Principles driving the growth of my mental health practice
Many principles drove the growth of my mental health practice. At my retirement in 2019, the practice had over forty clinicians and ten support staff working in three locations, and […]
Build a More Valuable Practice by Focusing on Profit
Growing profit, i.e., Ebitda, is the easiest way to add value to an organization. But what does that mean? And how does one go about growing Ebitda? Let’s begin by […]
Reducing In-the-trench Psychotherapy To Focus On Practice Management
As a therapist/owner, it is difficult to know when to reduce one’s in-the-trench psychotherapy to focus on practice management. After all, you were the first producer of your primary service, […]
Growing pains: Hiring and training new clinicians
Developing a good process for hiring new clinicians is essential to your health as an organization. It is one foundational to your success as an organization. And we need to […]
How to grow consistent community marketing: Community Connection Plan
For the first 20 years of my practice, we struggled with our marketing our mental health practice. We needed to find a community marketing system that we all could embrace […]
How mental health businesses weathered the health care storms
Mental health practices have weathered many storms through the last decade. Here is an analysis of how we have done.
From nothing to something: The beginning of my practice
The following summarizes the beginning of my practice. My goal is to use my early experiences as a case example. I reflect on some lessons that may be of more […]
Growing pains: Outgrowing your brand and how to fix it
Over the years of growing our practice, we found ourselves outgrowing our brand. My practice started as a partnership–until my partner took a university job. Then it was just me–until […]
5 best marketing favorites in psychotherapy practice
I presented a workshop at a hospital on practice development. I had just gone over our marketing favorites when a participant raised her hand. She said, “Yes, I get that […]
Using staff complaints to make your organization great
Staff complains, and managers listen. But understanding staff complaints and then properly interpreting them is one of the key things that good managers do. Over the years, I have noticed […]
From nothing to something: Beginning of an organization
The beginning of an organization is a story worth considering. Each has its own history. No two are alike. This is the story of the early history of Centennial Counseling […]
Developing deeper referrer relationships: How to broaden your reach
Whenever a clinician begins a new referrer relationship, that clinician becomes the point person for that connection. And we want the clinician to nurture that referrer relationship until the point […]
Dilemmas of success: Do it myself or delegate
If you are fortunate enough to grow, you will soon discover an additional challenge–having too many referrals to manage. While this may be a welcome relief from earlier struggles, it […]
Ten examples of culture change in one organization
Using the history of the organization I led (Centennial Counseling Center, P.C.) I have highlighted ten examples of decisions our leaders made that changed our culture. In essence, our understanding […]
How to use meetings to build your workplace culture
Once your organization reaches a certain size, building a strong workplace culture needs to become more organized and formalized. Certainly, the leadership of every organization should spend time thinking about and then […]
How many referrals do you need for a full caseload?
One of the early concerns when starting to build a practice is how to have enough referrals for a full caseload. I suggest that 1000 sessions per year is a good […]
How to accelerate the building of a full-time caseload
How long does it usually take to build a full-time caseload? In my experience, when one is starting from scratch in a new community and one takes the typical approaches […]
A marketing video on a practice-wide marketing system
This marketing video lays out some of the details of how we developed a systematic way of marketing a mental health practice to the community. It includes a low-key method […]
Creating demand by marketing
Practices succeed when they market services to the community they reside in a consistent, congruent, and appealing way. But creating demand by marketing does not come natural to many of […]
Running out of tricks: Middle therapy
One of the frequent conversations that comes up in supervision is on middle therapy. Usually middle therapy is defined as the period after 20 sessions when things seem to find […]
Client Retention Part I: Is it good for clients to stay longer in therapy?
Several good things come from the ability of clinicians to retain existing clients, i.e. the art of client retention. From a business standpoint, clients staying in a clinician’s schedule helps […]
Client retention Part II: Beyond the therapist’s control
There are many factors that contribute to client retention. Many of the most powerful are not related to anything the therapist can do or not do. I am referring to […]
Client retention Part III: How to retain clients
In 2011 Centennial, the organization I managed, began tracking client retention numbers for our therapists. We then compared them to the practice as a whole. As we shared those numbers, […]