Evan Correy, a counselor, who primarily focuses on therapy for trauma, shares his path in starting and growing his mental health private practice before, during, and after finishing the 6-figure practice program where he learned and successfully applied marketing for counselors.
Thriving in a Private Practice
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Hi, Evan.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Hey, Sasha.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Hi. So thank you for joining. It’s a good opportunity to talk about what you do and some of your experiences in building your private practice, and as well as the experience of being a part of the six-figure practice program. Does that sounds good?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Sounds beautiful, Sasha.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): So a few details about you and your business, what do you do, who you help?
Evan Correy (Counselor): So primarily I work with trauma and all that entails, often manifesting as depression and anxiety or simply not being comfortable with people not being clear about who they are, what they’ve been through or not being able to come to terms with something that they’d experienced or integrate that into who they are today. I do that in an individual session, I also do that with families who are struggling to overcome a painful event or even help the transition with a teen or a child, kind of figure out who they are, moving past events, and how to deal with that as a family.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): So you’re offering individual counseling, family therapy.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah, and I do a similar thing for couples as well.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Wonderful. So tell me, and you have a mental health private practice, you’re a licensed social worker, is that true?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah, I’m a full … I’ll be fully licensed … and I’ll be applying for my full licensure in about a week or two I think.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): And when did you start your private practice?
Evan Correy (Counselor): I started my private practice about in October of 2019.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): So that would be, what, about half a year ago.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah, about half a year ago.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Okay, wonderful. So why did you decide to join the six-figure practice program in the first place?
Evan Correy (Counselor): So I had opened my private practice, I had gotten the business piece set up, I had come the office space, I had done all the tax stuff I needed to do. And I knew that I need to be marketing but I wasn’t sure how, I wasn’t sure how to start attracting these new clients, I wasn’t sure how to start getting myself out there or getting noticed by clients, especially in Boulder which has a very high density of mental health practitioners.
And I created a Psychology Today profile but I had gotten maybe one hit over the course of three or four months, and that was it.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): And we talk about the different strategies in the course, the gathering, hunting, battering and farming. That’s a gathering strategy, right?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yes.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): It’s easy to do, it takes 500 words to put yourself in a directory, but it’s not very efficient as you say.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah, it kind of pays for itself over the year but that’s about it.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, it’s not sustainable in terms of clients are coming in. So I have a question for you, so you’re saying, “Well, I didn’t know enough about marketing, I didn’t know what to focus on.” Usually when people don’t know they just go and Google, so I bet you did that as well, how to do marketing. Why did you need a program? Wasn’t it enough just to Google that information?
Evan Correy (Counselor): So I Googled the information and I got information like, “Oh, you should connect with your clients; write what you want to write.” But I didn’t really write about what you want … the clients you want to see. But that wasn’t super helpful for me, I didn’t really have a way to put into words or a way to kind of create that step-by-step way of figuring out the clients that I did want to work with or the way I wanted to put myself out there in a way that felt authentic to me. It felt very easy to follow someone else’s model, but I didn’t really like doing that, I didn’t really … I didn’t want to put myself out there in a way that didn’t feel authentic because I wanted to get clients that felt good and I didn’t want to just burn myself out two years down the line.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): So what wasn’t helpful about the information you found?
Evan Correy (Counselor): It felt very … it felt very cookie cutter, it doesn’t feel very tailored to what my needs were as a growing clinician, a lot of it felt like for people who were trying to grow their practice from an existing one or just offering kind of generic marketing strategies, but not specifically how to help me craft my website or craft my marketing in a way that was useful to me or authentic to me.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Got it. So one of the struggles in the beginning of your private practice was marketing strategies and how you can make it your own voice and authentic to you.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Uh-hmm.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): What were some of the other struggles you had in private practice at the beginning?
Evan Correy (Counselor): There was kind of just a sense of now what, not sure … there was a sense of just being isolated from other clinicians, there was not really knowing how to proceed or how to kind of keep drumming up interest once things had started to get off the ground. Essentially the biggest I didn’t really have a method for connecting with other clinicians, how to market myself in an effective way and I had a real hard time building up places to network or other people to connect with around this.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, so this idea of I build the base for my practice, right? I can start working, now what?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Exactly.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): So what are the biggest measurable achievements that you had as a result of the program during the program?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Oh, I built a website which was probably the single biggest piece, and people are … looking at the stats people are actually looking at it. I’m getting measurable … I’m still working on the SEO and I’m adding more content to it, but I’ve been getting people who have … are looking at it just from getting … from Google searches which had never happened before, in addition to people who just clicked on it from my Psychology Today profile, it’s … I did even after … just kind of doing some of this SEO and some of the search engine stuff I started getting a lot more hits than I thought I would, getting some more contacts than I thought I would.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, that’s good.
Evan Correy (Counselor): And there’s still plenty … there’s still more than has been described in the videos that I just haven’t had the chance to put in my website yet.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): That’s wonderful. So you finished the website that feels authentic to you, and we actually go through your website in the program, we do the case studies of some of the participants. And you’re saying, “Well, my website is actually being found online by strangers,” right? And you learned how to monitor it, and good for you that you’re actually monitoring, that information is power. And you learned SEO which is huge, the search engine optimization. I did the blog post about that yesterday and how scary it is for counselors and coaches, right? It sounds like this scary beast, SEO, right? But actually it’s not talking science, right? It’s not that difficult to do.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah, and something I just remembered, the prison model for a writing content was super helpful for me, since I would tend just to get stuck and not know how to structure and not know how to keep going, but whenever I got stuck I could look at the prison model, like, “Okay, this is where I need to pick up.”
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, wonderful. So the writer’s block sometimes gets even stronger for therapists or coaches who are thinking, “Well, what do I write about in my website?”
Evan Correy (Counselor): When I’m sitting one-on-one with the client the words come so much easier than if I’m sitting staring at the screen trying to reach this general ambiguous population, and the prison really helped with that.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): That’s huge, right? So in the process of going through a structured kind of process of writing your content that actually is marketing content, not just among you and what you studied, right? It needs to work and have people call you. You actually clarify it for yourself, right? What am I doing, who I want to work with, what are my perfect client’s problems?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Absolutely, and how to express that in the content.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, what was your experience in having phone consultations? We use a specific script and some theory about what actually makes a phone call work, so that when people do reach out they become your client. How was that experience for you?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Talking about the phone consultations?
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yes.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah, I found it helpful. I have never considered like having the scripts before and going through and writing down something that I can … even if I’m half asleep and I see that my business line is getting an incoming call I can pick it up and just have something to read off, and a place to get grounded before I have to answer … before I have to start kind of engaging in a way that … in a more therapeutic way I have the chance just to … I have a foundation or a base to pick that off so I have more time to connect with the client and give my kind of brain a chance to jumpstart.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Wonderful, and I think that the word script is actually a little misleading, right? This is not a telemarketing script.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah, but kind of maybe bullet points, a list of things to hit, a list of things to make sure that I tell every client and every questions that I need to ask every client, and that way nothing gets forgotten and everyone comes in knowing the same thing.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Did you actually see, measurably speaking, more clients during and after the program than you had before?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah, I definitely got more interests from my website during and after the program than I did before.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Wonderful. And I noticed that some people shared that they had some internal transformation … well, transformation is a big one, but changes in the way they view themselves as business people, their business, the possibilities of what’s possible, right? Did you notice any changes for you?
Evan Correy (Counselor): As well for me. It really hammered down the fact that this is … I am a small business owner, and that changed the way that I approached handling the business itself and the way that I approach doing private practice work.
It did help me solidify the way that I think about the clients I want to work with and more specifically the clients I don’t want to work with. But the biggest change for me was the way I think about the business as a whole or the private practice as a whole and the decisions I make about how to run that.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah.
Evan Correy (Counselor): The cost-benefit analysis, like I hired … because of this class I hired an accountant for the first time this year to do my taxes.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): How was that?
Evan Correy (Counselor): It is by far one of the best choices I’ve ever made.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Exactly.
Evan Correy (Counselor): The refund I got this year was more than I paid in taxes for the previous year, and so it’s just … little things like that, changing the way I think about the way I engage in the private practice rather than just kind of doing the clinic work just outside a clinic.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): So really understanding this is a business, and I can actually … well, I should actually run it is a business not as a hobby, right?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Absolutely.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Wonderful. And would you recommend this product, and if so, who would you recommend it to? And well, maybe you think this program might not be a good fit for everyone, who is this program not for from your personal view?
Evan Correy (Counselor): I’d say this program is a good fit for people who they started out their … they feel confident about their private practice skills and their schools with clients, but maybe haven’t had the chance to really find the niche they want to work in or haven’t really found the way to reach the niche they want to connect with and reach the type of client they want to work with especially if you’ve been working in clinics or agencies for a long time and are used to clients just kind of coming to you, this is a great way to find a way to start attracting the clients that you want to find.
For people it wasn’t as close of a fit I would say that we didn’t do some process but I think the group was a lot more … it was a lot more psycho ed … not psycho ed, but focused on strategies and things you need to do and how to reach those results and not so much a process group. So I feel if there’s a lot of feelings or anxiety around the group this may not be … and I don’t know if you’re going to make changes around this.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, I actually created as a result of our first case study program, I split the six-figure practice program into a self-paced, you can just go ahead, start today, and there are office hours once a month, at least that’s how it’s structured right now and there’s also a mastermind that goes on just six people tops and you go on for a year. And the same content is here and there, but one is for people who just want the information and the application and just want to do the work and maybe get some support once a month for a year, and/or for people that really need the support of the group and then once in two weeks for a year.
Evan Correy (Counselor): I love that.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): So different approaches for different people, totally.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Okay, so I guess if … with that trained in mind, that if you’re not really sure if you want to start a private practice, this probably isn’t the place to figure it out. This is for people who have already … either have jumped off the diving board or up on it ready to jump.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, totally. So what you’re saying, if I understand you correctly, there needs to be some level of commitment, right? “Okay, I’m going for this.”
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah, this isn’t the group to figure out whether or not this is the career step you want to make.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, so true. Well, Evan, thank you so much for the input. And it was so wonderful to have you in the good. And I’m really glad to hear that you’re being found more, right? That was my main goal behind this program. I see even friends and colleagues who are struggling with getting found by clients and not having a predictable system, and that’s a shame, right? Especially coaching programs they still cost money and they still … some of them are very lengthy. And on top of it counseling programs, three years, hundreds of hours in internship and then you’re out there in the world, and what do you do with that, right?
Evan Correy (Counselor): Yeah. And most … my program certainly did not teach business.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, I haven’t so far came across any program in grad school or coaching programs that do teach that to the level that it would be enough to actually create your own business. So good news and bad news, bad news – you paid for clinical training or coaching training and you didn’t get what you actually need to be successful in business; good news – well, there are a lot of things out there like the six-figure practice program, other programs, working with a business coach. And I really practice what I preach, I’m part of two different programs of scaling from six figures to seven figures, working with an individual coach, with my own therapist, and it’s just exactly like what you said, the tax accountant and web developer, all those things, having a team to work with that can actually help me elevate my business. And in the long term also reduce the marketing efforts and time that it takes me, and just focus on helping people.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Absolutely.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Yeah, wonderful, Evan. So best of luck with everything.
Evan Correy (Counselor): Thank you, Sasha. And thanks for the program. It was good to see you.
Sasha Raskin (Business Coach & Couples Therapist): Ah, thank you.
The Six Figure Practice with Sasha Raskin, is an online program and community for counselors and coaches, who are building their 6 figure 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!
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About me:
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 business coach in Boulder, a couples counselor in Boulder, 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 6 figure 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.
