Balancing being a Business Owner and Practitioner
In this session of the Elevate Your Practice Summit, Samantha Mabe speaks with Alicia Murray, a licensed therapist and business owner, about the journey and challenges of balancing clinical work with running a virtual group practice and consulting firm. Alicia shares insights into growing her multi-state practice, managing time and resources, setting boundaries, and the role of SEO and automation in attracting clients. She also discusses her upcoming launch of Therapist HQ, a community for therapists looking to grow and connect, aiming to ease the isolation of private practice through resources and support networks.
Key Takeaways
Embrace flexibility: Running a practice allows adaptability for personal responsibilities, essential for work-life balance.
Leverage SEO: A strong digital presence can effectively drive referrals and reach potential clients.
Prioritize automation: Invest in tools like EHRs to reduce administrative burden and streamline operations.
Hire help when needed: Offload tasks like billing to focus on clinical work and strategic growth.
Set boundaries: Schedule specific times for admin tasks, using automation to manage client communication during off-hours.
Create community: Avoid isolation in private practice by engaging in regular consultation groups and connecting with peers.
Meet the Speaker: Alicia Murray
Alicia Murray is a licensed therapist in NY and owns and operates a virtual group practice with five clinicians. She also owns a consulting firm, The Therapist HQ, consisting of guides, courses, a community for therapists in private practice, and one-on-one consulting.
Transcript
Timestamps
[00:00:37] Introduction to Alicia Murray
[00:01:12] Alicia’s background and journey into consulting
[00:02:41] Decision to start a private practice
[00:04:18] Growth into a group practice
[00:05:32] Importance of SEO and digital presence
[00:07:55] Balancing client work with admin tasks
[00:11:26] Maintaining quality of care
[00:15:01] Advice for new therapists starting a private practice
[00:18:46] Setting business and personal boundaries
[00:20:54] Launching Therapist HQ community for clinicians
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: You are listening to the next session of the Elevate Your Practice Summit. Make sure to listen along and then go to the Elevate Your practice.co website to follow up with the speakers and get access to the amazing resources they have shared. And don't forget, you can save 30% on your first three months of practice, better@practicebetter.io, and use the discount code LATS 30. I hope you enjoy this session.
Introducing Alicia Murray
[00:00:37] Samantha Mabe: In this session of the Elevate Your Practice Summit, I'm talking with Alicia Murray about balancing being a business owner and a practitioner. Alicia Murray is a licensed therapist in New York and owns and operates a virtual group practice with five clinicians. She also owns a consulting firm, The Therapist HQ, consisting of guides, courses, a community for therapists in private practice, and one on one consulting.
[00:00:59] You can learn more about her and her practice and the community that she has developed on her website or reach out to her, at the dot therapist dot HQ on Instagram or find her over on TikTok.
[00:01:12] Thank you so much for joining me for this round of the Elevate Your Practice Summit. Can you start by telling us a little bit about you and what you do and how you got there?
[00:01:26] Alicia Murray: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited for this. My name is Alicia Murray. I am a licensed mental health therapist, and I own and operate a virtual group practice in New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. I'm based out of upstate New York, and as of January this year, I jumped into the consulting world, helping therapists create their own private practice or scale their private practice, Audit their private practice, whatever they may need help with in different stages of their business venture.
[00:01:54] I'm also a mom to two very young boys and I feel like that has really led me to the consulting world, because I think that being able to create this business while also balancing the things that are important to us really gives us such longevity and sustainability. And so that's the crux of, my guides and my courses and things like that is avoiding burnout, make it long lasting and make it as easy on ourselves as possible.
[00:02:20] Samantha Mabe: You have to be so flexible when you have littles at home because you never know what's going to come up. My son just started kindergarten and there have been multiple days when they've called me. I have to go get him and if I was seeing people in an office or if even if I just worked a regular nine to five job, you don't have that flexibility that running your own business allows you.
Alicia's Journey to Private Practice
[00:02:41] Samantha Mabe: So can you tell us a little bit about how you decided to start your own practice and Learn about running a business and then it sounds like you've grown to where you're offering services in multiple states. How did that come about and why did you decide to do it that way?
[00:02:58] Alicia Murray: I started researching and really truly building my practice in 2019 and I launched in January of 2020, Which is an interesting time frame relatively speaking.
[00:03:09] But I you know went from The route that I think a lot of therapists go during grad school, I did my internship at Community Mental Health. I ended up staying at the location that I did my internship and my pre licensure hours. I eventually got what I thought was my dream job at the VA. And while I loved working with the population, the actual Politics and requirements and just there was a lot of stuff outside of the actual one on one therapy, which is what I love doing, that just made it really heavy work.
[00:03:41] And so I knew through all of that private practice was my end goal, but I think that the troubles that I encountered and the hardships that I had in community mental health really lit a fire under me to do it sooner.
[00:03:54] Which was tough because I was always under the assumption of I'm too young to have my own practice. I'm too inexperienced to have my own practice. Who am I to start this? I think I was maybe two or three years out of being fully licensed. But then I became pregnant and I was like, okay, this is what we're going to do. Now or never. And yeah, I started in January, 2020, and then the group practice started to grow in 2021.
Growing a Group Practice
[00:04:18] Samantha Mabe: Did you always know that you wanted to be a group practice instead of just on your own?
[00:04:23] Alicia Murray: Never until it happened. So what happened was I was only able to see maybe 10 clients a week just because of my scheduling and such. And I kept getting referrals. I say that I SEO'd a little too close to the sun, and I just kept getting really consistent referrals.
[00:04:39] And I was like what if I just had another therapist so I could keep these referrals in house? I'm gaining them through my website and through my directories. It was a slow build. I brought on one therapist, I actually knew her from community mental health and she was incredible, the greatest first clinician I could ask to start with. And then she got filled up and I was like, Let's do it again and see what happens.
[00:05:02] So I just kept adding clinicians, filling up their schedule. Some of them are part time. They do it outside of their community mental health job. Some of them do it full time. They're contractors so it works out really well for everybody as far as the flexibility goes.
[00:05:15] And then now I have five clinicians and I'm like, Oh, this was never the plan, but it's great. And I'm so glad I can support them in it. It is a lot administratively to start and run the practice, and they're very happy to just see their clients and do their notes and walk away from it. So it's worked out really nice.
The Importance of SEO and Online Presence
[00:05:32] Samantha Mabe: Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about the admin and how you manage that, but I do want to say, I think everybody wishes they had the problem of they had their SEO was too good. And they had so many people coming in. Do you think you just hit the right point and the right pain points with that?
[00:05:51] Alicia Murray: Yeah, I knew from the start that I wanted to invest in my website. My dad is a tech guy. And so I feel like I grew up in the tech and the internet world. And I was like, I'm going to be a virtual practice. If I invested nothing else, I want a good digital footprint. And so I invested to get my website initially created. And then I invested, I think it was Maybe nine or 10 months later to revamp the SEO on it.
[00:06:14] And then I'm very consistent with my blogs that I do on it. I'm very consistent with sharing those blogs and the Google reviews. And so I feel like that whole combination of things has really helped to keep it fairly steady.
[00:06:28] Samantha Mabe: I tell my clients all the time that if they want people to find them with SEO, they have to blog. And so this is a story of that. It's not the funnest thing to do, but it is how people find you because they are sitting and they are typing these questions into Google at 7pm or 10pm or whenever they lay down in bed. And you've got to have your website show up and then you have to have it actually work for you In order to capture those people. Because if that's not happening, you're not going to get a call at normal business hours when you're a therapist with somebody who's just, I just happened to drive past your office and I want to come in.
[00:07:08] Alicia Murray: No, absolutely. And I love that you brought up speaking to them, because I think that's really the other half of the website that I feel like I have worked really hard on is okay, we have this client who it's probably seven, eight, 9 PM. Maybe they're feeling hopeless. They're feeling like they're hitting all of these barriers. How can I speak to them through my copy and through my website?
[00:07:27] And taking out all the clinical jargon, because, I don't think anybody cares about that. Nobody cares what your modalities are. It's just therapy speak as we say. So just really speaking to you're feeling like this and this is what you want. At the end of the day, this is your end goal and I think being able to really break down the services that we offer in a way that speaks directly to the clients as if we were talking to them is really the best copy that I've found, as far as the therapy world goes.
Balancing Admin and Client Work
[00:07:55] Samantha Mabe: Let's talk about how you manage your time and kind of balance doing the business owner tasks of admin and billing and manage all of those pieces with actually seeing patients. If you want to start with when you were doing it on your own and then how that has transitioned as you have brought on other clinicians.
[00:08:19] Alicia Murray: Yeah, I feel like when I was doing it on my own, it was such minimal admin work. With the lovely EHRs of the world a lot of things can be automated. It was very minimal. So maybe two hours a week just to get the blogs up, make sure all my emails are responded to, my phone calls, voicemail, things like that.
[00:08:38] As I started to grow, every therapist that I added, the admin work definitely grew, probably by an hour or so a week. Obviously bringing therapists on, it's a lot heavier admin work in the beginning, just getting them set up. I like to make myself available during and before and after their sessions to make sure that they're getting the hang of the systems. And then the billing, obviously.
[00:08:58] Once I got to where I'm at with the five clinicians and it was last year, finally in the fall, I brought a biller on because I was spending probably five or six hours a week just on the billing aspect. We submit out of network. We do courtesy billing. So dealing with claims that were rejected and fixing the claims and Finding out where the claims went and payroll and just running client cards for the week for sessions that were seen. It was becoming a very big substantial admin task and I'm not a biller. I looked at it and with the help of some of my colleagues, they're like, just focus on therapy and focus on your therapists. That's what you know and what you love. And it is the best investment that I made in my business, and I feel like it actually probably saves me time and money because my claims are all collected. My invoices are all collected. And I look back and I'm like, I can't believe it took me three years as a group practice before I brought on any kind of help. And that has helped my admin time substantially.
[00:10:00] Usually I block out two hours just to be safe and I have to put it in my calendar or else it doesn't exist and I'm very easy to convince not to do it. So blocking it out in my calendar and making sure that I'm able to sit in front of my computer and wrap everything up admin wise that I want to, or need to do.
[00:10:19] I think it's a blessing and a curse to have access to our business at all times through our phones and our laptops are anywhere we bring them. And so I'm definitely guilty of checking in on things or completing some quick tasks here and there when I can. But I really like to just bunch my work and just do it all at once if I can.
[00:10:36] Samantha Mabe: Yeah, I think that's really helpful to set aside that time so nobody else can book it and this is what you have to do. And when you have limited time, then you're willing to sit down and just knock it out. And it sounds like you've gotten to a point where your systems and then your billing person have made it really easy that you only have to touch certain things and everything else is handled and you're just checking in to make sure that things are running and nothing breaks.
[00:11:03] Alicia Murray: Yeah, absolutely. I'm a huge fan of automation. Anything that I can automate, I absolutely will. And it's been the biggest time saver.
Maintaining Quality of Care as You Manage Your Practice
[00:11:11] Samantha Mabe: As you've been growing and as you've been running a, your own practice, how have you made sure that the quality of care you're giving to your patients has remained as high as it would if you were working for somebody else?
[00:11:26] Alicia Murray: I think keeping that in the forefront of, and I feel like it goes hand in hand with hiring the biller, of this isn't my territory. My territory is these client facing sessions, my caseload, everything like that, and really keeping on top of supervision. I go to consultation groups every other month or so, weekly or bi weekly supervision.
[00:11:47] I think that if people in the medical world are ever feeling I think I'm good, I don't need case consultation or supervision. I think that we're probably just burned out, but I think that we always need it, and it's always good to have someone to talk through these things with and have a place to, verbally process what's going on in our caseload and just really keeping them at the forefront as much as we can.
[00:12:13] Samantha Mabe: Was there anything you guys do in your practice that you wished you had seen elsewhere that you made sure to implement?
[00:12:20] Alicia Murray: That's a great question.
[00:12:22] I think that I think a lot of people are starting to do online booking But we've been doing online booking Since the beginning, and that has been so great. Our population is mainly 20 to 30 year olds. And as someone near that age range, I also appreciate online booking. So that has been great. I wish every medical practice offered it.
[00:12:44] And then when I first started, I was one of the few that was doing virtual sessions because it was pre COVID and so we were one of the few that was offering virtual services, at least in our area.
[00:12:53] Samantha Mabe: Yeah. I think the online booking is so key and that's what I tell people is. Especially when you're hitting those 20 and 30 year olds, they don't want to make a phone call. There are still people who want to call you, who will want to talk to a person, but there are so many people who are like, I just want to book it online. I want the forms to come to me online. I don't want to have to talk to a single person until I show up at my session.
[00:13:18] And it makes it so much easier as the practitioner as well, because they can schedule. You're not going back and forth. You don't have to have an admin in the office to answer the phone. They can do it at whatever time they find you. And so they don't have to wait until your office hours, which you're going to lose a lot of people there.
[00:13:39] And then most of the EHRs also will help if they need to reschedule, because something changes. And for me, that's always the thing is I don't want to have to call these people. And I'm not a person who just wouldn't show up, but there are people who'd be like, I didn't want to call and I'm just not going to come. And so we want to make it as easy as possible for our clients.
[00:13:59] Alicia Murray: Absolutely. Absolutely. And call me crazy, but I never I have a voicemail. My message when people call says I can't respond to phone calls within 24, 48, sometimes 72 hours. Text me, this is also a secure texting line or email me, this is my secure email. And to my knowledge, I've never lost a conversion that way. But It's just the reality of I don't have the time and space to constantly be returning voicemails throughout the day. And it's just a much more expedited process to send the link over to self scheduling and send the intake paperwork over and to breeze past that stuff. But I've noticed too, that the phone calls are becoming less people really inquire via email and I'm sure that you find that as well.
[00:14:42] Samantha Mabe: You said you started virtual, was that always the plan was to be virtual and stay that way?
[00:14:47] Alicia Murray: Yeah. Yeah. It was always the plan. I always wanted to work from home and have my office at home. A lot of people told me it wouldn't work. It did. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I'm not really sure which one. But yeah, that was always the plan for me.
Advice for New Therapists to Create a Practice They Love
[00:15:01] Samantha Mabe: What advice would you have to a new therapist or somebody just in the health and wellness space who wants to start a private practice where they're running their own business while still being the person to see patients?
[00:15:14] Alicia Murray: Set aside that admin time to work on your practice. Put it in your schedule one or two hours and, start easy as far as researching what EHR you want to use, what name you want to come up with, what the step by steps are for your state as far as establishing the actual business. Breaking it down into those smaller steps, I think is so much more digestible and doable.
[00:15:36] The biggest advice I give people is do it even if you're scared or uncomfortable because you will be scared and uncomfortable, but it will still work out in the end.
[00:15:44] Samantha Mabe: When you jumped and made that transition, did you learn from anybody who was running a business? Or did you just go in and figure out these are the steps that I need to take and do the research?
[00:15:55] Alicia Murray: I followed a lot of therapists, I guess coaches or consultants, online and would just watch what they were sharing. My sister has owned a business for all of her adult life. So there was definitely moments I hit when she was just like, you'll figure it out. You'll figure it out. Like you will figure it out. It's fine. It's going to be fine. And I feel like everyone really needs someone like that in their corner, who's somewhat familiar with being self employed and dealing with all of the things that come with self employment, because it's less stressful, I would say, overall, but when the stress does come, it's very personal. We're responsible for the decisions we make. We're responsible when things go wrong, but we're also responsible when things are like, going amazingly and things are on the upswing. So it's a very Independent experience for sure.
[00:16:38] Samantha Mabe: And you talked about burnout as a clinician and making sure you have supervision and you have people to talk to. Do you have any advice for people who are experiencing business burnout the running of the business side of things?
[00:16:52] Alicia Murray: Yeah. I would say first and foremost, see what you can streamline, see if your EHR or your email or anything that offers any automation that you're not taking advantage of already. And that might take some digging.
[00:17:03] And if all of those processes are as efficient as we can make them, I would say assess You're income. See what kind of help you can take on. And not if you could take it on, but what amount can you take on? Can you take on just 1 hour a week of a virtual assistant? Can you take on 3 hours a week of a virtual assistant? And I think that when we take on an admin they know what they're doing as far as the business side of things go and so it will be run fairly efficiently once they're trained and onboarded. And I think even those small increments of time really can save a clinician loads of brain space, if you will.
[00:17:44] Samantha Mabe: And do you set aside a lot of your admin time for thinking about the future and how things are going to go? Or do you do that kind of as a separate piece?
[00:17:53] Alicia Murray: Definitely do that as a separate piece. I definitely find myself doing that in my personal time, quote unquote. I have this big wall calendar behind me, and I like to look at the whole year or the whole month and really, plan out like, where is this going? What am I trying to do? What am I trying to eliminate? And I find that I have to do that when the momentum for it strikes, if that makes sense. I couldn't find myself scheduling time for that per se, but if I'm feeling particularly creative or insightful or energized or anything like that. I find that's when my best sort of planning or ideas for the business comes.
[00:18:26] Samantha Mabe: Yeah, I think that's part of being a business owner is that your brain never shuts off from those ideas. And so you're always thinking about things and then you have to have a place to put them so that you can think about, is this a good idea? And then how does that fit into the plan and the schedule and everything else that you have going on?
[00:18:46] Alicia Murray: Totally. Totally. No, the brain never stops. You're so right.
[00:18:49] Samantha Mabe: And then can you share just a little bit, we haven't talked a ton about boundaries, but I know as a business owner, that's super important. And then as a clinician, that's also important. But I think a lot of us understand we have to have boundaries with our patients, but we also have to have boundaries with our business. And you said you don't answer the phone and you tell people you're not going to get back to them on the phone. And so I'm sure that helps. Do you have any other boundaries that you've put in place to keep the business and the personal separate?
[00:19:20] Alicia Murray: Yeah, so the phone is definitely a big one Yeah, never answering my phone I think another one because I find myself I tend to answer emails at odd hours, Especially in my newborn phases and things like that, And I found that scheduling my emails out to be sent out during normal business hours has maintained this boundary of No, you cannot reach me At four in the morning, even if that's when I'm crafting this email. Scheduling it to make sure that my business side of things is conducted during normal business hours per se so I can protect my evenings and weekends as much as possible.
[00:19:53] I will say the boundaries are very loose as far as the therapists in my practice go. I tell them like, if you ever need anything to get in touch with me because I just feel like that kind of support is so important when it comes to having therapists working alongside your business. And I never want them to feel unsupported or like they don't know they're in the middle of doing something and they don't know how to wrap it up or finish it or anything like that. So I will say that I probably could improve some boundaries in that area, but I don't know that I necessarily want to, if that makes sense.
[00:20:27] Samantha Mabe: Yeah, and I think it is different. The boundaries you have to set with the people outside of your business, and then the ones that you set with the people that are relying on you and that you need to be there to support through everything. And so I think, you understand that those are going to look different. And if you hire people who are only going to reach out if they really need help, you know that, okay, I actually need to address this.
Creating a Supportive Community
[00:20:54] Samantha Mabe: You are creating a community that's going to help practitioners to combat the isolation that can come with business ownership. So can you tell us more about what that is and what it's going to look like?
[00:21:07] Alicia Murray: Yeah, so it's called the HQ online. My consulting business is called Therapist HQ. And so it's going to be an all in one place for therapists who are in private practice or looking into private practice to connect with other clinicians. It has a full resource library with a worksheets and workbooks they can use with clients. It has a library of book recommendations, that's a big one for therapists, we love a good book and we love a good book recommendation, so I have a full library of book recommendations that are tagged for different diagnoses or for new therapists, things like different approaches. It also has practice organization and marketing materials.
[00:21:47] And then it has the weekly consultation piece. So there's an ongoing weekly consultation that people can pop into. And I found that in private practice, I went a long time without any virtual or in person consultation groups or networking groups or any kind of face to face with any other clinicians in private practice. And it's such a individualized experience to be on private practice versus community mental health or agency work. And so I really wanted to make sure that was incorporated. And then, of course, there's discussion boards and things that people can utilize.
[00:22:19] So I'm really excited. I feel like I made it everything that I wanted when I first started out or even as I was continuing to grow those things for myself. So I'm very excited. It's going to launch 11/1. And I think it's going to be really great.
[00:22:32] Samantha Mabe: Yeah, I think that's awesome. And I love that you have all the resources and you have you there helping people that you're also creating the community. And I think that's what is missing from a lot of the places that we learn about growing a business is you're just learning from a person on a screen instead of engaging with the other people that are going through this journey.
[00:22:53] Alicia Murray: Yeah, absolutely. And I tell people all the time like, networking meetings can quickly turn into oh my gosh, this is going on in my practice and I don't know what to do about it, because it's hard not to talk about that stuff. So why don't we just have a space to talk about it?
Connect with Alicia
[00:23:08] Samantha Mabe: That you said is going to be, have launched by the time this comes out. So where can people connect with you, find out more about that and just see more of what you are doing in this space?
[00:23:22] Alicia Murray: Yeah, the best place is on Instagram at the period therapist period HQ. Everything will be linked in my bio to get into my website that has the courses and the guides and that of course to get into the community as well.
[00:23:35] Samantha Mabe: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your journey and all of your advice for people who are trying to balance business and practice and everything else that we're doing.
[00:23:47] Alicia Murray: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:23:56] Samantha Mabe: Thank you so much for joining me for this session of the Elevate Your Practice Summit. If you enjoyed it, make sure to go to the elevateyourpractice. co website in order to connect with the speaker and get access to the free resources they mentioned in their session. You can also share the summit with any of your friends in the health and wellness space and send them to the website elevate your practice dot co. You can get 30 percent off your first three months of practice better at practice better. io and use the code L A T S 30.
