting clients as getting food, there are a few ways you can do that, different strategies – hunting, farming and I’ll actually add another one to the mix which is gathering. They differ those three strategies in the time that it takes to apply them and the amount of risk that you’re taking financially and in its predictability.
The biggest mistakes that I see coaches and counselors do is using (a) the wrong strategy at the wrong time, not using all three of them, and, well, the obvious – not knowing about those strategies from the first place and having so much information out there and all those conflicting messages on how do I actually stop. So let’s talk about those three.
Hunting, if you think about it there is kind of a big risk when you go and hunt an animal. This is by the way not a nutrition advice, I’m a vegetarian, this just a metaphor to show the different strategies. So there is a risk, right? But I can go out there and I can bring an animal home to eat pretty much right away.
Farming takes much longer. I need to wait a year for the crop to come in, but I’m not really risking my life per se.
And with gathering it’s kind of random and unpredictable. I can go out there and it’s pretty easy, it looks easy to pick but it might not be as effective as the first two strategies.
So let’s talk about hunting, and why hunting? Because this is the first strategy that you need to be using during the first at least three months of your private practice. So let me show you how it goes.
When you have a private practice let’s say you just started or you have one two three clients, what you do you do one to three months of hunting, then you start doing a little bit of farming and you have gathering in place and then it switches. So you’re probably asking yourself, “Yes, metaphors. And what exactly is it,” right?
Hunting is just three things that you need to be focusing on – your website, the content on your website, the biggest one being not the visuals but the text that would actually convince the person to reach out to you, and the third one is a system to bring people to your website which is the best system is by far Google Ads, so paid advertising that you know will put you when you want on the first page in Google for the keywords that you want to bring potential clients to your website. And if the text is good and the website is good they will call you.
So once you have that system in place you have this cyclical thing of people reaching out to you.
So what is farming? Farming is everything that’s free online advertising and offline advertising, offline being anything that you do in terms of relation creations and referral creation.
What are the disadvantages and advantages of those two systems? When you pay for paid advertising, of course, you invest money but you know that you’ll be getting inquiries and clicks on your website. It will cost you money though, right? So when you stop paying your website disappears from the search results.
When you’re using farming strategies like search engine optimization, like writing blog posts, like content marketing, like podcasts and vlogs and YouTube channels and many other things. And offline strategies like having coffees with your colleagues who potentially already have almost full by their practice and want to have someone they trust to refer to just for an example, and building your network of referrals. All those don’t actually cost you money.
So the wonderful thing about farming strategy is that your website will start ranking higher with time and it won’t cost you a thing. And when people click it you don’t pay, right? It’s not paid advertising.
The thing is it takes about a year to two years to really with a lot of consistent work to get to the first page of Google for the specific keywords that you want to get ranked for. For example, if someone looks for a business coach in Toronto and you want to be found when someone Googles business coach in Toronto you do all those farming strategies and you get to the first page, it will just take time.
So why do you need all of those two strategies? And I’ll talk about the third one in a moment, because you need to have clients right away, right? Both this is a psychological win and your perception changes when you have a lot of clients, it’s like, “Oh, okay, I’m doing this, I have clients, I’m serving people and I’m getting paid for it.” That’s a wonderful feeling that gives you momentum to continue building your private practice. And you want it to happen fast and efficiently. And you’ve linked the base for the farming as well.
So once you have let’s say 10 clients for a counselor, you can already, or maybe you have five clients, you can already start doing farming strategies. We don’t have time to talk about them today, but for an example – writing blog posts that contain keywords like business coach in Toronto, right? So Google thinks, “Oh, this is a website that talks a lot about that.”
Now time passes and there will be this tipping point where you don’t have to pay for advertising anymore, and that’s where you want to be. I haven’t been paying for my coaching or counseling private practice for advertising probably for more than a year. And last week I had eight consultation calls, so I paid zero and I still get clients who are interested in me. By the way, when you have a really good website and a good text people are already convinced to work with me, right? They maybe just want to check the price or to feel if it’s a good fit over the phone, but when I say, “Well, do you have any questions for me?” They already usually they say, “Well, when can we start? We already feel we kind of know you from your website,” right? So that’s an important thing.
The third strategy, I meant to tell you about gathering just a little bit because it’s such an unefficient strategy, and on the flip side that’s the one that counselors and coaches use the most. This is signing up for counselors or coaches listings like Psychology Today. It’s wonderful, nothing against Psychology Today or Thumbtack or some other ones, and there are constantly new ones. The thing is you can’t count on it. There are so many counselors there that you won’t be building your client base based on that. So it’s important to understand that having a listing on a website when you compete with so many others is not a strategy.
What I see usually is people get phone calls during the first month, maybe a little bit, and then it just kind of dies out? So you need to start with hunting and continue to farming.
I hope this has been helpful. There’s a button below this video, click on it and let’s talk. I’ll tell you about the program where we can actually build your private practice and go to six figures, okay? Take care.