Hi. This is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

You want to see the gift that keeps on giving? Here it is. It's a gift card and this makes any promotion that you have a better promotion. Let me explain. Let's say you go to a church and you say, "I'd like you to send anybody that needs counseling to me." You're talking to the counseling pastor. At the end, you say, "And I have these gift cards that are worth $100 that I give for the person that you refer to me. The first day is at no charge." Naturally, they'll refer to you as opposed to someone else.
Now, let's say you go to the school counselor and you say, "If you have people that you can't meet with because you can't counsel with families, you got to keep it with just your children, and you have to send them out, why don't you send them to me?" They say, "We have a list of therapists that we're going to send to." You say, "Okay, but I have a gift card and it's worth $100. The first day will be no...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

When you wonder why you're not rated too high on the internet. I have the reasons for you that are the three biggest reasons. Number one, Google and other search engines look for three things. The first thing they look for is pervasive presence. You have to be on Google, Bing, Yelp, Yahoo, Facebook, all the social media sites, and then your website has to be active. That's the first thing. They look for a pervasive presence. You have to be all over. The second thing they look for is that all your information is the same. If you have a different address on one site than on the other site, if you have a different phone, if you have your cell phone number on one site, you have your home phone number on another site, and a landline on another site, it all shows them that we don't know what exactly what we're talking about.
If they see two different phone numbers, why would they show this to the people that are...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

There's a way that you can make more money without working any harder. Here it is, sublet your office to somebody when you're not using it. Now, you may say, "Well, I only have one room, and I work four days a week," or "I work five days a week."
Well, let me give you an example. I have a client who worked Monday through Thursday, she just had a one-room office. She rented it out on Friday, Saturday and evenings to two different people, one for $350 a month, one for $300 a month, and she made $650 a month, which by the way, was the cost of her executive suite that she had right there, so she was getting her rent-free just by letting someone use her area. I said, "Is there any hassle with it?" She said, "No, at the first of each month, I just get their checks on my desk, one for $350, one for $300."
Think about this. It's just like seeing another three or four patient visits every month by renting your place...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants. I have a tip for you.

You know, one of the things I have found over time is that the therapists that grow are therapists that have energy in their practice. Now, you don't have to be a wild person or anything like that or be flamboyant. You just have to be full of energy.
One of the things I say is your practice is going to grow when you are one step more enthusiastic, one step more energetic, than your patient. Now, you can't be a wild person. If the person comes in and they're depressed, you have to be just a little more energy than them. If they come in and they're doing pretty well, you have to be just a little bit higher than them. Wherever they're at, you have to be one step higher than they are because people will go to the place where the energy flows from. If they get energy from you, they will keep coming to you.
I used to have a therapist that was working for us, and she was very slow in her walk and in her approach. She...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

A lot of people ask, as therapist, what type of business entity should I be? There are various types of entities. You can be a sole proprietorship, you can be an LLC or an LLP, you can be a corporation of some kind, but I'll tell you the most common kind is some derivation of the LLC. That's the most common kind.
Now, if you are real small and only going to see one or two or three people a week, perhaps you can stay as a sole proprietor. If you're going to be seeing more than just a few people a week, if you're going to be a real business, so to speak, I think you'll want to form an LLC. You can form an LLC in different ways. You can have an attorney form one for you. It's going to cost you somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 probably.
You can form one through Legal Zoom or Rocket Lawyer or something like that. That's going to cost you probably $250 to $300, and that's a good way. Or you can literally do it...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

A lot of people ask, as therapist, what type of business entity should I be? There are various types of entities. You can be a sole proprietorship, you can be an LLC or an LLP, you can be a corporation of some kind, but I'll tell you the most common kind is some derivation of the LLC. That's the most common kind.
Now, if you are real small and only going to see one or two or three people a week, perhaps you can stay as a sole proprietor. If you're going to be seeing more than just a few people a week, if you're going to be a real business, so to speak, I think you'll want to form an LLC. You can form an LLC in different ways. You can have an attorney form one for you. It's going to cost you somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 probably.
You can form one through Legal Zoom or Rocket Lawyer or something like that. That's going to cost you probably $250 to $300, and that's a good way. Or you can literally do it...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

When we think about retirement, therapists that are in private practice have to be extra careful. Because if you were working for an agency, you would probably participate in some kind of 401K or 403B, or some type of retirement program, tax-deferred retirement program, but right now, when you're in practice by yourself, you don't have that. Now, that creates a double whammy at the end of your practice career, and here's why.
Because right now, as a private practitioner, you're probably making more than if you were working for an agency. So you're used to living on a little bit more than the person working for the agency. When the people in the agency are working, they're putting money on a 401K. Now, when they retire, they'll have money on a 401K, so their income will stay up. You, by the same token, have had a higher income, but your income will go down if you're not involved in some kind of tax-deferred...

Hi, this is Dave Kats, from Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

Now that COVID-19 has hit us and is kind of past, it's forced us into a certain amount of virtual therapy, that you're doing therapy online in most cases. Well, I have a way that you can parlay that and use it to your advantage now that COVID-19 will soon be in the rearview mirror.
That is, what about doing group sessions using virtual therapy? Why don't you use a platform like Zoom, or some other platform that you're using right now and do group therapy, so that you would charge every person in that group just $50?
Now, you can make it so they know who else is on the group or so they don't know who else is on the group. It doesn't matter if you say we're going to have a group session today and only two show up, who cares? It's still a group session, and you can build. Here's what my tip for you is today. Why don't you try starting a group therapy session using virtual activity using video, and see if it...

Hi, this is Dave Kats for Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

So many times we hear that you have to not only have a website, but you have to have your website optimized. How do you optimize your website? Here are probably the four major ways to optimize your website.
Number one is, make sure that all your titles and subtitles have something substantive in them for the search engines. Let me give you an example. Years ago, I did websites just for some of our clients just for fun, and I did about 25 websites and a lot of times I'd put there on the homepage something warm and inviting like this, "Welcome to our website, I think you're going to like what you see."
That felt warm and inviting for a therapist's office, but to a search engine like Google, that told them absolutely nothing. It was a worthless first-page title. If I would have said, "Providing couples counseling to Denton, Texas for the last 12 years", then the search engine would have saw that I was a counselor,...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

One of the things I see as we go through this COVID-19 era is that different practices are taking different directions. I have one therapist I talked to the day before yesterday, who said that she's going to stay totally online, and she has rebuilt her website. She's staying totally online, and is going to do both counseling and coaching. I have another person that said they tried the coaching and the counseling online, and they absolutely hate it. You have to decide what to do, what pace you're going to take as far as along the continuum of whether you're going to do all online, all in person, or somewhere in between. Now, let's think of the advantages of these things.
One of the advantages of doing things online is that you can do it from anywhere in the United States or anywhere in the world. Anywhere that the internet reaches, you can do your counseling with. It gives you an opportunity to travel. It...