Episode 261 29 Jan, 2025
Wondering How to Get More Therapy Clients? How Mid-Size Practices Can Optimize Their Client Intake Process with Uriah Guilford
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With Uriah Guilford

Is your client intake process holding you back from getting more therapy clients?
In this episode of The Group Practice Exchange Podcast, I’m diving into the all-important topic of how to get more therapy clients with my guest, Uriah Guilford from The Productive Therapist. We’re zeroing in on what’s often the biggest roadblock for practices: an inefficient client intake process.
If therapy clients are struggling to book appointments or connect with your practice, this episode is for you. Uriah and I share strategies to simplify your client intake process, making it easier for clients to get started and for your team to deliver a seamless experience. We also discuss how optimizing your client intake process is not only how to get more therapy clients, but can lead to a more efficient admin team, happier therapists, and ultimately, a thriving practice.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
- Why people drop off during the client intake process—and how to get more therapy clients by fixing this common issue.
- The dangers of overwhelming potential therapy clients with too many contact options and how to simplify for better results.
- How tracking metrics can transform your client intake process and help you make smarter decisions for your practice.
- How to leverage AI and other tools to streamline the client intake process and create a stress-free experience for therapy clients.
- Real-world lessons from Uriah’s “secret shopping” of other practices—discover what works (and what doesn’t) to improve your client intake process.
Your client intake process is the foundation of how therapy clients first experience your practice. If it’s overly complicated or inefficient, you risk losing clients before they ever get through the door.
Uriah shares practical advice on how to get more therapy clients by ensuring your client intake process is streamlined, user-friendly, and designed to convert inquiries into scheduled appointments.
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Transcript: Uriah Guilford
Uriah Guilford 00:00:00 It’s still too fricking hard for clients to get in to see a therapist. Why? At a high level, it’s like happy clients. Happy therapists, happy admin team. One way to do that is to create a streamlined intake process. The better that flows, the easier it is for the potential client, the easier it is for the intake team, the happier everyone’s going to be. People are looking for your services. Make it easy.
Maureen Werrbach 00:00:24 Welcome to The Group Practice Exchange Podcast, where we talk about all things related to group practice ownership. I’m your host, Maureen Werrbach. 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.com.
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Maureen Werrbach 00:01:11 Green Oak is set apart from the rest by their deep industry knowledge and top notch advisory and CFO services. Plus they offer traditional accounting services like bookkeeping, tax prep, valuations and so much more. Here’s what’s in it for you: peace of mind, financial clarity, and the potential to significantly grow your practice and profits. In fact, Green Oak has the most impact with practices looking for financial guidance when leveling up thanks to their CFO services. And they’re not just about crunching numbers. They also offer a mix of resources like the therapy for Your Money podcast, The Profit First for therapists book, and self-guided courses to keep you informed and empowered and growing your practice. Ready to transform your practices financial health visit www.greenoakaccounting.com/tgpe to explore all that they have to offer. Green Oak Accounting, your partner in financial prosperity.
Hey everyone welcome back. And today we have someone who’s been on the podcast, but I think it’s been a while.
Maureen Werrbach 00:02:23 Uriah Guilford from The Productive Therapist. And we are going to be talking about optimizing your therapy intake process. If you’re a midsize practice, how are you?
Uriah Guilford 00:02:35 Yes, I’m doing good. I’m doing good. Thanks for having me on again. I would like to know you don’t have to say it out loud right now, but I would like to know who has been on your podcast the most so that I can try to win that award.
Maureen Werrbach 00:02:47 I have to actually ask Jen. You’d have to check. Yeah, but I don’t know that I’ve had anyone on more than twice. Twice. And so.
Uriah Guilford 00:02:56 Okay, there we go.
Maureen Werrbach 00:02:57 You’ve been on at least now twice. I don’t know if you’ve been on a third. If you’ve already been on twice.
Uriah Guilford 00:03:01 Before to go check. Yeah, I think I might hold the title.
Maureen Werrbach 00:03:03 I might hold might. Yeah. I was gonna say like, two times is probably the most I’ve had someone on. Maybe now I’m starting to circle around to three for some people, but yeah, I’ll have to ask, I like it.
Maureen Werrbach 00:03:14 You definitely were one of like the first people, you know, early, early in like 200 something episodes in. So you were probably in the first 20 episodes that I have. So yeah.
Uriah Guilford 00:03:23 Congrats for sticking it out so long.
Maureen Werrbach 00:03:25 Well thank you. All right. So we’re going to be talking about intake process but midsize I think one of the times that we’ve talked before, we were talking about smaller practices and like how to know when you’re ready to bring someone on to do your intake system. So now we’re going to move kind of the next size up and talk about it from the perspective of like midsize. But I want to ask you what do you consider midsize?
Uriah Guilford 00:03:49 Oh my goodness. That question just came up in a conversation I had I don’t know the answer either. The thing that I said just today to someone was I said 5 to 15, okay, is small to midsize, okay. But it all depends because like obviously you’re at 50 plus right? So and some people are at two plus.
Maureen Werrbach 00:04:06 But I know that like I think it depends on where you’re at. Because I see a Facebook group saying like I have like a midsize practice and they might have ten where I think that’s on the small, like that’s like the end of the small for me. And then I know people that have like 100 plus therapists and they would probably think 50 is midsize. You know, where other people like to me, I’m like, yeah, this feels big. But to someone who has 100, they probably think this is like a midsize.
Uriah Guilford 00:04:32 So most people don’t know that a small business is anything less than 500, right? Yep. 500 employees. Yeah, yeah. So at one point I saw that and I was like, oh, so what do I have? And then I searched for it and I was like, oh, a micro business.
Maureen Werrbach 00:04:45 No, a tiny business. Yeah. Many, many business.
Uriah Guilford 00:04:50 So let’s say 10 to 20. How about that?
Maureen Werrbach 00:04:52 We’ll say Okay. That’s perfect for the listeners to know kind of where they are in relation to what we’re going to be talking about.
Maureen Werrbach 00:04:58 Okay, so you’ve obviously had your group practice, but you’ve had your productive therapist practice for, what, five, six productive therapists?
Uriah Guilford 00:05:06 We’re in our eighth year, believe it or not. Yeah I.
Maureen Werrbach 00:05:08 Know. Wait, how many years have I been? I started in 2015. Oh my God, this was ten years. March. Yeah.
Uriah Guilford 00:05:15 You need to celebrate. Hey!
Maureen Werrbach 00:05:17 Holy shit. I’m going to be at ten years of having TJP. Okay, so you’re at eight, all right. In all of these eight years, you’re kind of like the go to person for figuring out and perfecting. If we can say this, like the intake process from a support perspective, being able to delegate that out, how are things going now? Because I feel like I’m assuming that you agree or you’re experiencing this or witnessing this as well is like all these processes we had that we might have built ten years ago, eight years ago, five years ago, even feels so different now. And I’m wondering, are you noticing, like the intake process looking different now than it did five or so years ago?
Uriah Guilford 00:05:59 Yeah, the short answer is no.
Uriah Guilford 00:06:02 Really? Not yet. Not yet. No, no, I don’t think so. Really? I think things are roughly the same as they’ve been. There’s a lot that has changed, obviously. And when you talk about the process of growing from a small to a medium size to a large group practice, there’s obviously a lot of complexity that changes and the support staff grows, all these kinds of changes. But in terms of like the standard kind of intake process and the things that people are doing know I’ve been doing a handful. I’ve done actually ten now, ten intake audits. It’s this new thing I’m doing, and it’s basically where I go and pretend to be a potential client. And then I start at the website and I go all the way to the client portal, consent forms, first appointment and go through that whole entire process. And so I’m looking at people’s websites and reaching out using the form and, you know, doing all the things that people are putting out there. It’s all basically the same that it’s been for some time.
Uriah Guilford 00:06:52 And yeah, we’ll get to this, I’m sure. But one of my takeaways, just most recently, was it’s still too fricking hard for clients to get into. See a therapist. Why? Yeah.
Maureen Werrbach 00:07:03 Well, I was going to say, why do you think I have a few theories, but they kind of go all over the place. What do you think?
Uriah Guilford 00:07:10 Yeah. So there’s a couple reasons. There’s a couple challenges. And I think it’s always been hard to get a hold of a therapist. You know, so you. If you’re looking for therapy, I, I did this myself for both of my daughters. And, you know, you call five, ten, 15 people and nobody picks up the phone. Even group practices. Right, because it’s hard to provide live answer. So the delay from first contact to actually booking an appointment is just too long. That’s one of the big ones, honestly.
Maureen Werrbach 00:07:37 Yeah, I was going to say that probably, I would assume is the biggest issue for clients not getting scheduled because I’m seeing so much in our industry around people having a hard time filling their caseloads.
Maureen Werrbach 00:07:51 So it’s not like right in this moment at least, and this ebbs and flows. This changes throughout the seasons and years. But like in this moment, most group practices and solo practices have availability. Because there’s so many of us, we’ve been split up into, you know, lots of solos, lots of smaller groups where years ago it was a little bit harder to start a solo practice. So people were more combined into groups, and now there’s just you’re much less visible because there’s so many. There’s not more, but they’re just all separated and have their own websites and just your own visibility is slightly less. And so there’s definitely more availability. And I think it’s so interesting to see that, although now there’s actually space in practices solo and group more often than not right now are looking and are like, we need more clients. But the problem is what? They don’t have a process in place that actually supports them. Getting clients, which is right in some ways blows my mind. I also think, could there be something to like overcorrecting? I think about Overcorrecting a lot in our industry, in all of the ways like compensation and just everything.
Maureen Werrbach 00:09:00 Like sometimes we go from we see a problem and then our industry will like kind of overdo it to the opposite end of the spectrum, which comes with other problems. And I have been thinking lately, about a decade ago, five years ago, when EHRs started getting a little bit more robust. Micro practice has been around for 13 or so years, and I started with Office Ally. I don’t even know if that exists anymore. I remember that, okay. It was archaic. It had nothing. It literally could submit claims, but it was like so, right? Not like good. And so I started with therapy notes, literally like the year that they started. And I’m noticing, like from that moment all the way to where we are now, there’s so many ways for a client To schedule an appointment. That I wonder if sometimes we’ve tried to make ourselves so available tech wise. Like you can use a form. You can call us, you can do like a form on your website. You can send a text.
Maureen Werrbach 00:09:59 You can also use your EHRs scheduler. And that like we went from not having all of these resources years ago to being like, we’re going to give you every available way to get Ahold of us. It’s too much. I think it’s going to make it easier. But then we might not have intake systems that like, allow us to make sure that we’re managing all of the different ways that clients can reach out.
Uriah Guilford 00:10:19 Oh, you’re 1,000% correct. And that’s that’s actually one of my pet peeves. And so when I’m doing these intake audits, I’m giving people feedback on, like, you have too many options. I was looking at a website yesterday where just at the top. So the navigation bar and then right below it there were 16 things to click.
Maureen Werrbach 00:10:34 Oh my god.
Uriah Guilford 00:10:35 Yeah yeah yeah 16 things to click. And then you know you get to some contact pages and they give you like every method of contact possible. So my advice is always choose the one main contact method that you prefer, whether like it’s because your intake team or your intake process works better because of that contact method.
Uriah Guilford 00:10:53 And then tell people just very clearly. Book an appointment. Start now. Get started today. And then maybe it’s a form. Maybe you want them to call you I don’t know, pick one. And it can be good advice to actually look at your metrics and see which contact method actually converts the best. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but it’s it’s super interesting. And and then maybe you choose that one because it turns out that more for us, it was always more people would convert to clients that booked a call using our online scheduler to talk to the intake coordinator. Right. Yeah. So there’s different ways to do that. But yeah simplify simplify simplify.
Maureen Werrbach 00:11:29 I agree and I feel like this could be something for practice owners listening now to like think about what are all the ways that you’ve made yourself available. But in a way has that actually made you less available to actually complete. And, you know, thinking of metrics, like you said, I always find it so interesting how sometimes we can be looking at metrics and they’re not actually telling us the story that we want it to.
Maureen Werrbach 00:11:52 And so even with this, like to figure out what is the best for your practice and your geographic area with the type of clients that call your practice, what is the way that most callers convert and you have to think about do you have metrics that are tracking, like how many inquiries you’re getting from each one? Because that only tells part of a story. And like I think about with hiring and sometimes on, indeed we get a ton of inquiries. But if we look at our data of like, how many of those inquiries are actually people that we go through the interview process and we actually hire them, for example, indeed is not usually one of the top ones where we have other places where we put our ads out. We get less people that apply, but our conversion of those that actually apply is so much higher, it’s much more worth to use that. And so thinking about it from the intake perspective is like, are you tracking the right information. Do you know not just how many calls are coming or how many inquiries are coming in from the different methods that you use? But of those, what’s the actual percentage that converts? Because that’s the most important piece.
Uriah Guilford 00:12:50 It really is. Yeah. Over time and as the person handling that role changes and all those kinds of things. Yeah, that’s super important. So talking about this challenge of people reaching out and not being able to like, complete an action or get Ahold of somebody or do something quickly. And I’m sharing this information on your podcast with the hopes that somebody will start the business that I decided not to start.
Maureen Werrbach 00:13:10 All right, guys.
Uriah Guilford 00:13:11 Are you ready for this? Yeah, I’ve been exploring this for a while. So artificial intelligence, voice agents. So in 2025, you’re going to hear about this a ton. Agents, agents this, agents that. And it’s basically software tools that use artificial intelligence to complete actions to do things. So in 2025 OpenAI is about to release this and it’s all coming, right? So you’ll be able to talk to your phone or your computer and have it actually go and book your vacation. Go and do things for you, basically like an executive assistant. But there’s these voice agents which are conversational, so you can actually hold a conversation right now up to about 90 minutes if you wanted to.
Uriah Guilford 00:13:47 With this AI agent. And it can be prompted and tweaked to be exactly who you want it to be. Right. Okay. So that’s great. So now there are tools where you can set that up so that every time someone calls your business phone number, it’s answered live with an AI voice agent that can hold a very surprisingly natural conversation, can answer all the basic questions. Can even take some actions. The most basic, which is booking an appointment with the human intake coordinator, right? So for a while I’ve been thinking about like I’m going to start an AI voice agency for therapists. That’s my idea, right? I think it’s a brilliant idea. I don’t know if we’re ready for it, but I don’t.
Maureen Werrbach 00:14:25 But I also love it. Yeah, it’s a way to, like, bridge the gap where we’re losing conversions.
Uriah Guilford 00:14:31 And guess what it costs? What? It depends. But probably about $0.30 a minute. It could be less, it could be more. Whereas like if you go to, you know, a virtual receptionist company that has human like call center staffed by humans, right.
Uriah Guilford 00:14:45 That’s 250 to $3 a minute. Yeah. So if you get your phone answered 24 over seven. 365. Right. Yeah. And you think.
Maureen Werrbach 00:14:54 Like what’s the average length of time that someone is on a phone to schedule an appointment. Maybe on the average end. I don’t know, you probably know better than me but like five minutes maybe to like fully get. Well you’re talking just getting them scheduled with an intake person. So that would be even. That’d be less.
Uriah Guilford 00:15:13 Yeah. 3 to 5 minutes. Probably. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That’s interesting. Think of.
Maureen Werrbach 00:15:17 Like, the conversion of cost.
Uriah Guilford 00:15:18 It’s low. Can I tell you a quick story that I don’t think I’ve told anybody, like, publicly. And I haven’t even posted about this. My goodness. So talking about the ease of getting started with therapy. Right. So this is partially a confession, partially an educational story. Okay. Are you ready for this? Yeah. So about a year ago or so, I downloaded an app you might have heard of.
Uriah Guilford 00:15:40 It’s called BetterHelp. And I was, like, very curious because I heard Ken Clark talk at your last summit back in. What was that, 22? Yeah, one of the things he said, he said, go out and check out the competition. Talkspace, BetterHelp, whoever it was. Then he said, check out the competition. See what they’re doing. Right. So I was like, you know what? I want to get back into therapy, and I know everybody in my area that’s any good. And so anyways, long story short, I downloaded the app, I signed up, and I requested a therapist, and I ended up working with that therapist for six months. It was a good experience, but it was so fascinating to see their client onboarding process.
Maureen Werrbach 00:16:17 Yeah. What is it?
Uriah Guilford 00:16:18 Yeah. What do you think my conclusion was? What would your guess be?
Maureen Werrbach 00:16:21 Robotic, systemized and fast and maybe not personalized.
Uriah Guilford 00:16:25 It was ridiculously easy and I loved it.
Maureen Werrbach 00:16:28 Really? Okay.
Uriah Guilford 00:16:29 Yes. So, I mean, this might not be the case for everybody seeking therapy?
Maureen Werrbach 00:16:33 Yes. Okay. Caveats. Caveats.
Uriah Guilford 00:16:35 Yes. Yeah. But here I am, a middle aged white guy looking for therapy. I don’t want to talk to anybody. Right. Yeah. I actually downloaded the app and reached out on a holiday. I want to say it was like 4th of July or something. And they, you know, so it was all app based. Obviously. I answered some questions, put in my information. Eventually I signed some forms. Not enough forms, to be honest, but I signed some forms and they matched me with a therapist within less than 24 hours, and I had a session booked within less than seven days.
Maureen Werrbach 00:17:01 That’s awesome.
Uriah Guilford 00:17:02 Yeah. And I was basically done in like ten, 15, 20 minutes or so. So I was like, okay, I want a therapist. I got a therapist. Here we go.
Maureen Werrbach 00:17:10 When thinking about, you know, midsize practices, putting a system together, an intake system that really converts inquiries, well, what could you take from that BetterHelp system that you saw for the intake part? Is there anything that, like, you feel like made sense that can translate over to a midsize?
Uriah Guilford 00:17:30 That’s a great question.
Uriah Guilford 00:17:31 I know we’re sort of talking about some bigger picture things that might not be as applicable to mid-size group practice, but from a very practical standpoint, I think you’ve done this for a long time. You have I believe you still have this like a filtering system to choose your clinician. Like if someone’s on your website and they’re like, I want a female clinician that works with kids who are neurodivergent, they can like, find that person, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I think a midsize group practice could very easily have a sort of a filtering system for people to select their clinician. And then honestly, the easiest thing to do would be to use self scheduling through your EHR. I know there’s challenges with that. We could talk about it, but that would be it.
Maureen Werrbach 00:18:13 That’s the one thing. Yeah, we’ve yet still yet to do.
Uriah Guilford 00:18:16 I want that to work.
Maureen Werrbach 00:18:17 I do too, so bad because I feel like it would cut out so much of the back and forth where we can potentially lose people who call on the weekend or when we don’t have someone live.
Maureen Werrbach 00:18:27 Yeah, it’s just our EHR has to somehow work a little better for us because it was like clockwork. Mike’s book where he talked about the queen bee role. Yes. For our practice. It’s the accurate referral. The act of getting the right fit therapist for. Yes. That’s it. Because, like, yes, we have great therapists, but I was a couples therapists. If my availability was open in the therapy notes, my EHR, and someone just wanted to get their five year old kid in, they just needed to get him in because some people are like, I don’t care, I just need them in. I might have availability next. And they would schedule with me even if my website says I don’t, you know, I work with couples, set it up. That’s the one piece that like, there would be way too much back and forth across the size of my practice to, like, look at every person who’s scheduled automatically and like, call them or look at.
Uriah Guilford 00:19:19 Like, interesting.
Maureen Werrbach 00:19:20 You know what? What are you looking for? And does the therapist actually do that because our therapists like tend to have like niche themselves. And until there’s like a way to filter in there, that’s like, I want to set schedule and I. And you have to like click first like couples work or it’s a child or individual with this like and then it filters the calendar of which therapists would be a good fit.
Uriah Guilford 00:19:44 Then I would yeah.
Maureen Werrbach 00:19:45 That would be amazing.
Uriah Guilford 00:19:46 That would be like magic. I mean, come on, dating apps have been doing this stuff for years, right? Like it should be possible. I will say that like I’ve seen most recently, I think the EHR doing the best job of this is Jane. Jane app.
Maureen Werrbach 00:19:57 Yeah, I’m hearing good things about them too.
Uriah Guilford 00:19:58 Yeah, because I was chatting with my friend John Clark the other day about this. They have this their scheduling widget is really nice because it actually shows the faces of all the therapists.
Uriah Guilford 00:20:07 So that.
Maureen Werrbach 00:20:08 Yeah, also helpful.
Maureen Werrbach 00:20:09 Yeah.
Uriah Guilford 00:20:09 If you want to do it this way, you could just have people schedule that way because you can click on each therapist, see a little bit about them, and then you can see their calendar and you can schedule with them, whether that’s like an initial consultation or an actual first session. Yeah. So I think that would be a huge unlock if that was more workable and more, you know, if it worked, I think that would be great.
Maureen Werrbach 00:20:27 Yeah, I do love that idea too. Okay, so you kind of mentioned a big struggle. And probably this is not even just for mid-size, but just practices is that they’re not able most are not actually live answering. And that tends to be how you can convert the quickest and easiest and that people are calling all these places, even though every practice says they have all this availability, they need new clients. Somehow clients are still not having an easy time getting a.
Uriah Guilford 00:20:56 Therapist.
Maureen Werrbach 00:20:57 Right? What does the midsize practice do?
Uriah Guilford 00:20:59 Okay.
Uriah Guilford 00:20:59 So I’m going to tell you this. And then I’m going to answer your question. So I created a course called Intake Accelerator. Right. And in that course I talk about the seven ingredients to a high converting intake process. It’s probably one of the best courses I’ve ever created. I think people should check it out and they can get a discount with TGP 25. Okay, so there’s my plug.
Uriah Guilford 00:21:17 Put it in.
Maureen Werrbach 00:21:17 Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes to here.
Uriah Guilford 00:21:20 I hope this will answer your question. So my favorite workflow for a therapy website is for every button to point to the contact page on the contact page. It says something like. The best way to get matched with a therapist is to fill out this form short form. Don’t collect everything you need to know for an intake session for a first appointment.
Maureen Werrbach 00:21:39 I think that’s what my practice does. Really?
Uriah Guilford 00:21:41 Literally.
Maureen Werrbach 00:21:41 What is your preferred time of day? Midday. Morning.
Uriah Guilford 00:21:44 Like. Yeah.
Uriah Guilford 00:21:45 What? Hair color of the therapist would you prefer?
Uriah Guilford 00:21:47 Yeah.
Maureen Werrbach 00:21:48 Yeah. Is there a certain day of the week that you’d want to do? Which ones aren’t the ones you want to do?
Uriah Guilford 00:21:53 Yeah. Oh my goodness. That’s funny. Okay. Keep going.
Uriah Guilford 00:21:55 All the buttons go to the contact page. The contact page says best way is to fill out this form. And then once they fill out the form, it automatically redirects them to another page on your site that has the scheduling widget for your intake coordinator. So if they want to, they can go ahead and schedule a call with your intake coordinator. That’s my favorite kind of workflow.
Maureen Werrbach 00:22:14 Wait, why do they fill out a form? Then? Why can’t they go straight to the widget to schedule with your intake person?
Uriah Guilford 00:22:19 Yeah, we noticed over time when we prioritize the scheduling widget first and said, like, this is the thing to do. Only about 40 to 50% of people would actually do that.
Uriah Guilford 00:22:29 Well, because.
Maureen Werrbach 00:22:30 Also you’re collecting their information. So if they don’t move forward to the schedule, an appointment with the intake person, your intake team still has their contact information they can.
Uriah Guilford 00:22:39 Reach out to. Exactly. Okay. And.
Uriah Guilford 00:22:41 You know, people are ambivalent about seeking therapy for the most part. Right. And so they’re not going to jump through a ton of hoops. But if someone’s really motivated, they will fill out the form and then they’ll book the appointment. So and then if you want to add on to that and create an even better experience, like we could do another podcast episode on like surprise and delight and how to like create high touch VIP experiences for clients. That’s interesting to me, but a welcome email sequence is really nice. Most people don’t do this. I don’t do you guys do this?
Uriah Guilford 00:23:07 No.
Uriah Guilford 00:23:08 Okay. Yeah. No, I actually evaluated.
Uriah Guilford 00:23:10 One like.
Maureen Werrbach 00:23:10 Post scheduling. We have an email, but not like a you’ve made an inquiry that I think is a smart idea.
Uriah Guilford 00:23:17 Both could.
Uriah Guilford 00:23:17 Work. Right. So an email sequence that’s like in the business of email marketing, they call it a nurture sequence. Yeah, but if someone schedules an appointment, then you can send them a couple emails that tell them about what to expect, how to get started, how to get to the office.
Uriah Guilford 00:23:30 Just like, you know, things like that. Those are kind of some nice things you can do, but from a very simplistic standpoint, point all your buttons to the contact page. Do a form that redirects to a scheduling widget. I like that.
Uriah Guilford 00:23:42 I love that.
Maureen Werrbach 00:23:43 Too, and it’s nice and simple. If we keep with the theme of today, which is Kiss method, keep it simple.
Uriah Guilford 00:23:49 Stupid people.
Uriah Guilford 00:23:49 Are looking for your services. Make it easy.
Uriah Guilford 00:23:51 Yes. Right. Yeah.
Maureen Werrbach 00:23:53 As we’re rounding to the end of this, is there anything that you want? I know you mentioned the accelerator, but anything that you want to share, either a last tip or a piece of information or anything that you have that might support these through practice owners. Share it and give your information as well.
Uriah Guilford 00:24:10 So many things. So many things that I would like to share. But the one that stands out to me is zooming out and thinking about what does success look like for the intake process for your practice.
Uriah Guilford 00:24:21 And this is very aspirational, of course, but at a high level it’s like happy clients, happy therapists, happy admin team. And one way to do that is to create a streamlined intake process. Right. So the better that flows, the easier it is for the potential client, the easier it is for the intake team, the happier everyone’s going to be. So not everybody’s doing this like for group practice owners, we have like a million different things to think about and to focus on, right? It’s hard to like choose what to do in quarter one of 2025. My pitch would be spend some time evaluating your intake process. How can you make it better? And the best tip? Honestly, if people didn’t hear anything else but this, this is my absolute best tip is to secret shop yourself.
Maureen Werrbach 00:25:04 I was just going to say do what you said you did to the last ten practices is like maybe even have a friend do it because you might be so in it and like have a friend do it and be like, give me all your complaints.
Maureen Werrbach 00:25:15 Yeah. You know.
Uriah Guilford 00:25:17 Fill out the form, schedule, do all the things. And then actually, I think the owner should also do it just in terms of actually seeing all the messages, whether it’s appointment reminders, client portal stuff, emails, and then you will automatically find things to improve and make better. I think this is the first impression that people have with your practice, so you should make it as amazing as it can possibly be. So I love that. That’s my suggestion.
Maureen Werrbach 00:25:41 That’s a great one. All right. How can people find you?
Uriah Guilford 00:25:44 All of our resources are at www.productivetherapist.com but specifically, if you want to check out the course I mentioned, you can go to www.intakeaccelerator.com and use the code TGPE25 to get 25% off.
Maureen Werrbach 00:25:55 Awesome. Thanks again for coming back on.
Uriah Guilford 00:25:58 I think I have the award of the most.
Uriah Guilford 00:26:00 We’ll check later. We’ll check.
Uriah Guilford 00:26:03 Perfect. Thanks, Maureen.
Maureen Werrbach 00:26:06 Thanks for listening. Give us five stars on whatever podcast streaming service you use.
Maureen Werrbach 00:26:11 And I’ll see you next week.
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Resources
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