[WHITNEY OWENS]: The Faith in Practice podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice podcast network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you start, grow, and scale your practice. To hear other episodes like the Imperfect Thriving podcast, Bomb Mom podcast, Beta Male Revolution, or Empowered and Unapologetic, go to practiceofthepractice.com\network.
Welcome to the Faith in Practice podcast. My name is Whitney Owens and I’m recording live from Savannah, Georgia. I’m a licensed professional counselor, group practice owner, and private practice consultant. Each week, either through personal story or amazing interviews, I will help you learn how to start, grow and scale your private practice from a faith-based perspective.
For those of you who’ve been following the show for the past few weeks, we’re doing some bonus episodes during the Covid-19 pandemic to get you more information on some quick things that you can use during this time of the pandemic, but also things that you can use long-term. So, today I have expert Marissa Lawton on the podcast. She’s a licensed counselor who also happened to graduate from a top 20 business school and she really loves integrating both her hard and soft skills. She is a corporate trainer, strategist, marketer and offers [inaudible 00:01:21] who lights up working fellow clinicians through building aligned business beyond private practice.
[WHITNEY]: Marissa is the creator of the Side Hustle Support Group, a six-month mentorship that helps therapists repackage and repurpose their clinical skills into an impactful online income stream. She also hosts a self-study program called the Space Holder that captures therapists’ creative energy and teaches them to build their first lucrative container outside of the therapy room. Welcome to the podcast, Marissa.
[MARISSA LAWTON…: Hey Whitney, I’m so excited to be here.
[WHITNEY]: Yeah, yeah. So, to be honest with you guys, this is our second time doing the recording on this. I’ve had lots of technical difficulties, but today we’re going to get it done. So, I’m excited about that. So, Marissa, why don’t you go ahead and share with people your story from how you went to a top 20 business school to now that you’re doing the Side Hustle for counselors?
[MARISSA]: Yeah. So, when I was little, I was going to be like the next Gordon Greco, without the like the evilness. I really wanted to go and just be this like corporate Maven. It was my idea and then of course the ultimate goal was always to own my own business. So, I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was really, really young, but I thought in my mind, in order to be an entrepreneur, you first had to go to business school and you first had to pay your dues at some corporation before you could ever go out and start your own business. So, that’s the path that I started on and when I started in business school, it was the early two thousand and the professors were saying, “You’re going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars when you graduate.”
And then by the time I graduated, we were in the middle of the economic downturn. So, Lehman Brothers was gone, Bear Stearns was gone. All these places that they told us we were going to work at and make a ton of money, we’re gone. So, it’s funny relating this kind of to Covid because I feel like my entire professional career has been made up of pivots, pivoting from corporate finance. So, that was in my junior year of undergrad. And so, my senior year I doubled down as sort of just taking a ton of marketing classes. And I also interned at some like advertising agencies and all of that. So, I had been preparing for this corporate finance career and I pivoted really quickly into marketing and advertising.
I graduated, worked for a little while in print advertising, which was dying. So, it’s funny because I learned all of these skills and how to market in magazines and how to market on billboards and how to market in print and then the internet took over and social media marketing and content marketing took over. So, again, another pivot early on in my career. After working in corporate for a little while, I married my husband who is an active duty soldier and he took me to the middle of nowhere, Alaska where there was no print shops and one Credit Union. So, the entire career that I had been building before that was kind of like, all right, either I’m going to not work for four years while I’m in Alaska or I’m going to figure something else out. And that’s actually when I stumbled upon counseling.
I read this book called The Success Principles by Jack Canfield, and it asks you to do a lot of exercises, but one of the exercises was to go back to childhood. And what were you always known for? What were you the person among your friends that always did, and I was always the person that people came to when they had questions of like, should I break up with my boyfriend or what should I do about this situation? I’m fighting with my parents. All of this stuff. And they always came to me to kind of work through their issues and to kind of figure out the next steps in their plan. And so, I was like, “Well, who does that professionally?” And so, while my husband was deployed to Afghanistan is when I went ahead and got my masters in mental health. So, we’ve PCSed a lot, we’ve moved around a lot. Every military spouse knows that every time you move you have to change your license.
This was before online therapy was really a thing and it was, and reciprocity was really hard then. And so, at that point I was like, “Well, what can I do with the clinical skills that I already have, that can move with me, that I don’t have to start over on my license, I don’t have to pay another state’s fee, I don’t have to potentially go get more classes or more hours to be able to practice in that state?” And so, that’s when I kind of pivoted again into online income, which started with coaching. And now I’ve gotten into one to many programs. I don’t work one to one anymore at all.
[WHITNEY]: Thanks for sharing your story with us. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of pivoting, and that’s just life though, right? I mean like you were talking about the market changes, so we’re always having to make changes. I mean even in our world, social media, it’s like which is the most popular social media and so, you’re changing yourself to be able to meet the needs around you. And so, I love that you have kind of pivoted yourself appropriately and you seem to be on top of kind of what’s going on and kind of meeting the need that’s there. And there is a huge need as therapists that we want to do things beyond sitting in the chair, right? We want to have these multiple income streams online. So, could you kind of talk about what that looks like and kind of how you work with people with that?
[MARISSA]: Yeah. Okay. So, we know when we are working one-to-one in session, there is going to be an income ceiling and an impact ceiling. Now, what we can do in the meantime is we can raise our rates and we can do stuff like that, but eventually you’re going to be pricing yourself out of the market, right? When you go looking for a house, you might have a price range in mind. Say you’re looking at, “I want to spend 280 on a house.” And you might go up and look at houses that are like 300,000 or whatever, but you’re not going to go like buy a house for $500,000 when your budget is 280. Same thing as when you’re selling a house. If every house in your neighborhood has sold within a range and then you list your house for hundreds of thousands of dollars more than that, it doesn’t make sense.
So, the market sets the price. Now, it doesn’t mean that some specialists, therapists can’t have a higher rate, but eventually you are going to come up against the top ceiling of your rate. And so, then that means now I see more clients. The only way to make more money is to see clients or to go into some sort of group practice. And so, when we go into group practice, I think it’s a great option, but you also have to use skills like managerial skills, HR skills, skills that you might not be interested in. And so, the other option that a lot of therapists either don’t know about or don’t know enough about is choosing what your case load looks like of one-on-one clients.
Maybe for you that’s 20 maybe for you that’s 10 and then coming up with an online income stream that supplements that smaller caseload so you can design your online income stream to either make up for those other 10 clients or surpass what you were making from those other 10 clients. And you get to choose the caseload that feels right for you. And then another income stream makes up for the revenue that you either are losing out or brings more revenue to you.
[WHITNEY]: Could you give some examples of kind of what that looks like?
[MARISSA]: Yeah. So, I mean, what most therapists are familiar with is coaching and they have a love or a hate relationship with coaching because it is an unregulated industry compared to what we do. Having to get our degrees, having to get our licenses, having to do continuing education, that kind of stuff. So, there’s some therapists who despise coaching and I totally understand that. The reason that I’m not a big fan of coaching either is because you’re replicating a one to one model. You’re still going to hit that time and income ceiling. Now, typically coaching is more lucrative than therapy, which is another issue that a lot of therapists have; is you can charge maybe 200 for a therapeutic hour or you can charge sometimes a thousand for a coaching hour.
So, it is more lucrative for sure, but you still end up having to make that decision. “Am I going to take another coaching client or am I going to go to Timmy’s recital?” You still end up having the time for money problem. So, what I’m all about is finding a one to many option. And for some people that might be a course for other people that might be something like a membership site and for other people that might be a group coaching program. So, instead of one on one coaching, you’re coaching in a group.
[WHITNEY]: Great. And could you maybe talk, I think some of us know a kind of a course and kind of group coaching. What do you mean when you say membership site?
[MARISSA]: Yeah, so there’s two things that we have to look at before we can decide what type of program we want to do. The first is how involved do you want to be with your customers? And the second is how much time do you want to spend marketing? And actually, now that I’m speaking when at a third, which is how much money do you want to make? Some of us are really hands-on with the clients on our caseload. And so, if we have another income stream, we don’t want to be hands-on at all. And so, that might lend yourself more toward a course that you can design that is self-study and that can sell and so, they can go through on their own time. When we’re thinking of passive income, this is kind of what we mean. even though I think passive income is a misnomer. So, this is something like a course. So, we could buy at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday, start right then and go in on their own time and you don’t have to do anything for that.
Now some therapists are like, “Hm, I don’t want to have a customer that I don’t even know their name or I don’t know anything about.” So, they want to have a little bit more involvement with that. And so, that’s when we move on to either membership side or group program. A membership site is, I compare this to like the lecture hall in undergrad, depending on where you went to school. But like if you remember an undergrad, like your freshmen, you know, English one Oh one was like a thousand people in the lecture hall and the teachers upfront or the professors up front kind of teaching from a PowerPoint slide or whatever and teaching one two a lot, right? Not one to a few but one to a lot. That’s kind of what a membership site replicates. You basically are teaching on a large scale or a large group.
You might have coaching calls with these people or Q&A calls with these people, but again, it’s done in large group. The draw to this is you do the same thing and whether you have a hundred members or a thousand members, you’re doing the same amount of work. So, it is very, very scalable but again, you get to interact with people but you’re not interacting on a high touch level. So, that’s when group coaching comes in. It’s like the upper division class. It’s teaching one to few. It’s more than one to one, but it’s one to a few instead of one to a lot like a membership site might be. So, that’s where you ask yourself, “Okay, how involved do I want to be with this?
The other thing you have to know is the more involved in the program, the less marketing you have to actually do. So, if you want to sell a course, you might not be spending a lot of time delivering the course. You’re going to spend a lot more time selling the course. A group program, which is kind of like at the other end of the spectrum, you’ll only need three or four people to make it worth your while. And so, you can spend a lot less time selling it, but then you spend a lot more time delivering it. So, those are kind of two questions. The next thing we look at is how much money do you want to make? Membership sites are typically really low-priced, under a hundred dollars a month. Usually they come in around the $50 a month mark and so, if you’ve only got 10 members, you’re only making 500 bucks a month. But like I said, you’re doing the same amount of work whether you have 10, a hundred, or a thousand.
I know people with membership sites that bring in $50,000 a month and they’re doing very little work. So, you got to kind of think of that. Of course, it’s again in the middle of the spectrum where it’s maybe priced around $500 so you don’t need as many sales as a membership site, but you still need several sales. And then a group program might be priced at like $5,000. That’s why you only need two or three people to make it financially worth your while. But again, you are earning that higher rate because you’re much more involved. So, those are kind of the three types of questions you want to ask yourself; is which of these scenarios makes the most sense for me? And then you can start moving forward coming up with the concept of your program.
[WHITNEY]: Yeah. Thanks for breaking that down. I love, I’m a one on the Enneagram. If you [inaudible 00:15:07] the Enneagram. So, I love having a step by step understanding about things. So, I love how you just broke this down. I’m taking notes. Okay. So, let’s say we’ve got a therapist out there who’s already created their course or they know how they want to do their membership site, but they keep hearing about email lists and why is an email list important? And so, how do you actually create it? Why is it important? And then how do we use it to actually make money?
[MARISSA]: I would first tell them they kind of made a mistake if they’ve already created their program. We always sell before we create. Always sell before you create. You never create your program before you sell it. Again, going back to a college analogy, right? You pay your tuition in August and your semester is delivered all the way through December. You don’t get your semester and then pay your tuition in December. You always prepay. So, in that sense we want to be the university in this example and we want to be charging, because we don’t know how many times those kids are skipping class. We don’t know if they’re actually doing their homework. Like we want our money and then we deliver the program. So, don’t create your program before you sell it.
Now you want to have a concept for your program, right? So, this is splitting hairs a little bit. You want to know what your program entails, you want to have a really detailed outline of your program, but please don’t spend the 30 to God knows how many hours creating the program. For instance, I spent 280 hours building Side Hustle Support Group. If I had done all 280 hours of that program and then no one bought it, imagine that waste of time. So, we don’t actually create before we sell. We need a solid concept because we need to know what we’re selling. But we don’t build it until we have people’s money in our pocket. So, that’s the first thing that I would say but once you have that solid concept and that concept consists of four things, it consists of the person that it’s for. This is like when you think of niche in therapy.
The person that it’s for, the problem that it solves for that person, the promise that it makes. This is again, different than therapy. We can’t make guarantees in therapy. We need to make guarantees with our programs. So, the promise that it makes and then that price that we’ve kind of already hit on, if it’s a low-price program or a higher price program. Once we know those four things, then we can start building an audience and start building an email list.
[WHITNEY]: Okay, that’s great. So, we’ve got these things, so we’re trying to figure these things out I guess, and then we want to go to an email list. How do you actually create an email list and get people on there?
[MARISSA]: There’s lots of different ways to build an email list. There’s different approaches to gathering an audience. Once you know the person, the problem, and the promise of your offer, you design your email list to be tightly related to your offer. So, for instance, if you are selling applesauce, we don’t create an email list based on bananas and Kiwi and peaches and plums thinking that, “Well, I’m selling fruit so I’m going to build an audience of fruit.” It doesn’t, that’s not going to give you good sales in the end. That’s not going to give you the conversion rates that you’re looking for in the end. If you’re selling applesauce, you only want to attract people who are interested in apples. We don’t care about bananas, we don’t care about plums, we only care about apples and so, that’s why we need to know the person, problem, and promise that our program makes so that we can directly reverse engineer an email opt-in that’s related to our program.
This way, anybody who’s on our email list is actually a qualified buyer. It’s not about casting the net wide and trying to capture as many people on our email list as we can. It’s in fact actually keeping that net really narrow. There are people, students of mine in Side Hustle that have email lists of 200 that make more money than people with email lists of 20,000.
[WHITNEY]: That makes sense.
[MARISSA]: Yeah. So, in terms of how do we build that email list, there’s a few different ways. The first way is to have an email opt-in. These are called opt-ins, freebies, lead magnets. There’s lots of different names floating around for these, but they’re really the same thing. It is a gateway for them to be able to access your email list. And this needs to be thought of as an exchange of value. Even though it’s free, they’re not paying you money for it, what they’re paying you, their currency becomes their email address. And even more than that, their currency becomes their time. Because we don’t want to be in somebody’s email inbox between the target ad and you know, Joanna Gaines, Magnolia email, and they’re just clicking, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. That doesn’t do us any good. So, even though the exchange of value is their email address, we really want to think that the exchange of value is the time they’re going to take to actually read that email. We don’t want just email subscribers. we want email readers.
[WHITNEY]: Great. Okay. So, first we get that email opt-in and then we get their email?
[MARISSA]: Mhm.
[WHITNEY]: Okay. And then do we do with that?
[MARISSA]: Well, so when you have an email opt-in, you can promote that in a few different ways. You can promote that on your own content, which is like your podcast Whitney and my podcast. This is your own platform. Now, typically, if you don’t have a big audience yet, some people have a big audience and then they start creating content but most of the people listening probably don’t have an audience yet, right? So, promoting your freebie on your own platform is going to get you like onesies and twosies subscribers. Like you might get five people a week from your own content. What else you can do is go be a guest on other people’s podcasts or write blogs for other places.
You know, I’ve written for Psychology Today, I’ve written for Psych Central, I’ve been on Joe Sanok’s podcast. I’m on your podcast. So, this is getting your email opt-in in front of bigger, already existing audiences. And so, whereas promoting on your own platform might bring you onesies and twosies, going and being a guest on other people’s platforms is going to get you, I call it tenises and twentises. It’s going to get you more people. The next thing that you can do is have what I call like a PR event, which I do, I’m known for the summits that I host. I’ve hosted Holiday Happy Hour, I’ve hosted Back to Business School, I have an upcoming summit called the Pick My Brain Panel and so, these not only use my audience, but they invite several other people, not just one other person’s platform, but several other people’s platforms.
And so, you’re getting in front of not only one bigger audience, you’re getting in front of several other bigger audiences. That is the biggest way and fastest way to grow your email list. But again, you need the topic of that summit to be directly related to your offer because now you’re getting in front of a lot of people’s different audiences and so, your chances of getting those oranges and those bananas and all these other people is really high. So, you need to make sure that the summit or the event that you’re hosting tightly relates to your offer because even if the other audiences only bring like 50 people, at least those 50 people are apples. So, again, it’s not about the number on your email list. It’s about the relationship between the people on your email list and their interest in your offer.
[WHITNEY]: That’s great. Okay, so we’ve got this email list rolling. What kind of things are we putting on the email list? Like information wise, I’m guessing we want to create good content for the people that are reading it. What kind of things would you recommend or how often should that be released? How many emails should you do?
[MARISSA]: Yeah, so it really depends on your style of selling. If you notice a theme and from what I’m talking about, it’s working backwards from the end, so, if your style of selling is really personal and really like personal outreach and high touch, then your email strategy is going to look a lot different than if you’re trying to sell to the masses these low price, high volume type programs. So, when you’re selling a group program for instance, and you only need those three, four, or five people, personal outreach and conversations are going to be much more effective. But when you’re trying to sell, to get a hundred new people in your membership site or a hundred sales of your course, the sales techniques change. Does that make sense?
[WHITNEY]: Yes. Yes. I like that. And I like that we’re creating something that’s authentic to ourselves. It’s in kind of the direction we want to go in as therapists because too many people, we try to do something that we don’t even really want to do it and it just comes off fake or you can’t, you don’t sense it. And so, people are honestly, and I say this to counselors too, it’s like they care not about your skills, but who you are and who you are is such a great offer to people. And that’s the same with this. It’s like people want to work with you, Marissa, because they hear you on a podcast, you’re acknowledgeable, you’re authentic to who you are and then they want to work with you knowing they trust you. It’s not necessarily, “Oh this is the product,” even though that’s important. It’s who you are that sells the product.
[MARISSA]: In marketing we call this know, like, and trust. So, somebody needs to know what you do. They need to like you, they need to be excited to learn from you and then they need to trust that you are going to get them results.
[WHITNEY]: I like that. Okay, so let’s say we’ve got a therapist who has their course and they’re feeling overwhelmed with what, if they only have enough time and energy to do one thing, if it’s an email list or if it’s a Facebook group or if it’s, what would you recommend the thing they focus on to sell a course?
[MARISSA]: Email list, 100%.
[WHITNEY]: Okay.
[MARISSA]: It is the only asset that you own. Well not the only asset that you own, but when it comes to building your audience, you own your email list. So, if you started your email list on MailChimp, which I don’t recommend, but if you started on MailChimp and you decided to move to a different platform, you literally download the CSV, which is an Excel spreadsheet. You download the CSV from MailChimp and you upload it into any other email campaign provider. You could literally print that Excel spreadsheet out and hold it in your hand if you want it to. A Facebook group, while it’s definitely a relationship marketing strategy, you don’t own that. Mark Zuckerberg does. You don’t own your Instagram audience. Mark Zuckerberg does. You don’t own probably a bunch of other things that Mark Zuckerberg owns, right? So, this is why I always say, if you only have time for one, always start with an email list.
[WHITNEY]: Great. So, you mentioned platforms already. So, can you talk about what you recommend as far as platforms and why?
[MARISSA]: Yeah, my favorite is MailerLite. It is, the reasons I like it is it’s free to start up to your first 1000 subscribers. After you get to a thousand, it’s built in tiers. So, depending on your audience size then the price goes up, but comparatively to other programs, those tiers are less expensive. It also offers features that other platforms don’t like. For instance, MailChimp does not offer link triggers at all. Like it’s just not part of their software. It’s not like it’s a paid feature. They don’t even have it. And that’s a really, it’s not necessary, but it’s really convenient and makes your audience feel very seen and taken care of. And it’s a feature I use a lot and so, I love that it’s not only included in the software, but it’s included on the free platform, the free tier.
They also have landing pages. So, you can build landing pages to collect those email addresses. And they also have websites. So, that’s one thing that therapists always ask me about like, “Do I have to build another website for this?” My first answer is that you actually don’t need a website at all to get started. You only need a landing page software. But what’s cool about MailerLite is if you wanted a full website, you could use their email platform and have a website built right there. So, I think it’s really cool. There are several others that are out there. There’s ConvertKit. That one is really, it was built for the coaching industry and it was built for online income, so it has a lot of like bells and whistles. But I don’t even use those bells and whistles and I’ve been doing this for five years. So, it’s robust, but it doesn’t have a free tier and it starts at like 40 bucks a month, which is more than I pay for MailerLite with a big audience. There’s ActiveCampaign, there’s a ton of different other ones out there, but I really think that MailerLite walks that balance between the features that it offers, it’s robust enough for anybody who’s just getting started and it’s affordable.
[WHITNEY]: That’s great. Alright, so let’s say someone’s listening right now and if they are, “Man, Marissa knows her stuff. I want to hire her to work with me or I want to be involved in one of her groups that she can like help me get to my courses going.” How can someone get more involved in working?
[MARISSA]: Yeah, so it really depends on the stage that you’re at. I have kind of two programs to support therapists who are looking into online income. Space Holder is a self-study course. It’s like a weekend course. It’s not something that’s going to take you forever to do. It’s designed to be able to be done in just a few days, but it takes you from the ideas that are floating around in your head, kind of channels, that creative energy and it walks you through that four-step process that we’ve already talked about. The person, the problem, the promise, the price. So, you go from having this kind of like the ambiguous idea to like a concrete plan that you could beta launch right after Side Hustle and you could sell or right after Space Holder, I’m sorry.
Now Side Hustle is different. It’s a six-month mentorship and it takes you, so Space Holder takes your idea to offer, Side Hustle takes you from offer all the way through audience building and marketing plan like we’ve kind of talked about on this episode as well. So, you don’t have to do Space Holder in order to do Side Hustle, but it’s for those who are more just kind of in the idea stage.
[WHITNEY]: That’s great. And then Marissa, you also have a podcast, right?
[MARISSA]: Yeah. I have a podcast called Empathy Rising. The premise of the show is that empathy and success are not mutually exclusive. And so, we can still be helpers and healers and empaths and want a bigger income and a bigger impact. So, those are the kinds of things that I talk about on the show.
[WHITNEY]: Great. And if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?
[MARISSA]: Yeah, marissalawton.com. It has both of my offers there, my podcast is linked there, and then you can also just fill out a contact form there as well.
[WHITNEY]: Great. Great. And so, is there anything I missed that you want to make sure you added or did we catch everything?
[MARISSA]: Yeah. We have a fun event coming on at the end of April. It’s called the pick my brain panel. And so, for any of you guys who have more questions, like this, just might’ve like opened up a plethora of questions for you like what does this mean? What does that mean? There’s six of us getting together. It’s going to be me, it’s going to be Joe Sanok, it’s going to be Ajita Robinson, Ernesto Segismundo, Katie Read, and Gordon Brewer. And we’re all just allowing you guys to just come and ask us anything that you can possibly think of. We all are going to be kind of talking about our own relative areas of expertise, but even if you throw a curveball at us, I’m sure between the six of us that we’ll be able to come up with a really great answer to your question.
So you can find that at bit.ly/brainpanel and just come hang out with us and ask any questions that come up about, you know, expanding beyond the therapy room, kind of finding more stability for your income in this uncertain kind of times, just diversifying therapy income, having something else that you can turn the faucet up if you need to, if your caseload ever shrinks, beyond your plans or anything like that. So, that’s kind of why we’re hosting it.
[WHITNEY]: Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I’ll have to go check it out when we get off here. Yeah, it sounds like a great panel to be a part of. Alright. And so, I ask everyone at the end of the interview, what do you feel like every Christian counselor needs to know?
[MARISSA]: Yeah, I think you hit on this. I think that building a business should be authentic. There’s so much out there that tells us you have to do a course or the only programs that work are business to business and none of that’s true at all. The best way to build your business is to ask yourself reflective questions. What do you want? What do you value and how can you create income streams that align with those two things?
[WHITNEY]: That’s great. Yeah, authenticity all about it and being real. So, well, you have provided so much great information and I’m excited about this going live because I think it’s going to help a lot of people where they’re at right now and great to have all your contact info as well. So, thank you so much for doing a second recording and being available for the podcast today.
[MARISSA]: Yeah, you’re so welcome. I’ve had a lot of fun.
[WHITNEY]: Thank you for listening to the Faith in Practice podcast. If you love this podcast, please rate and review on iTunes or your favorite podcast player. If you liked this episode and want to know more, check out the Practice of the Practice website. Also, there you can learn more about me, options for working together, such as individual and group consulting, or just shoot me an email, [email protected]. Would love to hear from you.
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