Hi, I'm Dave Kats therapist, consultant. I have a tip for you.

The last few weeks we've been talking about how to build your practice. We said there's only four ways to build your practice. You got to get more new patients, you got to get more patient visits, you got to provide more for services and you got to do better job on collections. Any one of those will build your practice. Today we're going to talk about how to increase your patient visits.

The first thing is to simply schedule more if you're not scheduling enough. Some therapists don't schedule enough visits. Most get therapists for the average condition schedule about 18 visits. If you're only scheduling four visits, naturally, you won't be doing as much as far as patient visits are concerned. It's like the old vaudeville joke and said, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this," and the doctor says, "Well, then don't do it." You want to see more patients then schedule more visits, that kind of thing. Only do that, of course, if...

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

We talked last week, that there was only four ways to build your practice and that is get more new patients, get more patient visits, provide more services or do a better job with collections. Today, I'd like to talk to you about number one, and that is getting more new patients. Now, we're careful not to promote any product. I doubt that most of you know even what we do for a living or what we provide for therapists, how we do our coaching with therapists or anything like that, because we want to make it strictly for you. We never go into that field of promoting ourselves.

In this case, this one week, I'm going to promote ourselves because we're going to talk about how to get new patients. I think the best way to get new patients is by having an online presence. As you know, more and more and more, your patients are coming from the internet. It's going to continue as far as into the future as we can see. We...

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

Did you know there are only four ways to build your practice? That's right, just four ways. Everything else you do doesn't make a difference or is a subcategory of one of these four ways. Here are the four ways. You can get more new patients, you can do more patient visits, you can provide more services to the patients, or you can collect more and effectively.

Now, today, I want to talk about just briefly what each one of those entails, because we're going to talk about it in detail over the next four weeks. What would you do to get more new patients? I would say that I would use the internet because that's the hottest thing right now. They say, if you want to win the race it's best to ride the fastest horse, and right now the internet is the fastest horse. That's where you should be advertising.

How about increasing your patient visits? That's mainly office procedure. If you give them a good written report...

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

About four decades ago there was a book written entitled Megatrends. It was written by John Naisbitt and he predicted the major trends that were going to happen in the United States in the next years and decades.

Now, it's been 40 years and we look at his trends and his ideas, and they were almost all correct. He had one chapter named Electronic Cottaging, and Electronic Cottaging meant that people were going to stay home and not go to buildings to go to work downtown, but were going to stay home and do their work out of their home with the use of electronics like computers and things like that.

Now, that was a bold prediction because then the internet wasn't really set up like it was. You were paying for time by the minute on the internet, and facts weren't that reliable, and people wondered whether it was going to be true, but it became true and you're good witness to that. Then the fact that you right now...

Hi, this is Dave Kats, therapist consultants and I have a tip for you.

If you're going to do a lot of tele-mental health, you've got to look good on the computer because it's hard to communicate with somebody if they have a bad image on the computer. I want to talk to you just a little bit about the simple things you can do to make yourself look good on the computer. The first thing is to make sure that the picture is level. So many times we see somebody shooting at an angle with the doorframe, instead of running like this runs up at an angle, make sure you have your camera level. The second thing I want you to do is make sure that the light is in front of you shining on you. You're not a harsh light, but just some soft light that's shining in front of you shining onto you.

Don't have much for background lighting at all because if you get a bright light behind you, it'll make you turn dark and they'll see just an image. Make sure your light is always in front of you. The third...

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

They say for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction and for every adverse thing that happens, there's opportunity in the same amount. What's the opportunity that we see when we talk about the COVID-19 pandemic that we're in? The answer is that it's an opportunity to market and be much more successful. Here's why. Right now the internet is exploding because everybody's staying at home at night, staying at home during the daytime, they're not going out to eat and they're on the computer or the TV day and night.

When is the best time to answer your phone? When it rings. When's the best time to advertise? When people are watching. Right now people are watching on every medium there is, they are exploding their computer, they're on the computer so much time. Why not advertise on the computer during this COVID-19 pandemic when you know that there are twice as many people on the internet as there were...

Hi, I'm Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

I will never forget when I was a young man learning about the internet, I did all the things my coach told me to have a good internet presence and yet I wasn't number one in our area. I said to him, "Why am I not number one? I've done everything that you told me to do." He said, "Well, Dave, it's very hard to get to the top unless you have enough reviews." That message stayed with me forever.
If you find that you're not at the top of your internet game and you need to have more new patients so you need a better internet presence, one of the best things you can do for yourself is simply get reviews. Now, you have to get reviews on different places. You can get reviews on Google, of course, and then Bing and Yahoo. You can get them on yp.com, even on Angie's List and Healthgrades so you can have reviews in a lot of different places.
They say that the sweet spot for Google is between 12 and 15 reviews. If you have...

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

Most of you know that I work as a consultant only to mental health therapists, but that my background was in chiropractic. I originally had a chiropractic consulting firm which was, by the way, the largest one in the United States. Well, I still own a couple of chiropractic offices. I bought a new chiropractic office not too long ago. I said, "How is your accounts receivable?" In other words, the amount people owe you. They said, "Oh, we do a really good job of that. Not too many people owe us anything." Well, at our insistence, I said, "I want you to run an aging of accounts and see what people actually owe us."
They called us back, they were absolutely shocked. They had $260,000 that people owed them from the past that they hadn't collected. Now, I'm not saying you're going to have $260,000. If you're on a cash basis, you may have very little, but if you are on an insurance basis, you accept insurance, you...

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

About 30 years ago, I had an opportunity that very few consultants have. I had an opportunity to work with the biggest and best plastic surgeons in Hollywood and in Beverly Hills. I went into their offices to work with them. I will tell you that the way they treat patients is a whole world apart from the way that a lot of therapists treat patients.
When you walk in, the receptionist is dressed to the hilt. They come around to the front desk. They shake hands with you. They call you by name even though you just walked in. They automatically know who you are because they've been waiting for you. They offer you several different types of things to drink. They fill up the form for you. You don't have to write it down. They ask you the questions. It's beautiful all over. The doctor is impeccable in his or her dress. They have everything exactly the way you want it.
Now you compare that to therapists who sometimes...

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...