When and How to Work On Your Business Ideas

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When and how to work on your business ideas

One of the biggest questions that I get is ‘when do I work my big idea?’ Maybe you have a private practice and it’s growing and you know you’re getting things going with it, but you’ve got this desire on the other side where you want to do a podcast or an eCourse.  Maybe you want to write a book, do more keynotes, do something that’s not just regional in your private practice, but national.

That’s a great thing, that’s really important, but one of the biggest things that people do is they take on too much. So the practice is just getting going then they get a podcast going then they get a blog going. They are then spread too thin, there’s too much on their plate and they just drop the ball or they don’t do anything.

R.I.S.E

I want to take you through a process of first looking at the low-hanging fruit of your private practice, making sure that that’s going really well and then we move on to your bigger ideas. The acronym I want to use is called R.I.S.E. This is after interviewing hundreds of top private practice owners, looking at the giants of people who have been successful and what they do. The overall thesis of it is you want to get things going and take things off your plate before you move on to something else.

R – Recongnize

The first part of R.I.S.E is to recognize where you’re at now, when you recognize this you’re looking at the baseline. This means that you’re looking at the amount of clients coming in, what’s working well, you know who’s referring well and where are you at right now.  So now you know here’s our baseline, here’s where we’re at and here’s what’s going on.

I – Increase

Now you want really look at what if you increase this scope, what’s going to inspire you within this current system. It might be that you add clinicians, it might be that you leave insurance panels. It might even be that you raise your rates for your private pay people or it might be that you expand into groups. You could even offer some things to those clients that take that therapy a little bit farther than it’s been going already. We’re going to increase what’s already working, we don’t want to start something new yet.

S – Support

Support is the phase where we’re looking at how do we take things off your plate. We want to brutally take things off your plate as you continue to grow, so this is going to be you’re not returning phone calls yourself, hopefully eventually you’re not returning all the emails yourself, you’re not doing the scheduling yourself.  You have to get either technology systems or people into place that can help you only do what you can do. So when someone pays to do counseling with Joe Sanok, I can’t have somebody else come in and do that so I have to show up for that. But if someone comes to Mental Wellness Counseling they don’t necessarily have to see Joe Sanok, they can see somebody else.

E – Expand

This now means we are looking at how to expand the practice to go beyond your own time and that’s the last phase you really want to look at,  how do we grow beyond yourself. This is taking you from that start phase into that growth phase and starting to think about that scaling phase. We want to get you totally replaced so that if you leave for a month your business continues to grow and operate.

R.I.S.E Within Your Practice

You want to do all of that within your practice, with what’s working already now. Once you do that then you can take the same thing for looking at a podcast and eCourse. We’ll go into some of the nuts and bolts with that more within Next Level Practice, but the R.I.S.E system is what you’ll use over and over. We’ll put things on your plate, we’ll work on a project, so for you that might be going from having no practice to starting a practice, or it might be that you start a practice but now you want to start adding some clinicians to a group practice. Maybe you have a group practice, now you want to systematize more of it, so we’re always saying we’re putting something on your plate, we’re seeing how it goes, we understand that we expand it ourselves, we know what’s working and then we create systems to take it off your plate.

So you have an assistant do things, you have technological systems, you upgrade your infrastructure, because if we just keep adding things to your plate, if we keep putting that energy into your plate you’re not going to be as creative. So when you’re driving into work, instead of just thinking about well how do I expand my practice, you’re going to be thinking about how do I expand my practice, how do I do a podcast how do I start a blog, and you’re going to be all over the place and get way less done.

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

joe-sanok-private-practice-consultant-headshot-smaller-versionJoe Sanok is an ambitious results expert. He is a private practice business consultant and counselor that helps small businesses and counselors in private practice to increase revenue and have more fun! 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.