The Practice of Therapy

Gordon Brewer 0:00
This episode is brought to you by blueprint health. blueprint health is a measurement based care platform for mental health providers. You can find out more about them by going to practice of therapy.com slash blueprint health. And also this episode is brought to you by therapy notes therapy notes.com, the leading Electronic Health Record system for mental health providers in private practice there who I use in my practice, check them out at practice of therapy.com slash therapy notes.

This is the practice of therapy podcast with Gordon Brewer, helping you to navigate your private practice journey.

This is session number 195 of the practice of therapy podcast. Hello, folks. I'm Gordon Brewer, glad you've joined me glad you're here with me in this journey and listening to the podcast. And if you're this is your first time coming to the podcast, I'm welcome you and hope you'll come back for more. And be sure to follow us wherever you might be listening to the podcast. So this is a little bit of a special episode. You know, one of the things about this, the past year, I've won I've been to one conference this past year, that was an in person conference. But with the rise of COVID. Again, and all of that we're really just I think most people are just kind of playing it safe in terms of how they do conferences. But every year in the fall, in September, brighter vision has an event. And that's always been an online event and it's called fall into cash. And so today we're gonna be talking with Austin Kirkland about that. And what I love about this event every year, I've participated in it for the last few years. But what I love about it is that they do a great job of

giving, doing a lot of giveaways, you know, one of the things nice about going to in person conferences, particularly if they have like vendors and stuff there you use a can pick up a lot of really cool swag. And so brighter vision is doing that again this year with their fall into cash campaign. And so you're going to be if you will go over and check out brighter vision, comm slash 2021 cash, that'll get you to the landing page. And you'll get to see, there are a lot of great people you can hear from they're going to be a lot of great webinars and giveaways and some special blog articles and that kind of thing. So anyway, Austin's going to talk more about that. And you'll get to hear from him and really more about what brighter vision does, and so looking forward to hearing from him. But before we get to Austin, one of the things I would also like to let you know about is the Google workspace platform course that's in the pre launch phase for, for my company, the practice of therapy. And if you go over to practice of therapy.com slash GWS platform, you can find out more about that. Now what this course does is will teach you how to use the different tools and dives and a little bit deeper than what we do and Google workspace for therapists. That's another course that's out there, we dive in a little deeper about how to use and setup Google workspace as a practice platform. So I'd invite you to get in on the pre launch that's going on this month during September. And you can again get to that practice a therapy.com slash GW s platform. And that way, you can go ahead and pre enroll, pre enroll in the course and get a pretty significant discount. And the other thing about when you go ahead and Enroll now, you automatically get lifetime access to the course. And also any of the content that is already there. I'm still adding to the course and have fully gathered up there yet. I keep making it keeps getting bigger. So I don't know if that's a good thing or not. But anyway, I keep adding to the content and there are a few modules that are doing the finishing touches on but I would say two thirds of the course is up there now and I'd invite you to go over and take take it vantage of the pre launch. So anyway, again, practice of therapy.com slash G. w s platform. And there'll be links here in the show summary in the show notes for you about that, you know, the other event that I wanted to let you know about. And I talked about it in last week's podcast and gave a little bit of misinformation. And I apologize for that. But one of the things that we've decided to do with killing at Camp this year is just go virtual, we had had talked about as being a live event and that sort of thing. But with the rise of COVID, and all of that we're gonna play it safe and go virtual. But the good news is, there still got to be a virtual conference. And I'm, again, like fall into cash, killing a camp is a great way to hear from some great people and get some great content. And it's really the become the premier private practice conference for for clinicians in private practice. And as far as learning the business side of how to manage your practice, and just some tips, and just some great folks that you'll get to hear from but if you go to practice of therapy.com, just K, I see 2021, you can register for the online event, it's going to be held on October, the 14th through 16th. And be sure and read check it out. So again, if you go to practice of therapy.com slash K, I see 2021 you can get all the information there. And so I hope to see you there, at least online. So anyway, it's it's got to be a good conference, not quite as good as being in person, but we're playing it safe. So anyway, check it out.

And also going back to brighter vision. And I know I'm jumping around here a little bit, but they one of the things I wanted to let you know about with their fall into cash campaign, you can really get some pretty big discounts on their services during this time. And if you check out practice of therapy.com slash brighter vision, you can save over $200 on both their website setup and also their social Genie setup. And they're going to also waive the setup fees for both those products during the fall into cash campaign. So practice of therapy.com slash brighter vision and and that'll get you to the right place. So be sure and check that out. So okay, so before we get to Austin here, I'd love for you to hear from our sponsors of the podcast, blueprint health, and therapy notes. You know, running a great behavioral health practice is hard. If your insurance base payers are demanding more and more measurable outcomes, therapists are getting harder than ever to hire and find and clients expect digitally enabled care experience. Introducing blueprint, the all in one measurement based care platform that helps behavioral health providers grow top line practice revenue, increase clinician satisfaction, and deliver more effective care blueprints, intuitive platform administers scores and charts, hundreds of symptom ratings to given to give clinicians deeper insights into how clients are progressing. And you may be eligible to earn additional reimbursement for each administer outcome measure. Get your front first month free by going to practice of therapy.com slash blueprint health. That's practice of therapy.com slash blueprint health. You know, in running a private practice, you need to have excellent systems and processes in place and one of the leading electronic health record systems that you need to check out his therapy notes. There who I use my practice, therapy notes provides a patient portal. Also the ability to schedule online, send appointment reminders, also handle your collections insurance claims. It's all in one platform for the clinical side of your practice. And they also have telehealth available through their platform. As I said they are who are using my practice and couldn't do without them. So be sure and check them out. Go to practice of therapy.com slash therapy notes and you'll be able to see what they have available. And also be sure and use the promo code Gordon, just g o r d o n and you can try them out for two months for free. therapy notes at practice of therapy.com slash therapy notes.

Well, hello, everyone, and welcome again to the podcast. And I'm so glad for you all to get to hear from Austin Kirkland today. Welcome, Austin, from brighter vision.

Austin Kirkland 10:29
Yeah. Hi. Thanks so much, Gordon, thank you so much for having me on here.

Gordon Brewer 10:32
I appreciate it. Awesome. Awesome. And I know that had a pretty long, long term relationship with the folks at brighter vision. And so Austin, as I start with everyone, why don't you tell folks a little bit about who you are and how you've landed? Where you landed?

Austin Kirkland 10:50
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, as you know, my name is Austin. Look, just some personal fun information about me. I'm a big lover of dogs might see one or two kind of roaming around here, photographer as well. But um, yeah, I've always had a passion for mental health services and access to mental health care. So I found myself kind of suddenly unemployed A few years ago, long story there. But I saw this opportunity come up with brighter vision, I jumped on it. It's just been a phenomenal four years that I've been here, you know, I can't spend I can't think I can't think of a better way to spend, you know, eight hours a day, then talking to therapists, you know. So, yeah, that's how I landed a brighter vision.

Gordon Brewer 11:29
Oh, that's, that's great. I always love people's backstory. So I have to ask, yeah, well, for those folks that might not be familiar with brighter vision, if they aren't familiar with brighter vision, they've probably not been looking in the right places. But tell folks a little bit about what you all do, and that sort of thing.

Austin Kirkland 11:48
Yeah, absolutely. So what brighter vision does in a nutshell, is we make marketing simple for therapists. And the way we do that is we work one on one with them to, you know, get a custom website built that's unique to their practice, and their clients and all that. But more importantly, you know, we market that website. So when there is that prospect of client, you'll place in that search online for help that they're going to be one of the first options that shows up. And that's what we do in a nutshell for our clients is help grow their practices, awesome. And you know, that they are really kind of my go to recommendation for people that are really, if you're, unless you really want to build your website yourself, which I know a lot of people are intimidated by that, they would be the go to hands down. Because like like Austin said, they take care of the

Gordon Brewer 12:40
SEO, which is so important and making sure that your website can be found and, and plus their, their templates and the the websites that they have are a really phenomenal, I've really enjoyed seeing a lot of some of our consulting clients use them and just see the beautiful websites that they get.

Austin Kirkland 12:59
So yeah, it's really it's really fun for me to because I work with the client kind of, you know, from the start to the end. So it's great to talk to them initially kind of get an idea of what their vision is. And then now a couple weeks later, when the websites built, I love to check it out. It's really awesome to see, you know, how their vision was translated to the website and then working with a team to they're very kind of like consultative as well. They're not gonna just they're not always there to do everything you tell them, you know, they're there to kind of provide some ideas too. So it's really neat to see the mixture and the end result of our underwrite.

Gordon Brewer 13:31
Right? And you guys to have got a say it's new, it's not new. Now I've got a platform for helping people with social media that's really an automated. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Austin Kirkland 13:44
Yeah, I'll be more than happy to I love it. It's called social Genie. For starters, I'm actually the one who named it. So I feel very proud of it. And as a matter of fact, is one of my best friends from high school that I'm still best friends with. He's a software engineer behind it. Anyway, it's always a just a fun fact I like to give but it's a really robust marketing tool that pretty much does all your social media marketing for you. And so what social genie is more specifically, it houses 1000s of pre created therapists, specific social media posts. They're all organized by categories or specialties really. And then what our clients can do is select that specialty like anxiety, for example. And they can say, hey, every Mondays and Thursdays at 9am I want a new post on anxiety going out to all my social media accounts. It take five minutes to schedule that out. In a boom, it'll automatically post for them to client without also have the ability to view a schedule and see the upcoming posts and you'll edit them delete them if they want to, but ultimately, they'll automatically post to the social media accounts for them. It's just a great hands off approach to social media marketing.

Gordon Brewer 14:51
Yeah, I've seen a demo of it and it's absolutely really takes this whole idea of curation of Mental Health Information, it makes it easy for the therapist to put it out there rather than having to spend all the time of creating all that for themselves on their, you know, doing all the work. So it's, it's really a phenomenal product, I would say. So. So with that work, one of the main reasons I wanted Austin on here was brighter visions got one of their annual events coming up are actually is this episode is coming out, they're in the middle of it, you know, talk about fall into cash.

Austin Kirkland 15:34
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So follow the cash is, is this awesome thing that we do every single year, throughout the entire month of September. So what it is, is we have 18 mental health professionals and businesses and practices they're all participating on. So there'll be weekly blogs, webinars content over the entire month. And between all of us, we're gonna be giving away about $17,000 worth of giveaways. Additionally, you also get a very, very heavy discount on our services. As a matter of fact, it's one of the best discounts we offer all year. So it's really exciting. We love doing this. And the whole point of this is to help provide, you know, free information free resources to therapists who might be starting out, or maybe they already have a practice. They want to grow up more, but it's just to help give them some more tools to excel more and fall into cat.

Gordon Brewer 16:25
Yeah, I love it. So what what are some of the topics that are going to be covered this year?

Austin Kirkland 16:30
Yeah, so there's a multitude of topics. So I'm just gonna pull up my spreadsheet here real quick. So if you see me look away, that's what I'm looking at. Yeah, so the first week, I mean, we have, I mean, a lot of different webinars, and Joe Santa is handing out one of his copies of this book from practice in the practice, we have one free ticket to Sydney's private practice retreat, which is a $300 value. So every week, there's me 1000s of dollars of giveaways, definitely look into it, all you have to do is just go to brighter vision.com. forward slash, I believe it's, um, 21 cache, that'll give you a lot more information. That's where you can sign up for it and start accessing some of those potential giveaways.

Gordon Brewer 17:13
Awesome. Just checking in. So what are other things that brighter visions got down the line in the future? What's it because I know there's been just some, some big changes that have gone through with your with the company and all of that. So what's, what's going to be happening that people would be interested in?

Austin Kirkland 17:31
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, we do have a lot of a lot of things coming up in the future. I'm not too sure what certain things I can actually speak upon. But they are very exciting stuff. We have kind of in the pipeline here. But as far as like our service with regards to the fall into cash thing, you do get a heavy discount. So to go over our pricing real briefly, our typical pricing is $59 a month with $100 setup fee at signup as well. So usually, customers are paying $159 to sign up and then $59 A month after, but with this promotion, you're getting to the month of September, we're going to waive the $100 setup fee altogether, you'll never pay that. And then we're going to lower your monthly price down to 10. It's going to lower it by $10 a month, that'd be $49 to sign up and $49 A month after that. So it's a phenomenal deal that we have going on.

Gordon Brewer 18:21
That's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. So what is people are thinking about? Maybe people that have already thinking about getting their website up and going for private practice, or maybe even folks that already have a website that it's not doing exactly what they want it to do. Walk us through just kind of the process you take people through in really getting their websites up to par, so to speak, or even started?

Austin Kirkland 18:53
Yeah, yeah. So there's, there's really two two boats of clients I typically work with one boat is going to be the brand new clinician that doesn't have any website at all, this is going to be the first website they've ever built. So during those conversations, I try to learn as much as I can about them. If they have an idea of what they want their specialty to be, that's really helpful to know. But a lot of times newer clinicians don't always have that idea. They're just not quite dialed in yet. Or maybe they don't want to be they just want to start getting clients, which is perfectly fine. Because all I'm trying to do is learn about their goals. And then I'll figure out a plan with the development team, you know, to help market that specific therapist. And then on the other side of things, I would say most of our clients, as a matter of fact fall into this group where they're coming to us with a website currently. Usually it's like Wix or Squarespace or something like that. And more often than not, you know, they tell me they're fed up with it. They spent, you know, hours working on it years ago, they never touched it again. So then I like to talk to them about you know what it is they like about their website, what it is they don't like about it because you put a lot of work into that right. So we don't Want to change anything that you're happy with? So I'll take the client through the conversation, let them know what certain things we can bring over what we can't more often that we can bring just about anything over from their current site into the new site. And then we just work together as a team to really develop something that's more unique, more personalized, that's going to help drive in their ideal clients.

Gordon Brewer 20:19
Right, right. I was talking with one of my consulting clients this morning, and we were just talking about some of the tips around SEO that I know about, what would be a few tips that you would give folks about around SEO that they need to think about? And we're talking about search engine optimization, I don't mean to be too co defined here. So

Austin Kirkland 20:41
yeah, yeah. So yeah, so I mean, search engine optimization is the point, pretty much the point of having a website is to have search engine optimization, really, because without search engine optimization, your website's not going to be found unless they know the exact address of it. And so what it is on a high level, just to kind of describe it, for anyone who might not know what it is, it's really its code in a way that's going to go into your website, that's going to describe your website to Google that way, Google knows who to show your website to, one of the most important things to do around search engine optimization is blogging. So a big factor with how well a website is going to rank over time is simply how often it's being updated. So if you look at it, from Google's point of view, they want to show their end user, which is the person placing the search relevant and up to date, information content. And so by updating your website, once or twice, even three times a month, you're going to tell Google like, Hey, I have good information, it's new, you know, show me first they're gonna be like, okay, we're gonna do that. And so a great way to do that regularly is through blog posts, because typically, these blog posts are going to talk about, you know, the types of information that you already have on your website, because you want that to match, it's gonna give you a decent amount of content, because there's a certain character limit that you want to hit. And then just do that every week, your website will rank super well, this is assuming you've done the search engine optimization initially prior to launching as well.

Gordon Brewer 22:08
And that's so helpful, because I think a lot of people are really kind of baffled by that is that they, they, they like you said they might create a beautiful, or at least for them beautiful website that is on Wix or Squarespace, and it's just crickets. And, and part of it is, is you've got to really kind of know, our back end stuff that just takes a lot of work. And so it's something that, particularly as we get busy, not something that would necessarily be a good ROI return on our investment, to spend the time on that. When it's really better to hand it off to an expert that knows what they're doing with all of that.

Austin Kirkland 22:46
Yeah, absolutely. I would do that all day long. I mean, what's nice about you know, our service is that's included even in our like, entry level package, which is $59 a month. I mean, typically, if you like go to another company to hire that outside, you're gonna pay hundreds of dollars a month, just for the search engine optimization, because I mean, they can charge that that much, because it is that difficult to understand. It's that time consuming to do.

Gordon Brewer 23:11
Right. Right. So, okay. Austin, this is just great stuff. And I want to be respectful of your time. tell folks again, how they can find out the web, the URL for fall into cash. And we'll also be sure to have it in the show notes here.

Austin Kirkland 23:29
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So all you need to do is go to brighter vision doc comm forward slash 2021. cache, that's it. So you just sign up in there, there'll be actually if you if you go to that page, you can scroll down, you can kind of see the weekly schedule of all the different giveaways and stuff. There's a lot, I don't want to list every single one right by line. But definitely check that out. Yeah, that's all you have to do just sign up there. You know, try to attend as many webinars. As you can see, a lot of times these webinars are gonna have live giveaways that you have to be present for. But ultimately, it's just a great way to earn a lot of different useful and free, you know, tools that will help grow your business and help you follow some awesome,

Gordon Brewer 24:09
that's great. And I'm going to be doing a webinar with him on using Google workspace in private practice, or Google workspace for therapists. And there's going to be just a giveaway of that course that I've got created as part of this sort of thing. So again, we'll have links here in the show summary in the show notes. So well, Austin, thanks so much for being on the podcast again. And it's been a while since the folks from brighter vision have been here, so we need to make it more often.

Well, again, a big thanks to Austin for joining me on the podcast and hopefully this has been a little fun for you and just learning a little More about the importance of websites and SEO. And you know, your website really is the front door of your practice. And for anyone that is going into private practice, they really need to have a superior, a good website that is going to rank well in Google. You know, there, there are people out there that just use, like the Psychology Today, profile as their website or Facebook page, that kind of thing, I wouldn't really recommend that. Just doing that, by itself, I think you're going to do much better by having your own website that really tells who you are, and tells your story. So be sure and check it out. Again, brighter vision.com forward slash 2021. Cash is how you can find out more about all of the different things that are going on, during the month of September with fall into cash. I'm going to be doing the doing a webinar towards the end of the of the of the conference. And I was just kind of trying to remind myself when that is I was just looking here. Yes, that's going to be on week five. So the last week of September, I'll be doing a webinar on using Google workspace in your practice. And speaking of Google workspace, be sure and check out the practice of therapy.com GW s platform. And you can get into the pre launch of that particular course, and also still available, and it always is there is Google workspace for therapist, and you can get to that by going to practice of therapy.com gw, GW S, GW s core, some Sorry, I had to remember what it is, is just GW s course Google workspace course. So, again, links in the show notes in the show summary here for that. As you can tell, I'm a big fan of Google workspace and really feel like it's a great tool that can really help you a lot with your productivity. And also, as always, be sure to check out our sponsors of the podcast, I'm so thrilled to have them and partnering with them. And that is blueprint health. And you can get to them by going to practice of therapy.com slash blueprint health. And they will help you out and creating a measurement based practice and being able to help you with just being able to know your outcomes, which is real important on the clinical side of things and can be on the business side of things as far as helping you with reum firstmet rates if you're with if you're using insurance in your practice, or you're on insurance panels, most insurance companies are going to want you to give them some measured outcomes. And so they can help you with that with their platform. And then as always, be sure to check out therapy notes. And you can find out more about them by going to practice of therapy.com slash therapy notes. And when you go to check them out, if you want to try them out for two months for free. You can do that by using the promo code Gordon, just g o r d o n. And the same thing for blueprint health. You can try them out for one month for free if you'll use that URL. And that'll give you a promo code when you go to that URL practice of therapy.com slash blueprint health, again to great sponsors two, two services, two platforms that I can absolutely get behind. So anyway, be sure and check them out. So Well folks, I hope you're having a good September. You know, fall is just around the corner at least it's starting to feel a tinge of it here in the air and in East Tennessee. And so I'm enjoying being outside and get to do some hiking this past weekend. As I'm recording this over the lady Labor Day weekend, it was really great to get out. Get out there about a six mile hike, which was great. So take care, folks, and we'll be talking to you next week. And be sure and follow us wherever you might be listening to the podcast in glad you're with me on this journey.

You have been listening to the practice of therapy podcast with Gordon Brewer, please visit us at practice of therapy.com For more information, resources, and tools to help you in starting, building and growing your private practice, and if you haven't done so already, please sign up to receive the free private practice startup guide at practice of therapy.com. The information in this podcast is intended to be accurate and authoritative concerning the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host guests or producers are rendering legal accounting or clinical advice. If you need a professional, you should find the right person for them.