Q&A was part of Next Level Practice, the most supportive community for therapists starting a private practice. In this video, Joe answers the question based on whether you can work full-time while building a group practice.
Question
Can you work full-time while building a group practice?
Answer
That’s what I did from 2009. My wife and I moved back to Traverse City, and I didn’t leave my full-time job until 2014. Practice of the Practice – from 2012 to 2014 – was totally being built outside of my full-time job. I had up to four people working for me when I left my full-time job. And then quickly got up to eleven people total and had a group practice in 2013. I made the same amount working ten hours a week as I did in my full-time job. In 2014, I made twice as much. And that’s when it was time to say, ‘If I’m doing this on ten hours a week, what would it be if I left this job?’
So, the way you want to do that though is to look at your full time job and where you have flexibility. For example, could you come in one or two days a week at 7:30am, work through your lunch, and then leave early? So if, typically, you work 8:00am to 5:00pm, could you come in at 7:30am, which would move your end time to 4:30pm? Or, if you work through lunch, maybe 3:30pm? Then, you could start to see clients once or twice a week. You could see a 4:00pm, a 4:45pm, and a 5:30pm.
If you just did them back to back to back, twice a week, times $125 a session, times 48 weeks a year, that’s an extra $36,000 before you pay rent or marketing. Even if we take off 35% to cover taxes and your rent, etc., that’s still an extra $23,000 a year, almost $2,000 a month extra. What would you do with $2,000 a month extra? I mean, you could do that home renovation project, you could put that money back into the practice, you could rent a bigger place to scale, there’s so much you could do if you even just saw one or two clients yourself and then grew a group practice.
So I would say yes, definitely do that. You can sublet a place and grow as you grow, or you can just rent one small place and get really efficient on how you rent it out. One thing around renting a space is that oftentimes people think, ‘Well, for a group practice I need three or four offices’. I had a single office suite, which I had four people working out of.
If you figure from 7:00am to, probably, 8:00pm you can get people in there every day. That’s 13 hours, and that’s not even on doing 45-minute sessions. You probably could fit in 14 or 15 sessions a day if you really packed them in. Nobody would really do that, but even if you did 10 sessions a day, six days a week, and then on Sunday maybe five. That’s 65 sessions! You could have four or five people in one office, easily, if you are good with the schedules.
Joseph R. Sanok, MA, LLP, LPC, NCC
Joe Sanok is an ambitious results expert. He is a private practice business consultant and counselor that helps small businesses and counselors in private practice to increase revenue and have more fun! He helps owners with website design, vision, growth, and using their time to create income through being a private practice consultant. Joe was frustrated with his lack of business and marketing skills when he left graduate school. He loved helping people through counseling, but felt that often people couldn’t find him. Over the past few years he has grown his skills, income, and ability to lead others, while still maintaining an active private practice in Traverse City, MI. To link to Joe’s Google+ .
