Have you been thinking about starting your own speech therapy clinic but feel intimated by everything you need to do? Let us talk you through the first steps! In this podcast we cover legal requirement, business management, marketing, and setting up your clinic.

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Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Denise: Welcome to The Mindful SLP, the show that explore simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I’m Denise Stratton, a pediatric speech language pathologist of 30 years. I’m closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and along the way, I’ve worked long and hard to become a better third.

Join me and I’ll do my best to make your journey smoother. I found the best therapy comes from employing simple techniques with a generous helping of mindfulness. Joining me in the conversation is Dan, my technical wizard and office manager.

Welcome to The Mindful SLP. We thought it would be helpful to talk through a checklist of things to do to open a private clinic, in case that’s something you’re interested in.

I found that a private SLP clinic is one of the easiest businesses to start. And so I’m going to do a little bit of interviewing of Dan here at the beginning because he helped a lot with the setup.

Dan: You may find out that there’s a little bit more to it than Denise remembers.

Denise: Still, it’s easy to make it successful, it’s easy to make it profitable. That’s what I’ll say.

Dan: It is one of the easier businesses, I’ve found.

Denise: And we started this a year in advance, preparing to open my private clinic, but that’s not necessary. You don’t need a year. We were just leisurely about it.

Dan: There are definitely some things you need to do to prepare though. And it’s, it’s, it’s good to not rush. So I would say don’t make the decision you’re going to start your clinic and expect to have it up and running next week. That takes more time than that.

Denise: So we’re going to go over the legal requirements, business management, advertising, and marketing, clinical decisions, and just some general advice. So Dan, tell us about the legal requirements.

Dan: First, before we get started on that, I want to say we’re going to be doing this at a very high level. There’s a lot to know about this and there’s, we could dig deep on every one of these topics and it would take a long time. What we’re going to do is just kind of hit everything at a real high level today.

We’re not business experts in all areas of the country. We don’t know everything about every state. And obviously we don’t know anything about starting a business in a country other than the United States. So you’re going to need to get some help. Now there in the United States, there’s different legal entities and you need to decide which one you’re gonna be. There’s a sole proprietorship, uh, there’s partnerships, LLTs, S Corps. So there’s a lot of different ways and they all offer different ways of doing the business. Now, the easiest one is a sole proprietorship. That’s basically just saying I’m operating just as me. The downside of that is it doesn’t offer you any legal protection.

Yeah. If somebody sues the company, they’re suing you and everything that you have, your, your family home, your cars, everything is tied up all in that together. So we decided to go as a S Corp because that provides the protections that we wanted to have for our business. It makes Denise an employee of the corporation.

But it also makes it so that the limitations of liability are stopped at the S-corp. They could not take our house.

Denise: Yeah. They could just take the profits of the business.

Dan: Right. And you know, any assets that you might have. So they’re going to take your pop-up pirate. Oh no, no. The other advantage of that too, and this is something you’re definitely gonna want to run by your tax advisor is being an S-corp allows us to be in that same area as Apple Computer and Exxon Mobile corporation, all these monstrously, huge companies. So when it comes to the IRS, who are they going to go audit? They there’s just not that much money and time and value in them to go after the tiny little one or two, three people companies. So they tend to operate more on those bigger ones, which I don’t mind keeping the IRS as far away from me as I possibly can.

So the first thing you want to do, check into your legal entity and because you’re going to need to have that so that you can apply for a business license. Now, every state has different rules for applying for business licenses. In Utah, Idaho, it is so simple. The state has a website where they walk you through the process and literally you can sign up and get your business started in about half an hour.

Not all states are that simple. Some states are much more difficult and other states are even easier than that. But you need to find out because you need to have a business license with the state. And in some cases you’re going to need to have one with the city as well. And that was a surprise to me because I didn’t realize that the city needed a business license separate from the state.

Denise: And we have to renew that every year with the city.

Dan: Correct. To the state, we have to renew it every other year. Federal, you need to have a federal tax ID, and that is a simple little form you fill out online and they send you your federal tax ID number. That takes just minutes, but that’s really, all you need to do with the federal government is just to have that tax ID.

Denise: And your state occupational license. Here, I have to renew it every two years. But you need that too.

Dan: You’ll also need to apply for a, a sales tax ID. Your state may vary, we still have to have a sales tax ID in Utah’s case because we don’t have any sales that are taxable. We only have to file our sales tax forms once a year. And that is nice.

Now there’s some surprises with this that we had no idea, uh, what kind of surprises. When we started to setting things up, we set up our clinic in the basement of our house. And the first thing that the city said is…

Denise: Where’s your fire extinguisher?

Dan: Where’s your fire extinguisher. Okay. Well that makes sense. But what we didn’t realize is that fire extinguishers have to be inspected and recharged every year.

Denise: Even when you buy a brand new off the shelf. It’s not ready to go. Someone has to inspect it and put that little tag on it.

Dan: We had to get that done before the fire marshall could come by and inspect our house to make sure that it was compliant with the codes, and we had to do that before we could apply for the business license. So there’s these little idiosyncrasies that you got to find out about and take care of in order. So, you know, I obviously we don’t know what your city will require. Just be aware that there are some things you need to know,

Denise: Just get used to paying $50 or more for them to come spend five minutes with your fire extinguisher.

Dan: Exactly. The other thing that they always do is they, they want to see a working smoke detector in every room and that’s something else you just gotta be ready for. But how do you know these things? Usually you can call the city and when you’re talking to them, they will tell you all the requirements that they have set up. And they’re really helpful. They’re nice people. They’re not trying to make your life miserable. They’re just trying to get you to understand the rules. And they’ve explained it to a thousand people that same day. They’re really actually there to help you because quite honestly, the city wants you to have a successful business because it helps them.

Other things that you need to think about are insurance, not that you are going to be collecting insurance. These are the insurances you need to keep yourself safe. Obviously you’re going to need malpractice insurance.

Denise: It’s really reasonably priced for speech therapists. We don’t have a lot of malpractice issues in our profession, so it’s not expensive.

Dan: I did a Google search to find a couple of different options. Got a couple of different quotes. And we’ve been with that company now, since the very beginning. It renews once a year, they send us the documents that we need that we have to send on to everybody else. It’s pretty simple. It’s not very much just a couple of hundred bucks a year.

Yeah. So just get it, have it. Then you have everything you need. By the way, I just want to mention, we are not going to delve into insurance as far as us taking insurance, which we do.

But that’s a whole can of worms that we can’t, we don’t have time for.

Denise: So we’re going to move on, but just know we’re not doing insurance in this podcast. We’ll do it sometime. So business management…

Dan: Well, before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about umbrella insurance. So this is important to have as well then, because our clinic is in our home. We were able to add this umbrella liability policy on to our homeowners. And what that does is it protects us from someone who falls down the stairs, gets hurt on the property while they’re coming to the clinic. And you’re probably going to be required to have this. We have, I think it’s a $3 million policy and it just added a a hundred dollars or two to our homeowners every year. We just let the business pay that part and go on with it. But you do want to have that because if someone should fall, you’re going to get sued. You don’t want to lose your business because of it.

Denise: And where it’s in our home. I don’t know if that makes a difference, but if you had a place of business, you’d want it the same. I tell you this, this is important. I had this almost scary experience. Um, I was talking to a mom and her kids had already started out the door. I have concrete steps down to my basement, so not ideal, but a little toddler was making his way up the steps he got up to the very top step stood up, but his heels were kind of off the edge and he was teetering back and forth. The mom’s back was turned, because she was talking to me and I’m looking in horror at this impending accident. Thankfully he didn’t fall down the stairs, but it was close and I was like, oh my goodness, this is so scary.

Dan: You’ve just got to be covered. Now, when you do this, if you do do it in your home and you go to your homeowners policy, they’re going to want to know that you’re operating a business in your home. Do not try and fib your way around this, because if you do, and there’s an accident, you make a claim and they find out it’s because of a business, they’re going to avoid it and you will be left without any coverage. And you just don’t want to go there. It’s not worth it. Yes. It’s going to cost you a little bit more because you’re operating a business and you may need to shop around and change your insurance for your home, but it’s important. You gotta be covered for this stuff, or you’re gonna regret it. Let’s talk a little bit about business management.

I think you need to sit down before you start and dream a little bit, know where you want to go with your business. I always asked Denise, where do you see this going? What do you want it to be? And she’s like, I don’t care. I just want to help a few kids, but I think it’s important to know. Do you want to have a thriving business that actually outgrows the basement, that you need to hire additional therapists? Do you want to start into a business, that’s big enough that you actually have multiple locations? How big do you want your business to become? Because it makes a pretty big difference in how you set things up.

Denise: That’s true. At first, I didn’t want employees. Then we had employees and then I decided I want to spend my time creating materials, doing blogs, stuff like that, which takes time. So it takes you more time to be a employer. As much as I loved working with the SLPs that we employed. I just thought, you know what, I’m just going to do it alone because I’m putting all my time into creating materials, which I really love to do.

Dan: Right. In our case because I work full time. I’m provided insurance through my work. We didn’t have to worry about the health insurance for Denise’s clinic. But when we had other clinicians, that is a concern that we had to deal with. And by not thinking that through in advance, you know, that is something that kinda, you know, it became a stumbling block to us in later on, So you need to understand some of these things and just kind of have an idea where is it you want to go. In Denise’s case, when she was thinking about this, she knew right upfront, she wanted to have Fridays off. That was just a standard that she was going to make in her business. She also wanted to have a couple of mornings off. And so she just plans that into her business, so when she gets to a certain client level, she knows she’s done.

She’s not going to take any more clients. And it’s real easy if you don’t have that line drawn to keep taking on more and taking on more and suddenly you’re, you’re, you’re constant and you don’t have any time for what you really enjoy. You need to know what your plan is. Are you trying to be a full-time business, is this your main source of income?

You need to know what income you want to make. Those kinds of questions. Doing it alone, this is hard. You can’t do it alone. There are certain aspects of a business that you can do on your own if you have expertise. Can you do your own bookkeeping? Do you know how to do that? That’s something that has to be done. It’s not something that you necessarily need to do. And that’s where you need to know your own limitations. And in your case, Denise, you happen to have a husband.

I have written accounting systems my entire career. So I understood enough to do the bookkeeping, but if you didn’t, that would be a problem that you would have had to take care of yourself, or find somebody to help you with. I don’t do tax accounting. We hire an accountant. We have a lawyer that we talk to every now and then. We don’t have him on retainer, we just pay him when we need to, to answer some questions that we have. You just got to know where your limitations are and then find somebody to help.

Denise: What about payroll?

Dan: Yeah, those are big things you have to answer to. You have to do accounting, you have to pay taxes. That’s just part of the rules. Uh, you don’t necessarily have to do a payroll, but you need to know the rules up front. In some states it’s different. You need to consult with your tax advisor. That’s going to be important, there. Accounting is not too bad. You need, if you don’t know how to do accounting, you need to get somebody who can help you. And, you know, there are accountants around who can help you do it. You buy QuickBooks or some other small accounting package.

Accounting for a clinic is actually pretty simple because there’s not a whole lot of complexities to it, but you’d need to keep track of it. And probably the most important thing to do when you’re starting out, set up a different account at your bank for your business, do not ever mix the money from your business with your personal accounts, because that will get the IRS all over you.

So anytime you take money in from the business, you know, from doing therapy, you put it into that business account. When you need to take money out for yourself, you take the money from the business account and put it into your personal account. Always keep that line very well drawn. And if you do that, you’re going to be okay.

Denise: Okay. So that’s kind of all the accounting stuff. Now let’s talk about a website, a logo, a clinic name.

Dan: Yeah, that’s, that’s a lot more fun. Accounting is boring, but that’s where I live.

Denise: You do need a really good website. That is mainly how people will find you these days.

Dan: It really is. And it has to be, if you’re going to spend money, this is a good place to spend money.

Denise: You can get your cousin to do it or something like that, but unless your cousin’s really good…

Dan: It’s going to look cheap and cheesy, and people are gonna judge you and your abilities on how that website looks.

Denise: It needs to be easy to navigate, and…

Dan: It’s got to tell what you do and how you do it and how good you are at doing it. And it’s got to answer questions and make them want to pick up the phone and call you.

Denise: Yeah, so just put your money there. And also a logo, we have had really good luck actually using Upwork to get someone to make a nice logo for us. And so…

Dan: Upwork.com is a website that you can put up a request for work on there, and people from all over the world will bid on it to do that work for you. And it has been a wonderful thing for us to do that. We’ve used it for all sorts of things from drawing pictures to creating forms.

Denise: There’s some really good artists out there, so I would not hesitate at all to go to a place like Upwork.

Dan: You can even get the people to build your website out there as well. So you can, you know, it’s, it’s all in how you want to go at it, but it’s, it’s a great place to get a source that is not going to be as expensive. We work with guys in Bangladesh, in India, Mexico. Uh, we’ve worked with people all over the world and had really good luck with that. Another thing that’s important to have, and, uh, this is probably, well, this has to be done locally. You need a good professional photo of yourself. Spend a little bit of money, go to the spa, get primped up and look good because it’s important. That picture is what people are going to look at. And they’re going to make a lot of quick judgements on your abilities based on that picture.

Denise: And a clinic name. Now I have Timpanogos Speech Clinic and I like it, but it happens to be very close to a local hospital’s name. I get calls all the time and misplaced referrals to people who think that I am working in a hospital and I thought, Hmm. Yeah, I wouldn’t have done that. If I had realized that I’m my name is just so close.

Dan: Yeah. And another thing on that is I am constantly trying to explain this because it’s Timpanogos, which is a name of a mountain here next to us. Everybody here knows what it is. When I talk to insurance companies, oh my goodness, it is such a pain to try and help them because they are, I always can tell them that.

Tim, Tim, pat, Tim, Tim, Tim paggin those. What is that? And then I have to stop and explain. It would have been much easier. So you’ve got to kind of think that through a little bit, hard to say, you know, what’s a good one, what’s a bad one, but you know, just something to think about. So what makes a good website? I think you need to have a few things. What it is that you do needs to be prominent on that front page. This is the kind of therapy that I really excel at. You need to have an about page that talks about you and your background and why you, what services you offer. If you take insurance or not, you need to have that kind of thing.

I don’t necessarily put the fees directly on that page because you’re going to be updating those all the time and you don’t want to do that. Sometimes it’s best to just have them call you. But I think it is really important to make sure that your phone number is front and center at all times, so they know how to get ahold of you.

Put your email address on there, and I will suggest you don’t use your personal email address, you know, super [email protected]. That’s not good. And have a nice professional email address. And when you get your website, they’ll give you email addresses too. So, you know, we have [email protected]. We have [email protected], you know, a way that is professional and that is separate and you can get that set up.

Also, we have had very good luck by having an inquiry section right there on the front page where they can type in their name, their email address, their phone number and their question. And it sends us an email. Now, yes, we get spam, you know, all sorts of things through that, on our front page, but it is such a handy way to get people their answers quickly. And they will ask all the time Hey, I have this kid and he’s three years old and he’s not doing his Rs. Well, that’s not exactly, and that’s the thing, but they ask that because they don’t know, but it can make for a quick answer for you, because then you can call back and you have a little bit of an idea what it is.

Denise: So I get lots of referrals through the inquiry page, yes.

Dan: And it’s worked to get this, this page set up and it’s even more work to get the page to rate high on your search engine. That’s a whole business in itself, but we used blog posts at the beginning. Denise did a blog post quite regularly to help build that, so people would see it and do it.

Denise: And when we started, we actually went to city affairs and health fairs around our area, just to get noticed. We had a booth, we had some information, we had some freebies like bubbles for the kids and people who were interested in speech therapy stopped by. We actually got a lot of my very first clients from those. And we don’t do those anymore just because we don’t need to. They’re kind of hot. They’re kind of long days, but if you need to get started, that just worked in our area. There’s a lot of little cities around here each with their own individual fair.

Dan: We’ve we’ve tried other things. We’ve tried putting our names on shopping carts at the local supermarket, that did not work at all.

Denise: I would not. That was a lot of money and it garnered one phone call.

Dan: If I were doing this all again, my number one recommendation is get a Google ad. It doesn’t take very much time to set it up. They will help you. You can put your budget on there. We usually run it for a hundred dollars a month and a hundred dollars a month usually gets us two or three clients a month out of that.

Denise: And when my waiting list gets too large, we just turn the Google ad off, which is turned off right now. Right. Once you get going, you will probably have a consistent waiting list. I find that with most private SLPs in my area, besides your website, you get enough clients that have been exited under your belt and the personal referrals start going. So people come to me because someone else in the neighborhood referred them.

Dan: That is your best friend, honestly, a part of being on the web is to make sure that you claim your business site on Google. Now, Google provides this as a free service where you can go out there and register your business. It’ll put you on the map in Google World and physically on the map too cause you’re going to put your clinic address on there when people search and you can do this and you’ll understand, when you search for a business, there’s a page that comes up that shows you the businesses, both that specific business and anyone like it, and it puts them on a map and you can click on it and it’ll give basic information.

What’s your phone number? What’s your hours? You can put in what services you offer and those kinds of things. The key to that is make sure that it’s there and it’s accurate and it’s all complete. But from there, you can tie in Google reviews. And this is a really handy thing too. And I think of all the different review sites we have, the Google ones are the ones that just pay off so much better.

Denise: Ask for reviews from your exiting clients.

Dan: Not the ones that you don’t like, or they didn’t like you don’t ask them. You want to have a five star review every time.

Denise: You can have, even have an email template set up, but you can personalize it a little bit when someone exits, asking them to, because I have so many clients who just love the services they got, they say, yeah, I’m going to do that and they walk out the door, it’s their child’s last day of therapy and they forget. So you can get maybe a 10%, maybe.

Dan: Maybe people who will actually give you a review, It makes a difference.

Denise: Keep on asking for it.

Dan: Google looks at those five star reviews or one star, which that’ll drive you crazy. But, you know, it looks at those reviews and that’s how it decides who to recommend when people type into their search engine, I need a speech therapist, you know, they’re going to recommend the people with the reviews and that probably more than writing blog posts and other things is going to get you traffic. Another topic is to decide upfront your fee structure. Denise, talk a little bit about this one, but I think the important thing is keep it simple.

Denise: Oh, definitely keep it simple. We instituted a sibling discount one time. It was a logistical nightmare. I would never do that again. So my fees as far as time are just prorated, so that’s simple. We half hour, 45 minutes, sometimes a client who comes an hour. Um, have a initial assessment fee, which is different from a full blown evaluation. That it’s 95% of the time only used for someone who’s seeking for insurance because the insurance will pay it. But sometimes the client has to pay it because it’s going towards their deductible. Well, that’s, I have to use standardized tests. It takes me more time. That’s higher than my initial assessment fee because someone’s…

Dan: It takes you two to three hours to put together an insurance assessment.

Denise: And so, yeah, I charge more. But someone who’s just coming, you SLPs, you know, you know you can look at him and you can know if they need therapy or not.

Over the next month. I develop my plans. I tell the parent hey, it takes me a month to really get to know your child. I’m gonna decide on my goals and you’ll get the goals within a month and you’ll get my evaluation report where with the insurance, I have to have it all written before they come the next time. So there’s that time pressure.

Dan: So how do you know how much to charge?

Denise: We’ll call around or have someone call around for you. I had you call around for me.

Dan: I called around. We had her niece call around, you know, you just ask them, what’s what do you charge for speech therapy? They’re so used to getting that. You’re going to get those calls too. You will not be able to tell who’s a client and who’s a competitor. I mean, just get used to it.

Denise: So price yourself at the middle or higher, do not underprice yourself. This is my number one advice. Your master’s degree, your experience, that is worth a lot. And I see some speech therapists who start out and their rates are really, really low. And I’m just like, no, you don’t need to do that.

Moving on to clinical decisions.

Dan: There’s some things that you need to do to set up your clinic. First off is a fee sheet.

Denise: Oh, it just describes what I charge for assessment, for an evaluation. It describes my, uh, policies as far as if there’s a no show, mean they don’t contact you and they just don’t show up.

Dan: Are you going to charge him or not? I mean, you got to make these decisions. They need to know upfront. So you got to make this decision.

Denise: Yeah, just send them the fee sheet, decide what you’re going to do.

Dan: Kids get sick. So we, we require them to let us know by what is it, nine o’clock? And if they don’t tell us until like 11 or 12, then we call it a late cancellation and we charged them half. That’s just our choice.

Denise: Yeah. Yeah. So clinic policies, this kind of runs into the fee sheet. How will you handle frequent cancellations, uh, frequent no-shows things of that nature. You just need to know ahead of time. Sometimes you have to fire a client.

Dan: You do, and that frequent cancellation policy is your friend because you, you will need to fire a client. They’re taking advantage of you, they’re occupying a slot where you could have a regular paying customer who is not a pain in the neck. I mean, there are customers that we have to chase down to get payment, and it’s just not worth it.

Denise: Yeah, so just, yeah, just decide. So have your clinic policies. I have my client’s initial that they’ve read the policies given to me. You want to collect all that stuff. Have a case history form. We have one in our free resource library because I wasn’t happy with any of the ones that were out there that I could use. So now I really like the one I have and you can get it at SLP. proadvisor.com/free. Just have all those scenes created beforehand.

And so that clients understand, this is how you work, you are a business and no one is going to go weeks and weeks without paying you. And you’re not going to keep seeing them. No, you’re not. You’re going to run it like a business. Now let me talk about email templates. It was a long time before we actually got using Spark, which is what we use for email. Now. I love it. I’ve created email templates. Every time I start to type an email and think oh, am I going to have to send this to someone else? I create a template. I have templates for new clients with all the attachments that I need to send, for exiting clients, you know, asking for the reviews, templates for my waiting list.

I even have a template for the parents of soon to graduate clients asking, are you hearing this at home? You know, it’s important to have that discussion. I have a template for the graduate students who want to come observe me.

Dan: Look for something that allows you to create templates. Sometimes if you don’t want to spend any money on that stuff, just get a Word doc, and create that, that email. So you can just copy and paste and go on.

Denise: All of these things are gonna make your clinical life go more smoothly. And it’s going to save you time. Now, let me talk a little bit about training. I decided I wanted to be trained in PROMPT, and I decided I wanted to be training in Hanen More Than Words. Which training I got before I started my clinic, or right after I started my clinic, those were somewhat expensive, but they have paid me back so much.

Dan: You’re investing in yourself.

Denise: You’re investing in yourself and you’ve got a specialty. You’ve got a specialty area that will, people will come to you for. So just look around and think, what am I really interested in?

And what kind of training do I want to get? And the cool thing about this training now, ever since COVID-19, so much of this training is offered online where I, you know, flew to different cities, had to travel, get hotels, all that kind of stuff. But I don’t regret it.

Dan: But remember to keep all your receipts on everything that you do, because all this stuff is tax deductible, and, you know, that’s like having the government pay for a third of your training, which that’s really nice.

Denise: So I would choose training over buying a whole lot of materials. Because what you can do with bubbles, balls, and boxes is amazing for the younger crowd, older crowd, a few games. I mean, it’s amazing what you can do.

So the training is paramount in my mind as far as materials, but speaking of materials, let’s talk a little bit about standardized tests. They’re expensive. Their forms are expensive. I almost only use them when I need a standardized score for an insurance client. So I think a lot before I invest in the standardized tests. There are so many great dynamic assessment measures out there that give us good or better information on intervention. For example, there’s the PAST, phonological awareness assessment, that David Kilpatrick wrote. I love it, love it, love it. There’s a Story Champs for narration, , DSS, developmental sentence scoring, if you wanted to look at a child’s syntax under sentence development, some of the assessments that Michelle Garcia Winner has for social thinking, awesome. Now these aren’t standardized tests you buy, but the information is so good. There’s my phonological awareness tracking chart, actually, which I love. And I use that all the time. So only buy what you really need, you can gradually add those standardized tests as you need them. Hanen More Than Words, their checklist for autism. Love them. Love them. Love them. Now granted, I’m getting into specialized training I took and the PROMPT, but the PROMPT assessment forms give me way more information than any articulation test. So if you do take the specialized training, you’re going to get very dynamic assessment forms, which are going to give you so much information.

Dan: But I think the key thing is to make sure you start small, start simple and grow as you need to. Don’t go and say oh, I need to have these seven assessments. Just pick one. Remember that it has to pay for itself. So, if it’s not going to be able to make you make more money, it’s not worth buying.

Denise: It’s going to take some time for those standardized tests to pay for themselves, by the way.

Dan: So, yes. Yeah. But you know, if you have to have them great, but make sure you just don’t go get a whole bunch of them. Software…

Denise: When we first began, in fact I just used Word documents. Uh, we created our own invoice forms. We grew past that. I mean, you could start that way. You honestly could. But now, as far as clinic software, let me tell you a goal(?) Library is a must for me.

Dan: It saves you a lot of time.

Denise: It saves me a lot of time being, having insurance interface, because now we do do insurance. So if you think that’s a possibility down the road. Report templates, those are all going to save you time.

Dan: The key thing on software is it’s got to save you time. So look what, where you’re spending your time and then find the software that will take care of that for you. And it’s not a bad thing to start without software and do it manually with word documents like you did, just so you know what you need help with.

Denise: So now we’re down to some general advice.

Dan: Yeah, so how did you, how do you decide, how do you know?

Denise: I did network interviews with private therapists in the area. And they told me how they got started. They told me what they used. So you just call them up and you say, hey, is there a time I could talk to you? I only want about 20 minutes of your time. I’m interested in starting a private practice and we’re all more than happy to share.

Dan: I found this very fascinating actually, coming from the business world where competition is a bad thing. Speech therapists are a great group of people because they don’t see each other as competitors, you get together and talk about stuff. And I, I find that amazing.

Denise: We all have waiting lists and we’re just happy if we can refer them to someone who could serve them better than we can or who maybe has a spot.

Dan: So just ask, what would you do differently?

Denise: I wouldn’t spend money on business cards.

Dan: No. We spent a lot of money on our business cards at the beginning, and they were very pretty.

Denise: And the little kids think they’re fun to flip and take and play with them. And that’s all they’re used for no one, no one does, everything’s digital now.

Dan: We used it at the first fairs and things that we went to, but beyond that, we didn’t, I could have had just a few little name cards that we printed up on our own printer with the, uh, the Avery label forms.

Denise: Yep. Um, brochures. We spend a lot of money on doing a brochure.

Dan: That depends on how you get started too. I mean, the brochures are, were helpful to put into doctor’s offices or, you know, places that would let you put a brochure in there. Those can be nice. One way to get clients at the beginning is to talk to pediatricians. And having something that they can just hand to a client that could be handy.

Denise: Yes, but now I get pediatricians who refer to me just because a family went to them and said, this is my speech therapist. And I haven’t even talked to the pediatrician, but they get the clients are doing the work for me.

Dan: When you’re first starting out, you may need something like this to help get the word out there, but eventually it does build.

Denise: I wouldn’t print a thousand.

Dan: I wouldn’t bring a thousand.

Denise: We got a book rate for that, but…

Dan: You know, it’s something that if, and we actually had someone on Upwork design the brochure and it looked beautiful and it was a great brochure, I probably could have printed them on our laser jet and call it good and just did them as I needed them.

Denise: I think that’s enough information. That might be overload actually.

Dan: It probably is. But really the key thing here is to keep it simple.

Denise: So the cool thing is, is we know how to do what we know.

Dan: Yes. You are a competent professional.

Denise: You have a couple of toys, you can do the therapy. It’s this other stuff that swirls around. Do I need a test because of insurance or do I need this? And I gotta have my business licenses, but as far as the basics a parent walking in the door with their child, you know what to do. So just get the supporting materials, get this legal stuff taken care of. And it’s not really all that hard to start your own private clinic.

Dan: It’s not that hard, so do it. This is one of the most rewarding things we’ve ever done.

Denise: The one more thing I just want to mention, uh, people love to pay online now, or you have a little square thing that you stick into your phone and they run their card that way. I can’t remember the last time we got a check. So look into that too.

Dan: Talk to your bank. They’ll have ideas for you. If you have a question, let us know, shoot me an email at [email protected]. I’ll be happy to help you if you have questions, we can chat. I would love to help you get started. If you want to hear more about this type of stuff on the podcast, let me know because as you can tell, it’s hard for me to stop talking about it.

I enjoy it so much. Just like everything else, when you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself.

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