Episode 247 | Diversifying Services in Today’s Market with Dr. Ajita Robinson

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:00:00) –  We’ve been at the micro level for a really long time, and we have to shift to thinking like a CEO and not just a practitioner that’s serving on the ground level, which is still very important work to do. But this climate does require that we do a really good job of differentiating our services and disrupting the way mental health services are perceived in the overall marketplace.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:00:20) This episode is sponsored by Therapy Notes. Therapy notes is my favorite EHR, and it’s one that I’ve been using in my own group practice since 2014. They’ve got everything you need to be successful in your group practice, and they’re constantly making updates and have live support. If you want two free months of therapy notes, go to therapynotes.com/r/thegrouppracticeexchange. 

 

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Maureen Werrbach (00:01:14) – Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode. Today I have a friend of mine and someone who’s been on before, Ajita Robinson back on, and we’re going to be talking, of course, about diversifying services, but we’re going to talk about it from the lens of this climate and how we’re seeing just so much shifting and changing post-Covid. And so I wanted to bring her back on to talk about diversifying services, but through the lens of what we’re seeing in the mental health industry now and sort of forecasting what we see coming up in the future. Hi. 

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:01:58) –  Thank you so much for having me, as always. And we always have amazing conversations. And I just thank you for the opportunity to kind of, you know, stay abreast of what’s happening in the field and the changes that we are seeing. So thanks for having me.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:02:11) –  Yeah. So I am just literally going to jump right in. But are you seeing changes in terms of what is successful for group practice owners or what things when it comes to diversifying services to like reduce burnout with employees to stay relevant? As you know, economic changes happen.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:02:29) –  What are you seeing that’s different now that maybe you weren’t giving in terms of feedback five years ago?

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:02:35) –  Absolutely. So I mean, everyone I think now hopefully understands the importance of diversification. Like if we do not have a diversified practice, we don’t have a sustainable practice. And I think the for many people, the change healthcare situation was a wake up call. But on top of that, the change in the customer buying experience and cycle should also be a wake up call that we’re seeing that customers are needing more touch points, not only from a therapy perspective, but also from a kind of client conversion perspective. And so what that means not only from a course or a product perspective. And we’ve been seeing this for a couple quarters now on the product and consulting side. But on the therapy side, we’re seeing the importance of they want to know exactly who you are, right. So the importance of diversifying your marketing streams so that they are coming in knowing kind of a little bit about you because in so many ways, not only because they’re making different decisions economically, they’re wanting to make safer decisions economically.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:03:37) –  And so you can’t be a wildcard. And so the therapists that are unwilling to have a digital footprint are really struggling right now. Right. They’re struggling in a different way when it comes to getting in front of your ideal clients. And certainly if you are a private practice, you’re making that experience harder for yourself because there’s been so much in the marketplace that has caused harm that they’re looking for the essentially the gold standard or the trusted experts in the field, because it got really murky there for a while to figure out who was actually qualified to do what. And as therapist, we don’t traditionally do as great of a job to not own horn. And so we really have to get and shift our mindset around what does it mean to kind of stand in your expertise so that the people that need, you know, how to distinguish the authentic healers from those that are better at marketing than we might be. Right.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:04:25) –  That makes a lot of sense. I was going to ask you something as you were talking.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:04:29) –  Oh yes. Touch points. So you and I know what touch points are. Explain to those that are new to marketing and client engagement in that sort of way. What? Touch points means. And maybe a couple examples of how group practices can create multiple touch points for clients.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:04:47) –  Absolutely. So a touch point really is an interaction. So and it can be passive. It’s one way that you are interacting with that. You are reaching out to that you’re getting in front of your ideal audience. And so one way that you could do that is through your blog posts, right? So if you’re writing organically rich and optimized blog posts when they’re searching in Google, your blog posts ideally will come up as one of the resources that they can use to answer a question. Get some information. So that’s actually one of the main ways on the practice side we get in front of audiences is by making sure in our specialty areas we rank number one organically on Google, and then we might add a little bit of gas by running an ad, but we’re already running it to an optimized landing page and or blog post.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:05:31) –  So that’s one example of a touchpoint. So we could use our website. In a blog we use email marketing. And so we email individuals that are on our newsletter that have signed up to receive communications from us. That includes our referral partners. People still are trusting and looking to their general practitioners and their specialists for trusted referrals. And so you want to be top of mind. So how are you staying engaged with them? And I’m a midwest girl, so I absolutely love the power of relationships. And so I still go into the community to help fairs. I still walk in doctor’s offices and build relationships. Right.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:06:09) –  A midwest thing because I’m Midwest and I do that’s to. And whenever I talk about marketing, I’m always like, I mean, at the end of the day, I always and as an introvert, even surprisingly, say this, I always think that literally meeting with the people in your community is the number one way that you can grow your practice. But so many people talk about the digital ways, which of course can be great, which is.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:06:31) –  Fine, but.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:06:32) –  I find much better conversions. Absolutely, yeah. Meeting in the community.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:06:36) –  So I love that piece and I always bring that up because that still works. It actually has sustained through Covid, you know, through this white recession that it looks like we’re navigating is that people it’s much faster to build a relationship with someone that can see you here you that are in proximity. Right. Because online you’re a face behind a screen. They don’t know if you’re real. Right? There’s something about that human interaction that I think we really should benefit from. And we are uniquely trained to connect with people. And so it’s your superpower. Leverage it. Right. And so it cuts through a lot of noise. So I do a lot of in-person at least 1 to 2 times a month. I’m intentional about getting in front of and connecting with people. That doesn’t have to be lunch all the time. Sometimes it’s a Chamber of Commerce meeting that I’m going to where I know my counterparts or niche mates may be in, but it does mean that there’s a statistics.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:07:27) –  That said, in the past like ten years or so, your customer ideal customer needed seven touchpoints. Yep.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:07:35) –  I was just going to ask if you know the number of touchpoints that people need now.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:07:39) –  It is now 31.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:07:40) –  Holyshit. Oh, I would have been way off with that.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:07:43) –  And it is absolutely remarkable. So one of the reasons that I wanted to bring that stat up is that for those of you that are like Ajitah, I’m doing the email marketing, I’m doing the social media, I’m doing the blogging, and it’s probably at the seven touch points. We have not updated our metrics. And so that means that you want to do things that help you increase your touch points, your no like trust factor. It means that you have to be more present, but you don’t have to do that actively. So for me, that looks like I am running more ads than I ever had before. And there are people that will say, oh, I’ve been following you for six years, y’all.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:08:16) –  Six years. Right? And it’s in the last kind of two weeks. They’re like, oh, I’ve seen your ads everywhere. And it forced me to click on it. And I’m like, finally, because I got to that 31 touch points faster by kind of getting back in front of them with different information. But that’s dialed in, right? That is dialed in to who you serve in this marketplace. Because what we were doing, you know, four years ago, even last year, may not work the same way. Right. And so I think it’s so important for us to actually look at the data, internal data, but also look at the industry data, because I think oftentimes we’re behind because we’re not sure what metrics we should be looking at and then how to pivot based on that information.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:08:55) –  Yep. Also, it’s a little bit more difficult to really pinpoint what is working and what isn’t because like you mentioned, needing so many touch points, it could be that all the things that you’ve been doing the 30 other times that they’ve had interaction with you, whether it’s through like we have touch points that include every one of our therapists on their bio pages, also has a video because it’s a way that they can get to know the therapists outside of just what’s written and like a photo.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:09:25) –  Right? And so it could be that they’ve had a ton of interaction, that if you hadn’t shown those things or engaged in those other touchpoints, you might think that it’s that last thing that they said was the reason that they found you. Right? Or the reason they scheduled, you might think is the main reason. But underneath all of that, it could be that was just not the straw that broke the camel’s back, but the version of that which is like that made me finally want to buy in.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:09:49) –  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think, you know, as we’re having this conversation, one thing that I want to kind of highlight is the importance of testing. Testing your offers, testing, you know, whatever that sales cycle is, so that we then can have some information about what works for you, because what works for me may not work in your market, right, may not work with your specific clientele. And so I think that now more than ever, it’s important that you know your numbers, that you understand not just the numbers, but the qualitative aspect of that.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:10:19) –  And so we’ve gotten back to our client satisfaction survey used to only be quantitative. Right. So we would send out the survey. We’d ask some scaling questions. We’ve added some more qualitative pieces in there. But then we actually are picking up the phone. And we’re doing that more often than we were before, which does require a little bit more, you know, from our admins. But we’ve automated a lot of that client onboarding and kind of management process. So we have time to nurture that relationship in a real way. So if clients are thinking about, you know, ghosting a therapist or not returning because of a variety of reasons, that they’re also less likely to complete the client satisfaction survey. And so if we contact them, that’s another touchpoint where they feel seen, heard and cared for. And so they’re more likely to be honest in that conversation. And we can help them either with giving them a targeted referral outside of the practice. Either way, we’re doing that nurturing work, or we can kind of redirect them to a therapist that better suits their need based on that feedback.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:11:15) –  But it does allow us to focus on the serving aspect at a higher level. And I think that is where the benchmark has changed. It’s no longer sufficient to kind of, you know, hang your sign your websites up, book me. We’re noticing that there’s a little bit more work involved in that client attraction process.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:11:33) –  Yep. I was going to say post Covid, you know, immediate. Well, not immediately within like the first year post-Covid, we saw a huge amount of turnover and it being very easy for solo practitioners to sort of hang their sign, minimal amount of cost because they could do it from home. I think we’re at a stage now where we’re starting to see, because we’ve sort of supply and demand wise, flooded the market with so many therapy practices, solo, small group, large group that even though it might feel like a lot of people are talking about a reduction in new clients coming in, it’s not because there’s less people that are searching, it’s because there’s so much more availability or so much more out there that potential clients are seeing that the likelihood of your visibility, even if you’ve been around for a long time, has gone down a lot.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:12:21) –  So I want to go back to because we talked a little bit about marketing with this, which is obviously an important aspect to diversifying services. But what are some new or emerging services that you think is worth exploring for group practices in today’s climate?

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:12:36) –  Absolutely. So I always talk about, I think in this space looking at the B2C. So we’re business owners serving customers. And I think it’s a missed opportunity if we do not focus on the B2B. So as a business owner serving other businesses. And so where is that sales cycle for customers has increased significantly. The sales cycle for businesses has actually shortened because they actually don’t have the time to kind of sort through all of the mush of what’s actually in the marketplace. And so building B2B relationships has actually worked really well for us. We shifted our focus quite significantly beginning of last year and really just went double down on it this year. And that is really in many ways is what stabilizing our practices as we test. Right. So we talk about testing new things, but we don’t talk about the income you lose when you’re testing potentially.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:13:24) –  Right. Yep.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:13:25) –  I was also going to say B2B is helpful because it still helps B2C because if you’re working with other businesses, they have employees, and those employees are now getting to know you so that when they are ready to seek therapy on their own, they’re going to remember your practice.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:13:39) –  Absolutely. And I’m going to tighten that a little bit more. So because we’ve directly gone after B2B more intentionally as our primary kind of driver right now, our goal is to get B2B to pay us to do B2C. That’s actually what we’ve been doing. But I’ll give a quick example for those of you that aren’t familiar with what that might look like. So we do some professional development for a federal association. They’re not a government entity. They just serve federal service members, their benefits, things of that nature. And so we came in to do professional development for their employees. There’s about 100 of them. We run their leadership retreat. We again, we’re their dedicated professional development provider. So we provide 1 to 2 every month, stable income that we don’t have to write notes for that I can staff with multiple people on my team.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:14:24) –  So it’s not even me as a group practice owner, but what we wanted. I knew one of the natural extensions of us doing professional development work with them was they have a 100 member association that they are responsible for. And so we for the past six months have been ironing out how to make us their direct EAP for mental health services. And of course there are folks are around the country, but that also allows me to then partner with other therapists in areas where we are not located. And again, we’ve now been able to cut out the ERP company, the administrative costs, which often is what reduces our reimbursement rate and we can go direct to consumer. The benefit to the association is that one of the major reasons that less than 3% of folks with ERP benefits actually use ERP benefits is the access point. How do you actually access services? And then the secondary one that’s, you know, the top driver that people report, like roughly 86% of people say the reasons they don’t use the ERP, number one is because it’s difficult to navigate the barriers of using it, including having to ask your HR person.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:15:28) –  So thus disclose. And then number two is the lack of culturally competent providers. And it’s not that we’re not available. It’s often that the EAP service providers directory doesn’t make it easy to segment based on specialization, ethnicity, things of that nature. And so we actually get because we have a robust directory right of that. It’s very easy based on the things that we’ve built for folks to be able to identify, but they actually can pick up the phone based on the service. We provide these types of clients and speak to someone and get an intake call and get immediately scheduled. And so it reduces that friction. They pay us a significantly amount of money for that ease of access. And the budget was already there. It was just being under utilized. And so those are the types of things that we are looking for. Yeah, I’ll come in for the speaking engagement, but I’m absolutely re-engaging you on what I call the enterprise level at the organizational level and what they do externally, who They serve. So I don’t then have to pitch all of those federal agencies to serve their people.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:16:25) –  I went and pitched directly to the association that serves the federal agencies. And so for us, we have to think a little bit more strategically about who we serve and how we want to do that work. We’ve been at the micro level for a really long time, and we have to shift to thinking like a CEO and not just a practitioner that’s serving at the on the ground level, which is still very important work to do. But this climate does require that we do a really good job of differentiating our services and disrupting the way mental health services are perceived in the overall marketplace.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:16:54) –  I love all of that. I’m going to ask a final question that relates to this. Because you were talking about B2B. What types of partnerships would you consider in terms of diversifying services if you because you’re pro like getting into the community. You mentioned partnerships with this B2B stuff, but what kind of partnerships do you think practice owners should be considering when thinking about diversifying services?

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:17:18) –  Yeah, so I think that’s very niche based.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:17:20) –  So we work primarily with individuals like navigating divorce and separation. So a law firm or in this case a law association would be who I would be going after. Right. Again, just going a little bit higher level. I can serve their people and I can serve their clients. And so thinking about who you serve, who’s your audience base and then who represents them, what organizations do they work for, what organization do they belong to. And then go to another layer up if you can. But definitely government entities, the US government at every level is looking for qualified mental health professionals. They have over $9 billion that went unallocated last year because not enough of us applied and not enough of us stated that we had the capability to do the work. We’re already doing the work, and so a lot of these contracts are going either unrewarded, or they’re going to big subcontractors that don’t have our skill set. Right. So I would say main areas would be associations, universities, corporate entities and government entities.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:18:18) –  Those are areas that I’d be thinking about diversifying.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:18:20) –  I know sort of as an aside, that you’ve done trainings on getting into the governmental, like the $9 billion that didn’t get. Do you have any trainings that people can buy into or. I know you’ve done it before. I don’t know if those were live ones. I’m sort of asking live on a podcast, and I’m not sure if you actually do have anything now, could you share that with me so that we could put those in the show notes for those? Because I know that’s like an area I have no idea, like how to do that kind of thing. And so if anyone’s listening is like, oh my gosh, I don’t even know what the first step would be to sort of establish a relationship with a government entity to support them in terms of mental health. You have something, right? I do.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:18:59) –  I have courses, and I also have a membership program that’s actually broken out into kind of three phases or three tracks. So you could focus on speaking, consulting or contracting.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:19:08) –  And so that is our purpose for profitable therapists collective. And we have an annual summit that’s in person that focuses on diversification. And so yes, that’s what we have that support okay.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:19:19) –  Just share that with me after. And then to sort of close up, will you just remind people of who you are? I forgot to ask you this before going live. So I’m sorry to everyone if she says no to this, but are we allowed to talk about something that’s about to come out because this podcast will come out until after. So I think that should be okay. Okay. Yes. I feel like that aligns with this topic.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:19:39) –  Yes, absolutely. So I’m Doctor Jed Robinson, I’m a licensed clinical professional counselor. So grief and trauma and my clinical specialties and obviously an income strategist for therapist I do all of that under the Purposeful and profitable therapist brand and community. You can find us on Facebook. So in line with that, because I’m so passionate about diversifying income, I actually wrote a new book, The Purposeful Profitable Therapist Guide to Diversifying Income, and it will be out in July.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:20:05) –  And so by the time you hear this, it is wholly available for you. And I wanted to make sure that folks had an accessible way to access information. Like we might be experiencing course fatigue, but many of us are still reading books. Right. And just to make sure that that’s out in the community, I get asked all the time for those folks that we may not want to be in a community, but we need access to information, so to make that accessible. So that was a labor of love and three years in the making. So I’m glad that it is out in the world.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:20:33) –  I’m so excited to read it. So I’m happy for you, my friend, for yet another amazing book that’s going to be coming out. And so for those that are interested in learning how to diversify their services, especially in this climate, go out to Amazon or your website. I’m sure it’s going to be there as well. Right? Is it Dr. Ajita.com?

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:20:53) –  Ajitarobinson.com and on Amazon.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:20:56) –  Perfect. Awesome. Well it was so nice having you again always.

 

Dr. Ajita Robinson (00:20:59) –  Thank you so much.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:21:02) –  Thanks for listening. Give us five stars on whatever podcast streaming service you use and I’ll see you next week.