Month: May 2023

[00:00:01] When you started your group practice, you did so with a vision. Maybe you seized an opportunity without planning to by saying yes to someone who wanted to intern or work for you. Maybe you’ve always known, though, you wanted to have a group practice and you couldn’t wait to start building out your team and moving into that leadership role. Either way, you are the leader of your group practice and no one else can replace you in that role. This is also true when it comes to your financial leadership. 

Welcome to the Money Skills For Therapists podcast, where we answer this question: How can therapists and health practitioners go from money shame and confusion, to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of the course Money Skills For Therapists. 

Hello and welcome back to our special mini podcast, Money Skills for Group Practice Owners. Today I’m going to talk about financial leadership in your group practice. I want to start this episode with a really simple idea. You can delegate tasks, but you can’t delegate out your leadership. When you started your group practice, you did so with a vision. Maybe you seized an opportunity without planning to by saying yes to someone who wanted to intern or work for you. Maybe you’ve always known, though, you wanted to have a group practice and you couldn’t wait to start building out your team and moving into that leadership role. Either way, you are the leader of your group practice and no one else can replace you in that role. This is also true when it comes to your financial leadership. 

I know that money is probably not your favorite part of your group practice. A love of finances is usually not why we go into school to become therapists. I see so many group practice owners happily digging into mentoring their employees or trying their hand at marketing and networking, but wanting to pretty much ignore the financial side, thinking that if they make those other things work, then the money is going to work itself out. But the bad news is, it won’t. So what many therapists do is hire a full service bookkeeper or an accounting service. And then they feel like they did what they were supposed to do. The finances are taken care of. But that is also not true. 

Going back to my first point, you can delegate tasks, but you can’t delegate out your leadership. And this is what I see happens when we try to think of bookkeeping as a substitute for us stepping up and learning money. You get all sorts of reports from your bookkeeper each month, and maybe they even explain them to you sometimes, but you still have no idea what they mean. Sure, all the information is in one place now. That is a good thing. The task of bookkeeping is done. But you’re still as confused and disempowered as ever about your group practice finances. 

I know several successful business owners, including group practice owners, who, despite having built large businesses, feel like a total hot mess financially. They have bookkeepers and accountants who give them reports, but without having the knowledge and the confidence to understand what they’re seeing and to do something with the information in front of them, they can’t really make money work for them. They can’t even connect with their own success. Because when you look at the numbers, the numbers are meaningless to them. Are these good numbers? Is there money here to hire someone? Am I paying myself too much? Am I paying myself too little? This is why I don’t believe that group practice owners just need to be the CEOs of the group practices. They need to be the CFOs. What is a CFO? The CFO is a Chief Financial Officer. That’s the person who looks at the numbers deeply, understands the information in front of them, and can make strategic moves needed to reach their business goals. 

So what are those goals for you? Is it buffers in all of your bank accounts? So you don’t need to hold your breath when you run payroll? Is it finally being paid well? Is it having the big picture perspective on your numbers that means you don’t privately burst into tears after one of your best clinicians gives notice because you know that financially things are actually going to be okay? Those things are all possible when you build your CFO skills and confidently step into the financial leadership role that is already yours, but that you may not be fully claiming yet. So what does real financial leadership look like in group practice? It looks like many things, and that includes being able to read financial statements and understand exactly what they mean. Because we still want you to delegate tasks, and bookkeeping is a task. 

So I’m all for therapists trying their hand at bookkeeping to start and in Money Skills For Therapists, which focuses on solo practice. That’s very, very important. So I want you to have some knowledge of how to do bookkeeping. But as the group practice leader, quickly that’s going to be a task that you delegate to somebody else, even internally. But you need to be the one who can make meaning out of the numbers, even if you’re not doing the task of putting the numbers together. You’re the one who looks at it and understands what it is telling you. That is part of what looking like a CFO looks like. It also looks like running your practice with a vision and a plan because you know where you’re going and why. You know how many therapists you ultimately want to have on your team. You know what their fees are going to be. You know the wages or the fee split that you’re going to have with them. You know how many clients you want them to be seeing each week. You know what your monthly overhead is going to look like. And you know what you can start spending money on when you hit different milestones. 

When you have that perspective of where you’re going, you understand, okay, when I get to this point, I’m going to give myself this raise. When I get to this point, we’re going to be able to have that second office location that we want. You can actually see where you’re going and what can happen when you hit those different points. It looks like having buffers in all the right places so you can weather the natural ups and downs of business without worrying about running out of money. And this is really, really important. And it’s a step that a lot of people like to skip, but that is part of being the CFO is having those beautiful buffers to alleviate your anxiety. It looks like having a good regular CEO and CFO paycheck, so you’re paid well for the work that you do and know that you can keep receiving that paycheck even if client sessions are down for a couple of weeks or during the summer or during the winter holidays, because you’ve set up money to make sure that that paycheck keeps coming. It means having the ability to zoom out and see the big picture in your business so you don’t get stuck in the weeds with your numbers. 

You understand what numbers are important. You understand how to put them in perspective, and you don’t get caught up in the little decisions or the little details anymore. All of this together will give you a sense of safety and stability. It will let you feel proud of running a group that really reflects your values. You’re going to feel less like you’re playing a game of whack a mole and more like the empowered CEO and CFO, that financial leader of your group practice, with a confidence and a paycheck to reflect the leadership and vision you bring to the table every day. This practice was born out of your brilliance and your vision, and you want to enjoy it rather than dipping in and out of owner’s remorse, wondering if you made a huge mistake. 

You could forevermore pay a full service accounting firm 600 to 800 bucks a month, which is 7200 or 9600 a year, or a fractional CFO for those of you with bigger practices, fractional CFOs, people who can come in and try to bring this financial expertise to you, charge 3000 to $5000 a month. Seriously. And even with that, you can still feel confused and disempowered about your group practice finances. Or you can join me in Money Skills for Group Practice Owners and do the work that’s going to allow you to deeply understand your numbers. So when your just-does-your-books bookkeeper or team member shows you a report, you know exactly what you’re looking at, what the numbers are telling you, and what strategic actions need to happen to keep you on track with your financial and your practice goals. It’s your business and your vision. 

No one can steer the ship better than you can. So it’s time to learn the skills to step confidently into your CFO role and lead your practice with intention and clarity. Would you like my support in confidently owning your financial leadership role? The Money Skills for Group Practice Owners course is about taking you from feeling like an overworked, stressed, and underpaid group practice owner to being the confident and empowered financial leader of your group practice. You can click on the links in the show notes to learn more or to book a discovery call with me to chat about whether the course is right for you. I’d love to connect with you about it. 

The application window is open right now for Money Skills for Group Practice Owners for our January 2024 cohort. If you are hearing this, it means that this is your chance to apply to join me in January to work together for six months to help you become the empowered financial leader of your group practice. Click on the link in the show notes to learn more and to apply today.  

Thanks for listening today.

[00:00:07] Again, these are numbers that sometimes we might want to avoid because it’s like, Ooh, that sounds like a number I don’t want to know. But if you’re looking at finding your ideal numbers and making things better, you need to understand what is happening now. 

Welcome to the Money Skills For Therapists podcast, where we answer this question: How can therapists and health practitioners go from money shame and confusion, to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of the course Money Skills For Therapists. 

Hello and welcome back to our special mini podcast, Money Skills for Group Practice Owners. Money Skills for Group Practice Owners is a six month course that’s all about helping group practice owners become the empowered financial leaders of their practice. And today’s podcast episode, and the next one that’s going to come out as well, are completely focused on group practice. So you’re welcome to listen in, if that’s not you there’s still lots of things here that are going to be relevant for solo practice, but we are really going to be getting into that next level of complexity for group practice that is part of running group practice and what can make group practice so much more challenging than solo practice. 

So last time we talked about the idea of your group practice as a machine. That idea that your group practice is a machine with all these different parts and components and you might not have thought about that as you were building it. Often the decisions that we make on the fly as we’re building things, it’s like somebody comes in and they ask for a certain fee split and you’re like, I don’t know, that sounds good. Ends up becoming your default fee split. And there’s a part of your machine that you’ve just built without necessarily intentionally making it a certain way. Now, one part of your machine is in place, and there are many, many parts like that, that come together to give you certain financial results from your group practice. If you have built your group practice machine wrong, no matter how many clients your practitioners see, you’re never going to see the financial sustainability that you’re looking for. 

So today I want to talk about finding your ideal numbers for your group practice. Every group practice has its own set of ideal numbers, and those ideal numbers are not just about like what’s going to make the most money. That’s not the purpose of business. I want to say that maybe that’s the purpose of business in a very like capitalistic view, but I don’t think that’s why you’re in group practice. I know that’s certainly not why I’m in business. The purpose of business is to help you to generate money from doing what you love in a way that aligns with your needs and your values. And that is this beautiful opportunity that you have with your practice by figuring out your ideal numbers and how to hit all the right sweet spots. So group practice leadership is actually a role that you want to stay in long term, not something that you’re waiting to get out of as soon as possible, waiting to sell your group practice. So let’s talk about what figuring out those ideal numbers for your group practice actually looks like. 

The first thing that you need to do is understand the current state of your numbers. We need to start where you are. How much does it cost to run your group practice? Getting into your numbers and deeply understanding what’s happening in your group practice is so important and it can be a step that people want to skip. When I’ve worked one on one with folks, this is like really the step that I start at if I can see that they don’t know their numbers. The first thing you need to do is really get acquainted with these numbers and understand how are things working now. That’s really going to help you start to see what is not working. So how much does it cost to run your group practice would be one piece. How much are you paying in overhead? How much is your rent? How much is your admin team? How much are you paying your practitioners? How much does each employee cost you? Not just in terms of those wages that you’re paying to the folks, your income-generating folks, the therapists who are working with you, or health practitioners, but also in terms of the benefits that you pay for them, the trainings that you offer to them through their work with you, how much is each employee costing you and how much they’re making you is that second really important part of the puzzle. Sometimes that number can be really surprising for folks, and sometimes that number immediately shows you why it might feel like your machine is broken and your group practice is not working is how those numbers are shaking out of what folks are bringing in the door and then what it’s costing you to employ them and manage them and take care of them. 

The next piece – and this is one that a lot of group practice owners want to skip and ignore – is how much are you getting paid for your leadership work? With this, I am not talking about your clinical time. I’m not talking about the clients that you’re still seeing and that revenue that it’s bringing in and that part of your paycheck. But I’m talking about how much you’re getting paid for the time you spend managing your staff, hiring and training them, setting a marketing strategy for your practice, networking and promoting your practice in your community, making big picture decisions about your business. I’m talking about your leadership. How much are you being paid for that time that you spend doing leadership work? Sometimes the answer to this is $0 or very, very little. Sometimes you might do the math on this and realize you’re getting paid $10 an hour or $50 an hour. And that’s really helpful information. Again, these are numbers that sometimes we might want to avoid because it’s like, ooh, that sounds like a number I don’t want to know. But if you’re looking at finding your ideal numbers and making things better, you need to understand what is happening now. 

Finally, how much do you need to be setting aside for taxes? You can look at, you know, your taxes you paid for the last few years. Understand what is the obligation, that tax obligation that your business has and make sure that you understand that number as another part of your responsibilities. So those pieces, again, were: how much is it costing you to run your practice in terms of operating expenses? How much employees are costing you and how much are they bringing in? How much are you getting paid for your leadership work? And how much needs to be set aside for taxes? All of these pieces come together to create your financial picture and determine how much money is in those bank accounts and whether things feel spacious or whether things feel tight. Then once you understand where you are and some of those financial obligations that you have and the way that things are currently set up, because you can’t just snap your fingers and change your practice overnight, right? 

We need to understand where you are. Once you’re grounded in that, then you can start to move into understanding what’s possible and how you want things to be. Start to set a vision for where you want your group practice to go financially. Part of that is thinking about how much of your time is going into running the group practice and what your time is worth. What do you want to actually be paid for that leadership work? What is your salary or wage when it comes to being the leader of your group practice, not just a clinician working within it. But if you’re spending 10 hours a week running the group and then another 15 hours seeing your own clients and taking care of your own clinical work, how much are you going to be paid for that? Ten or probably it’s more like 15 or 20 hours a week that you’re doing of that work. What is that portion of your pay need to be? And that leads into your leadership paycheck, right? What is the paycheck that you need to be seeing coming home between that leadership work that you’re doing – and if you’re still seeing clients, part of that paycheck will also be your client paycheck – what do you need to be paid ultimately to make this worth it for you? 

I’ve heard from so many group practice owners that say that they’re actually getting paid less now than they did as a solo practitioner. That can be an okay place to be if you’re like in an investment stage and you’re going somewhere and there’s a vision, but that is not a good place to live. Right. We don’t want you to basically be exploiting yourself for the work that you’re doing, leading other folks by having you get paid way less than you would get paid to see a client yourself or to do some other kind of work. Next, you want to think about how much money needs to be left over at the end of the month to allow you to build buffers. Right. We don’t want money to just go down to zero every month and start over. Part of building a sustainable business – and this applies to all types of business – is having extra money that builds up. Having those buffers so that if you have a down month, if some of your clinicians have to go on leave like maternity leave or sick leave or caregiver leave, there’s still money in the bank accounts to pay everything, right? You’re not going to be in trouble if suddenly sessions drop for a couple of weeks. And with many businesses, the reality is that is where they are. They’re at a place where if they didn’t make sales for a couple of weeks, they would be done. They’d have to close their doors. And we don’t want you to be there. Right. So part of it is starting to set your goals. 

When you’re looking at those ideal numbers, what are the buffers you want to see in all those different bank accounts? How much money do you want to see in that payroll bank account so that you don’t have to like white knuckle it every time you run payroll? How much money do you want to see in your operating expenses? And there are guidelines for this, but it’s also personal. Again, we’re talking about your needs and your values. What are the amounts in those accounts that could be serving you really well, giving you that financial stability that most group practices do not have right now? Finally, what are your hopes and your dreams for your practice? Where do you want to go with it? Are there other things that could be requiring money that your practice should be saving for every month? Things like maybe buying a professional suite or being able to offer retreats and having money that you can put down to deposit for, you know, a retreat space to do these retreats that you’ve been dreaming of doing. Those are the things that can really feel exciting and expansive. And I know most entrepreneurs that I know – most group practice owners and many, many solo practitioners, too, you know – we don’t want to get bored. We like to do different stuff. Right. And so what is that Dream Fund look like for you and your group practice? That is money that can be put aside to move towards new and exciting and expansive things beyond what your group practice looks like today. 

Once you have point A, which is where you are, and point B, which is where you want to be, all of the things we just talked about in terms of your ideal paycheck, those buffers that money to be scared of in the business, then you can work with your numbers and see what needs to happen to get where you want to go. Using a cash flow projection tool can be a great way to do this, and we have a beautiful one that we’ve built that we use for this in our own business and that we use in next level work, like Money Skills for Group Practice Owners. This is going to be included. You can start to play and be curious about your numbers to see what changes, even gradual or small changes can be made to get you where you want to go. You can play with the number of clinicians that you have on staff and how many clients they see. Would you have more part time clinicians? Would you have full time clinicians? How many sessions at a minimum are you going to require as an employer? And this is also a space where you have the opportunity to be a great employer by setting an expectation for your team that’s reasonable and sustainable for them as practitioners, rather than trying to squeeze as much money out of them as you can. And this is something that I see in group practices that are not in alignment and that don’t have financial health, is they can exploit their employees. And I don’t think that’s who you want to be. I don’t think you want to be a group practice owner that’s trying to squeeze as much money out of your clinicians as you can before they burn out and leave. 

You have an opportunity when you really have control over your numbers, to set sustainable expectations that make people want to stay with you. So seize that opportunity. You’re also going to want to be curious about the fees that your clinicians are charging. Are they insurance based? Is there maybe an insurance company that you realize you prefer working with and that pays better and you can get off the other panels? Or do you look at switching your clinicians to be out-of-pocket and then get really curious about what their fees could be and what that could do for overall numbers, how that can get you to those ideal numbers you want to see. 

Policies are another piece you can be curious about if you actually started having your clinicians enforce the policies that you already have in place. And often that’s the first step. What would that do to your numbers? Or do you start charging cancellation fees because you’re not doing that at this time. And with a tool when you have different cancellation fee numbers, you can see like, okay, well, what if we charged half the cancellation fee? What would that do to our numbers? What if we had a 48-hour cancellation policy and we charge the full fee because that’s appropriate for the folks that we work with? What would that do financially? Those are all places that you can play with and that will have impact ultimately on how your machine works. 

You can look at your operating expenses. Is there something that you can cut? Are there places you could do things differently? Are there investments now or things that you’re paying for by default that you could cancel for now? Or things that you were planning on buying next month that you could defer till later until your numbers really support them? You can think about other offers, too. And this is something we also have built into our cash flow projection tool. Playing with questions of like, what if your clinician started running a group? What if you had workshops and what is that money coming in the door do to your overall picture? And how close does it get you to your ideal numbers? All of these things together give you the ultimate financial results of your practice on the tool. We have all of the these factors at the top: fees and number of clinicians and how many people they see and your operating expenses. This all goes into the top end, and at the bottom you see the financial results. 

How much money ends up being left there at the end of the month? How much money is building up for tax payments? Is that going to meet your tax obligations? How much money is available for your paycheck? Is that getting you to that ideal leadership paycheck that you need to make this work worthwhile? Are there leftover operating expense money so you can see buffers building up? Is it hitting the goals that you want to see in your buffers? Being able to play with your numbers and put them all together and be curious about them lets you really see and understand how your group practice machine works and what is possible. I love doing this work with group practice owners because it lays bare the workings of that machine. Once you can see it all come together, you can find those sustainable numbers and understand exactly what needs to happen to make your practice work. 

Would you like my support in making your practice sustainable, paying you and your team well for the work that you do? Money Skills for Group Practice Owners is about taking you from feeling like an overworked, stressed, and underpaid group practice owner to being the confident and empowered financial leader of your group practice. 

The application window is open right now for Money Skills for Group Practice Owners for our January 2024 cohort. If you are hearing this, it means that this is your chance to apply to join me in January to work together for six months to help you become the empowered financial leader of your group practice. Click on the link in the show notes to learn more and to apply today. 

Thanks for listening today. 

[00:00:02] It is a lot of work to run a group. Like, a lot of work. There’s so many moving parts between all the admin that has to get done, managing other therapists and practitioners with their various personalities and their needs, insurance money not showing up, grumpy clients complaining to you about the services that they’re getting, clinical notes not getting done. Sometimes it can feel like you’re working harder than ever, and it’s definitely not the passive income that you dreamt about when you started your practice. 

Welcome to the Money Skills For Therapists podcast, where we answer this question: How can therapists and health practitioners go from money shame and confusion, to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of the course Money Skills For Therapists. 

Hello and welcome to our special mini podcast, Money Skills for Group Practice Owners. This podcast is appearing in my normal Money Skills For Therapists podcast feed, as you probably noticed, but the next few episodes that are coming out are going to be focusing on group practice only. Group practice owners, these next couple episodes are for you. We all know that solo practice finances can be emotionally daunting. I mean, I built Money Skills For Therapists on that premise, and hundreds of therapists coming through the course and accessing our support have definitely proven that point over and over again. But there’s a reason that group practice is even more difficult. 

Today we’re going to talk about why group practice feels so much harder than solo practice. First of all, let’s start with what it’s like to be a group practice owner from the dozens of group practice owners that I’ve talked to while I was putting together this course. I know that you love being a group practice owner some days. When group practice is good, we all know that it’s really, really good. You got to build something bigger than yourself. You can see it meeting the needs of your community, filling a gap in what’s available in your community. By having folks working for you, they’re offering specialized services that otherwise just wouldn’t be available in the way that you folks are providing them. You get to make a bigger impact than you ever could by yourself. You get to feel proud when you think about all of the lives that are impacted every week by your team, which is way more people than you can reach on your own. You get to enjoy the community that you built. You don’t have to work alone anymore. You get to mentor other therapists and practitioners. You get to have a team who share your vision and your values. And generally, you just have colleagues so that you’re not working alone anymore. That isolation that is such a hard part of solo practice goes away in a certain sense when you have a group practice. Now you actually have people that you’re working with all the time. You also get to wear different hats. You get variety. You get to be a leader, a mentor. You get to be an administrator if you want to. You can also hire that out, of course. And you don’t have to be a full-time therapist anymore. You get to use diverse talents and enjoy that variety. Plus, you don’t have to rely on seeing clients to get paid, which can get really tiresome. You have built something bigger than a 1 to 1 business by building your group practice, and you get to see the fruits of your labor and feel pride in all of that. 

But we also know that when it’s bad, it’s bad. Some days, I know many, many, many group practice owners are unsure if they made the right decision by starting a group practice. It’s heavy, carrying the weight of not just paying your own paycheck, which can sometimes be stressful enough in solo practice, but having to pay a whole team. You might worry about money a lot. You might hold your breath when you go to run payroll. Kind of that white-knuckled experience of being unsure if the money’s going to be there. It is a lot of work to run a group. Like, a lot of work. There’s so many moving parts between all the admin that has to get done, managing other therapists and practitioners with their various personalities and their needs, having to chase people and put out fires like insurance money not showing up, grumpy clients complaining to you about, you know, the services that they’re getting, clinical notes not getting done. Sometimes it can feel like you’re working harder than ever, and it’s definitely not the passive income that you dreamt about when you started your group practice. 

A note about passive income in general. That’s a term that I wish that we would just kind of cancel. If we could just take a vote on that and get rid of that term. But we do know that group practice is scalable. And when we build something bigger than ourselves, we imagine it getting easier. And yet group practice can actually end up feeling a lot harder than solo practice. Also, and I’ve heard this over and over and over again, the revolving door of employees is exhausting. I’ve seen this with my own group-practice-owning friends, when they have a therapist leave, but it can really feel like just when everything is going well, when everything’s coming together, you have a cohesive team, the money is working, you get a resignation letter or two and your stomach just drops. Thinking about that big hit to your revenue, all the resources that you spent on these therapists going down the drain, all of the time and energy it’s going to take to find and train someone new, not to mention actually filling their caseload after that. It’s also hard to take an actual break and set boundaries around your work. Sometimes your practice and your personal life can feel all bound up together. You think about your business all the time. You find yourself working evenings and weekends. You can’t imagine being able to take a vacation and really walk away from it because you know that something would come up and you’d have to jump back into your group. Your business is deeply part of you and that can be lovely. But also sometimes it’s a bit much. And finally, to top it all off – and on your worst days, this can really feel like insult to injury for all of this work you’re doing – you are definitely not being paid like a boss or CEO. You might still be relying on your own client income in order to be paid well, or you might be getting paid last and making even less money than you used to make when you worked full-time in client-facing work. 

Either way, when you think about all the work you do and the hours you put in, you shudder to think of how much you’re being paid an hour to run your group practice. These are numbers you’d rather not know. And I will say I’ve met several group practice owners where the answer to that is actually zero. They’re not being paid at all. So they’re being paid from the client income that they’re generating, but they’re not actually getting paid for all of that other work that we just talked about. Basically, they’re doing that in a volunteer role functionally, and the ups and downs of group practice, like those days that you feel good and proud and everything’s amazing, and then the resignation letter and the type money and the like, exhaustion. They can just come one after another. The good moments and the good days can be immediately followed by something bad happening. 

Your practice can often feel like an emotional and financial rollercoaster, which is not at all what you were going for when you set out building it. So I think many of us can agree, but maybe not all of us, that roller coasters are fun for an afternoon once or twice a year, but they’re not for your business and livelihood. I personally enjoy centrifugal force rides, which is a bit of a controversial opinion. The rides that spin you and, you know, like use the force. So flying saucers were on the outside, spinning cups, that kind of thing. And that is fun for a little bit, but I definitely wouldn’t want to do that for more than like 2 hours once a year. Rather than a roller coaster, what you’re looking for in your group practice, would be more like a luxury train car – if we want to keep going with the vehicle metaphors – a train car rolling steadily along the tracks, confidently headed to all the right places at the right pace, and also with a nice dining car and fancy drinks and snacks. Obviously, I know that you want to feel a sense of stability and safety in your group practice, knowing that the money’s going to be there. You want to feel proud of running a group that really reflects your values, takes care of your team members, and has a positive lasting impact on your community. You want to feel less like you’re playing a game of whack-a-mole all the time. Moving from one crisis to the next, and more like you’re competently steering your group practice ship. Weathering the natural ebbs and flows of business, including therapist resignations, with confidence and with ease. You want to be the empowered CEO of your group practice with a confidence and the paycheck to reflect the leadership and the vision that you’re bringing to the table every day. 

This practice was born out of your brilliance and your vision, and I want you to really connect with that. This wouldn’t be here if not for you dreaming it and making it happen. And you want to enjoy that rather than dipping in and out of owner’s remorse. And you can have all of this by strategically setting up your group practice finances so that your practice is healthy and sustainable and allows you and your team to thrive. When you started a group practice, you stepped into a higher level of business complexity than you had when you were a solo practitioner. There are so many moving parts that will make or break the financial health of your group practice. But so often, those decisions that you make on the fly while you’re building your group are the key elements that are determining if your practice finances work or if they don’t. I like to think of a group practice like a machine, and it’s one that you’ve built, but you might not have realized all the different parts and how they worked when you were building it. All the moving parts of group practice come together to shape the end results. How much money will be there at the end of the month, how much you and your team can get paid, whether you can afford employee benefits to take care of and retain your team, whether you can save up for your group practice, visions, and dreams. 

You’ve built your practice in a certain way and it’s going to give you certain financial results because of that. Things like the fees you set for your therapists’ sessions, your income splits or wages that you’ve set up with them, the operating expenses that you’ve taken on, your admin team wages, your client policies and how well they’re enforced, your training policies, the benefits that you offer. All of these things come together to create financial results. And if you’re like most group practice owners, you don’t fully understand that machine yet or how to fix it to make it give you the results that you want. In fact, if you set your machine up wrong, no matter how many clients your therapists see, you will never have the financial stability that you’re looking for. Which I know is like ugh. 

This is why, despite what we tend to think – and the solution that good practice owners tend to go for when they’re thinking about this problem – hiring more therapists is not the solution. It’s easy to just think – and I’ve seen group practice owners do this time and time again – I’ll just hire a couple more therapists and then everything’s going to be okay. And it might be true in your case. But also, unless you know that you’ve set your numbers up so your practice is actually designed to work and designed to be profitable for you and have money going to all the right places, then you’re actually just guessing at what the solution is. It’s our tendency, and we’ve talked about this many times on the Money Skills for Therapy podcast. It’s our tendency to always think that more is better. But having taught finances to hundreds of therapists, now I can tell you that more is more, but when we don’t have our businesses set up properly, more money coming in the door doesn’t mean it’s going to stick around or do what you need it to do for you. You need to fix your machine for that to happen. 

The good news is your machine is totally fixable and you can learn how to make it into a financially stable practice that pays you well, that practice that you were dreaming of when you started out. And I would love to help you do that. Money Skills for Group Practice Owners is about taking you from feeling like an overworked, stressed, underpaid group practice owner to being the confident and empowered financial leader of your group practice. 

The application window is open right now for Money Skills for Group Practice Owners for our January 2024 cohort. If you are hearing this, it means that this is your chance to apply to join me in January to work together for six months to help you become the empowered financial leader of your group practice. Click on the link in the show notes to learn more and to apply today.  

Thanks for listening today.