[JOE]
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 650.

Well, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. I hope that your year is wrapping up well. It is late December and however you celebrate in December hope you’re having a great time. Hope you’re doing what you enjoy, spending time with friends, family. Northern Michigan often has snow at this time of year, but I record this like months in advance so I literally have no idea if there’s going to be snow today when you’re listening to this. So pull back the curtain secret sauce. Yes, we record this months ahead of time. So really excited that you’re here. Hope your year end is coming together nicely.

Don’t forget that in early 2022 in January, we have our next cohort of Next Level Practice. That’s our membership community that is for you, from that moment, you think to yourself, I want to start a private practice all the way until you’re ready to make your first hire. That’s what Next Level Practice is for. We have small groups, we have accountability partners, we bring in experts like Pat Flynn, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman. We’re talking right now at the time of this recording with Simon Sinek, to potentially bring in Simon. Was just emailing with Daniel Pink, who is going to be coming in at some point in 2022, as well, Kira Ross from Success Magazine. So we’ve got some really big experts coming in in 2022 that have some books that we’re going to be buying for you. So make sure you sign up to get all those emails if you are brand new to private practice over at practiceofthepractice.com/invite.

We often talk about all these different things that we have going on to support you. There was a time when I was working my full-time job. When I was working 40 hours a week at the community college, then I had my counseling practice as well and I had this side gig podcast that I would do on Sundays when my daughters were taking a nap. And there’s these side gigs, sometimes that become your full-time gig. I sold my counseling practice. I don’t have that full-time job anymore. Practice of the practice is my stuff right now.

Today we’re going to be talking about how to do some experiments, how to think differently about things outside of your practice, how to be a Rebel Therapist so many different ways. I am so excited, we have Annie Schuessler who is a business coach and host of the podcast Rebel Therapist Podcast. With her rebel therapist programs, she helps therapists, healers, and coaches make an impact beyond a traditional private practice. So Annie, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[ANNIE SCHUESSLER]
I am so excited to be here. Thank you so much, Joe.
[JOE]
I love the name of your stuff, Rebel Therapist. I just resonate with that right away. Tell me about your rebellion within you. Why Rebel Therapist?
[ANNIE]
So I started coaching therapists and healers about 10, 11 years ago and the first thing I was doing with folks after being a therapist myself, I was a therapist for a long time before that I was helping people build their private practices and relatively traditional private practices where you want to feel your caseload, make a great living, enjoy your work in that kind of traditional one on one way. Then I started feeling a little bit like I needed a bust out of that box and I noticed even more than that, that a lot of my clients wanted to bust out of that box and start serving people in different ways.

I started thinking, what do I want to build for them and how do I want to reposition my business to draw in these rebellious folks? That’s where Rebel Therapists came from. So it was actually a pivot in my business coaching and in my podcast. So my whole scene changed a few years ago over to just helping people who are healers and therapists to move beyond private practice.
[JOE]
If you were to kind of say, here’s what a traditional way of thinking about therapy is, and here’s what a Rebel Therapist is, how would you say those two groups tend to think differently from one another?
[ANNIE]
Well, a lot of times they’re the same people at different moments in their careers and the sign of someone who’s a Rebel Therapist is that they are innovative. They’re looking at how can I serve people better? How can I serve people in a new way? How can I get to use my gifts that I don’t get to use in a 50-minute session or I don’t get to use what I’m just meeting with people one on one in the way that I’ve been trained. I’m learning these new ways of working and I have these new ideas of how I’d like to use my skills. That’s the sign you can kind of hear it when someone has a private practice and they’re starting to think about what they might do next. So these folks might say, “I don’t know what it is, but I’ve just got this feeling that I’m meant to do something more. I want to start a podcast. There’s a book I’ve been wanting to write. So those folks who are just percolating with ideas.”
[JOE]
So what are some of the first steps that you take to kind of help people in that process? I know before we got recording, we were talking about how we both really like helping people with experimenting. So maybe take us through what’s that typical process for someone that wants to dip their toes in to get going outside of your traditional therapy?
[ANNIE]
Well, I’ll give you an example. So there’s someone named Samantha Fox, she’s in New York city and she’s got a private practice where she works with a lot of different folks. She also has a niche in working with queer women and in particular, a lot of queer women who come out later in life. So that works great as a private practice. You can have a niche and you can also have a more general practice all at the same time, make a great living. But she noticed that she wanted to serve these particular women in a different way, and that they would benefit from having access to each other.

She also didn’t want to only work with women in New York. She wanted to be able to work with these women all over the world who are coming up on that moment where they’re questioning or curious or ready to come out and they don’t necessarily just need a therapist. They may also need a community and some tools and a way to walk through this experience. So, because that’s her niche and that’s her life experience she knew that she could create something really special for them to walk them through that journey.
[JOE]
So what did she create?
[ANNIE]
That’s to become a coaching program.
[JOE]
Okay, so became a coaching program?
[ANNIE]
So she’s got a couple of coaching programs, one, that’s a small group program for women who get to walk through that process with each other, figure out like, well, who am I attracted to? What’s my identity now. And how do I manage maybe leaving my marriage, all of the different things, the big things and the little things that come up. Some folks want to walk through that process with a really wonderful group of other women and some people want to go through it privately. So she has a one-on-one coaching program to walk people through that process and also a small group program.
[JOE]
Now, when people are licensed, I know one question I frequently get, and I’d love to hear how you respond to this too, what kind of ethical or licensure or just liability things do you think people need to take into consideration when they’re maybe moving outside of what their license is specific to? Obviously they’re moving into coaching, but are there things that you want people to think through or walk through before they dive too far outside of their particular license?
[ANNIE]
Absolutely. So I recommend, so I am really not a legal role model or a legal expert. So I actually bring a couple of lawyers into my program to help people answer their particular questions. So I learn a lot from them whenever they’re teaching my cohort and some things I notice is, I notice it’s usually a really good idea to separate these out. It’s usually a really good idea to have two separate websites and to really separate your business completely, your new business from your therapy business and it’s very nuanced. So it’s going to depend on your license, where you’re licensed, what kind of work you want to step into.

What I love about having these attorneys answer people’s questions is that it means that people keep moving through the process. The legal stuff is one of the things that sometimes stops people. They just get so worried. I’m going to mess it up. I’m going to mess up my license. I’m going to harm someone. Really good concerns, but those things don’t need to stop. You. There’re going to be answers to those questions. They’re going to be ways to do this really ethically and I think that’s one of my favorite things about therapists, is in general, we don’t want to do anything unethically. So I love, yes, I love working with therapists and watching them navigate through that gracefully.
[JOE]
So during the kind of exploration phase of what could I launch, at least one thing that I often see, and maybe you see this, or don’t is that people, they have some idea for a product. They spend a whole weekend sketching it out, they get excited, they make a bunch of Canva graphics. They feel like they’re like ready to launch it and they have zero audience. I often have to say our default as highly educated people is to structure, to write, to create, not to market and connect with your audience. For one, do you see that and second, do you recommend that? Or do you recommend maybe starting somewhere differently than starting with the product you’re going to sell?
[ANNIE]
I think it’s so important to get an idea of definitely who it’s for. That’s the biggest thing, is who’s this for very specifically? Like in Samantha’s example, she knew particular women she would want to create something like this for. And then doing a rough outline of what is the particular transformation here that you want to walk someone through. It’s not going to be like, let’s solve all of their problems in this area. It’s going to be something really specific in particular, and then to roughly sketch out a program. So if someone goes off for a weekend and works on it, brilliant. I love that. If they go off for three or four months and start creating videos and curriculum, I’m like, no, please stop. Come back to audience building, come back to audience engagement. But I like to encourage people to do a combination of running a pilot for either one person or a very small group of people before they even have an audience.

So you’ve got to have particular people in mind, but you could start with zero to a very small audience, as long as you know, hey, the second time you launch this, the third time you launch this, you probably won’t have enough folks for it if you’re just relying on your referrals. You’re going to need to start working on building that audience really early on, because that’s some place, like there’s so many places that really beautiful businesses can go to die. I think you just named one of them is like, you’ve got a beautiful thing. You want to put it out there. You don’t have audience and then you take that personally, when it doesn’t sell the second time or the third time.

It may not have anything to do with a mismatch between your service and who it’s for. It may actually just be, you haven’t hit critical mass yet. So I love to educate people on how to build an audience, how gauge with an audience so that they can kind of ramp up their audience as they go and then they also have launched a pilot to maybe one person, maybe three people so that they can also start getting those testimonials and that experience so that the service itself is really top notch by the time they have a bigger audience.
[JOE]
Now when you say launch a pilot, like I have ideas of how I would do that how do you coach someone through doing a pilot?
[ANNIE]
I encourage people the first time to take that weekend, like you talked about to sketch out what this is going to be, and then to email or contact in some way, everybody who they know who could help them fill that pilot; so all their colleagues, all of their community who may know someone who needs this pilot and to let people know how excited they are, let people know why they’re the person to create this and really who it’s for what the transformation is and in a really honest, vulnerable, ethical way, announce that pilot to everybody. A lot of times, if you’ve landed on a really good niche and you’ve got a service that serves that niche really beautifully, then you will get some folks for your pilot just from that. Because probably if you’re listening to this, you’re probably a really good therapist who has people who already trust you and are going to be rooting for you in this.

That’s not, like I always want to put down this warning like that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to make this whole business a grow just with that. But it’s a really great starting point. So that’s what I mean by a pilot is like, do something very simple, high touch, easy to create and that has a lot of view in it. So it may be a one-on-one coaching program where the entire thing is delivered live the first time but you’ve also got in mind, you’re documenting everything that you’re doing. So you’ve got in mind, this is going to become a group program. Maybe eventually this is going to become a large group program. But right now I’m just going to work with this one person or these three people to make it an excellent experience for them. So no recording of like prerecording videos or prerecording audios, or doing like a million worksheets, really teaching it live and keeping it very simple the first time around
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[JOE SANOK]
So then when that pilot’s successful first, how do you know it’s successful and then second, what do you do if it is successful?
[ANNIE]
I think it’s successful if you have decided ahead of time, all right, I want to sell this to three individuals over the next few months. I want to walk them through the process and I want to see them getting this particular result from the program. So if they’re prequalified, if they’re really the right person for this, I want to see them getting this particular result and I’d like to get three great testimonials from running this program three times and being paid well enough for that pilot that you are feeling like you’re getting paid for creating it. You don’t have resentment for the amount of money that you’re making. But it doesn’t necessarily mean, and that you’re charging what you will be in the future once you’re running it, like let’s say a fourth time or a fifth time. You may be doubling the price, or you may be charging quite a bit more. I think of success as getting paid to create that program and to really serve those people in a way that you can see yep, they got the results I was really hoping they would.
[JOE]
Then when you’re really ready to kind of launch it, walk us through maybe some of the nuts and bolts of launching different types of programs.
[ANNIE]
So you’ve still got that referral network and you’re nurturing those relationships. That’s always going to be an important, like one of the most important parts of launching is having people who are familiar with your work and they want to refer to you and whenever your program is open, they are happy to send people your way. That’s always going to be really key. And you want to be building your email list behind the scenes. So you’re creating excellent content that serves those very particular people that you’ve been building this for and you’re also getting in front of other people’s audiences. So this is all happening before you do a bigger launch and in getting in front of other people’s audiences where your people are already hanging out, that’s going to be really key to building that email list and getting it up to at least like a hundred, 200 folks who are really within your niche and are hungry for what you’re creating.
[JOE]
Your numbers aren’t like when you have 20,000 people on your list. It’s like find two or three people that can go through this, give you feedback, give you testimonials, get a couple hundred people on your email list. The numbers that you actually need to have a successful side gig that eventually can become a main gig is not huge. Like I still think of trusts and Janine, some of my first two people that gave me money with Practice of the Practice. I still remember those two people and they’re still in my community and we text each other and it was those first couple people that said, I want to give you money to learn from you that you’re like, what? You want to give me money. That’s amazing.

But it gives you that confidence to then say, well, okay, now tell me what’s working. And over the years, Janine and Trust have sent me emails like, “Hey, the way you said this, it came across to me is I think I’m your ideal client. I would never have bought from you if this was the first email.” It’s like, whoa, that’s so helpful that they then said to me, listen, you missed the mark here and to have those early adopters that to just are there for you kind of for the long haul.
[ANNIE]
Oh, that’s so gold. Do you feel like, I feel like that first, like 10 or $20,000 that you make, I know I’m putting it in monetary terms just to keep it like measurable, but that first year when, with your pilot offer, you’re able to make that like $10,000, $20,000, that is the heaviest lifting. That is the thing to really work for and to be iterating and getting towards. I think the next steps are actually much easier. Like once you’ve hit that critical mass of, I know what I’m doing really impact these folks, then it’s just so much easier to 10X that same result. But yes, I know I went to money, but yes.
[JOE]
No, I think that’s good because we all have those things. I remember when I left my full-time job at the community college, like we all knew how much the president of that college made. I think it was within 18 months I surpassed his income. I thought like that just for me, was such a good emotional thing because I thought in 18 months, there’s no way I could have been making that much within the community college. They just don’t pay that. So to just have that own, my own personal, emotional barrier of, I got to break through that and seeing that potential, I think the money side is a very clear KPI of, what are the key performance indicators here?

Well, we’re not just doing this as a hobby. We’re doing it to make money, but then also to serve within it. I think I hear so much kind of within, especially Next Level Practice, people that are just getting started out, that they’ve come from that social work field. They’ve come from that non-profit world and there’s so much guilt around the money when it’s like, well, if you want to help the poor or the oppressed or social justice or whatever, if you have $0, that’s really hard to do that. So we’ve got to figure out that money side as well as that impact side.
[ANNIE]
I agree. That’s one of the first things I say to folks when I’m working with them is I’ve got a bunch of different biases. I’m going to tell you all the ones I know about what my biases are around business so that you can know that going in. And one of them is, I think it’s really good for you to make money. I think it’s good for you to make a lot of money. I think I used to be a little more wishy-washy on that, but I see really ethical folks having more money as such a good thing that we tend to invest it in really good ways and when we have the ability even yet have to write a check to an organization that’s doing the work that is so important to us in the moment that feels so amazing. So yes, I —
[JOE]
Or even to be able to buyer, like the book that just came out, I bought a bunch from the local bookstore and it’s a little bit more expensive than if I bought it on Amazon. It’s like, okay, I don’t care about the extra couple bucks. I want local bookstores to thrive. We all have our things, whether that’s Food Co-op or other things. Maybe we look at that Apple and we’re like, I can’t believe it’s this expensive at this darn Co-op. I could go over to Trader Joe’s, but it’s like, no, I’m going to invest my money in the things that I believe in. So to have that privilege and then to say, I’m going to use this privilege and this income to impact the world and the way that I think the world should be better, to me I think that that’s amazing.
[ANNIE]
Absolutely. And you get to impact so many more people if you’ve got a profitable business where you are creating content that ends up helping a lot of people who never even pay you. Sometimes people say, wait a minute, in this model, I’m going to be creating all this content to serve people and I’m giving away a lot for free. Like, isn’t that a problem? So I always bring them back to let’s look at your business model that you’re building. Does it pay you really well? It’s going to, if it does, and it needs to, then it’s going to feel so great to you to also be creating content that can help some folks who you never meet and you never collect money from. So it works really beautifully.
[JOE]
I mean, I have a kind of thought that there’s the people that are going to bootstrap it and they’re at such an early phase that they’re going to listen to every podcast. They’re going to read every single thing. They’re going to look at all of our stuff on Pinterest and infographics and all that and they’re going to put the time in, and that’s what they’re spending is their time. Whereas there’s other people that say, okay, I’m past the information age. There’s more than enough information out there. I want to enter the implementation age. So they might join one of our programs that it speeds it up for them. That’s what they’re paying for, is it speeds up their progress. Then kind of as you move along, the most expensive things we offer, like are Done for You podcast launches, it’s crazy expensive. It’s like 18 grand plus, but you show up, you do a podcast, you don’t have to learn any of the backend stuff.

So when you get to that implementation phase to say, I would much rather go do counseling or to go do consulting than to learn how to do podcast show notes, like whether you’re at that end or you’re at the bootstrap side, you’re spending something. It’s just, it’s either your time or you’re spending your money and that money is then buying you time. So I think that when we start to think that way like that, we’re all always paying for something either with our time and energy or with our money. That just makes it easier to say, okay, what am I going to personally invest in that’s going to speed things up. So for example, I hired a consultant to do a big, broad assessment of Practice of the Practice, from the outside to interview our staff, interview some of our clients, and to just say, here’s what’s going well, here are the big, weak spot and opportunities.

If I did that, my staff and my clients would say things differently than if they’re talking to an outside consultant. So the money that we’re paying him to me is going to speed up our ability to grow and expand over time in the right areas. Then like, I don’t want to do that work anyway. I don’t want to go do assessments and interviews and stuff with my team. I want someone else to really help with that. So then I can do things like this that I really love doing and then the rest of the team can do the things that they really love doing as well,
[ANNIE]
A hundred percent. We can’t give away implementation for free. So giving stuff away for free that people can act on, on their own, not a problem. I think people are really paying us more for an experience than for the information. You can really find any piece of information at this point.
[JOE]
Yes, you spend tons and tons of time finding that information. So Annie, for you personally, as someone that does work similar to me, how do you think through what your next project is going to be, what your next offering is going to be, how you’re going to expand your audience? How do you figure out where you’re going to spend your time when you’re working?
[ANNIE]
I’m really nerdy this way. So I track all of my time. So every minute that I’m working, I’m tracking it so that I can then look at the end of the week and then at the end of the month and say, is this aligned with what is most important for my time? Is this aligned with my goals? So for me, it’s going to be about serving at the highest level and looking at like, is the coaching I’m providing the best coaching for me to be providing? Is it the best way for me to be providing it? Then always number two is going to be looking at my marketing system.

So I go in, every time I launch my program, I look at who signed up and where did these amazing people come from? So I look at how many folks came in through my podcast, how many folks came in through podcast interviews that I did, how many folks found me through search. I look at those things, referrals, and I make sure that I’m doubling down on the thing that work, especially to bring in the folks who get the best results. Like where did they come from? Let’s do more of that instead of doing 18 million different things.
[JOE]
Do you have an affiliate program for your current people or some sort of way that current clients then refer people into it?
[ANNIE]
No, it’s all just voluntary. But a lot of times they know exactly who sent them and so that’s really helpful.
[JOE]
Okay. Because that’s one thing we’re looking at with Next Level Practice of whether we should like financially incentivize that or not. Like it’s something we’re always evaluating. So I always like to hear how other people do it too. Well, Andy, the last question I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?
[ANNIE]
I love this question and I was so excited to get a chance to answer it. So you need to listen deeply to yourself as you create a future vision for your business. It’s really easy to make decisions by default and to keep moving forward in your business in a way that you think is expected of you, but you can end up recreating something that really stresses you out, really burns you out and doesn’t work for you. So I just want to really encourage you to lean into your wisest self, lean into your imagination and insist on creating something that is going to really use the best of you.
[JOE]
If people want to connect with your work, if they want to hear more about what you’re doing, I know that you have some free e-courses, also maybe talk about those and how people can connect with you.
[ANNIE]
So I would, a great way to start is to head over to rebeltherapist.me/mini. I have a mini course there that just walks you through how to get ready to create a pilot program and then get started on that pilot program. So that’s all of that stuff is over at rebeltherapist.me.
[JOE]
Awesome. Well, Annie, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[ANNIE]
Thanks Joe. I had such a good time.
[JOE]
So what action are you going to take from this podcast? It’s so easy to just consume information, listen to it at one and a half speed or two speed while you’re walking and then never do anything. I’m sure you’re filling your brain with information, but let’s get some implementation going. The things that you know, so many people don’t know. I still remember this time we had this guy young Ye living with us from South Korea and I was making rice from a stir fry, not using a rice cooker and his mind was blown. He said how to make rice without a rice cooker? I said, yes. It’s easy when you know how, and to me, that’s one of those things that it’s like, we know things that are just intuitive.

It could be parenting advice, couple’s advice. It could be what to do if you’re dealing with eating disordered eating or different things. The world needs to hear more of that. So take your knowledge and go beyond just what you’re doing in that one on one counseling, put it out into the world and when you build that income, it’s amazing it’s going to help you serve more people, but also it’s going to help your bottom line. So sign up for that mini course, take some action after this podcast today and if you take some action, put it on social media and tag us. We would love to see that. On Instagram that’s where I hang out the most. It’s just Practice of the Practice, but you can find me on all the other places, just search my name. Just tag me on. I would love to hear what you’re doing as a result of this podcast today.

Also we really want to thank Therapy Notes. Therapy Notes is the best electronic health records out there. They now include teletherapy as part of all of their plans. Use promo code [JOE] at checkout, and you’re going to get some free months. So go check that out over therapynotes.com and thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you soon.
[JOE]
Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.