[ALISON PIDGEON]
You are listening to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. Whether you were thinking about starting a group practice or in the beginning stages, or want to learn how to scale up your already existing group practice, you are in the right place. I’m Alison Pidgeon, your host, a serial entrepreneur with four businesses, one of which is a large group practice that I started in 2015. Each week, I feature a guest or topic that is relevant to group practice owners. Let’s get started.

Hello, hope you are doing well today. We are doing a series right now called What’s Next and I have interviewed several people who are talking all about transitioning away from clinical work and doing something else. I just really enjoy having these conversations. Today I am talking to Katie Reed. She is an LMFT, has had many different experiences in the mental health field and then started a business where she helps therapists figure out what they’re going to do when they want to kind of transition out of doing therapy work.

So she has created something called the Clinician to Coach Academy, the Clinic Coach Certification, and she has something called the six-figure flagship program, she’s going to talk about in the interview. She says, she’s a little bit obsessed with helping you get profitable, doing the creative out of the box, authentic work you’re called to do. And Katie is one of those people that just has lots of energy and enthusiasm, and she was so fun to talk to. She had so many great nuggets of information to share. So if you’ve ever thought about stepping away from clinical work, maybe you are a group practice owner and you don’t necessarily have to see clients anymore, and you want to try something new. Katie is definitely somebody you should talk to. So I hope you enjoy this interview with Katie Read.
[ALISON]
Hi, Katie. Welcome to the podcast.
[KATIE READ]
Thank you. So excited to be here.
[ALISON]
I’m excited to connect with you today. And before we get started with all of my questions, could you just introduce yourself to the audience and let them know about your business?
[KATIE]
Sure, absolutely. So I am Katie Reed. I am a therapist, I’m sure like everyone in your audience and I’ve been a therapist for a long time. I’m a person, I kind of went through a bit of a transition in my own life. I had gotten licensed in California, was working there as a therapist for a long time. I always say I’ve kind of done all the jobs in our field, maybe like a lot of people in your audience where I did agency leadership, I had private practices, I taught grad school, I created therapy training materials. It’s sort of been all around our therapy world. And honestly I loved it. Like I had a lot of jobs before I became a therapist and being a therapist was by far like winning the lottery. I absolutely love everything about being a therapist.

We moved with my husband’s job to a different state and suddenly I was kind of at that beginning place again. I had a long re-licensure process ahead of me. My new state didn’t care at all about any of my previous experience. They were like, “Well, you’re new here. So start over.” Our lovely non portable careers that we all have. So during this long process where I couldn’t just go and open up another therapy office because I wasn’t licensed yet, I actually fell back onto something I had loved in the past, which was copywriting and marketing. And I began just doing some copywriting and marketing coaching for fellow therapists to help them with their websites. And it’s funny, I was surprised to discover how much I loved it. Over time I ended up getting re-licensed, but by that point, this marketing coaching business had grown so significantly that I was like, “No, I don’t know if I’m going to go open that office right now. After all, like, this is really good.”

I was at this place where I was like, wow, I’m actually kind of living life on my own terms. Like I have two young kids, they have special needs, I had a schedule that was very limited in terms of when I could actually work what hours I needed to be with my kiddos. So I realized that there were so many parts of the therapy world that were quite constricting in a way. Like I don’t know about you. I mean, I got into this field almost 20 years ago and things today are done the exact same way they were done back then when I got into the field. And there were several things that were constricting, like the lack of portability of the licensure was an obvious one that I was dealing with, but also just the fact that we do our 50 minute sessions, everything is kind of the same as it’s always been in the therapy world, and suddenly I had moved into this coaching and consulting world.

I was like, “Wow, I am working from home. I’m completely setting my own schedule. I can pick up and go somewhere else and work from anywhere,” which we all got a little taste of during COVID when we all shifted to working from home. But suddenly I had this incredible portability, this flexibility, and I realized that I was probably for the first time really getting paid for my knowledge and my expertise, as opposed to just getting paid for the hours that my butt was in the chair. And that was a big revelation for me to realize like, wait a minute, this is a whole different way of thinking about work and this is a whole different way of using all these years from the therapy world that I could bring now into the coaching world.

So what has evolved for me over the past couple of years has been in business where I became more and more interested in helping fellow therapists do exactly this, to say, let’s evolve how you use all of these skills that you bring from the therapy world. All this expertise, all the years that you put into licensure, let’s bring this, but let’s use it in a way that serves clients where they’re at by using modern technology, by being able to work with people all around the country, all around the world, by taking your skills in a direction that then allows you to create the lifestyle, the freedom, the portability, all these things that were just lacking from that therapy world. So now this is what I help therapists do. I’ve actually developed a certification. It’s the only certification specific to therapists who want to become coaches because as you know Alison, there’s no real way in the coaching world to set yourself apart if you are also clinically trained.
[ALISON]
Right.
[ALISON]
Because anyone can become a coach. Somebody can wake up tomorrow and decide they’re a coach now. There’s no great way for us as clinically trained folks, folks that are bringing so much knowledge to the table, there’s no great way for us to set ourselves apart. So I created a certification for us, the clinic coach certification, and I help therapists leverage their knowledge and their expertise into flagship group coaching programs with the goal that you can either add this as something secondary that you do along with your therapy practice, or you might be like me, where it eventually evolves to the place for you, where it eclipses your therapy practice and where you’re able to leverage your time in such a better way, rather than simply having hour after hour of what I call that sort of, butt in the chair therapy work; where you can take your knowledge and you can now be using it, teaching it to groups, creating materials that can be used over and over and over for future clients, and that help you then have the freedom and the life, the portability, all those different things that I always longed for in the therapy career, but that I just never thought were possible because of the built-in limitations of that type of work. That was a really long intro.
[ALISON]
Yes, no, that was great. You sort of launched into some of the questions I had, so that was perfect.
[KATIE]
Oh good. I was like, “Geez, I’ve been introducing myself for like 20 minutes here.”
[ALISON]
SO I’m curious, with the folks that reach out to you, I imagine maybe many of them are group practice owners who have built up the group practice and maybe they’ve kind of stepped away from clinical work they are hopefully making a good chunk of their income from what the other clinicians are bringing in and now they don’t have to see clients anymore if they don’t want and they’re kind of looking for, “Okay, what’s the next thing?” So is that kind of a segment of the population that you tend to work with?
[KATIE]
Absolutely. It’s a huge segment of the population. And I think the reason why is, typically all my folks who are the successful group practice owners, if we look at these folks as a whole, they understand business building, they understand how to create a successful entity that is out there helping people already. You’ve probably got really high executive functioning skills already and so you already are coming in with this huge level of personal expertise. And then it becomes just a matter of learning this new world where you’re marketing beyond your local area, you’re leveraging online tools and online software and technologies in a really different way. And you’re maybe putting yourself out there in a different way than you were asked to do previously as a therapist. But what’s great is so often, especially my group practice owners, they kind of whisper it.

They get to this point where they’re like, I’m a little bit bored. Like I built this thing, it’s great, it’s successful and I’m proud of it. You know, of course there are the daily demands, the daily up and downs of staff or client issues or things that they’re managing but they’re also at that point where they’re really creative people. And once you hit that point where you’ve sort of grown the group practice, you’ve kind of used all this creative energy for a couple of years and getting that off the ground, getting it rolling along, and now you’re looking around going, Now, what? What is next here? I’m finding myself a little bit bored.” And what’s so great is, and I feel like so many of us were attracted into this profession, oftentimes because part of that intuitive, deeply sensitive therapist personality, I think coupled with that, side-by-side for so many of us is a deep well of creativity. And when we’re not channeling our creative energy into building something new, into creating our next level into really saying, “Wait, how else can I impact the world? How else can I make a mark? How else can I achieve things I want to achieve in my life?” when we’re not channeling our creative energy in those directions, this is when we start to spiral down.

We get into our own worst tendencies. We get into our own little addictive tendencies or procrastination or sort of that dysthymic where you’re just going through the motions day to day. And it’s easy to slip into that when you’re a smart, successful person, you’ve hit a certain level where you’re like, “I’m pretty good. Life is pretty comfortable.” And you just don’t know the answer to the question now what. And you can start to spiral —
[ALISON]
Yes, I know. I was just going to say, I feel like you’re talking directly to me, Katie.
[KATIE]
Oh good. This is your therapy session now.
[ALISON]
Yes. Please, please. This is why I have four businesses, because I get bored and then I want to start a new thing.
[KATIE]
It’s so funny, just this morning in my six-figure flagship program, we were having this conversation because one of my successful therapists, she is on her third or fourth niche and she’s like, “What’s wrong with me? I’m multi passionate. I want to work with all these people.” And I was saying to her, I’m like, “If you knew the number of brilliant business ideas my husband has had to listen to,” but I was obsessed with for a couple of weeks, and then I moved onto the next one. I do think there is such joy in that creative personality that wants to keep building something new and it can be exhausting. Let’s be honest, it can be exhausting because we’re always in that like build mode and that fun mode, but what’s the alternative? Like who would you be if you didn’t let yourself grow for businesses?
[KATIE]
Oh, I’d be like miserable.
[KATIE]
Right. That’s it. Yes. I do feel like there’s so much joy in letting ourselves, allowing ourselves the possibility of that next level. And for so long, I had this identity like, well, I’m a therapist, this is what therapists do, therefore, this is just it. Like, this is the trajectory from now until retirement. This is what I’m supposed to do, because I got this expensive grad school education and this expensive license and this is just it. And I wasn’t letting myself look bigger at how many new ways there were in the world of actually helping people and of working. And doing that is so freeing. It’s amazing. And it is exciting. It’s not like every single business idea. Even if you are a successful group practice owner, you might go try out three businesses that kind of tank on you before you hit the one that really takes up. It’s not like we’re guaranteed success all the time, but the effort, the creativity, the person you become in moving through those is really what makes your life and what makes your life exciting.
[ALISON]
Absolutely. So I wonder if you could give us some examples of the folks in your program? Like what do they eventually come up with in terms of like a business or coaching? Or can you give some examples?
[KATIE]
Yes. So let me think through a few individual people. So we have niches across the spectrum. Now what I typically recommend, if you are a clinician and you’re interested in moving into any sort of coaching, I strongly recommend that we separate out our two businesses. So creating the coaching as its own entity, as a way to protect your license and as a way to protect the lay public, who doesn’t really understand the differences and they’re not really necessarily sure all the time exactly what they’re signing up for. Then I strongly recommend that in your coaching business, you serve people with a very specific but nonclinical need. So we have people who work very hard on figuring out their niche, meaning what is the thing that you are really passionate about that you could talk about all day, that you could be excited about all day?

And the interesting thing is in the coaching world, and this varies a little bit from the therapy world, often people’s niches have to do with their own unique life experiences. And not to say that therapists don’t do that as well. They absolutely do, but in the coaching world, we might find, I was just reading materials from one of my students this morning and she has had a lot of training in public speaking. So she’s bringing her clinical background. She understands how to overcome anxiety. She understands how to help people in the moment to manage stress and worry and all of those things and she adds this other element where she can also help you become a more confident and better public speaker. So that fear of public speaking, in most cases, that’s not a clinical level of need, but it’s certainly a very specific need.

So that’s a perfect example of someone who’s separated it out, who has the background and the skills due to the fact that she is a successful therapist, that she can help people with this one unique time that people might feel extremely anxious, not a clinical level of need. You know, they’re just nervous when they have to get up and speak at the meeting or if they’re asked to talk at a conference. They can go get this type of help. And then we have people who maybe they have a unique life experience like going through cancer, going through some sort of difficult relationship, going through grief and they want to on the other side, help other people so that those other people’s experiences of that are easier, are made better.

I have one person I was just speaking to who is helping parents of special needs children learn to become better and better advocates, learn to feel like the expert that their child needs. Now that comes from a unique life experience. So she can pull that in. I’ve had people who went through rough divorces and they’ve become divorce coaches because they wanted to help other people anticipate what was coming next in the court process, for example, anticipate how they could best support themselves and their kids, and best ways to talk to your kids about divorce. We have people who do specialize in kids and families. I have one woman, I think this is such a cool idea, she wants to help train nannies and aupairs to really understand attachment styles, to understand some of the things that we learn about as therapists, but she basically wants to help train, educate, build a better nanny for the family who really wants the nanny to feel just like it’s as good as if the parent was there.

So it’s amazing to see the creativity and the spark that comes from different people as they start digging into what is authentically interesting to me, what is my unique life experience that I want to bring to the table to help people with? And then from there, the sky’s the limit in terms of what they can do, what they can create when they narrow in on this one group of people that they’re super excited to help.
[ALISON]
Yes, that’s great. Those are really good examples. And I feel like that helped kind of flesh out the whole idea for me. Do you have a specific recommendation about how much time it takes to kind of start up another business or a coaching business? Do you give people alike a ballpark idea about the time commitment?
[KATIE]
Absolutely. I mean, I’ll tell you my program right now is a year long because I truly do believe if you’re going to sink your teeth in and really grow something, and especially if you’re starting from ground zero; I know some people come in and they’ve been building for a little while. They’ve got a little bit of a business built or they’ve started along the road. It’s just not growing as fast as they’d like, then they might move a bit faster than that. But typically really, if you’re starting from ground zero, if you’re figuring out who you want to be in this coaching world, you’re testing out your new ideas, your niche. You’re starting to step out there and speak to your niche. You’re starting to put yourself out there probably for the first time and say, “Hey, I’m Jane and I’m an expert in this,” and you’re starting to share material out there, build an audience.

That process takes a few months. In our program specifically, we bring people right up to their first launch of whatever their program is that they’re creating. And then we help people optimize that so that they can run that program month after month and not have to continually launch it over and over. So that’s specific to our system. But I really do believe if you want to dig your heels in, give this a chance, I’d say you probably need at least three to five hours a week of really dedicated work. And I’ll pause and say, I always hesitate when people say how many hours a week, because one person’s hour can be very different from another person’s hour. If you are the person who like me, can be easily distracted and you suddenly have a new idea and you need to go chase it down the rabbit hole and before you know it, 30 minutes has gone, your hour will be less productive than the person who’s awesomely great at focusing and turning off all their notifications and they just drill down and they do their really focused time.

So let’s say on average, three to five hours, a week of dedicated time to really learning and growing. And I would strongly recommend, of course, working with someone who can teach you what you need to know so that you are not wasting your time spinning your wheels going in the wrong direction; someone that can shortcut your learning. But I would give yourself a good six months to a year to really figure out, do you enjoy this? Are you getting bites from people? Are people responding to you? Are they interested in what you’re doing? Are you getting questions and inquiries? Maybe are taking on a couple one-on-one clients, even if you know that your eventual goal is to scale into groups so that you can leverage your time better. In the beginning, are you booking a few of those one-on-one clients so that you can test out your idea? You can test out how much you enjoy this work versus your coaching work, or I mean, versus your therapy work or other work that you’re doing.

So that is what I would recommend. Like I would definitely say if you want to do it, don’t dabble because dabbling just won’t get you there. You’ll find yourself frustrated. You’ll find yourself in that space. And I was here in the beginning where I was sort of downloading every freebie I could find and thinking about it and researching, doing a lot of stuff that didn’t actually move the needle very much because my level of commitment, I still had so much self doubt that my level of commitment was not strong enough yet. So much of this, as you can understand it is that mindset thing. It’s like, yes, it’s normal. We all have self-doubt. We’re all going to doubt our ability to move forward on these things and learning to move through it anyway.

And that’s where often my successful group practice owners, they’re really masters at that. They’re like, “You know what? I doubted this group when I launched it. I doubted when I rented this big office space. I doubted when I had to buy all this furniture and here we are, a year later super successful.” So that’s one great thing I think, especially for your audience is that they can be real masters at feeling the doubt and moving through it anyway.
[ALISON]
Yes, that’s interesting, because I feel like even when you do attain a certain level of success, it’s still like, it can still come up again with a new business. Like you don’t just assume like this is going to work because I have this other successful business. It’s a different business and so I think you can kind of fall into that trap of like, oh, well, it might not work. It might be a failure.
[KATIE]
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And that’s where I think it’s so normal for one thing. Like I think it’s completely expected that we all will feel that way and we all will have the imposter syndrome. We will have the doubts. And people who have some chops already at managing that, and so often, this is where, I have to laugh at myself as a therapist and so many of us, you would know exactly what to say to your client in that situation and then when you find yourself in it, you forget all your own good advice. You’re suddenly blank on what you could possibly do to overcome this even though if it was your client, you’d have the perfect answer at your fingertips. So, so often it is about turning back and saying, okay, and if this was your client and they had this great idea, but they were feeling self-doubt and they were spinning their wheels because of that doubt, what would you have them do and then incorporating and taking your own good advice in those situations?
[ALISON]
Absolutely. When you see therapists launch a coaching business, are there specific mistakes that you people make, especially if they don’t kind of reach out to a coach like you to get help?
[KATIE]
So that’s a great question. So a couple of different things happen. One is piecemealing. So when, and I did this in the beginning, part of why I can talk about it as a mistake, I was piecemealing a lot. I was grabbing freebies from all over the place, trying to learn more about this coaching world. I was listening to every different podcast in the world. And what you end up is you hear conflicting advice, you hear person A built this way, person B built the totally opposite way. And the reality is there are a million ways to grow. Like you will absolutely be able to learn little bits from different people.

But I think in the beginning, especially one mistake people make is grabbing information from all over the place, which leads you going in five different directions, whereas if you just chose one of those people, you know, choose your favorite podcast or choose your favorite coach out there, go sign up with that one person, follow their way for a good chunk of time. That way will probably work for you. And then you could go choose the next person, follow their way for a while, and their way will probably work too. But you have to pick a path to stick with. Otherwise you’re piecemealing from all over the place.

The other tricky one for therapists, and this is probably the hardest one, people know what therapy is. When they call a therapist, there’s a general sense in the culture of what they’re signing up for, for the most part. Now, when we move into a coaching type of world, we need to get very, very good at our language in our marketing because we suddenly have to stand out in the online world, this huge, crazy busy online world. You need to catch the attention of the person who has this issue, this problem that you would like to help with. And in order to do that, we really, really, really have to get good at marketing, at copywriting, at things that, I don’t know about you, I never had to think too much about as a private practice therapist.

So we have to get good at it because we suddenly have a broader base of competition, things competing for our client’s attention that we need to step out and stand out within. So not paying attention to marketing, not learning to really do excellent copy is an issue. I had one therapist, she’s so wonderful, but she came to us and she had her therapy website and we were reviewing it with her. And there’s an app. I don’t know if your folks have heard of it. It’s called The Hemingway App. It’s just a free app. And in general, for marketing copywriting, this usually surprises people, you actually want your website to be written at around, shockingly enough, a third grade level.

And I typically give my therapists a little bit of leeway. I’ll tell them if you are between third and a sixth grade level, you’re probably good to go on your website. And just for the listeners out there who are like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. I want smart clients,” we all want smart clients. We all get smart clients. We all are smart clients, but the nature of online marketing is something has to grasp your attention very quickly. You have to be able to read and understand it at a glance. And when we get it around that third, fourth, fifth grade level, it now does that and it has a much better chance of catching and keeping your attention. And this therapist came to us and because we are so rewarded as therapists for writing at a really high level, we plugged her website into the Hemingway app and her website came out at a grade 16. And we were like, “Okay, you are brilliant.”

It was written brilliantly, but it sounded like a dissertation. Because that’s what we are rewarded for in grad school and beyond. So I do think that is one challenge we all have; is learning to write in a way that is very much the opposite of what we were taught in school and maybe the opposite of kind of how we speak and how we think. Because we do have these more advanced concepts floating around in the back of our minds all the time. So learning to do that. And then the other big one is just making sure that your niche is not a deeply clinical niche. I do have a lot of people and they’ll come to me and they’ll say, “Well, I’ve seen coaches out there saying that they are trauma coaches. So I’m a trauma therapist so now I’ll just offer trauma coaching.”

To me, this is a mistake because yes, unfortunately untrained people can walk around and say things like I’m a trauma coach and it’s an unregulated industry and so they get away with doing it. I personally don’t think that will be that way forever. I think eventually it will be regulated, but we’re not right now. As therapists to me, we carry the higher ethical burden of responsibility. So I really believe though, you might be a great trauma therapist, it would be who viewed, it would be who of the public, it would be who of your clients? And honestly, just your own sanity, less burnout at the end of the night to pick a nonclinical niche for your therapy work. Again, going back to that, what is a specific problem that’s not necessarily a clinical level of need that you can help as a coach?

And it can be difficult to shift your thinking when you’re so used to thinking in a really clinical way, but as we help people work through different possible ways that they could do something they still love and are passionate about, but not have it be so deeply clinical that’s when it starts to make more sense. And that’s when they get more excited about the work where it’s like, “Oh, this, this could actually be a little bit easier. My coaching work doesn’t have to be as heavy as my daily work as a trauma therapist is every single day.” So those would be, I would say the major things that I would have therapists look out for.
[ALISON]
Yes. That’s great. And also, I’m really glad that you brought up the distinction between like coaching and clinical work and keeping everything separated. Because I feel like a lot of people don’t know that and obviously you don’t want to do something to jeopardize your clinical license. So I’m glad that you kind of went through all of that. Katie, I know you have lots of resources on your website for people and some free things that they can check out. So if they’re, I’m assuming if they’re interested in kind of checking out if they perhaps want to go down this road of developing a coaching business what can they see on your website?
[KATIE]
Absolutely. So if you are interested in possibly coaching yourself, we do offer a pretty meaty training. It’s about 90 minutes long. It goes really into depth with what we teach, what we do in our certification and why we do it, the kind of a why behind it. And it gives you a lot of actionable steps you can take right now, if you’re interested in looking in this direction for your future. So for that training, you do need to apply. We are an application based program, but the application is at sixfigureflagship.com. Six is spelled out [SIX], sixfigureflagship.com and it’s a short application, but you can apply there. We will send you that training and so you can look over and just think about it more if this is an idea that you’re toying with.

If you’re not there yet, but you would still like some other practice growth freebies, I have a bunch, I have a big group of freebies that I send out at my website, which is katieread.com. And I have one of those names that can be spelled a hundred different ways. So let me spell it for you. It’s [K A T I E R E A D.com.] And you can also always just join us over in the Therapypreneurs, which is our big free group on Facebook. I know Alison you’re in there. We try to just give any information we possibly can, keep it active over there. And it’s all other therapists who are outgrowing their offices in all sorts of different ways; speaking, writing, consulting, coaching, all different ways. So you’ll find a lot of like-minded entrepreneurial therapists in there.
[ALISON]
Yes. It’s a great group. I’ve enjoyed being a part of it.
[KATIE]
Thank you.
[ALISON]
Yes. Thank you so much, Katie, for joining us today and for sharing everything you’re doing. I’m really excited about what you’re giving back to our therapist community and how you’re helping them create new businesses. So thank you.
[KATIE]
Thank you. Yes, absolutely. It’s so good to be here. Thanks, Alison.
[ALISON]
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This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.