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Episode 188 : Tips to Getting Admin Support as a Small Group Practice with Uriah Guilford

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WITH URIAH GUILFORD

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  • Episode 188 : Tips to Getting Admin Support as a Small Group Practice with Uriah Guilford 00:00

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Hey Group Practice listeners! New podcast episode out today! In this episode, you’re getting a clip from this month’s expert training in the Exchange Membership where Uriah Guilford of The Productive Therapist walks us through what you need to get admin support set up as a small group practice.

In this episode we cover:

  • What admin support can offer you as you grow
  • How & why to admit you need help
  • Calculating the value of your time

This episode is sponsored by TherapyNotes. TherapyNotes is an EHR software that helps behavioral health professionals manage their practice with confidence and efficiency. I use TherapyNotes in my own group practice and love its amazing support team, billing features, and scheduling capabilities. It serves us well as a large group practice owner.

Do you ever wish for a financial therapist who could relieve you from the last few months’ bookkeeping, talk you off the edge when you’re running into issues with Quickbooks, or help you work through a profit plan for growth? GreenOak Accounting does just that! GreenOak Accounting is an accounting firm that specializes in working with group practices. Their value goes WAY beyond bookkeeping; they can help you get on track for financial success. Schedule a free consultation by going to http://greenoakaccounting.com/tgpe

Transcript:

Maureen Werrbach

Aziza – TGPE Member Experience Manager
So hi, everyone, I’m Aziza, the membership experience and Program Manager here at TGPE. We have Uriah today, from The Productive Therapist, he’s going to be talking about how to get admin support as a small group practice. So whenever you’re ready to start Uriah.

Uriah Guilford
Awesome. Yeah. I’m super excited to talk about this. It’s one of my favorite topics, as Maureen knows, and I’ve got a lot of information to share with you today. I’m not great at monologuing, I’ll do my best. But if you have questions, at any point, during what I’m sharing, please pop in the chat, and then Aziza will, will share that and feel free to stop me anytime. That’s totally, totally fine.

So I’m super glad that there’s a couple there’s 12 people here, this is awesome. I think most group practice owners are interested from day one, or from early on, in help getting help with building this thing that you’re building, because it takes a lot of time and effort and energy. And I think we all want to avoid burning out while we are building our group practices. So here, let me go ahead and share my screen here real quick. And what I want to talk to you about specifically is five simple tips for getting the help you need. And this, this could apply to anybody in the group practice journey, no matter what your size are, no matter the time period, you know, whether you’re in your first year or in your fifth year, this is kind of geared towards people who have around one to 10 clinicians. But the advice and the tips will apply to to anyone in any phase of group practice.

And this is not an easy thing. So I just want to give you tons of compassion and empathy from where I’m sitting that this is not easy for any of us and at different phases of our group practice ownership and growth. We go through different aspects of delegating and outsourcing. I’m going through a new phase right now in my group practice, and it’s actually challenging in new ways to let go of control and to let people step in and help me so tons of empathy and compassion for wherever you are now, don’t feel bad about what you’re going through. I’m just super happy that you’re here and that you’re interested in this topic. So you can get some get some help.

Okay, so five simple tips. If you are a group practice owner with between one to 10 clinicians and you don’t have proper admin support, you might be experiencing any or all of these three things: your to do list is bursting at the seams, it just seems to always be growing and growing on and on. There’s no days of the week where you get to the bottom of your list and you’re like I have nothing left to do, this is amazing. So then, you know, you’re constantly varied neverending tasks, and you’re always having new ideas. And maybe you’re popping into the Group Practice Exchange Facebook group, or the Exchange Facebook group, and you’re and then you read 10 posts, and you have 20 new ideas about things you think you should be doing right. And then possibly, hopefully not if you’re in the exchange, but you might be feeling alone in your private practice, group practice journey. And that doesn’t that doesn’t need to happen. Fortunately, we have this group. And thank goodness for Maureen and everything that she’s done for us. It’s been amazing.

So if you’re in that position, you really do need to get some help needed to start to delegate, build a team, and then find a way to reach your dreams quicker. I really believe I truly believe that what we’re doing is world changing and impactful for our communities both locally and beyond. And I do believe that you should be able to change the world and also love your life. So you don’t have to sacrifice your family, your personal time, your hobbies, your well being certainly to build this group practice. And these tips will hopefully help you get there just a little bit faster.

Okay, one of my favorite authors and business leaders is Mike Michalowicz I’m sure you’ve heard of him at this point, author of Profit First, Clockwork and many other good books. He says the longer you do the inexpensive work, the longer your business will be trapped in inefficiency. And as a result will stay tiny forever. That quote is terrifying. So it’s very important that you take the message that I’m sharing today and put it into application because it really you know, it really matters that your group practice grows to the point where you want to grow it so that they can help people in your community. Okay, so tip number one. And this, I think each one of these tips that I’m going to share are challenging in their own sort of ways. This one is just I think, where most of us start, admit that you need help. So the problem here is that you think that you can successfully juggle all the roles and tasks in your group practice. And I think with almost without exception, every one of us starts probably as a solo practice, most likely, and then grows into a group practice by hiring one clinician, and then another one, and then another one. And there’s just no way around the fact that we start by doing all of the things, you’re doing your own bookkeeping, your own marketing, your own social media, your own networking, your own hiring, managing and firing, right. So go down the list absolutely everything in your practice, you are handling out of necessity. And because you don’t have a lot of funds, necessarily to to hire and delegate, but also just out of, that’s just what you do. That’s just just how we start.

And the insight that I have for you here is that it seems very common sense. But sometimes we wake up and go, Oh, my gosh, I’m buried. But doing everything yourself for too long is definitely a recipe for burnout. And honestly, that is one of the sort of mission statements, it’s part of the mission statement of productive therapist is to help therapists avoid burnout to get more done so that they can have more fun. And there’s not much help that a burnt out therapist or group practice owner can offer to the community, to their team and to the world. So that is super critical.
The solution here is pretty simple. Admit that you need help.

I mean, you and I are both amazing and brilliant and competent. And there’s no question about that. However, we’re we’re definitely human, we’ve got limitations on our time, our energy and our capabilities. So if you want to grow your business, you’re going to need to delegate obviously, you’re here listening to this. So you get that. And then you need to avoid becoming the bottleneck for your own progress. And you’ll need to accomplish your big dreams, you’ll need a team rather to accomplish your big dreams. And you’ll ultimately be able to help more people if you get some help.

Mike, I’m sorry. Michael Hyatt, so many Mike’s. Michael Hyatt is also one of my other favorite authors and business leaders. And he says, if you’re if your dream doesn’t require a team, then your dream is too small. And I don’t think if you’re on this call and listening to this webinar, I don’t think you have that problem. Your dream is probably not too small. But you definitely need a team. Okay, so you get it.
Simple step to take here and you can do this now, we I don’t think we have time to necessarily do it. But you can start it now grab a piece of paper, draw a line down the center, and then write the tasks that you really don’t like the ones you really would love to delegate yesterday, if you could on the left side. And then the tasks that you actually enjoy on the right now circle one task on the left, that you will take steps to delegate this week. So the information that I’m sharing with you, I really do want it to turn into action. Right now, as you’re listening or later on, schedule it sometime this week, today, or in the coming days to actually take these steps. And maybe you, you know, you don’t need to write it down on paper and you can think about it and decide what what you want to delegate what’s really been bothering you, keeping you up at night and and stressing you out.

So that’s tip number one admit that you need help. And part of this is deciding what things you want to delegate first. Okay, moving on to tip number two.

Okay, tip number two is to calculate the value of your time. And I don’t know if you need help in realizing how important and valuable your time is, maybe you do maybe you don’t. But I think this is critical. The problem here is that you spend too much time on low value tasks without even realizing it. And an example that comes to mind, which is very common for all of us is at some point, when you are the only one handling the intake coordinator role, it becomes too much to do. You’re seeing your clients, you’re trying to handle marketing, you’re trying to hire people, you’re trying to help the clinicians that you have already onboard in your practice. And you’re also the person to respond to every email, every voicemail, every inquiry every webform. And the truth is, even though you and I are quite good at that, and we’ve done it for so long. That doesn’t mean that it requires a therapist who might get paid, let’s just say somewhere between 100 to $300 per hour or per 15 minutes to be handling that tasks. And at some point if you are the one doing that if you’re spending three hours a week or five hours a week or 10 hours a week doing that you’re actually not leveraging your time I’m very well.

The insight here is that you make excellent money when you focus on the right tasks. Of course, handing off the intake coordinator role is one of the most challenging things to hand off just because it is the life blood of our practices. And we care so much about the practice that we’re building, and also the people that are calling who are asking for help, that it’s so tough to find somebody that we can trust enough to really hand that off to you. But I can tell you that it will change your life. So solution here is to calculate the value of your time and compare that to what it would cost to outsource some of the low value tasks.

So for me, I love getting help with things like insurance billing. There’s some folks out there that love Insurance Billing. My friend, Daniel Kepler, is one of them. But I certainly do not. And that cost me right around $24 to $28 an hour. My bookkeeping never been good at that QuickBooks still kind of frightens me a bit. So outsource, outsource that for about $75 an hour to Greg Higdon and his team over at grow the books dot com. And also, I just put it on here, my lawn care, around $30 an hour, I’m perfectly capable of, you know, taking care of my yard and whatnot. But it’s actually not the best use of my time, and I don’t really enjoy it.

So for me, all of these tasks are significantly less than no longer seeing clients now, but my fee was at 180, a couple years ago. And then my coaching fee is between 250 to 300. So you can kind of look at that real quickly and do the math and look at it for yourself, figure out what your fee is. And anything that is earning you less than that is something you should consider outsourcing not everything, but some of the things you should consider. So for me, these expenses are necessary for my business growth as well as my personal well being, and I look at it as an investment.

So it can be challenging for us, especially when we don’t have a lot of extra funds in a new or small group practice, too. It can be stressful to pay $300 a month, or $500 or $1,000 a month. But it really is an investment in allowing you to grow without getting stuck. And then also, like I said before, just maintaining your own well being in your own sanity. So pretty simple step here is to take a look at your total client income from let’s say, last week sessions or last month, divide that by the total number of client appointments you had. And this is of course, assuming that you are still seeing clients as a relatively new group practice owner or you know, in the building phase of small group practice ownership.

So this, this little math equation will give you your average fee. You might have some sliding scale clients, you might have some insurance different, you know, reimbursement rates at different for different insurance companies, and then private pay rates and those types of thing, things. But if you do this math, you can get what I would call your average fee.

Now, this is the tricky part, try to avoid taking on new tasks, and maybe ditch some of the current ones that you’re handling now, that cost you significantly less than your average fee. So that hopefully is is helpful for you to at least stop and think when you’re doing something. Maybe it’s your your bookkeeping, or the intake coordinator role. And you think, oh, is this the best use of my time? What should I be doing? And then at some point, your time as the sort of CEO of your group practice will probably be even more valuable than your clinical rate, I would say.

So when you’re focusing on strategy and growth and other different things and you know, developing leaders in your group practice, then you’re actually going to be worth that that hour of your time is going to be quote unquote, worth more, because it has a bigger impact and more of an outcome. So tip number one is to admit that you need help, always the first step right. And then tip number two is to calculate the value of your time.

Thanks For Listening

Thanks for listening to the group practice exchange podcast. Like what you heard? Give us five stars on whatever platform you’re listening from. Need extra suppor? Join The Exchange, a membership community just for group practice owners with monthly office hours, live webinars, and a library of trainings ready for you to dive into visit www dot members dot the group practice exchange dot com forward slash exchange. See you next week.

Resources

Here are the resources and guides we recommend based on this episode

Do you have an in-office or virtual intake coordinator? Do you want to increase your conversion rate, create a smooth intake process that works, and empower your intake coordinator to feel successful and perform better?

Therapy Intake Pro is a unique program that is designed to help your intake coordinator level up their skills and feel increasingly confident & effective in their role. Check it out here!

Use coupon code TGPE15 for 15% off a purchase of $100 or more!

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Finding professionals is easy with the Productive Therapist Directory – the only business directory for therapists. Use the nifty search feature and you are one step closer to finding the services you need to grow your private practice.

If you’re a freelancer or company that provides services just for therapists, feel free to join the directory and create a listing. This is the best place to connect with therapists who are looking for your amazing services.

* I am an affiliate for some of the businesses I recommend. These are companies that I use in my own group practice, and make recommendations based off of my experience with them. When you use some of these companies through my links, I receive compensation, which helps me continue to offer great free information on my podcast, blog, Facebook group, and website.

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Meet your host

Maureen

Maureen Werrbach is a psychotherapist, group practice owner and group practice coach. Learn more about her coaching services here:

About

The show

The podcast is structured so that you get practice building tips in small doses, where an episode can be listened to (and a group practice building lesson can be learned) in a single car ride.

Episodes are structured into categories: coaching sessions where I coach a group practice owner on a specific topic, tips of the day by yours truly, real talk where you get to be a fly on the wall while an established group practice owner and I talk about the highs and lows of ownership, and trainings done by experts in the field.

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* The content of this post is intended to serve as general advice and information. It is not to be taken as legal advice and may not account for all rules and regulations in every jurisdiction. For legal advice, please contact an attorney.

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