Let's take a look at the simple math behind reaching 100K in yearly revenue as a mental health counselor in private practice while working not more than 4 hours a day, and taking 1 month off a year! Get your calculators ready! Let's brainstorm a gameplan for your business: http://bit.ly/practicegameplan
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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.
Transcription
The 100K math of a thriving therapy private practice or coaching business
Founder of the 6 figure practice. And today we're going to do some math. I know you probably didn't go into this profession, whether you're a counselor or a coach or both, to do numbers. But I think some numbers are important if you have your own business.
And I want to make it simple in terms of thinking about the possibility of having a successful business while helping others and also not sacrificing yourself or your lifestyle or your loved ones, right? Because some of the problems that I see that counselors and coaches have when they have their own business is they're either burnt out or they don't have enough income or not enough clients. And those extremes are not doing them or the clients any good.
So let's look at the benchmark, it's a round number - 100K a year. And I talked a few times about why it's a good benchmark to have in your private practice. So let's look at some figures. I won't repeat myself why it's a good business matrix today, you can look at the other podcast episodes. Today we will just look at one scenario. And my suggestion is get your calculators because it can be helpful to actually do the math together.
Many times especially when counselors just graduate and they don't have the experience of actually talking about salaries or fees or anything like that during the counseling programs, and especially given the sad stats of counselors in the US making not more than 34K a year on average and holding a second job usually not in their field, and most coaches not making more than 10K a year for some it's difficult to imagine a situation where they're both helping clients and not charging too much and making more than 100K a year. And it's totally doable, so let's look at the math.
So the scenario we're going to look at is you are working only five days a week, you are working for only four hours a day, right? So no more than four sessions. And you're not working every week, you're taking one full month off each year. And that being said, you're still making more than 100K and while charging less than the average of what the highest end is. So let's do the math. I hope you have your calculator ready.
So first of all the range for therapy at least, it starts probably with $5 on the lower end, that's the lowest, lowest, lowest I saw in organization I was involved with, and to 600, right? Stan Atkin, for example, being the expert he charges 600 per session for one hour and his sessions are three hours for couple's therapy. And of course, it depends on the area you live in. And I'll be talking just about private pay today to make things less complex.
Now the average for a 45 to 60-minute session in the US is between $60 and $120, right? So what if we don't even charge $120, what if we just charge $110 per session? So let's do the math. So 110 per session and let's multiply it by 20 which is 20 billable hours a week, meaning you work only five days, not more than four sessions a day, right? So 110 multiplied by 20. Let's multiply it by 4.3 - this is the average amount of weeks in a month, right? Because it changes. And let's multiply it by 11 months, not 12 months because you're taking one month off, right? Having a good lifestyle, having vacation, spending time with your loved ones on the holidays.
And that all amounts to, drum roll, $104,060. You just crossed the 100K a year while not charging on the higher end of the average. And not being burned out because you're all working only four hours a day and only five days a week, right? So you have a weekend of two days.
And let's add on top of it. So I'm not a tax accountant, right? So that's one caveat to this conversation. But if you're filing as an S corporation, again, this is not a tax advice, I'm just saying that this is what's possible. In some instances you can pay instead of paying around 30% from your income as an employee you could be paying around 15% in yearly taxes, which means that your taxes by half as well. And money that you're not paying is money ... is same as income, right? So your income increases because you're paying less taxes.
So it's not that difficult to reach that. It's just ... well, let's call it what it is - at the beginning in your private practice when you're setting it up even though you want to get to that 20 hours a week in this scenario working with clients you'll probably be putting more work on the business end and less on working with clients, right? You'll be putting your time into building the marketing systems, the operations and the sales, all words that sadly are not mentioned when you're getting your training in helping skills, right? But all those need to be set up at first.
So you're paying your dues with building your business at first while not working with a lot of clients. But gradually it starts shifting, right? You're doing less and less of marketing and the business stuff and the operation side is already set up and running smoothly if you set it up correctly, and the amount of your clients increases.
And if you're doing your marketing the right way you're basically building automated systems that work for you and they will continue to work with you and work even more efficiently. For example, if you're doing some content marketing, writing blog posts and doing that in the right way you'll be consistently ranked up higher and higher in the search results, right? So that would be working for you.
Now, of course, if you offer higher fees, let's say not 110, let's say you charge a 150 or you charge 200. That actually allows you to give more sliding scales for clients that cannot afford that. So you can play with that. And in a way clients that can pay higher fees in that situation will be without really knowing about that paying for the clients who cannot afford higher fees.
And another option, let's say same scenario, you work four days a week ... sorry, four hours a week, five days. Oh, I got the math wrong, sorry. Four hours a day, five days a week. If you want you can even add one hour of pro bono a day, right? You'll still be working only five hours. You'll have four hours a week that you're doing pro bono work, right? And then you can charge 110 from the others.
So all I'm saying is you can totally make a good living while still offering sliding scale, still not overcharging and even offering pro bono if you set it all correctly. So I hope it's been helpful. I'll see you on the next podcast episode.