How to Plan Your Year with Whitney Owens | GP 100

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Image of Whitney Owens. On this therapist podcast, Whitney Owens talks about how to plan your year.

Are you clear on your company’s mission, vision, and values? How can writing down your goals help you to plan and achieve them? What mindset challenges do you need to overcome to accomplish your vision?

In this podcast episode, Whitney Owens speaks with Alison Pidgeon about developing a strategic plan and goal setting.

Meet Whitney Owens

Photo of Christian therapist Whitney Owens. Whitney helps other christian counselors grow faith based private practices!Whitney is a licensed professional counselor and owns a growing group practice in Savannah, Georgia. Along with a wealth of experience managing a practice, she also has an extensive history working in a variety of clinical and religious settings, allowing her to specialize in consulting for faith-based practices and those wanting to connect with religious organizations.

Knowing the pains and difficulties surrounding building a private practice, she started this podcast to help clinicians start, grow, and scale a faith-based practice. She has learned how to start and grow a successful practice that adheres to her own faith and values. And as a private practice consultant, she has helped many clinicians do the same.

Visit her website and listen to her podcast here. Connect on Instagram or join the Faith in Practice Facebook group. Email her at [email protected]

In This Podcast

  • Writing down your goals and accountability
  • Working on your practice plan for 2022

Writing down your goals and accountability

As a practice owner is essential that you plan out your year and your goals.

I think there are some crazy statistics that say the people who actually write down their goals are 30-40% more likely to achieve them. Now’s the perfect time of year, if things have slowed down between Christmas and New Year’s, take some time to really think about what you want to accomplish and to write it down.  It makes a big difference to write it down. (Alison Pidgeon)

Saying what you’re going to do, telling people you’re going to do it and when you’re going to do it, all increase the likelihood of actually taking action. This is why being in a community with other like-minded people working on goal setting, gives you the accountability you need to push on through.

Working on your practice plan

Mission, vision, and values

  • My company’s mission statement
  • My company’s vision statement
  • My company’s values

The reason why we put these things at the top is that I think as business owners, we can get really distracted by lots of great ideas and opportunities that come our way, but we have to remember to stay in our lane and be true to what we originally set out to do. (Alison Pidgeon)

Your business goals

The next thing you have to focus on is what your business goals are for the new year:

  • Revenue (and also write down what it will be at the end of 2021): What amount of money do you need to make as a business owner or to meet the needs of your employees?
  • Clients served: How many clients do you want to see?
  • CEO work hours reduced: In your group practice the number of hours isn’t necessarily directly tied to your income anymore, if you’re delegating properly, you should be able to work fewer hours.
  • Expansion Plans: Do you want to open a second location or hire more therapists?
  • Other: This could be a big idea such as writing a book or starting consulting.

Brainstorming ideas

Brainstorm all possible ideas for how you could accomplish your goals in 2022 (taking into account the overarching goals you described above).

People get tripped up because typically you need to think through breaking down a really big goal into little steps. That’s where having business coaching, consulting, or having a fellow practice owner to help you think through these things can be really helpful because it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. (Alison Pidgeon)

If one of your goals is to increase the number of clients your practice serves, then that means you’ll need to hire more staff.

Reviewing your ideas

  • Review all possible ideas and decide which ones best fit your goals and the mission/vision/values of your business

As a business owner, you’re going to have many ideas, but they won’t necessarily all be good ones. You’ll need to decide which ones will really move the needle forward.

Brainstorming your vision

Ask yourself these questions:

  • How is your business growing and changing?
  • How are you growing and changing as a leader?
  • Which mindset challenges do you need to overcome to accomplish your vision?
  • Write a declarative statement about your vision for your business in 2022.

Plan

Revisit all your possible ideas and prioritize your top 7 projects here

Books mentioned in this episode:

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!

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