5 Tips for Building a Long-Term Successful Practice with Wendy Dickinson: Part 2 of 2 | GP 124

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Image of Wendy Dickinson is captured. On this therapist podcast, Dr. Wendy Dickinson talks about 5 Tips for Building a Long-Term Successful Practice.

How do you hire clinicians that stay for the long term? Are you interested in becoming part of a therapist-centered online community? Why should you maintain an abundance mindset?

In this 2 part podcast episode, Alison Pidgeon speaks with Wendy Dickinson about 5 tips for building a long-term successful practice.

Podcast Sponsor: Brighter Vision

An image of Brighter Vision Web Solutions is featured as the sponsor on Faith in Practice Podcast, a therapist podcast. Brighter Vision builds all in one websites for therapists.

When you’re in private practice it can be tough to find the time to even review your marketing efforts, let alone to make improvements where needed.

By first understanding your practice and what makes it unique, Brighter Vision’s team of developers are then able to create you a beautiful website that will attract your ideal clients and get them to contact you. Better yet, they also provide unlimited tech support to make sure it’s always up-to-date, and professional search engine optimization to make sure you rank high in online searches – all at no additional cost.

But best of all, we’ve worked with them to create a special offer just for Grow a Group Practice listeners. Get your first 3 months of website service completely FREE. To take advantage of this amazing deal, head to brightervision.com/joe. 

Meet Dr. Wendy Dickinson

A photo of Wendy Dickinson is captured. She is a licensed psychologist and is the Founder and CEO at GROW Counseling and the founder of GROW Restored. Wendy is featured on Grow a Group Practice, a therapist podcast.

Dr. Dickinson is the Founder and CEO at GROW Counseling, a counseling and leadership development organization that assists individuals, couples, groups, and corporate teams to achieve their fullest life or career potential.

With more than two decades of experience, Dr. Dickinson specializes in such clinical issues as addictions, crises, faith-based issues, leadership development, stress management, trauma, maximizing productivity, and vocational counseling.

She has recently launched a project called The Right Counselor – a platform that allows clients and counselors a place to connect that is ad-free, soothing, and provides helpful content and reviews.

Visit the Grow Counseling Website and connect with them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

See also, The Right Counselor, and connect with them on Facebook, and Instagram.

In This Podcast

  • Hiring clinicians for longevity
  • The Right Counselor
  • Maintain an abundance mindset

Hiring clinicians for longevity

Hiring the best-fit clinicians into your private practice is a nuanced procedure, but it is entirely possible to find the best therapists to work in your practice that align with your values and share your passions.

We spread it out over a few weeks because we want [the clinicians] to have enough information about us to make a good decision about whether it’s a good fit [for them] as much as we are looking for information about them. (Wendy Dickinson)

To hire clinicians that will hopefully stay for the long-term, you need to make sure that they share similar visions for the future.

Ask yourself:

  • What are you looking for in the best clinician for your practice?
  • What kind of community have you built within your practice and regarding your clients?
  • Why is this community important to you and to the practice?

The Right Counselor

This is Wendy’s creation, a free, more intuitive, and softer approach to common online therapist directories.

When you go on Psychology Today it can be very chaotic and a little difficult to navigate. We needed something that was intuitive and straightforward for our clients, and also soothing, right? (Wendy Dickinson)

The main distinction of The Right Counselor is that it is a space where a therapist can recommend another therapist.

Who is it that I [as a therapist] would endorse? That’s the piece that we worked for a long time to figure out. (Wendy Dickinson)

Maintain an abundance mindset

Many clinicians are nervous to share connections, client leads, or resources with one another because they think that clients and the work that they provide is scarce.

This is not true.

When we source from that place of scarcity it makes it [much] harder to connect [and] support each other. (Wendy Dickinson)

There will always be people who need help, and there will always be needs to care for. By restricting networks, scarcity is created, but by being open with referrals and building networks, abundance is supported.

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Alison Pidgeon, Group Practice Owner

An image of Alison Pidgeon is displayed. She is a successful group practice owner and offers private practice consultation for private practice owners to assist in how to grow a group practice. She is the host of Grow A Group Practice Podcast and one of the founders of Group Practice Boss.Alison Pidgeon, LPC is the owner of Move Forward Counseling, a group practice in Lancaster, PA and she runs a virtual assistant company, Move Forward Virtual Assistants.

Alison has been working with Practice of the Practice since 2016.  She has helped over 70 therapist entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses, through mastermind groups and individual consulting.

Transformation From A Private Practice To Group Practice

In addition, she is a private practice consultant for Practice of the Practice. Allison’s private practice ‘grew up.’ What started out as a solo private practice in early 2015 quickly grew into a group practice and has been expanding ever since.

Visit Alison’s website, listen to her podcast, or consult with Alison. Email Alison at [email protected]

Thanks For Listening!

Feel free to leave a comment below or share this podcast on social media by clicking on one of the social media links below! Alternatively, leave a review on iTunes and subscribe!

Podcast Transcription

[ALISON PIDGEON] You are listening to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. Whether you were thinking about starting a group practice or in the beginning stages, or want to learn how to scale up your already existing group practice, you are in the right place. I’m Alison Pidgeon, your host, a serial entrepreneur with four businesses, one of which is a large group practice that I started in 2015. Each week, I feature a guest or topic that is relevant to group practice owners. Let’s get started. Hi, I’m Alison Pidgeon your host. Thanks for joining us today. So today is our second part of our interview with Dr. Wendy Dickinson. If you did not listen to the first part, it will probably make more sense if you went back and started at last week’s episode and then come back and listen to this one. So we did an extra-long interview and cut it into two parts because Wendy had so many awesome things to talk about and to share so I definitely wanted to make sure we covered everything that I felt was going to be really valuable to you. So just another brief introduction of Dr. Wendy Dickinson; she owns a large group practice in Georgia that is all self-pay. She is a certified dare way facilitator and certified dare to lead facilitator. She’s the founder and CEO at Grow Counseling and the founder of Grow Restored, which is a nonprofit. She’s also doing a lot of other amazing things, which she talks about in the interview. I hope you enjoy this discussion with Dr. Wendy Dickinson. [ALISON] I imagine you’re the visionary type and not the everyday operations person type. [WENDY DICKINSON] That is true. That is true. [ALISON] Yes, me too. So do you still hire your staff or do you outsource that as well? [WENDY] No, we do all the hiring in-house and very particular about that. We really want to make sure that, we have an extensive interview process with people, they talk to a director, they talk to me, they do a case presentation. They talk to some of the peers and we spread it out over a few weeks because we really want them to have enough information about us to make a good decision about whether it’s a good fit as much as we’re looking for information about them. So we try to be very transparent, very forthcoming with information. Our bias, what we’re looking for in a staff person is we want somebody who’s going to build into our community. So we know people may not stay forever at Grow, but we want people who are intentional about, we want to come in, we want to contribute to the community. We want to be part of this for a longer term, rather than a shorter term. I know that there are practices that seek out and specialize in just the opposite. Like they want to help people get those initial hours they need and then be a jumping point for them to do something different. So a part of our interview process is really casting some vision for what we’re looking for and what community we’ve built and why that’s important to us so that people can then either opt in or opt out. But yes, I’m very intentional about being part of that process. I always say, I’ve done a lot of teaching, taught at the graduate level at several universities. I’ve done a lot of supervision. If you have like a basic level of insight and intuition and you care about counseling, I can help you become a great therapist, but I can’t make you into a person who’s a good fit with our community, or I can’t make you somebody who we like to hang out with. So those are really big values for us. It’s like, we want somebody who we’re going to want to share what’s going on in our week, or we’re going to want to talk about our families and our friends and our hobbies with. That’s an important part of the hiring process for us, does that fit? [ALISON] Yes, so you’re looking for that culture fit sounds like? [WENDY] Yes. [ALISON] Can you speak a little bit about the culture that you’ve created because I imagine if you’ve grown to 45 employees, you probably have been intentional about building the culture. [WENDY] Yes, sure. We have a list of values that we work from that we are really explicit with in the interview process and then in onboarding, I think the expression of those has changed a little bit as we’ve grown because we used to be one little office and we were on the office together. Then as we added some locations, we had people who were maybe working out of two offices and there was a lot of overlap. Then really getting a pandemic, when we went on lockdown, that’s really when people pulled back to only one primary office. So we tried to keep the cross interaction at a minimum so that we wouldn’t contaminate each other if somebody was sick. It really shifted our model but to that point, part of our culture had been, we’re very connected, we want people to know each other we want people to know each other on a personal level to the degree people are comfortable. But we want there to be that sense of like connectedness. So we’ve worked really hard through the pandemic and I think we’re reimagining that in a more post pandemic era of what that looks like in terms of staying connected. One of the examples that we’ve done or have people do these, we call them the three-minute videos, so when we have a new staff person, we’ll pair them up and they record like a three-minute speed interview with each other. So what’s your favorite drink, mountains or beach, whatever questions you can cram in three minutes. It just helps the rest of the staff to get to know them. It’s sort of a version of what would happen in the break room if everybody was still hanging out in the break room. What we value. So we value connectedness. We value question asking is a big part of our culture. Instead of telling people, we ask questions both from the leadership level down as well as the staff level apps. Hey, tell me about that. What were you thinking or, hey, is it okay if I missed this thing or I’m out of the office this day? We just feel it creates this culture of honor and respect. So question asking is a big deal. Curiosity is a big deal. We always want to be continued learners. That’s one of the things that, I took the most meandering path through grad school that was possible, I think, to end up with my degree. I was in school for about eight years and supervised through most of that. That continued learning piece really stuck with me because I see practitioners that get out into the workplace and you become an island. It’s easy to become an island and you’re busy with clients and you’re doing your thing and you get stuck in wherever you are. It’s easy not to continue to learn and read and grow and develop. So that’s something that’s really important to us, is like ongoing collaboration, ongoing growth, continued learning. We also value authenticity and transparency, like lean back on all the Brené stuff, but those vulnerable, open conversations are really important to us. We say we always have an open-door policy and I think most of the time that really works. I’m not saying we’re perfect, but we try to show up when someone needs something or own mistakes if we make them and just to hear someone else’s perspective. I would never say we’re perfect because we’re not but we work really hard at showing up and being present and trying again if we don’t get it right the first time. [ALISON] I’m really glad that you talked about how your values really inform your culture, because I’m a big proponent of that as well. I think that’s something so important for business owner, any business owner to do is really be clear about their values. And it’s one thing to have on a piece of paper, it’s a whole nother thing to actually live them out and it sounds like you’re doing that and that’s really cool. [WENDY] Yes, we try to. [ALISON] So let’s switch gears a little bit because I know you have some other projects or businesses. I’m not sure what you want to call them, but I wanted to spend some time talking about those, because I think that with your visionary entrepreneur mind, it sounds like you’re doing some really cool things. So you want to tell us about the, is it called the grow directory? [WENDY] It’s called The Right Counselor. [ALISON] The Right Counselor, sorry. [WENDY] Yes, The Right Counselor. Yes, we’re super excited about this. This was a little passion project I had that started back in probably 2013, 14, somewhere in there. It’s been a minute. And I naively thought, oh, we can build a super awesome database that helps counselors connect to clients and it won’t be that hard and it was that hard. Part of it is that I do, I would say I’m a recovering perfectionist, but I do have a high standard for excellence and I’d rather not put something out there if I can help it then put something out there that’s mediocre. So I didn’t realize communicating with programmers and web developers and all this was as challenging as it is so for anyone that does that for a living kudos to you because that’s hard work. We have, so we’ve been through several companies and we have finally gotten it launched. We launched in January, which we’re super excited about. So we’re live therightcounselor.com and I would say the easiest way to describe it is, it is a database where you can advertise. It is similar to Psychology Today, which is probably our largest competitor. The difference, there are a couple of really strong differences and this is the part I was passionate about. First of all, it’s free. It’s completely free to counselors to advertise. So I feel like in this marketplace, counselors needed a place where it was professional, it was cool, it was free of the advertising. I feel like when you go on Psychology Today, it can be very chaotic. It’s a little difficult to navigate and we needed something that was intuitive and straightforward for a client, but maybe also soothing. People come to these websites when they’re in the midst of a crisis and having to then navigate through pop-ups and ads and all this other stuff is not soothing for me, even when I would jump on and I wasn’t in a crisis. So we wanted something that felt intuitive, like you were using Facebook or you were using Amazon. So those were the goals. The big difference to me is that I wanted a way to sort of pull back the curtain in terms of who I, as a therapist would recommend. So if you’ve been in the space for very long, first of all, it’s not ethical to ask clients for reviews. So it’s hard to get reviews from clients but what I find is like a client either loves you or hates you. If you look at reviews, they’re either like, oh my God, this person changed in my life. They’re most wonderful person in the world. Everybody I know should ever see them. Five stars, gold stars, thumbs up. Or it’s like a zero. Like somebody was very frustrated and very disappointed. There’s not much in between. I mean, rarely do I see reviews for therapists that are like three stars. They were pretty nice and helpful. It’s like usually this dichotomy. So what that tells me is that may not be the best barometer if somebody’s trying to find a therapist or a way to evaluate a therapist. What I think is the best barometer is if I, as a professional, who’ve been in the field for 15 years or you Alison have been in the field for, I don’t know how many — [ALISON] 15 years. [WENDY] Yes, if we say, “Hey, these are the people we trust and if we were going to refer our friends and family, we would refer them to these people,” that pulls back that curtain to say, you may not want to see me. Maybe we’re friends, maybe, whatever, I’m not in the right area. I don’t specialize. But who is it that I would endorse? So that’s the piece that we worked for a long time to figure out how do we do this? So on The Right Counselor, you can give another professional a thumbs-up. You can write review. We’ve got a version coming where clients will be able to see people’s connections. So it’s sort of a hybrid of like the LinkedIn and maybe a Yelp or Angie’s list or something. That’s the idea. Part of the reason we made it free is because we wanted to be able to review other therapists, which means that they have to be on the site and we didn’t want the financial piece to be a barrier for anyone. I know a lot of therapists these days are using Psychology Today as their main webpage rather than maintaining a website and so that’s one of our hopes is that as we continue to develop the site that we can add in elements that counselors can use to really personalize their page and make it feel like their own space that communicates who they are with these embedded reviews from their colleagues. [ALISON] Oh, nice. So it looks like, or it sounds like you looked at the attractions of what was already in the marketplace and combined maybe a few different things that already existed, but in separate places. [WENDY] Yes, yes. I think it’s interesting because, I mean there are some other sites to advertise. I mean, Psychology Today is just the main, that sort of, is air phrases. They’ve done some updates I’ve noticed in the last couple of years, but it still, to me doesn’t feel like it just hits all the boxes. So I thought a way to pull some of the best elements from several different sites or concepts together was an exciting thing to do. [BRIGHTER VISION] When you’re in private practice, it can be tough to find the time to even review your marketing efforts, let alone to make improvements where needed. Whether you are a seasoned clinician with an existing website in need of a refresh or a new therapist, building a website for the first time, Brighter Vision is the perfect solution. By first understanding your practice and what makes it unique, Brighter Vision’s team of developers are then able to create you a beautiful website that will attract your ideal clients and get them to contact you. Better yet, they also provide unlimited tech support to make sure it’s always up to date and professional search engine optimization to make sure you rank high in online searches all at no additional cost. But best of all, we’ve worked with them to create a special offer just for Grow A Group Practice podcast listeners. Get your first three months of website service, completely free. To take advantage of this amazing deal, head to brightervision.com/joe. Again, that’s brightervision.com/joe. [ALISON] Cool. So how long did it take you from the time you had the idea to the time you launched the website? [WENDY] Probably about seven years. [ALISON] Wow [WENDY] We would work on it, I would work on it for a while and then hit a roadblock and have to put it down for a little bit and then I’d come back to it and be like, no, I think this is still a good idea. I still want to figure out how to make it work. I have to give credit to my assistant. She’s unbelievable. She really helped pull us, drag us across the finish line with the developers. If she hadn’t been able to be involved I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. She handled a lot of the like nitty gritty of the programming side, which was awesome. [ALISON] Nice. So is the purpose to have it make money in any way or is it more just like a nonprofit passion project? [WENDY] Right now we’re not making any money on it. I think at some point we will probably try to figure out maybe what we can offer that would be a subscription model, where if you chose a new subscription level, you would get X, Y, and Z or access to cool podcasts or whatever, maybe some resources and some other offerings. But we’re always, our plan is to always keep that basic level membership for free. The bulk of the cost has gone into the startup. We’ve already covered all of that and so I think right now we’ve got this really cool opportunity to sort of see where the energy takes us and back to that doing things organically. I wanted to launch it and then see what people felt, what was the need for? Do people want something different? Is there another layer that would be helpful? So we’ll probably circle back around that after we get some momentum in getting people to sign up. I think having a place where, again, back to that community piece is really important to me. I think this field can be so isolating and so difficult. If we have families that support us and we have healthy home environment, that really helps because you go home and you decompress and unwind, but especially for the therapists that feel isolated and alone and I think their pandemic has put a spotlight on that, it’s really heavy stuff to carry by ourselves. So we have this, usually there are really great communities when we’re in grad school and then you graduate and that sort of a lot of times drifts apart. So I could see a spot for people to connect in communities in some way and just sort of maybe it’s not official continuing education training, but maybe it’s just to like space that feels safe, that people could share what’s going on and connect and support each other and find some colleagues that are interested in the same things and get some tips. I don’t know about every area of the country, but I find in Atlanta can feel a little territorial, I think like people maybe source out of a place of fear sometimes that if they share their wisdom or their knowledge, or what’s worked for them, somebody’s going to come in and take their stuff or get their clients or there won’t be enough. So I think when we source from that place of scarcity, it makes it really hard to connect and support each other. One of the things I’ve noticed is if people are in different parts of the country connecting, it takes that element out of the mix a lot of times. So I think finding a way to make those connections broader feels like it could be really helpful to people. [ALISON] That’s great. Well, very cool. I know that you are starting a new, I don’t know if you call it a service line or what you want to, how you want to describe it, but you’re starting a new service within your private practice. That’s pretty huge. So do you want to tell us about that? [WENDY] Yes. I don’t know what to call it either. We’ve named it the Grow Counseling Network. So it’s at our local practice is Grow Counseling so this is an iteration of that. I’ve been working with a company. It’s a large company. They’re nationwide and in Canada. We’ve been having conversations over the last, almost year at this point about how we support their staff. The CEO and the vice presidents have an overwhelming care for their team and want to build up wellness programs and help support them. They’ve got a largely gen-Z, millennial base and so I think they’re recognizing that, especially this generation needs those wraparound services they need to feel cared about as a person, they need to have a vision and a mission for their life. It’s not just about how much money they make. So to make a long story short, one of the things that they were realizing is that the staff were interested in getting some counseling. So very generously we worked together to put together a package where they could say, hey, we want to offer counseling to our staff. The company’s going to pay for it so it’s completely free to the staff and we’ve already got counselors in place who are waiting for your phone calls. So if you want to schedule something, go for it. So the difference between this and like an EAP or an insurance program, EAP is usually very limited insurance. Obviously, you end up paying the deductibles. It’s challenging sometimes, a lot of times to find someone in network who’s accepting new clients. So I find that finding the right therapist is sometimes even a bigger hurdle than how much the therapist cost for people. So we’re trying to take those two hurdles out of the way, so we’re saying we have a list of people that we’re building up that we’ve vetted and they have space they’re taking new clients on and the company’s paying for it. So I love this idea of corporate America chipping in for people’s mental healthcare. I just am so excited about that. That’s where we started and we launched in Georgia, their headquarters are here, so we launched in Georgia and overnight, we had about 250 people sign up for counseling. So we thought, okay, this is a need. We have accurately hit the nail on the head. They have about 5,000 people in their company. So that was a a pretty significant chunk. The CEO said, “Hey, this is great. We love it, but I don’t want to just offer it to our staff in Atlanta. We want to offer it to everyone. Is that something you could figure out how to do?” This first quarter of the year, I’ve been recruiting therapists with my team. We’ve been recruiting therapists in almost every state in the country and in Canada and we’ve got a team right now, about a hundred therapists it’s completely free to apply. There is an application fee involved. That’s only charged if you end up joining the network and if you get clients, so it’s down the road. We launched nationwide in Canada on the 21st of March and so far, we’ve had 900 people sign up, so about, closing in on 25%, 20% of the company. Just the reactions from people have been amazing. I wish I could post emails like so that people could see how excited they are. I think there are other companies, of course, I won’t be posting anyone’s emails but I think other companies may be interested in the same a thing given how much morale this is just boosted people to know there’s an option to know if they needed something there’s someone to reach out to. So it’s been exciting. [ALISON] That’s amazing. I really like that model and I like how you’re really solving that issue, like you said, of the cost, but also the availability of the therapist, because I imagine this company probably has health insurance and they probably have outpatient mental health benefits, right? [WENDY] They do. They do. And one of the things that was important to me, because I value the work therapists do and I value our time and our mental health was we decided not to contract at a specific rate and we didn’t want to ask therapists to come down to slide down. So we’re paying a hundred percent of whatever therapist hourly rate is. [ALISON] Wow. [WENDY] So that’s, I think pretty unique given the other third-party payer situation, so I’ve usually run into [ALISON] Yes, that is amazing. I love how there’s so many folks now who are thinking outside the box and just trying to find win-win solutions for these things. Because I think there are, especially since the pandemic started, I mean there’s so much demand and it’s like, we just have to be really creative with how we meet the demand now and traditional insurance doesn’t work a lot of the time. [WENDY] Unfortunately, yes. [ALISON] Yes, so it almost sounds like your model is like Lera’s model if you’re familiar with Lera similar. [WENDY] Similar. I think they contract at specific rates. There’s a couple that are a little different. I think the other piece is, we don’t have a non-compete, so I want people to be great. I want them to do whatever they want to do and I don’t think that takes away from what we’re doing. So we’re not going to ask people to sign a non-compete, which is very different from the way most of these companies work. [ALISON] So what has that been like for you to have to go out and hire people in multiple states and expand the practice to be that large because I would imagine that is probably daunting? [WENDY] I think I’ll have to report back to you about that. [WENDY] We’re still in the messy middle of all of it. It’s been a lot of work. I mean, I was joking the other day that I get up and I send emails as fast as my fingers can type for as long as I have childcare and then I get up the next day and do it again. So there’ve really been four of us that have been working a lot of hours on this. Then we have another two people that have been doing some research for us to find great therapist. My belief is that you find great people through great people and so one of the ways we’ve approached this is really just networking like, “Hey you’re already in our network or we think you’re awesome. Who do you know or who can you put us in touch with?” We’ve found some really incredible people that way. We’ve also developed a pretty extensive application where people submit a short video so we can hear them. We get a sense of what they’re like on camera. Because I don’t think I mentioned all these sessions are virtual. So it is a different element. Obviously, now after the pandemic, people are a lot more comfortable on camera than I think they used to be, but we really do try to get to know them. Then I’ve been personally handling the matching and the referrals end of things, which gives me the opportunity to interact with a therapist and get to know them. Other than it being a daunting, overwhelming, huge project that has been exhausting and wonderful. It has been so much fun to get to know therapists all over the country. I mean, we have just encountered some of the very best people who are also doing great therapy work. I feel like I have friends everywhere now, like just the email back and forth and like, “Hey, how are you doing? How’s it going? What’s the weather like and come visit here or there or whatever.” It’s been really fun. So I’m reminded of what a great industry we’re in with the people helpers that really care about people and they’re good people and they’re doing their best to meet a lot of needs out there. [ALISON] That’s awesome. We’ll definitely have to reconnect after you’ve been doing this for a while and see how it’s going because I’m curious. [WENDY] Perfect. [ALISON] Yes, yes. You’ll have to come back on the podcast again. So how do you support all of these contractors with like administrative needs? Are you building out like a really big admin team or do you not provide admin support or how does that work? [WENDY] That’s a good question. We went back and forth about that. Like, do we have a Grow Counseling network thing and process that you have to follow? We decided that that would be more disruptive to most private practice people than it would be helpful. So if you’re in private practice, you already have paperwork, you already have a system, you already have a thing you do. We didn’t want to come in and say, hey, we want to just see some of these clients, but you have to learn a new system and do things on our side and whatever. So we did as much as we could just streamline what needs to be different. Essentially once we make a referral to you as a private practice clinician, that client becomes a regular client of your practice. So only they fill out all the regular paperwork, if you do a screening with them, you would do that. I give all the counselors the opportunity to review the basic information about the client before they accept them just to see if it’s a good fit, but they follow all regular processes. The only difference is at the end of the session, instead of billing the client, you fill out a simple form on our website that takes about 30 seconds. You put in the client identifier, the counselor’s name, the amount of discussion and the date. Then we invoice the company and we pay the counselors. So there is a lag time a little bit with the invoicing and payments, but that’s pretty much the only downside. Other than that, they’re basically a regular client in whatever way you would normally approach counseling. [ALISON] Very cool. So what do you think is the future of mental health services? Because I mean, obviously there’s this sort of growing movement, maybe of employers wanting to simplify access to mental healthcare for their employees. What do you think that’s going to look like in the future? [WENDY] Yes, what I hope it looks like, our companies that are going, hey, this is a way we can make an investment in our people to show them that we care and it’s a rounding error. Depending on the size of that company, it’s a rounding error financially for the corporation. So I hope that that is the direction that we see things going. I think that if an employer hands somebody call it $400 or $500 a month in cash, or they say, “Hey, we’ve got a counselor they’re available. They’re here for you. You can talk about anything. You can bring your spouse in,” whatever to me that sends a really different message. I think in terms of feeling cared about and supported as a holistic being the second offering counseling and other wellness services really emphasizes that we care about you message. Handing someone $500 is nice. I think everyone would take $500, but it doesn’t come with any real message, I think. Having a one-off mental health day that people can take here and there doesn’t really help if part of your issue is like anxiety, loneliness, depression, then you just sit at home on your mental health day with all of your concerns. So I think this is a really nice way to go, hey, we care about you and we’re going to put our money where our statements are. It’s not just an empty statement. So I love that. I hope we move in that direction. The other thing is, and this is, I think if you’ve been following regulations very much, I think we’re definitely moving towards a more national licensure process which, and we see it with the CPAC and the interstate compacts. But I would love to see a nationwide licensure process where we could go, hey, I have a client right now I’m trying to place you as a very specific experience with a religious background and we don’t have somebody in our network who specializes in that that’s in the right state. That’s something that I just would love to see is like, hey, we can, if you live in California, but there’s a therapist in Montana who specializes in what you need, with everything being virtual, I think there’s a way to make sure that boxes are checked and people are safe, but also offer people opportunities and options that they wouldn’t have otherwise. So I’m hoping that’s also a direction in the future. [ALISON] Yes. I agree with both of those things. I think those are definitely things that are going to happen more and more in the future. Well, it’s been great hearing about your practice and all the things that you’re doing. What is the best way for people to get in touch with you if they want to check out your practice or if they want to contact you? [WENDY] Yes, absolutely. We are at growcounseling.com, is our main website. You can follow us on all social media as Grow Counseling. My email address is [email protected], so feel free to reach out to me W-E-N-D-Y. Then the Grow Counseling network, we’ll make sure there’s a link from Grow Counseling, that website to an interest video, if you want to hear more about that project. [ALISON] Excellent. Yes, that would be great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Wendy. It’s so great hearing about all the cool things that you’re doing. [WENDY] Thanks for having me. I it’s been great to chat with you. [ALISON] Well, I wanted to say thank you one more time to Brighter Vision, our sponsor for today’s episode. I have a Brighter Vision website. I’ve always been very happy with it. We actually have recently refreshed our website because it was made back in 2016. So we went in and modernized it and I’m really happy with the result. So if you are ready to get an amazing website and get three months free, take advantage of our deal over at brightervision.com/joe, that’s J-O-E. I’ll talk to you all next time. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this awesome interview. It’s so inspiring to talk to other practice owners who are doing super cool things. If you want to hang out with other group practice owners to find some support and get new ideas, definitely check out our membership community called Group Practice Boss. You can read all the details at practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss. I’ll talk to you all next week. If you love this podcast, will you please rate and review on iTunes or your favorite podcast player? This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.