The Practice of Therapy

Kelley: All right. Hi, I'm Kelly Stevens. I'm so excited to be here on Practice of Therapy with you, Gordon. It's been I've been a longtime listener of the podcast and I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
Gordon Brewer: Well, hello everyone and welcome again to the podcast. I'm so happy for you to get to know today Kelly Stevens. Welcome, Kelly.
Kelley: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
Gordon Brewer: Yes, and as I start with everyone Tell folks a little bit more about yourself and how you've landed where you landed.
Kelley: Awesome. I'm happy to.
Well, so as you said, I'm Kelly. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist here in California. I live in Southern California, which has been a crazy time here in Southern California these last few months. And I primarily work with teens, young adults and families in my private practice. And then also my husband is a psychiatrist.
So we're a mental health family over here. And then I also own a company called Private Practice Pro, where we teach therapists how to launch private practices, and then also how to fill their private practices, and that's also a really fun kind of arm of what I do, and do some teaching there, so, I'm excited to be here, and I think we're talking a little bit about multiple streams of income for therapists, and how the industry is evolving in that way.
So we're going to have a good conversation. I'm excited. Yeah.
Gordon Brewer: Yes. This is, this'll be good. Yeah. So yeah, maybe that's a good place to start. What are you in the, in the time that you've been in private practice, what are you seeing are. Kind of the big changes that are coming or trends and that kind of thing.
Kelley: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. So one thing I see a lot and hear a lot from my friends and the people in my programs is this idea that they want to make multiple streams of income. I also will hear people say they want to make passive income. And if anyone's listening to this, I'm making air quotes, right?
Because I don't necessarily believe that there's anything that's truly passive, right? Right. And. Certainly, there are many ways to make money as a therapist outside of the therapy room. So, you know, some people will offer supervision, some people will have a group practice, people will maybe teach, be an adjunct professor, offer workshops, retreats, intensives, and those things I think would be considered like, non passive, in quotes.
And then, you know, I think of it as like, leveraged income, which might be online courses, digital workshops, social media. Those sorts of things. And there, there's many different ways to do it, but I'm seeing a lot of people want to incorporate many streams of income into their practice, but feel maybe a little confused about how to make that happen.
Number one. And then number two, I, I see a lot of people put out some sort of digital offer and spend quite a bit of money making that offer, but then not make any money selling the offer. So I don't know, do you feel like you're seeing the same thing, something different? What do you think? Yeah.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah, I think it's the, you know, what one of the things is really looking at ways to, as we say, to diversify income.
And you're right. There is really no such thing as true passive income. I think you can put things in place around that. You know, I think, you know, what one thing for sure is, is that, you know, having a, a group practice is a form and I'm using air quotes to a form of passive income and that that's not much you know, time you're having to spend seeing clients to where you can You know, reap the benefit of that income.
But yeah, I know for me, even just in the practice of therapy, I've done, you know, I started out doing some courses and had, you know, some success with that. But I think we're I think online in some degrees, we're getting a little on what online weary yeah, you know, I think having gone through COVID and all of that, you know, being on a big in front of a screen, we, we want something different.
Kelley: Oh, certainly, you know, I think so too. And I think that I especially see this in relation to our clients. And so a number of my friends have created client specific resources. So what you and I do is create resources for therapists, which, you know, obviously is supporting their businesses. And I think people are much more.
Open to taking a course online if it's related to their business. But I do see this with clients where I'll see therapists making a beautiful digital course and, and I've had friends and people who have worked with, who've made amazing resources, but then They're not getting clients to buy it. And I think a lot of that work up front comes first with really trying to figure out what it is that your target client actually is going to use.
And so, you know, if you have maybe a mom who's struggling with postpartum depression, has a new baby, has, is not sleeping, is not, what is the likelihood that that mom is going to sit down for a 12 hour course? On their phone versus maybe they would listen to a 15 minute a day podcast. You know, and so I think a lot of that upfront work of deciding what the resource is and whether or not the person needs it is what's missing.
And I see many therapists fall into this trap that a lot of online coaches and people are saying, no, no, no, you can, anyone can sell a course. Anyone can do this, you know, and, and in many ways, I don't want to tell people, no, you can't do this. I don't want to leave them hopeful, hopeless, but I think that the.
Absolute most important part before you put out any resource, whether it's therapy, whether it's a group practice, whatever is first determining who are you trying to get to purchase it or sign up for it? And will they use it? Like will it work for them? And will they actually do it? Do they have the time?
Gordon Brewer: Right. Well, I think to add to that is also being very have a lot of a lot of clarity around what problem are you going to help them solve?
Kelley: Yes.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. And how is it going to make their life easier. And that sort of thing. And so, yeah.
Kelley: Absolutely. I know I watch a YouTube channel that I really like by a woman called, I think her name is Sunny Lanzari, or I'll send you the link if you want to link it in your show notes.
And she says something which I think about all the time, which is you need to be helping If you're selling an online resource, not therapy in general, but just an online helping a specific person at a specific point in their journey with a specific outcome. And I really see a lot of us therapists make that mistake where we are used to working with many different types of clients in our private practice.
And so we might market digital resources to help many different types of people, rather than saying. You know, this is a resource. I keep using that like new moms because that's what I am. But like, we're going to solve this very specific problem for new moms. You know, maybe it's that they can't get their baby to sleep and it's fueling their anxiety and depression.
And we're going to teach them how to help their baby sleep. And coping skills for their anxiety and depression related to insomnia. And that's the only thing we're going to cover, rather than all of postpartum depression as a whole. Or something like that.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah, right.
Kelley: I don't know. That example was off the top of my head, so I'm not sure.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah, well, that was a good, that was a good example. That was a good example. Yeah, so, yeah, so as you think about Diversifying income are really having multiple income sources. What are some other things that maybe are kind of outside the box things that you've discovered?
Kelley: Yeah, that's actually a really good question.
So you know, one thing I've done a lot of, which I think a lot of people don't think is I've like done some work with university counseling centers, which. This is funny. I don't even really talk about this online very much, but I've done things where I've partnered with University Counseling Centers when they have students who need a resource outside of the campus Counseling Center.
So I know, like, I've done some alcohol and drug assessments. I've done things where, like, when the school gets in or when the student gets. In trouble academically with or sorry, when the student gets in trouble for drinking on campus or something, they have to have an outside assessment of someone rather, they're ready to go back to school.
Things like that seem to be very helpful if you're not looking to build an online resource. If you're looking to do something that's just in your community and that sort of thing, if you were not, if you're saying, you know, if somebody said to me, no, you know what, Kelly, like, I want to build a following on social media and I want to build a digital resource.
I'm telling people now to consider offering hybrid models. So maybe you do have some sort of online course, or maybe you have a podcast. But you have also a monthly group that goes along with it or some, because I do think that people want that person to person contact. And, you know, I think as therapists, we want this resource that stands on its own, that we don't have to maintain, you know, I think that for the clients that many of us work with.
They're not a lot of our clients are not going to go home and just do it on their own and having a little scaffolding and accountability, I think is
Gordon Brewer: important. Yeah. I think the more that you can increase that kind of human to human contact is gonna, is, is, is much more appealing to people. In that sense.
Yeah, absolutely. I think so, too.
Kelley: And especially if you're just starting and you're just starting to sell digital products. But, you know, the biggest piece of advice I give people a lot of times is first, if you're going to sell something digitally. I first don't want you to, to start with the product.
You know, I think we all are like, I have this book in my mind, or I have this course in my mind and we have no one to sell it to besides maybe our own clients and our own private practices, which is like 30 people. Right. I think first you build an audience first, you get to know, you know, whether it's that you start a podcast or a YouTube channel or an Instagram or Tik TOK, or whatever you decide to do first, build that.
And build it out of a willingness to serve people, like just be putting out a lot of free information and get to know who your people are online and then ask them. And then because there's so many ways on social media now to say to the people who follow you or subscribe to your channel or whatever, Hey, what are you needing?
What is it a book? Is it a workshop? Is it a course? What is it? And then you create out of, let's say you have 5, 000 people following you and 300 of them respond, you know what, what I really need is a workshop. And if you had just spent six months creating a course, well, yeah. You know, that's a piece of gold information.
And so I usually start with building the audience and then give it a year and build the product afterward.
Gordon Brewer: Right. Right. Yeah. It's you, you might be familiar with the book. It's called, will it fly by Pat Flynn?
Kelley: Yes. Yeah. And
Gordon Brewer: that's yeah. And that's that's exactly the principle that he kind of talks about is you build a.
As he calls it, a base of super fans that are there that, that follow you and that know, like, and trust you and all of that sort of thing. And so I think that's that, that's an important piece with all of this.
Kelley: Absolutely.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. I think when
Kelley: I put out my first digital course, one thing I did was I, I waited until I had 10, 000 followers.
And then I actually gave the first version of that course to 30 of them for free. And I said, could, I'm going to give this to you for free. I had a questionnaire and my only thing I'm hoping that you would do is you'd, you'd tell me. Like you would fill out this questionnaire and let me know how it goes.
And that was so helpful to me because six months later I refilmed the whole thing with so much more information that they really wanted.
Gordon Brewer: And,
Kelley: you know, I think it's like that test what my team and I call is like proof of concept. Like we need proof of concept that this is going to work before we invest our time into making it.
Gordon Brewer: Right, right. Yeah, it's it's if you think about it, all the people that do well on, you know, like YouTube and podcasting and that kind of thing. The other thing I would say is with the content you're putting out there is being consistent about with it.
Kelley: I mean, I
Gordon Brewer: would say. The, the success of this podcast is not because of me.
It's because I've put it out there every week after week for, for, Oh, I just was reminded for the last since 2017, how many years is that? Yeah. So, I mean, yeah. And so I think that's what's helped. Grown this podcast is just consistency.
Kelley: Yeah. And that's a labor of love, you know, podcasts are a lot of work and that is a labor of love and, and also of service to a community of therapists, you know, I think.
Whenever you're serving an audience, like through a podcast, as somebody who puts out content every week, I know, since 2017 until now, that is a lot of work. And there's a lot of unpaid hours that go into that.
Gordon Brewer: Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. Well to switch gears a little bit, I mean in thinking about building an audience, or another term for it that we use is marketing, And this applies to your, I think, people in private practice.
What are you finding that is effective nowadays?
Kelley: That's a good question. You know, I was just chatting actually right before as I was frantically driving home from pickup with talking to one of my friends about this. And, you know, I think When we're recording this podcast, I don't know when this is going to come out, but we're recording it right now in the weeks after the tick tock band and the tick tock came back and, you know, we've seen the rise and fall of Twitter and X.
And there's been so many changes in social media in the last, you know, what, there's always changes in social media, but just in the last six months, it's been wild. And what I'm really telling people is two things. One authenticity is everything. If you're just putting out content that looks. Like everyone else's that's trending and whatever those things are important, and it's really important to learn strategy of what works However, if you don't do that with a heart and you're bringing who you are, it doesn't matter people are not gonna You know, especially therapy space that would be number one and number two You sure as sh it better be building your email list because we don't know what's happening In any given time with social media and I know for me, I have 112, 000 followers and people will say to me, that's amazing.
Like, but that is not the good metric. That is not the metric I look for. The metric I look for is how many people are on my email list and how many people are already in my ecosystem. Because any given time, as we've seen with Twitter, as we saw with TikTok social, we don't own our audience. It can go away in a minute, you know, so I tell people like we want people to know, like, and trust us by being authentic online.
And then we want to very quickly, ideally bring them into some sort of resource where we can be in contact with them, whether that's an email list and not an email list that is selling to them constantly. Cause we all get emails from Macy's and target. Okay. Like I get like three a day, probably from, we want.
You know, information and we want to know people are like, I follow this one lawyer who I have student loans as many of us do. And I follow this one lawyer and I read his emails every week that he sends it out because they are so rich with the information that I need. And those are the types of emails that it's always my goal to write.
So I could go on this Gordon for three hours. Oh,
Gordon Brewer: yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's a, as you, as you said earlier, Kelly is give your best stuff away. Totally. Yeah. And and I think that that is so true. I mean, you know But with this podcast, just having these conversations with people week after week well, it's, it's just really enriching for me, but people keep coming back for that.
And it's yeah. So absolutely.
Kelley: Well, I know I appreciate it. I'm a big fan of your podcast and I agree with you. I think, you know, we give away 80 percent and we charge for 20%, like what I'm trying to think of, like we do have to make a living at, but however, if we're not of service to the people that we want to work with, then they're not coming
Gordon Brewer: back anyway.
Yeah. Well, Kelly, I've got to be respectful of your time. What are you working on here lately that you want people to know about?
Kelley: Well, thank you. You can find me on Instagram or on my website at the private practice pro. I teach therapists how to open practices and grow them. And I'm just excited to be here and be on with you guys.
I really appreciate it.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah, well, it's good to connect with you and I'm so glad you were on the podcast and we'll have links in the show notes and the show summary to for people to connect with you easily. So.
Kelley: Thank you so much, Gordon.