File: POP 249 – Ginny Mills did W-2 instead of 1099 and here is why
Duration: 0:35:45

[SPONSOR TALK]
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[MUSIC]

This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session #249.

[MUSIC]

[A STARTING WITH INTRODUCTIONS]
Joe Sanok: Welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. I am Joe Sanok, your host here, live in the radio center two building. We are all about teaching you innovative ways to start, grow, and scale a private practice. We are so excited that you’re here today. Our team has been working hard to get these podcasts up. We will need to batch them, so that you could tear through all of these and take massive action around scaling your practice. Many of you are in that beginning phase and maybe this is more inspirational, just thinking about where you should head, but a lot of you are in that mid five figures, upper five figures and you’re looking to get to that next level. And so we want to give you practical solutions from people that have done it. They have six figure and multi six figure practices, and I just totally rock in that hour. So that’s why this series were dumping all of them on you this week so that really you can take massive action and binge listen to all of them. And today is just as good if not better than the other ones. Ginny Mills is with us and I will tell you about her in just a minute. But if you want to apply for that next Mastermind Group I am starting, it’s a small group of six people that you are going to work together for a year. You can head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/nextlevelmastermind to apply, and from there we are going to have a conversation to see if you are fit for the group. And we would love to help you out if you are trying to get to that six figures or that multi six figures. So without any further ado, I give you the one, the only, the never replicated Ginny Mills.

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Joe Sanok: Well, today on the Practice of the Practice Podcast, we have Ginny Mills. She is the founder and clinical director for Full Life Counseling and founder of the new membership site, www.parentingthroughaddiction.com. Ginny, welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast.

Ginny Mills: Thanks Joe. Appreciate you are having me.

Joe Sanok: Yeah, I am really excited to have you here. We have cross paths in a number of ways and I am just excited to have you on the podcast and introduce you to the nation.

Ginny Mills: Aw, I appreciate the opportunity.

[GINNY’S PRACTICE – GROWTH STORY]
Joe Sanok: Yeah, well. Why don’t we start with your practice, Full Life Counseling. Tell us about, kind of, when you started it and we will, kind of, dive into how you have been scaling it.

Ginny Mills: So, I began the practice in February of 2009. I am a licensed clinical addiction specialist and I eventually chose to make the focus of the practice to be very addiction specific. And so I was not new to that field, but new to private practice and so it took a while. I believe I signed my lease around the first of February and I think it was the end of April before I got my first client. So those were few stressful weeks. And over time I have added people to my practice and scaled first one person at a time, eventually to expand into much broader services including some Sober Living and Intensive Outpatient and bought a building and it’s been quite a rise since February of 2009.

Joe Sanok: Yeah, yeah. So for those people that in their first phase of practice, the startup phase where they are under 50,000 gross for the year, what were you doing in that first year and even those first months when you didn’t have any clients to get people on the door?

Ginny Mills: Oh, it’s pretty scary I have to confess and I think that for me because my practice was so niche focused. I simply starting visiting residential treatment programs around the country. One of the secrets about that world is that because there is a strong need for referrals from all over the country to high-end residential programs, there is also a pretty big budget to be able to bring potential referral sources to visit the premises of the program. And so I started reaching out to business development and outreach specialist to represent different treatment centers around the country and said I am developing a practice that includes intervention which means making referrals to residential programs and I would really like to have a firsthand impression about any program that I am going to be referring to. And so while I had the time, then you know, they would actually foot the bill. So they would find me out. I would get to see their program be able to ask a lot of questions, making some meaningful firsthand connections and then be able to talk with families later about having visited those specific programs. And so in time there were referrals that came initially from people that I knew in the business and that I knew in my personal life, and then as I started getting intervention referrals, I was able to make referrals to treatment for primary care, and then would get those referrals back for aftercare.

Joe Sanok: Wow, so a lot of those facilities are willing to, kind of, fly you out, show the facility and then kind of hope that you would refer to them. But in essence they are more likely to refer to you when they sent people back from that program.

Ginny Mills: That’s exactly right and because my practice doesn’t… we have never tried to provide primary treatment. We do a lot of pre-treatment on front end and help people determine what they need and where to get it, and then hope that they are able to come back to us for aftercare which is really the longer segment in the recovery process. Primary treatment is sort of like the classroom part of drivers end. And so it’s really the supervised practice and aftercare where the big chunk of opportunity lies, and so we refer for the primary treatment and then hope to get it back for aftercare.

Joe Sanok: Wow, so as you were growing, you doing this networking, were there any other things that were especially helpful as you were kind of just starting out the practice?

Ginny Mills: Well, I think that certainly the opportunity to connect with community organizations… I was really creative in terms of trying to offer services that nobody else was offering. And that’s always a little frightening because you discover that maybe there’s a reason why not all those services are offered. I tried to offer some different subject specific workshops at the public library, like recovering your financial health, recovering your credit score. Recovering your relationship with your children, your relationship with your parents. Recovering your physical or dental health. That was a total flop. I never had anybody come, but then I was able to say, okay, well, that’s not going to work. I need to try something else and eventually I think what made the difference was the opportunity to start making a few referrals and then connecting with the outreach specialist from the different residential programs as well as making connections with the professional monitoring groups. Professional monitoring organizations are those groups that are usually separate nonprofits working with licensing boards like the medical board or the dental board or pharmacy board, and when professionals end up with substance related impairments, then these monitoring organizations provide oversight of their practice either until they are ready to return to practice and then after that for a period of time to make sure that they are stable to provide care to the general public. And so I made some relationships with the professional monitoring organizations and I think that gave me a huge amount of credibility in the community because my name then became associated with the addiction practice that served a more higher end, more accomplished clientele. And I think that was a big game changer for me, was making those connections with the professional monitoring groups.

Joe Sanok: Yeah, those are great ideas. I am even thinking about, Steve, my substance abuse counselor here and all the things that he could be doing that you are saying. I am going to make him listen to this interview. Well, I can’t make him because he is a 1099, but I am going to highly encourage him (laugh) to listen to this.

Ginny Mills: No doubt.

[ADDING CLINICIANS AND MOVING FROM 1099 TO W-2]
Joe Sanok: Yeah. So at what point did you start adding people to your clinic?

Ginny Mills: Well, I started adding people when I was at the place where I was not able to respond to the request for services in fewer than 72 hours. Because the very nature of addiction recovery, denial is such a powerful thing and when people get to the place that they are ready to pick up the phone and ask for help, we need to be able to get them in fairly quickly. And at the point where I couldn’t meet my own standard for responding to those request in less than 72 hours, it was time to get some help.

Joe Sanok: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know I see a lot with my consulting clients, you know my conferences or mastermind groups that you kind of get to this point. Usually it’s around probably 70,000-80,000 gross, that the hustle, the wearing multiple hats, the like you having all the vision and doing all the work for the practice really starts to bring people out and they start to outsource more. And usually when they first outsource something, it’s really hard to let go of it, because you’ve designed it. This has been your baby. Did you struggle with any of that as you started to take things off your plate?

Ginny Mills: I think it was easier to trust the resources and the approach of the first 1099 I brought on board because he had as much experience as I did. He had as much… had the same [Inaudible 00:11:13.13] that I had. I knew that he had been trained in an environment that I felt was a pretty close parallel to my standard of care. Where it got harder was when I added other people whose background and training was a little bit different. And I think that I wanted to be able to have some continuity without being a control freak, and finding that balance was really hard for me.

Joe Sanok: Yeah, how did you find that, because I think that’s hard for a lot of business owners?

Ginny Mills: Well, you know, it’s interesting. I think that I was very deliberate about having a clinical team meeting and an individual supervision meeting. But I think it was as I moved in the direction of trying to define a model of care such that I could teach that model and ask people to follow that. And I made the decision to move away from 1099s and toward employees in part because in North Carolina associate level providers are – that we discovered last year at MAC – that there is different language. But in California, these would be considered interns here. They are considered associate level providers, and you know my account at folks told me that that does really meet the IRS definition of a 1099 because they required supervision and they don’t really fit the experts status category. So in order for me to be able to direct how I wanted them to work as well as satisfy that particular caveat, I started going ahead and bringing people on as part time employees, and so then I could train around a particular model of care based on sort of where [clients 00:13:20.14] work in the stages of change continuum. And so we built a model of care based on stages of change that I taught our clinicians as a part of a weekly practice training that was then supplemented and complimented by their individual supervision.

Joe Sanok: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love that you go back to MAC. Those of you that don’t know what that is, that’s the Most Awesome Conference which we host most years in Southern California, and that’s where I first met Ginny. And I think it really does what you just said, put a [Inaudible 00:13:56.16] on why you need to have accountants and attorneys just looking over what you’re doing. So like my attorney had me separate out the supervision. So I can have an LLPC. So in Michigan, it’s a limited license. For California’s interns, for you, it’s associates. So they have to get their own supervision from somebody else and then they also have to file their own LLC that I pay. And so that’s more complicated for the person joining, but then it protects me from the IRS, you know, potentially. But I think it really shows that you need to have those expert eyes, glancing over what you’re doing, especially when you are in that scaling phase, you get to that 100,000 plus. What else was hard about bringing on additional clinicians, bringing on additional people to do scheduling, phones, any of that?

Ginny Mills: Well, I think one of the things that was true for me is that I worked in a group practice before where almost everybody had been trained in the same graduate program. And so I began to add people whose background and training was from different graduate programs, I had a sudden new appreciation for the quality of training at my university and how important it was that those foundational skills of joining and rapport building and helping the client feel heard and understood were more important than… I had sort of taken those things for granted as part of the assumed skill set of a licensed clinician and I discovered that that wasn’t always the case. And so I think that was an unexpected discovery. I guess all discoveries are unexpected, but I did come to appreciate that it was important for me to request an audio tape or video tape [Inaudible 00:15:53.08] even of a MAC session. It was important for me to do a very thorough wetting process where I really talked to people and tried to get a sense of the ability to sustain a clinical relationship with clients in their previous employment, and also to really trust my gut about the in-person experience of just how effectively that person joined with me in the interview process. And last, but not least, we do too team interviews and when possible I try to do a spouse interview. And so I am happy to elaborate on those if you would like?

Joe Sanok: Yeah, yeah. Tell me about how you developed that and I haven’t heard of spouse interviews except for maybe pastoral candidate somewhere.

Ginny Mills: Well, I have worked in programs where team interviews are sort of the standard. I mentioned having worked in a previous group practice, and I always really value being invited to give my input. So we certainly did that. And actually another podcast that listened to advocates for the whole business of making a… for me and my husband to invite a candidate and their partner out for a meal to simply give that partner the opportunity to ask questions, for me to have the opportunity to observe the interaction between the candidate and their partner, and to really be able to consider the implications of the job on their lives and how their personal life might impact their opportunity with the practice. So in one case I was really excited about a candidate, and it was in that process of the spouse interview where I realized that this person’s personal life was such that it was not going to be a good thing for her or for us in the long run because her husband was working full time and going to graduate school and she had two little kids. And so if an emergency had come up – and this was in response to a job that had some physical on-call requirements – she wasn’t going to be able to respond to that if she didn’t have somebody who could quickly step in and take care of her children. And somehow in the context of our interviews before that, it had just not clicked with me. So it was in the context of that dinner out that we were able to recognize that while I thought she was a wonderful person and a great candidate and a good counselor, it was not going to work for either one of us in the long run.

Joe Sanok: Wow, I think that’s great. I think every time that I have gone against my gut in hiring someone, it has always come back in a negative way.

Ginny Mills: [Inaudible 00:18:56.23].

[SOBER LIVING FACILITY CONCEPT]
Joe Sanok: Yeah, I really encourage people… even if you feel like, oh, I got to fill this office or we got to fill this specialty. Take your time, just like Ginny was advocating for. So I know that you then, you were doing some residential, you were living the Sober Living. Take us through how you guys decide to add that. And then… I know what happened, but our audience doesn’t know what happened. Take us through the launch of that Sober Living facility and then kind of how that landed afterward.

Ginny Mills: So Sober Living is a relatively new concept in North Carolina as compared with other parts of the country. And so we had a couple of gentleman who were feeling really isolated who really needed support in their recovery, who were counseling clients, and needed a place to live. And I was familiar with the Sober Living concept and we decided to do a pilot project and that pilot project was very successful for both of those gentlemen, and we decided to expand that and make it much more robust. We experienced a lot of success, say, for about two, two and half years. And then in the meantime sober living programs became much more popular in North Carolina. And our organization is located literally right in a central part of the State, not near Ashville, which is super cool, and not near the beach which is also super cool. And so as more competition developed and the opportunity for folks to be able to choose sober living in environments that they found to be more desirable, our referral rate didn’t go down from the treatment programs, but our admission rate went down. And so, you know, we went through a period of time where we had to decide is this just a slump or is this a weak point to not be able to maintain and sustain this program. And it was a painful realization. I remember when our outreach specialist looked at me and said, okay, I think it’s time to pull the plug on our brain dead patient. And I think it took us a long time to get to the place that we were ready to do that. So consequentially we had leases to extricate ourselves from, furniture to get rid of. It was quite the ordeal and a lot of challenge, but you know it led us to the realization that there were other ways to make a difference, and other opportunities that were really important as well as opportunities to replace that income. So we began the pursuit of another endeavor.

[PARENTING THROUGH ADDICTION]
Joe Sanok: Yeah. Well, and I think that it’s interesting. You know, you try these good ideas, you go after them, and you know sometimes they don’t work. And you look back and you think, wow, that distracted me for a year that I could have been putting into my practice. But also there is those ideas that do work. So I like that idea of at least trying to say, well, how can we test this, what’s the minimum we can do to really launch it. But then sometimes, they aren’t minimum. Sometimes you got to go full tilt forward. So sometimes it just doesn’t work out, but it leaves you to bigger ideas. So why don’t you share with us a little bit about PTA?

Ginny Mills: So Parenting Through Addiction is a membership based program that we are in process of launching. We are developing a variety of resources for parents whose lives have been affected by a son’s or a daughter’s use of drugs or alcohol. It doesn’t always mean that this circumstance has evolved into addiction, but we want them to have the opportunity to learn and to have support and inspiration, and in some respects most of all for them to have hope during that period of time that their son or daughter may not be invested in doing something to change their behavior. A lot of times if we are to think about the stages of change model, parents are far more prepared to take action when their son or daughters substance use is becoming alarming to them than their son or daughter may be ready to take action. And so, I think that one of the things that treatment centers have always known is that parents in their effort to be supportive to their children have sometimes erred on the side of enabling and rescuing too much. They may also have erred on the side of not understanding that the situation may be getting out of control and that young person may really not be as able to recognize the gravity of their decision-making as their brain is becoming more and more and more compromised by the drug or alcohol use. They may not be able to see it. One of my earliest mentors, you know, taught me that it’s really important to not be mad at someone who denies what they really don’t know. So if I can help parents be able to learn and develop their own understanding of addiction and the ways in which they can be a part of the solution instead of a part of the problem, then when their son or daughter really is able to accept that lifeline, then they are in a much healthier place as parents, they are much more prepared to know what to do, and it improves the likelihood that that young person gets off to a great start in recovery. And so the membership platform allows parents who are a part of our practice, but it also allows parents who are within the sound of your voice or my voice through a podcast or other promotional opportunities around the country to connect with daily [Inaudible 00:25:00.10] with one of four online courses that we have developed, with a couple of different online support mediums where we provide psycho-educational programming as well as parent-to-parent support, the opportunity to engage with an addiction specialist to help customize the identification of a shortlist of treatment centers that is within their family’s needs, preferences, and resources as well as the opportunity at the highest level of care to have some one-on-one private parent consultation. And so our levels of membership range from free all the way up to a higher level of membership which is currently set at $300 a month. But that is probably going to change as the program evolves. But right now, memberships are free, $19 a month, $49 a month, and $299 a month. So it allows parents the opportunity to access the level of education, support and resources that they need at any given time and to scale up or down based on their different circumstances.

Joe Sanok: Mm-hmm. Well, I love the shift from starting a practice and then growing into adding clinicians and then looking beyond just the practice. I think it in such a perfect way captures those three phases of starting, growth, and then scaling. So for you, when did, kind of the, light bulb or the light switch go on in regards to “I got to do something beyond just a group practice, that I want to do a membership site or sober living or things” that help you scale even more? Was there a moment that you realized “I have really got to go after something beyond just owning the practice?”

Ginny Mills: Well, I think my motto has been to grow for good, not greed. And so I am looking so much to make more money, but to a recognize unmet need, and whether that was those two gentlemen who needed company and support and a safe place to live and a safe neighborhood or the opportunity to connect with parents who are being told over and over and over again, you know, you just need to let your kid hit rock bottom. And we know from media around the country that sometimes rock bottom is death. So those parents read those news articles and they are terrified and they are having a hard time finding the resources to be able to help them, know how to help their child. And so in many respects, it’s not so much about looking to grow simply to satisfy some ambition that I may personally have as much as it is to fill unmet need. And I think that so often you do a great job of encouraging people to find a niche and/or a niche depending on what part [Inaudible 00:28:11.18]. So for me, recognizing that I don’t need to do primary care, I don’t need to replicate services that are available that are really good. I need to look for ways to fill unmet need and those are the areas of growth and opportunity that we try to identify and pursue.

Joe Sanok: Mm-hmm. Why I think that was really cool about kind of where we are right now as a society. Is that the businesses that are doing it over good versus greed are the ones that are successful? And so you can do both. You can, not both in the sense of being greedy, but in sense of the business that genuinely care about people and they are genuinely looking at, well, where are the unmet needs here that people could actually get some extra service and help. That’s where you attract natural customers as well. So it’s a great time that we live in where you don’t have to be this kind of greedy Scrooge McDuck to make money and to have a decent lifestyle. You can actually serve people really, really well and then that’s going to attract people to your business too.

Ginny Mills: I certainly agree. I felt particularly well positioned to do Parenting Through Addiction. Part of my background is that I have run a residential program, I have run a sober living program, I have run an outpatient program, and I’m a mom of a daughter in recovery. So from the standpoint of understanding all the different aspects of what parents can anticipate and the resources that they are going to need to tap into as well as their own experience of, you know, loving their child and wanting to see their child be successful and not want their child or their family to have to suffer any more than is necessary, I feel like I was particularly well positioned for that. And it just made a lot of sense when we started looking at unmet need.

[CONCLUSION AND USEFUL LINKS]
Joe Sanok: Yeah. I always love when people take their own personal story and they decide they are going to improve the world in some way through that. Like Harrison who owns Wecounsel. He launched online counseling because his sister went through something and couldn’t get a counselor locally. So he [Inaudible 00:30:29.20] started this HIPAA compliant platform or you starting this, and we just did the World Changers Challenge in June, and to see all these mostly counselors thinking about what’s my big idea that goes beyond my practice and what’s my story behind that, the revolutionary story. It’s just so inspiring to see counselors, therapists, psychologists going beyond just their individual practices to launch things that are going to improve the world in some unique way. So Ginny, if every practice owner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?

Ginny Mills: Because this is such a standard, Joe, question, I knew to anticipate this question and you are aware that I just came back from a weekend with Leslie Baker and Robin Custer and Cindy Doyle that we met at the Most Awesome Conference last year, and if I had… I think one of the things that that experience created for me was the opportunity to appreciate how important it is to be connected with other counselors outside of my own practice. I’m really extroverted and so I knew that I would want to be a part of a group practice and to create a group practice. But I really didn’t realize until a few years ago is how valuable it is to connect with other counselors outside of my practice and to connect with other counselors in other parts of the country. I have learned something from them. I feel supported by them. I have a kind of objective feedback from them that’s decidedly different from those that get a pay check for me or get supervision for me and I think that this is hard work. We are the container for so many stories for so much pain, for so much growth as a part of the counseling process that we really need support from other counselors in general. And I think as a group practice provider and somebody who is trying to grow in healthy ways, I think that contact with other counselors outside of my practice has been a real blessing and something that I would really encourage for everybody.

Joe Sanok: Ah, I can’t echo that enough. I am with you whether it’s consultant friends of mine that we get together or other clinicians. I have got my people on both sides too and having people I think especially that aren’t in your town, it’s really nice to be able to kind of bounce things off of them. So Ginny, tell me what’s the best way for people to connect with Parenting Through Addiction or to connect with you if they want to hear more about what you are working on?

Ginny Mills: So literally to go to www.parentingthroughaddiction.com and to simply choose one of the membership options available at the bottom of the screen. If they would like to reach out to me by email, they are certainly welcome to email me at [email protected] or [email protected]. Ginny is spelled G-I-N-N-Y.

Joe Sanok: Awesome. Well, Ginny Mills, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast.

Ginny Mills: Thanks Joe. I so much appreciate the opportunity. Have a great day.

Joe Sanok: You too. Bye.

[MUSIC]

Joe Sanok: Well, I hope you are inspired to take massive action to grow and scale your private practice. Go after it. These are regular people. They just kept moving forward. They kept looking at what’s the next reasonable stuff was. If you are interested in applying for that Mastermind Group,. it’s the next level Mastermind Group, you have to be at least $60,000. With most people being at that 100k or hovering around that 100k. That application is over at practiceofthepractice.com/next level mastermind, and if you are ready to take insurance billing off of your plate for you or your group practice, schedule an appointment to talk with Practice Solutions. Practice Solutions is the premier medical billing company that I have met. And Jeremy and Kathryn, we text, we talk in the phone. I get feedback from my consulting clients. Head on over to www.practicesol.com/joe and you can schedule an appointment to chat with them to see if they are a fit for your practice.

Thanks for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Next we have Sherry Shockie Pope. Oh my gosh, Sherry has rocked out private practice and it’s killing it, can wait to share her story with you next time. Have a great week. I will talk to you soon.

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Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for intermusic, and this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered, is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guest are rendering any legal, accounting, clinical or other information. If you need a professional, you should find one.

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[END OF PODCAST 00:35:44.11]