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

We are always concerned that patients keep their appointments and we track the statistics a lot of times. How many people did not keep their appointment? How many no-shows did we have for this week? Which there's a statistic that's just as important as that and that is how many rescheduled for the following week or for the following visit? For instance, if I said to you, "You have eight people scheduled today," and at the end of the day, I said, "They all showed up." You'd say, "Great." Well, what if I said, "But none of them scheduled for a future visit." Then you'd say, "That's terrible." Now, we track how many people show up, but we rarely track how many people make future appointments. I would suggest to you that from now on, every day, you track how many people kept their appointment and how many people made future appointments or at least have a future appointment scheduled. I think that you'll find...

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

Have you ever thought about being a supervisor? A lot of therapists become supervisors and it can be profitable and helpful to your profession in lots of different ways. Let me give you an example. I have one therapist who has five interns that she supervises. They all work in her office, they all get their own patients, and she pays them just $25 per session. She collects anywhere from $75 to $100 a session. I talked to her the other day and we did some calculations and she makes $3500 profit on those therapists, those interns that she’s supervising, every single month. I’m not saying that you have to do that; you can just do one at a time, but I want to explain to you how successful it is to have a person that you supervise. It varies state by state. In most states, a supervisor will supervise someone for approximately three years until they get their hours and they’ll have a meeting with...

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

I have to tell you that this tip is only for about one out of 20 people or maybe one out of 10 people. If you are already a supervisor, in other words, you’re supervising other people or at least if you have the capacity to supervise other people then there’s another step for you. I always wondered why supervisors don’t become trainers of supervisors. Have you ever noticed that when you went to the supervisor classes, in other words, classes for you to become a supervisor, that it would cost quite a bit, and the classes were pretty full, and it didn’t take much to do? That’s something you could be doing. If you’re a supervisor, think about becoming a supervisor trainer. A lot of times it’s just a matter of doing a few small things, and registering, and automatically you’ll become this supervisor trainer. I’d like you to think about that. Not for...

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

I’m always amazed how the medical profession treats the people that are wealthy. They cater to them in a special way. I had an opportunity several years ago, to spend a lot of time with the plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills and in Hollywood, and it’s amazing how they treated their patients. They treated their patients like royalty. When the patient came in they were greeted by name. They were whisked off into a private reception area. They were asked if they wanted coffee, or juice, or water, whatever they wanted and they were catered to in every way. They were treated like royalty. Now, my old dentist treated me like royalty too. Whenever I came in the staff greeted me by saying, “Hi, Dr. Kats.” Not David or just a grunt or something like that, and I rarely if ever waited at that dentist’s office. He would saw me right away, it was a professional experience. They kept my credit...

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

Last week we talked about kicking some of the low payers to the curb. One of the things that naturally comes up from people when they respond to that is, "Well, if my practice is not yet full, can I keep these people?" And the answer is yes, you can. If your practice is not yet full and you do have those low-paying insurance companies and you want to stay with them and you're willing to work for the $40 or $50 or $60 that they give you, go ahead. More power to you. In fact, if your practice is not yet full, one of the things you can do to get it full is to talk to the Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) in your area about you being the therapist for them. See, this is rarely done by a therapist and EAPs are always look for people to send their workers to. EAPs look for people to send their workers to. If you go in and talk to HR or whoever is in charge of the Employee Assistant Program and you say, "I'm...

This is Dave Kats with Therapists Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

One of the best things you can do to improve your internet presence is very simple, and it's free. That's just getting people to review you, to give good reviews about you and your organization. Now, it's become easier than ever to give reviews. Right now, if you have an Android phone, you have Google Maps already downloaded. If you have Google Maps, you can look up your clinic, and then anybody that looks up your clinic can give a review. They'll give a five-star review. They just touch the fifth star, and they'll say, "What would you like to say?" and they'll say something good about you. They'll say, "Okay, this will be posted under your name." They say, "Fine. Post it." and the review is done. If you have an iPhone, you have to download Google Maps. Once you download Google Maps, you do exactly the same thing. Who can give you reviews? It's not professional, in most people's opinion, to have patients give...

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

One of the things you can do to stay active on the Internet is to write articles and put them on your website. What's the difference between somebody that six months ago was in practice, and went out of business and their Internet is still up there, the website's still up, and you, who six months ago were in business, are still in business but you haven't done anything with your website? How does the search engine even know that you're still in business? One of the ways you do it is by having articles posted on your website. I'd say about every two weeks. If you can put an article on your website about every two weeks, that's enough. The good news is the articles can be very short. I'm telling you that an article can be one paragraph. It is nice to be two or three paragraphs, but if it's just one paragraph, that's good. It doesn't necessarily have to be about your specialty. It can be about anything...

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

Now, this tip isn't for everybody. We've been talking over about the last five weeks about how to have good internet presence. The last thing you want to talk about, I think you should consider pay-per-click advertising. I'll tell you that a lot of large offices in the therapy profession have pay-per-click advertising and it really pays for them. Now, what is pay-per-click advertising? Well, when you look on Google, when you search something on Google and it comes up, a lot of times, there's ads at the top of Google, or on Facebook, there'll be ads. Well, those are pay-per-click ads. Now, what does pay-per-click mean? It means that you put an ad on there, but you don't pay anything unless people click on it, and so you pay per click. Now, you can decide how much money to spend and you can spend as little as $100 a month. If you have a going concern and good practice, I would suggest that you consider...

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

Have you ever thought of how you perceive yourself as a therapist? In other words, how good you feel about yourself as a therapist? How good a job you feel that you do? Well, I ran across an article that said that they're certain factors that determine how you feel about yourself as a therapist. Here they are, they were really six of them.

The first one was self-image. If you have a good self-image, you're going to think that you're a good therapist. If you have a bad self-image, you're going to think you're not so good a therapist. So that stands to reason.

The second one that was the size of your practice. If you have a large practice, if you have a successful practice, if you have a waiting list, naturally you think yourself a better therapist than the people that are struggling to get people to come in, and can't keep people under their care.

The third thing they talked about was having extra education....

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

Have you ever wondered how your patients perceive you? How they see you as far as the value you play in their life? Well, there was an article written about how patients perceive their therapists, and there were seven things that made a difference in how the patients perceive you.

The first one is simply their need. If they have a problem that they desperately need help from, they see you as being much more important. For instance, if they desperately want to keep their marriage together, and you are helping them do that, then they see you as a very important part of their life. The second one was their personality. For instance, if they have a personality disorder of some kind, they may not see you as important as they could. The third one I thought was very interesting, it was your presentation. How you present yourself, how professional you look, how professional you act, the way you dress, and things...