Today join Sasha for an in-depth discussion on increasing your revenue within your counseling or coaching practice.
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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.
How To Increase Revenue Part 2: Three Ways to Grow a Business
Today I want to talk about the three ways to grow your business according to Jay Abrams who’s one of the leading marketing people out there who have been doing this for decades. And this is a second part in my conversation about different ways to increase your revenue in your private practice, whether you’re a counselor or a coach, it doesn’t really matter because the same principles apply.
So the first way to increase your profit is increasing the amount of clients. The second one is increasing your prices. And the third one is increasing the frequency of repurchase, basically the amount of sessions.
Now why are we talking about money if we’re here to do counseling or coaching, right? Well, I’m pretty sure that if you graduated from a master’s program in counseling you definitely did your part in terms of putting the time and the money and the effort to grow your counseling skills. The same thing, if you invested in a coaching program that’s, well, for the lack of a better word, decent, beyond just one weekend you definitely know more than enough to already start working with clients.
So if you’re thinking about how to incorporate your ability to help clients with a sustainable business, basically helping adults to create the changes that they want in their lives and at the same time making a comfortable living for yourself and making it a sustainable thing, right? Because the last thing that you want is let’s say you went to a coaching program for a year or three years of a counseling program, the last thing you want to do is start a private practice, put in the time and the effort that it takes into growing that and grow it to a point where you’re not getting the results you want, basically not enough clients or not enough revenue to keep going, right? So by not building a business, as a business not as a hobby, you’re not doing yourself or your clients any favors. So that’s why it’s important to take care of the business part in your business, not just chase one certification or training after another.
It’s kind of like if you’ve been trained in a classical music instrument, you will notice that your teacher when you play this they will focus on that little part where you get stuck at instead of playing the piece again and again and again, right? So if you’re pretty solid with your counseling or coaching skills it’s important to learn how to constantly grow your business.
So let’s talk about the first part, increasing the amount of your clients, that’s probably the one element that comes to mind first when people think about how to grow their businesses. And the ways to do that, first of all you have to have your marketing systems in place. By the way, what’s the difference between just marketing and marketing systems? You want to have a predictable stream of new clients; it’s not enough to have random inquiries where you don’t really know where this client came from. You want to be able to predict, “Okay, in a week I have approximately let’s say five consultation calls that will schedule by clients. Out of those 75% become clients,” let’s just say. “I finish working with a client on average after a year, if I’m a counselor.” And then you can create that predictability that people so crave when they stay employees for years, in the process of building their own business.
Now when you have a marketing system in place you know exactly what is the journey that your potential client is going through, and you know where are the places that you are being found, right? And that can be done through paid advertising, free advertising, Google Reviews. You can know what happens when they go to the website, right? Because you crafted a marketing text that’s really, really good and actually motivates people to contact you.
And you also have the logistics in place to have your potential client book their first session with you because you’ve taken care of all the steps between those two, from the moment they schedule a call with you to having a consultation call where you have a very specific set of questions that increases the amount of your conversion rates. A good one by the way is three out of four, 75%, you should be able to close, close is more of a sales word, but honestly it’s important to look at consultation calls as sales calls. So if it’s a good fit for you and the client and those are your perfect clients who reach out which you definitely should do, when three out of four are saying yes to working with you then you’re at a good place. If not, then you need to improve that step as well, not just how people find you but how you convert as well.
And if it’s a counseling client they actually don’t become a client until they come back to the second session, right? So that’s important too and we’ll talk about that in a moment.
Another way to increase the amount of clients is with time increase the amount of services that you offer. So for example, if I have counseling clients who I work with and we work mostly on depression and anxiety, and one day I decide, “Well, I want to start I group, a support group, to help people with their social anxiety specifically,” right? So something that I can do is to offer to the clients that I already have or past clients that I know are dealing with social anxiety and I know it would be helpful for them to talk about that in a group setting and to practice it, I can offer that to them as well, right? So this is not about serve as much as you can, of course, this needs to be done within the ethical boundaries of is it actually going to be helpful for your clients. So that’s important.
Now referrals, building referral sources, another way to increase the amount of clients and this can be done by networking with your colleagues, networking with people that are in similar industries that complement yours. For example, if I’m a couple’s therapist I might connect with a few divorce lawyers and we can help each other by sending each other clients. That’s one way, for example. So this can be done online, this can be done offline.
And another big one especially if you are a coach is reviews. So every successful case study basically, every client you helped in the past can create future clients. They might be telling their family members and friends about you, and if they leave a review for you on Google Reviews, for example, that might be by itself creating clients. It’s so much more impressive when I read about someone, a potential coach I want to hire from the words of their clients, and it’s just so much more impactful.
So let’s talk about the second one, increasing prices. This is one that especially counselors struggle with, and I get it you want to be as helpful as possible, and also how do you make a living at the same time, right? So I created a separate blog post about that, how to price your services in a smart way that is both fair and makes sense business-wise. And then just to start ask yourself, “When was the last time you gave yourself a raise?” Or maybe you’ve been charging the same thing for years, maybe it’s time to increase your fees by a little bit. It might be good to do that with existing clients or just with future clients – you decide.
And ask yourself why are you charging what you’re charging, right? Is it from a place of fear? Is it from a place of it actually makes sense? So that’s all important.
Now you can also experiment with it and see, for example, if you have a consultation call tomorrow you can try out and say a different fee than you had yesterday, and see what happens, right? Just give yourself the opportunity to experience reactions from your clients that you maybe thought would be different.
So as I said in that blog post, when some of my clients give themselves a raise and tell their clients, “Well, I’m going to be raising my fees by that amount in a few months,” many times the clients would say, at least some of them, “Well, it’s about time.” True story.
The third way to grow your business is increasing the frequency of repurchases, so basically the amount of sessions. How do you do that ethically in a way that actually helps? Well, it’s different for counselors and coaches, but with counseling it actually starts with the first session. I know some counselors that … well, pretty much everyone probably had the experience of a client coming for the first session and then they don’t come back. Why is that?
It’s important to understand that as a counselor you’re in the business of hope. If your client doesn’t believe that (a) you can help them, (b) they can help themselves, they might not even try to do so. So it’s important to remember that the first session that you have with your clients has a very, very important purpose which is to help your client to come back to the second one.
How do you do that? First of all you are, I love the strengths-based approach and basically showing them that there’s a possibility for them to create the change they want in their lives based on their successes in the past, so that’s one way. What I love doing is to already create some change even in the session. So I’ll give you a few examples.
When I work with a couple, in the first session beyond just getting some important information I show at least one strategy that they do practice with each other during the session to have a better positive experience of each other, responding to them, right? So that they can see, “Oh, okay, so a change is possible and it’s possible sooner than I thought.” Or when I work with my ADHD clients, clients with ADHD that I do coaching with, we talk about their biggest challenge this week and then we create some movement with it during the session inside and preparing to take action, right? So it’s super important to have this proof in the first session that things can be different.
And that’s where many counselors and coaches miss the point when they do the first session just as an introduction conversation, “Tell me about yourself?” It’s great, it’s important, and if I’m as a client only get to talk about myself and that’s pretty much all I get from the first session I might feel a sense of missing out.
So that’s in terms of what counselors can do.
Coaches, same if you charge for a session and my goal for every coaching client I have is to move towards working with our coaching packages as soon as possible. And that’s for many reasons, but basically when someone signs up for 12 sessions or 24 sessions, for example, those are the two coaching packages I have, they commit to that amount of work which in a way can already contribute to their success. And it provides a predictable amount of income for you, so you know, “Okay, this person I’m going to work with for at least 12 sessions and that’s in the contract.”
So that’s very helpful both for the coach and for the client, because I notice when I do coaching usually around fourth or fifth session after this initial excitement that your coaching client has they will probably stumble upon this plateau or a dip in energy level, right? So if they have the opportunity to move through that because they already paid for 12 sessions so like, “I might as well do the work,” it’s a great way to make sure that they actually achieve the results that they want by the 12th sessions of the 24th session despite the challenges on the path.
So that’s the gist of it. Again, just to recap, there’s three different ways of growing your business, (1) increasing the amount of clients, (2) increasing your prices, and (3) increasing the frequency of the purchase or the amount of sessions.
Now guess what? You don’t have to choose one, you can combine, right? First of all, of course, what feels good to you. And if let’s say you’re charging, for the sake of round numbers, 100 per session and you have 10 clients a week so you’re earning 1,000 which is 4K a month, right? Let’s say a client stays with you for three months, just for the sake of round numbers, so you can increase the price by instead of 100 to 125, give them a notice two months from now you’ll increase your fees by 25. So that adds 250 a week. So another thousand a month if I’m doing my math, right? Not blame it on my ADHD. So if all those clients stayed with you only three months you just created 3,000, just by giving yourself a raise of 25 bucks per session during those three months. Pretty cool thing.
Now let’s say you work for a year, you increase the amount of your clients to 20, if that’s what you want, and you gave yourself that raise of 25. So guess what? Those 5,000 if I’m not mistaken that you’re making in three months become 10K in three months, right? Multiplied by four you will be making 40K a year. I hope I’m right.
Anyways, if they stay with you for longer than three months you just created those additional clients without even gaining no one else, right? And in the blog post that I did about, the first part of this series about increasing your expertise, will definitely help you with clients staying with you, recommending you and you just being able to help them so much faster and so much more efficiently.
So I hope it’s been helpful an, I’ll see you in the next one.