Joseph R. Sanok, MA, LLP, LPC, NCC

Joe Sanok is an expert on achieving ambitious results! He is a private practice business consultant and counselor that helps small businesses and counselors in private practice that are starting a private practice. 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+ .

Photo by Norlando Pobre

 

How to Start a Private Practice An Interview with Tres Adames

This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, Session 62. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and I am so glad you’re with me. Man, I took last week off from doing the podcast. I was going to try to do it, but I had a brother from Oregon and his new fiancée and my sister from Cleveland and her husband and my parents we were all up. We did a day-after-Christmas thanksgiving because we hadn’t all been together for Thanksgiving.

Then we had our Christmas Eve dinner which is called, Wigilia. It’s this Polish dinner where we have pierogis and we have prunes with beans and we have oplatki, which is like a flatbread. It’s just one of the most special evenings of the year for me.

You know, I just decided that I was going to skip it. If you missed it, I’m really sorry. I hope you did something other than listen to my lovely, lovely voice. Yeah, actually, my back kind of hurts today. I’m standing. I’m going to take off my shoes.

Back in 1999, I had a really bad snowboarding accident, and so if you hear the pain in my voice, send good vibes to my lower back. I fell snowboarding, and I went to the Mayo clinic a couple of years later and had a back surgery and every once in a while, it flares up and it’s just not going back and so I’m going to see my chiropractor and see my DO and all that, but yeah it just kind of hurts as I’m standing here.

Sorry if you hear some pain in my voice but it is what it is, fighting through it for you, you the listener. My hands are cold and will put that in my lower back. It kind of helps a little bit.

Today, I don’t have a specific podcast sponsor. You may have noticed that I had some sponsors there for a bit, and I’ve not been pursuing that as much, because the amount of time that goes into finding a sponsor for my return on investment of my time I realized that it was a lot of time to get what was about the equivalent of my counseling sessions.

I’m going to put more time into the things that are going to definitely return money on the investment of my time but yeah, I decided not to do a sponsor today. I’m still obviously finding sponsors here and there but not putting in that personal time into that.

But I do want to give a resource, and it connects with my guest today and it’s our Facebook page. That’s just Facebook.com/practiceofthepractice a sort of active community. There’s definitely way more active Facebook groups that I’m a part of but you know, I’ll let you know when there are new posts that are out. People will post things there and oftentimes I’ll do specials there just to connect with people.

We’d love to connect with you there. I’m more of a personal level. Again, that’s Facebook.com/practiceofthepractice. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the show or what you’re learning or just questions, whatever it is.

The reason I bring that up is Tres Adames, who is my guest today, has been probably one of the most active Practice of the Practitioners people from –haven’t really named our group yet. I say practice nation sometimes. I think that kind of sounds good. But he’s been by far one of the — I can think of five or so people that are really, really involved in our community and that really will send the emails, they’ll comment on things I post on Facebook, they’ll let me know if there’s an episode that they’re doing.

Tres would often email me especially like two years ago, when I was really launching the podcast and the website. Maybe it was more like a year ago. He would just say, “Here’s what I learned. Here’s how I’m implementing it.” I was just so impressed that he took so much time out to let me know what I was doing that was helping him and really helped me tweak some of the things so that I could grow because I love hearing from you guys. I love hearing what’s working, what’s not working, what maybe I didn’t quite hit the mark. Maybe I didn’t explain something real well. Maybe, I had a big long run-on sentence like I’m doing right now.

He would so often send me an email or respond to things that I send out. I got to know him through email and then we talked on the phone once when I was offering a free consulting on a thing that I did to the email list. He and I were chatting and I think he had even on Twitter had a comment and I said, “Tres, I’ll give you a free consulting from that.”

He’s just been super active and honestly to see how much he’s killing it is just so empowering and exciting and it’s just so fun. I think that this year, I’m going to try to do more stories from people that have been learning from Practice of the Practice implementing and then seeing those results.

My big keyword phrase for this year is that I help people find and I haven’t really nailed how I’m going to say this obviously. But ambitious results is kind of the two-word phrase that I’ve come up with as to what I do, that I help people achieve ambitious results. I think that really captures my own goal-setting and personality and drive. I’m going to be using that term, ambitious results quite a bit because I think it really captures who I am and what I try to do.

Without any further ado, let me introduce you to my friend, my colleague, someone that inspires me and he’s going to teach us and help us discover more about how to raise rates, your SEO, and a few things he’s learned as a pastoral counselor, as well.

So, Tres Adames.

Joe Sanok: Tres, thank so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast.

TA: Thank you for having me.

Joe Sanok: Yeah. This is really awesome. You’ve been so involved in our private practice community for a while, and it’s great to have you on the show.

TA: Thank you for having me.

Joe Sanok: Yeah. Why don’t we just start with who’s Tres? What do you do and then we’ll go from there.

TA: Well, I’m Phoenix, Arizona. It’s not too cold here right now.

Joe Sanok: Unlike Michigan.

How Tres supports himself and how he started a private practice full time

TA: Yes, I know. I love the warm weather here. I’m originally from Phoenix. I went out of State for school, though, for college and seminary. I’m a pastoral counselor as well as by vocation a minister but counseling is how I support myself.

I’ve been counseling for the last two and a half years. I started doing it full-time since just the last six months. It’s kind of something I fell into. When I finished seminary, you know, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. It’s not like the ministry has a lot of jobs available, but I actually just worked in retail for two years and hated it. I worked 50 hours a week. I did the overnight shifts, day shifts, floating back and forth. I finally realized you know I got to do something because this is isn’t what I’m meant for.

Joe Sanok: Sure.

TA: Meanwhile, I was doing ministry on the side. But people kept coming to me one-on-one a lot and just saying “You know, I had a lot of good advice. Now, you should be a counselor.”  I was like, “Well, maybe I should.” It’s something I eventually pursued and I know other people have stories like that, but I did not anticipate that I would end up here, doing this. But it’s something that I love doing. Probably the biggest help was not only my seminary education but the fact that my counseling professor in seminary said if you are in ministry or if you are a counselor, you need to get counseling. I was like, “Okay.”

I did therapy for three years and got all my issues out of the way. That’s probably been the most helpful thing I’ve ever done, just for me personally as a counselor

Joe Sanok: That’s awesome. I think that’s a really good point of counselors being in counseling. I know that’s true of myself, too. I’ve been to good counselors, I’ve been to bad counselors. The first couple I went to I was like, “Wait. This is the field I’m going into.” I don’t know if I want to be like these people, but recently over the last couple of years, my wife and I have gone to a marriage counselor, and it’s just great to have that third person that can just weigh in and help you sort through all your junkie brain.

TA: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely for sure, and I’ve noticed the difference between counselors that get counseling and those that don’t.

Joe Sanok: Yeah.

TA: That’s always been my drive. You have to take care of yourself if you want to help other people.

Joe Sanok: Absolutely. That’s a really good point. You said you went full time about six months ago. Take us through maybe when you were part-time doing counseling.

TA: Well, I left retail and I started working at a local college. I had a teaching assistantship there and did that for two years. But in the middle of that I was trying to do other stuff. That’s pretty much where I’d started counseling that I was just doing on side.

How Tres went from one session a week to starting a private practice

I had like one session a week. If I had two it was a big deal. But I started thinking, “How do I actually turn this into something that’s probably more of at least a part-time job because right now it’s just something I do on the side.”

Joe Sanok: Sure.

TA: I just did a lot of research online, and I read a lot of actually marketing books on counseling, but a lot of them were pretty outdated. It just kind of had a lot of the old type of advice like go out and network. Or you can go door to door.

Joe Sanok: Knocking on people’s doors.

TA: Yes.

Joe Sanok: Hi, I could be your counselor. Want to buy a vacuum?

The one thing that replaced the yellow pages

TA: Yeah. I know. I realized that Google is the new yellow pages.

Joe Sanok: Yeah.

TA: People don’t contact people the same way they used to.

Joe Sanok: Sure.

TA: So even just books that were 10 years are way outdated. I just typed the research in finding whatever I could find and I found your podcast because I had been listening to Pat Flynn, I’d been listening to Dan Miller. Really, their stuff but nothing was really specific to what I was trying to do. Like it kind of was but not exactly but I don’t even know exactly what I searched on the iTunes store. I think I just searched for counseling and yours came up and I started listening to it and I was like, “Wow, this guy is like exactly what I need to hear.” That’s how I found you.

Joe Sanok: Wow, that’s awesome. Hey, real quick, I think your microphone might be rubbing against your sweatshirt a little bit, because I’m hearing a scratching kind of whenever it moves.  

TA: Okay. Yeah, I’ll be sure it doesn’t do that.

Joe Sanok: That is perfect. That’s even better.

TA: Okay, cool.

Joe Sanok: So, you start listening to the podcast and I think it’s easy to be a consumer of information. Someone could say, “Joe, you’re the reason that Tres was so successful, but you’re the one that implemented it, and so you consumed information. How’d you start implementing some things?

TA: Probably, the first thing that I started doing was increasing my rates because before, when I first started, it was like I charged like $50 an hour and then it went up to $65, and then I went up to $75 and I found out that the more I kept increasing my rates, the more clients I got, which I thought was contrary to what would happen. I thought I would get more clients if it was lower.

Finally — I’ve even charted each month as I raised my rates the amount of clients I get, and it goes up every time. Just sent out a letter this month saying this is going to be my new price and finally I’m going to be at $125 starting in January.

I even had one client that started paying that price early.

Joe Sanok: Oh, my gosh. We knew you were worth this.

TA: Getting over that false guilt, I think, was really hard, but that’s something that you really helped me with so that was good.

Joe Sanok: Yeah. I would imagine as a pastoral counselor like having that background as well on top of it like already human services people have a hard time with it but then I think also then not wanting to feel like I mean, there’s been in the world slimy ministry people and you don’t want to come across just one of those persons. How did you internally get over, I mean, you have like the one-two punch of guilt.

TA: I know, exactly. I actually also do some hours at a charity, and they still have people pay a rate like $40 but if it’s not $40 at least $20 because they want to see people invested in it somewhere.

I think the hardest reality is that when it’s that low even when I was doing it for $50 on my own, I don’t know how say it without feeling guilty but pretty much like the people who pay the least are probably sometimes in a lot of ways, the most difficult to deal with. I found as it got higher, you know, people were much more invested in it, they had put a lot of time and effort already into their progress, they were serious about the work that they were doing in the office, they were much more receptive to reading outside of the office. They’re doing journaling exercises, so eventually I saw that it was better for my clients to charge more. They didn’t blow it off as much, they showed up to their appointments, so they were just more invested, overall.

Joe Sanok: Well I think that that’s a great point even though maybe like I don’t know how to say this without sounding like you know all snooty but I was just listening to one of Pat Flynn’s podcasts and I forgot the guy’s name, but it’s a guy that runs his E-courses, and he was talking about charging more. They were talking about the example of if someone gives you a book for free or you have to save up to buy it for $200 like you’re going to read the book you paid $200 for, even if it’s the same book.

I do think that I’ve seen in my own practice that when people have to — it kind of hurts a little bit to pay to come to counseling, they’re just totally invested, they do the homework and they follow through or I’ve seen people like go to their families and be like, “Hey, will you support us?” Then they have this whole support system also to work through their issues.

TA: Yeah, definitely for sure.

Joe Sanok: I like your point of that you do work for a local ministry that offers the added reduced cost. Can you maybe talk a little bit more about that decision rather than just doing your private practice?

TA: Well, I still kind of wonder why I’m doing that stuff, but no, it’s mainly because you know, some people do call and they need help and it’s nice to connect them to a program where that’s available and I can work with them because maybe they have done their research and they connect with me, but I can’t necessarily do counseling for free with my private practice as much as I would like to, obviously, because I have to pay rent and I have to pay for insurance and I have to pay for taxes and all the overhead there.

Joe Sanok: Sure.

TA: But a lot of that is taken care of through this non-profit. That’s why I do that. And I really don’t do that many hours there. At most I might have four sessions a week there, but I just do that a couple of days but usually just one day a week. I’ll go down there and do that and offer that. But you’ve kind of mentioned that before is the advantage of charging a higher price is that you can pretty much you can offer those services for free or for a reduced rate or even at a sliding scale if you want to use that, that program.

Joe Sanok: Sure.

TA: Pretty much the people were paying full price. I don’t want to say it like this but you know they’re allowing you to continue counseling, overall.

Joe Sanok: Sure. I know that for myself going through another agency it makes it easier to say, “Well, I don’t offer a sliding fee, but I do help kids in foster care through Bethany Family Services and through single mom ministries those referrals is where I choose to give back. My counselors that work at the practice, they each choose whether they want to do sliding fee or to partner with another non-profit in town and to have that kind of like you know, those places will figure out who is best to come see Joe Sanok. I think that’s great that you’re doing that.

You have the practice going kind of part-time up till six months ago. What shifted over maybe like take us back to like a year ago into that lead-up to a full-time private practice.

TA: Well, I was just tired of working at the college because I was still doing that. It was just taking way too many hours and they kept piling on more work for us to a grade and it was just taking way too much time until finally, my colleague said to me, “It’s pretty a work of –” for minimum wage at this point if you plotted all the hours it’s taking us like… That’s so true. So, during the summer, didn’t have classes and just threw all of my weight into counseling and that’s where I started seeing an increase to a point where I was like, “You know what? I could just live off of this.”

But I was implementing a lot of stuff I was learning from the podcast. I had increased my rates. I worked on my SEO, and I’ve made some mistakes with that but also learned a lot from that. I learned a lot from one of your first podcasts that you did when you talked about SEO.

I use Weebly. I know a lot of people use WordPress, but I like Weebly. It fits my personality. I can kind of make it look the way I want it to look. I got a profile on Psychology Today. That helped and then also some other listings that were helpful. I use the Pat Flynn type of strategy of the —

(cross-talk)

Joe Sanok: Let’s just be pausing. So, SEO, search engine optimization basically means how you rank in Google. Take me to some of — you said some of those indexes or links back to your website. What are some of the things that you really put your time into?

What is ranking highest in Google, how to attack keywords in Google

TA: Well, I made sure I had a listing on Psychology Today, on Theravive and then a couple of Christian counseling directories. Let’s see what else. I may try out a Facebook page, Twitter, Google + because I had heard that they — well, Google likes it when you use Google + so I tried to do that and then also, probably honestly, the biggest thing that probably gets the most clicks is just the Google local because that’s what’s coming up now when people google things, you know, counseling in your area.

I worked on the keyword Christian counseling Phoenix Arizona. That was the keyword that I kind of attacked and that was based on the one that you had mentioned you do counseling in Traverse City.

Joe Sanok: Yup. Well done.

TA: Yeah, so I just attacked that one like crazy.

Joe Sanok: What are some of the ways that you attacked that?

TA: Just making sure that it was not only the actual site title. The site title was Christian counseling Phoenix Arizona and then you could actually — that doesn’t have to be the actual title, the page where people click on it. You can put a logo or something else instead. But the actual title, the URL, I had Phoenix Christian counselor. That was also probably something that helped a lot, making sure that I had the keywords listed in on the first page of the copy itself. Like, you know, Christian counseling, Phoenix Arizona. It kind of had — as you had mentioned before weaving it throughout the pages the natural copy itself.

How Tres almost got banned from Google

I found like paying for SEO is a bad idea because my first website got — it didn’t get banned. But it got — what’s the word — penalized for it. I dropped like 40 different spots. I was just in turmoil over it.

Joe Sanok: So, you paid someone and then you de-ranked?

TA: Yeah, and I don’t know what they did, either. To this day, I don’t know what they did.

Joe Sanok: Yeah.  

TA: Pretty much I learned, don’t get too greedy. If you’re on the first page, that’s pretty good.

Joe Sanok: Well, and I think that’s a good point that if you’re going to hire someone to do SEO work for you, ask them how they’re going to do it because the updates in Google that just happened like three months ago like even Pat Flynn has changed a lot of his strategy where in the past is he would write all these articles and spin them and then link them, and Google doesn’t care about that stuff as much anymore.

If people are using what are called gray hat or black hat SEO tactics of like having these spam robots go out and comment a million times using your back link that’s going to like ding the heck out of your website.

Even if you don’t know and this isn’t so much for you but for the people listening. Even if you don’t know anything about SEO, asking them some questions like well how are you going to rank? Like what do you — how are you going to optimize things and then figuring out, is that actually something that Google wants? That’s such a great point. I haven’t of people hiring a company and going down that much, but be warned.

TA: Yeah, did I learn from mistake? Again, I wasn’t completely banned. I was just penalized.

Joe Sanok: Yeah. How long did it take to recover?

TA: Six weeks.

Joe Sanok: Wow!

TA: But still I saw a drop in hours.

Joe Sanok: Sure.

TA: That’s pretty scary for a little bit.

Joe Sanok: Yeah and was that before you went full-time or after?

TA: That was after. I’ve just now recovered. Yeah. I know. Likely it didn’t completely tank me which I knew it wouldn’t completely tank me. But the other thing was also that I had moved locations.

I saw there’s an opportunity to kind of rebuild and so I got a URL that was actually a better fit because my office, I use the office out of a church and that’s probably a good tip to maybe also throw out to some people that are wanting to start a private practice, but they let me have an office for free and that was really helpful for the first year and a half. I just you know offered to give a couple of sessions a month to some of their own parishioners, and that was a big help just to kind of help with overhead to get started but eventually, that church got bought out, and another church came in and I had to leave.

Joe Sanok: A church that got bought out, wow!

TA: Yeah. It’s kind of crazy. Anyway, I ended up getting some office space with another counselor so we have a suite that we use. I actually moved to Peoria which is a suburb of Phoenix, and I had to change some of my keywords because I was no longer in Phoenix. I was in Peoria, so having to set up pretty much a brand new website wasn’t completely awful because I eventually would have had to do that anyway. Start at least with a few words.

Joe Sanok: Were you doing any blogging or was it mostly just on the internal pages that you’re optimizing?

TA: No, I have a blog. I have a podcast, as well. I try to blog at least once a month and you know, and I tried to encourage other counselors to do a lot of these same things but you know, people are like, “I don’t have enough time.” But I mean, if you at least do it once a month, you know, after a year, you have 12 blogs.

Joe Sanok: Yeah.

TA: Derek Halpurn he says his approach is you know, not to blog you know every single day like some people do but just you know, promote more. It’s not that you have to produce more content, you just got to promote it more. So that was the approach I took.

Joe Sanok: Wow, that’s great. I know like for me, I used to be doing you know, two or three blogs a week but now, I want to make sure I’m doing the podcast really well and getting interviews that are just great and so I probably have you know, one to three blog posts a month, but you know, one might be the monthly income report, too.

As you move forward, what are some strategies you’re going to use to continue to get clients maybe over the next six months?

TA: Well, probably more offline networking, as well online. That’s something that I think I probably shied away from for while just because my personality is more introverted. But I think the hardest thing for me, what Christian counseling is that, it’s kind of envisages me speaking from my niche. It’s kind of been sadly, abandoned by the church as a whole and so trying to connect what church is for me is, has been my goal but there’s still such a stigma probably more in the church than there is outside.

For me, just where I’m at, and this is true for anybody. Relationships really come first so while the networking you know, just meeting people is good and having a good website, having real relationships, that’s really kind of the strategy I’m trying to do is trying to get to know pastors more, as many as I can in the area. That’s what I’m looking to do is kind of be a resource for them. Because, you know a lot of times, people just need community, as well.

I want to be a resource for them to connect my clients to, “Hey, you know, if you’re looking for a community and a church, this is a good church because actually, I really don’t see a lot of church-going people, that come to see a Christian counselor. They’ve kind of been disenfranchised by it. They kind of feel hurt by it, so I kind of find myself kind of in the middle, if that makes any type of sense.

Joe Sanok: How do you think that strategy might apply to maybe outside of the Christian counseling space like are there other niches that that kind of connecting and overcoming barriers would apply to?

TA: Let’s see. I don’t recall about that.

Joe Sanok: So, I guess like something that comes to mind for me is you know, like lawyers, like we just connected with a law firm recently and helped them to understand how counseling can help their business, for example. Or you know, even at the local food coop how nutrition and counseling could go together rather than just you know, eating healthy, you have to kind of go even farther, faster or even with the new year coming, well, who knows when this will play, but maybe the new year now.

Well, in the future. You know, working on your weight loss or anything like that it seems like kind of that model that you just talked about — there are pastors that have an audience that is against counseling, how do you teach those influencers about the benefits of counseling for their audience? That seems like it could apply to a lot of different areas.

TA: Yeah, it could. Definitely, it could because there’s one market or one networking group that I go to, and it’s made up of different business people and none of them are you know, in counseling. I’m the only counselor there. But one thing I try to focus on is just the self-care. That’s something that seems to translate across various different fields like it’s so easy to get caught up in work itself. But you need to take care of yourself. That’s something that a lot of people can relate to. Because I’ve had business people send their employees to me and you know, they’re not anywhere, they’re not in healthcare or anything like that at all, but they recognize, “Hey, one of my employees needs counseling. This is a referral.” You never know where referrals are going to come from. It’s not necessarily going to come from a place that you think it might.

Joe Sanok: Now, I think that’s a really good point. You know, just always know that there could be a referral that comes. And there have been times that I’ve been at just get-togethers and a referral of a friend or you know, a sibling or something comes out of that and you know, if you’re acting stupid, you know. There’s something hard here. It’s like you know, well, not that you just need to be on your best behavior, but just be your authentic self wherever you’re at.

TA: Yes, definitely.

Joe Sanok: Any other things kind of in the New Year that you’re hoping to achieve or learn or grow in?

TA: Well, I’m planning on actually doing more writing. I’ve been doing the blogging, but I’d like to do a book. I have kind of my own eclectic approach to counseling, especially Christian counseling because I don’t necessarily do Biblical counseling where you pretty much just open the Bible, and you preach at people. I don’t think that’s effective.

Joe Sanok: Right.

TA: I have my own kind of approach that I’d like to put into book form and then maybe making some courses on certain issues that people struggle with. There’s a lot of stigma, I think, for Christians that struggle with depression because they think, you know, they should always be joyful, they should always be happy and if they’re feeling bad, then they’re doing something wrong. That’s not necessarily the case. The fact that they’re being so hard on themselves is actually making it worse if not the actual cause of depression.

Joe Sanok: Right.

TA: So, I’ve been thinking about you know, what would a course look like. Maybe somebody that won’t go see a counselor. Maybe they would be open to a course and just learning about how depression happens and what to do with it.

Joe Sanok: That’s great. It sounds like you’re working on a lot of interesting things within your niche.

TA: Yeah, yeah.

Joe Sanok: Good for you. Well, One question that I always ask people towards the end of the interview as I’m sure you know is what would you want every counselor in America to know if they were listening right now?

How Tres got over himself and learned how to make more money

TA: Just that what you do is very valuable and not to sell yourself short. It does feel awkward kind of putting yourself out there, putting your name out there, being all over the web, but just know that you’re not selfish, you’re not prideful in doing so. You’re helping people in doing so. And so, eventually, something I had to tell myself is I need to get over myself, because what I’m doing is meaningful and there are people that need to hear just what I have to say in regard to what they’re struggling with. So, what you do is important. Just go out and do it.

Joe Sanok: Awesome. Well, Tres Adames, how can people get a hold of you if they want to connect with you?

TA: Probably the easiest way is just go to my website arizonachristiancounseling.com and you just contact me there.

Joe Sanok: Awesome. Well, Tres, thank you so much for being a part of the community and it’s awesome to see you grow and I’m sure over the next year or so, we’ll stay in contact, and I’ll hear about your new endeavors.

TA: I hope so.

Joe Sanok: Well, Tres, thank you so much for being on the show. Always so fun to connect with people in person. I guess face-to-face over Skype when you’ve been having kind of an online friendship for a while. Tres is just really enacting a lot of what we talk about here on Practice of the Practice.

So, we would love to — both Tres and I would love to hear what you thought of this episode and what you’re going to do. If you want to go to the Facebook page, Facebook.com/practiceofthepractice. Just let us know what you’re going to be doing in 2015 and maybe what you’re going to be enacting from what Tres said.

So, thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an awesome, awesome week. See you.

Special thanks to the bands Silence is Sexy and Mome. We like your music.

And this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered.  It is given with the understanding that neither the host, nor publisher nor the guest is rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional advice. If you need a professional, you should find one. See you.