[00:00:00] Linzy: Hello and welcome back to a Feelings and Finances episode of Money Skills for Therapists podcast. These are our short little episodes that we do at the end of the week that are all about answering listener questions, giving you a little burst of financial goodness to take you into the weekend. Today we have a question from Edgar who’s a recent graduate of Money Skills for Therapists.
[00:00:23] Here is Edgar’s question.
[00:00:24] Edgar: Hi, Linzy, my name is Edgar Frías, and I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist in California in private practice, and I am a longtime listener of this podcast and also just recently graduated from your Money Skills for Therapists course. And I’ve recently started experimenting with scaling in my practice.
[00:00:47] I just started a group for artists, and I’ve been kind of wanting to think a little bit more about scaling. I know that you have more experience with this, so would love to hear your thoughts, like whether they are good or bad, positive, negative, neutral about scaling? Uh, how much should we be aiming to scale in our practices?
[00:01:09] Should we scale everything? What’s the difference between, doing individual work or working with a lot of people? What have you noticed? It’s something that I’m definitely kind of mulling over as I’m getting excited about being able to offer these types of opportunities for folks, while also knowing that I do love doing individual work as well and find it really meaningful.
[00:01:34] So yeah, I would just love to hear any reflections you have for me. And again, I want to thank you so much for the work that you do in this world and for creating this incredible podcast that is such a great resource for our communities.
[00:01:48] Linzy: Okay, so scaling. This is a great question, Edgar. And this is something that I hear and see more and more therapists talking about. Obviously this is something that I’ve done myself in terms of pivoting out of private practice, in my case completely, and into Money Nuts and Bolts, my company, where I run Money Skills for Therapists and Money Skills for Practice Owners and have this podcast.
[00:02:12] So, it’s definitely something that’s on a lot of people’s mind, this question of scaling. And I think Edgar, this piece that you mentioned about how you love one on one work, this is a really important piece of information for you and for anybody listening. So scaling, you know, is when we take what we do and we start to reach beyond those one on ones, right?
[00:02:33] Like health practitioners, therapists, generally speaking, our business model is we spend an hour with somebody, we sit down together, we use all of our skills and our expertise and our gifts, and we’re like drawing on all of these things to give them this beautiful customized experience with us, you know, really attuned to exactly where they’re at
[00:02:51] to help them with whatever problem we are there to help them solve. That is a business model that has the limitation of, we only have so much of ourself to give, right? We only have so much time. We only have so much energy. You might be able to do that with 15 people in the week and feel good and be quite effective.
[00:03:09] But if you tried to do that with 40 people in the week, you certainly would pay the price, right? You would burn out. The quality of that is not going to be as good if you do it 40 times over than if you do it 15 times or whatever limit you identify for yourself. But as you say, that work, though, can be so rich.
[00:03:26] So meaningful. It’s very powerful to have an individual relationship with somebody where you really get to know them and you get to walk that path with them, whatever the path that you’re helping them down. And I don’t think that we should discount that when you’re thinking about the type of work that you want to do, because it’s really easy to fall into this thing of thinking, this kind of capitalist thinking, of just like bigger is better.
[00:03:49] And if you have a bigger business, you’re going to be happier. Your life is going to be easier. If you make a million dollars, all your problems are going to go away. That is not true. That is not true. So as we’re thinking about building our businesses, what we really need to be thinking about is what is the work we actually want to do.
[00:04:04] What makes you enjoy your day? What is it that you do in your work that you look back and you’re like, Oh, that felt so good. Or that you’re in the flow in the moment thinking like, God, I can’t believe I get to do this for work. This is amazing. We don’t want to give up those things, right? So never think that you need to scale your business or that there’s something wrong
[00:04:23] if you don’t want to scale your business. If you absolutely love the work that you’re doing and it lights you up, and it’s feeding you, and it’s also literally feeding you, it’s paying you enough, there’s no reason to scale. If you are curious about scaling, I will say like my experience with the benefits of scaling, of taking what I do and doing it differently is that you do get to have that bigger impact.
[00:04:47] Right. You get to reach more folks. You also get to create something that folks get to have results from what you do and Edgar, in your case, you’re talking about like working with like artists and a group of artists. I’m not entirely sure, you know, what you’re planning right now, but generally speaking, when we scale, there’s more people involved, right?
[00:05:04] So when I run Money Skills for Therapists or when I run a round of Money Skills for Group Practice Owners, it’s not just me who is helping somebody through their journey of, you know, developing calm and confidence with money. There’s other people in that group walking alongside them.
[00:05:20] And we all know the power of groups. We all know that folks can help each other as peers in a way that you cannot as a facilitator or a therapist or a practitioner, because they’re walking the same road together. And there’s something beautiful about that, which means that there’s less work for you to do in terms of being the interpersonal connection that’s helping somebody through a certain transformation.
[00:05:39] But it also means that you don’t get to be that person who makes it happen for somebody, too, right? Like you’re also kind of giving up that central pivotal role, which for some of us if we are have been raised to be helpers, and if we really derive like an identity from being helpful and being kind of integral to somebody’s healing, then that’s actually something you have to kind of give up and grieve a little bit when you start to scale, when it’s no longer about just you doing something, but you put what you do into a book or a course, or you create a community space. Folks are going to start to get the results that they used to get one on one with you,
[00:06:14] they’re going to start to get those results in other ways through the information that you’ve shared, through the vibe that you’ve created, through a process that they’re walking through in a more automatic way. And there is a change there. Like I know for me, there was kind of some grieving that I had to do a few years ago now, but realizing like, right, now I’m helping people get this certain result, but I don’t actually get to like walk alongside them in quite the same way that I did with my clinical clients, right?
[00:06:40] So there’s less intimacy there, frankly, in a scaled kind of offering. And so that’s something to consider as you’re thinking about what you want is like how much of that intimacy do you want to get from your work? How much does that feed you? How much do you want to start to scale and do the things that you do and make change in like a more kind of generalized way to put it a certain way.
[00:07:00] And maybe you look for intimacy in other places in your life because that’s also something that friends of mine have talked about as we’ve scaled our businesses, kind of walking this road together, is when you give up some of the intimacy that you get from one on one clients, whether that’s like therapy clients or if you’re a manual practitioner, your massage clients or your, your physio clients, like those folks that you have that real connection with.
[00:07:22] If you’re unconsciously trying to get some of that intimacy in life from those relationships, you’re going to have to find it somewhere else instead, right? You’re going to have to like, make great friendships, build a beautiful neighborhood group with your neighbors. But I think there’s a lot of opportunity there.
[00:07:35] So that’s the first thing I’ll say in terms of just like the work itself. It’s checking in with yourself about what you want to get from your work emotionally, and making sure you’re setting up a job, you’re building your company in such a way that you still get to do what feeds you. And that’s going to be different things at different times, but being honest with yourself.
[00:07:50] So Edgar, if you love that one on one work, don’t give that up. Right? But just think about how much of that do you want to do in the week? And then how much of maybe some different types of work, some more scaled work, would you like to do? The other thing that I will say is financially, there are obviously big returns that can come from scaling, but that’s also going to vary depending on how much you want to sell what you do because selling is always a big part of money coming in.
[00:08:14] It is the thing that makes the money come in. So how much do you want to be showing up and selling? How much help do you want to get? As we scale, we also have to hire folks. So you get to start to think about, do you want to be a one person operation who’s kind of doing everything, but doing maybe less one on one work, but you want to be like picking up the admin that’s going to come with having a more scaled offer?
[00:08:33] Do you want to hire team members? How many team members do you want? Every time you hire a team member to help you run your company, you know, make your service happen, you’re making your life easier, but you’re also choosing to be paid less, right? So I, for instance, choose to have many team members. I love having a team.
[00:08:49] And now I think a lot of that getting to like cheer somebody on and walk alongside them that I used to do with my clinical clients, I now do that with my team, right? I get to coach my team every two weeks. We have like a meeting where we have a one on one and I get to coach them and help them work through a challenge and think about where they are professionally and how they want to develop.
[00:09:06] And that’s really beautiful. And I get to have that intimacy, that professional intimacy in those employee relationships now. I get to mentor in this different way, but I’m also paying those folks. So that means I get paid less. I have other friends and folks that I know in the kind of similar scaled space who choose to have nobody worked for them or just have contractors do a couple things here and there, and then they get to make lots of money, but they also have to do all sorts of stuff that I personally wouldn’t want to do.
[00:09:33] So that’s also something to think about Edgar is like, what is the work that you love to do that you would want to take on? You know, if you’re starting to like create a space or create a group, what is the administrative stuff that you’d be like, Oh, that would actually be really fun. And that would be a nice variety
[00:09:45] in contrast to my one on one work. And what is the stuff that you know you hate, and you’d want to be hiring somebody? Because as we’re thinking about the path to and the model of the business that we’re building, you want to make sure that you’re building a business that will also be able to sustain
[00:09:59] you and sustain your team, right? That’s going to make enough money to pay you, and maybe to pay a virtual assistant and maybe to pay a marketer. So there’s a kind of a math equation there to also figure out. It was just like, how do you make a job that you’re going to love where you’re not doing stuff that you
[00:10:14] don’t love, and you’re also making enough sales that everybody is taken care of. So those are kind of like some pieces, Edgar, that I’m going to give you. Some, some seeds maybe to plant as you’re thinking about scaling. I think there’s like lots of beautiful opportunities in scaling, but also it’s not everything.
[00:10:30] And if we think that it’s going to solve all of life’s problems, that is not true. But I will tell you what scaling has given me, Edgar, is like, I feel so much lighter about my work, doing the work that in the way that I do it now. I get to see folks in Money, Skills for Therapists and Money Skills for Group Practice Owners have these big transformations and do these amazing things without me doing this like intense kind of like really soul demanding work like I used to do in my clinical work.
[00:10:56] And I have a lot more time freedom. Right? So those are all real. Those are all realities. I get paid better than I did in my private practice, but not as much as I would, uh, if I was choosing to do a bunch of other roles in my business. But I’ve been able to consciously make those decisions. So I think we can scale in really conscious waysthat meet our needs, but it’s being really connected with your needs as you grow your business
[00:11:15] so you don’t end up growing something that you hate, which is very easy to do. So thank you so much, Edgar, for your question about scaling. I really appreciate it. And I so appreciate you as a human. Anybody who has met Edgar knows that they are just a downright lovely human. And thank you for submitting your question today, Edgar.
[00:11:34] If you have a question for me that you’d like me to answer on feelings and finances, I would so appreciate you doing exactly what Edgar did and heading over to our website, moneynutsandbolts. com slash podcast. You’ll see a little section there that says, have a question for Linzy. It’s like super easy to record.
[00:11:50] You literally just press record, and it’s going to start recording you right away. Just share your name and your question. And I would love, love, love to answer your question here on an episode of Feelings and Finances. Thank you so much for joining me today.