The Practice of Therapy

Gordon Brewer
Well, hello, everyone, and welcome again to the practice of therapy podcast. And I'm so glad for you to join me for this kind of special mini series or mini thing that I've teamed up with my good friend Daniel fava. And Daniel spin on the podcast before and he is one of those go to people when I have website questions are things around that. And in this particular episode, what we're going to be doing is just talking about website redesign, because that's something that I'm going to be going through and sharing with folks, as I go through that. And Daniel has been just gracious enough to, to partner with me on this and and hold my hand as we go through this. So welcome, Daniel.

Daniel Fava
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, this is such a fun idea. I was really excited when you when you reached out and and had this idea, because I think that it will be a lot of fun to kind of pick through my process as a web design agency, and also your process that you're going through to redesign your website. And so I think I think folks are gonna get a lot of, you know, good takeaways, especially if they're thinking about redesigning their whole therapy practice websites.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna be taking notes here is we go along.

Daniel Fava
Okay, grab.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, let me grab my Let me grab my planner here real quickly. So we do that. So go ahead, pause Just a second.

Yes, sir. Daniel, what is, as you see it, where's the starting place? If somebody is thinking about redesigning their website, or really wanting to do some some overhauls with things,

Daniel Fava
yeah, so I'm, I'm gonna start with you basically, how I start with, with all of our clients that, you know, reach out with just an inquiry and they have, they just want to, they have a website project, or maybe some SEO stuff that they want to do. So they come they come to us fill out a quick form, you know, name, email address, and all that sort of stuff. And then we hop on the phone. And really, the, the place I always start with is the why, why do you want to redesign redesign your private practice? website? Especially you know why right now, because most people, you know, maybe they come out and they're like, Oh, my website's pretty old and outdated. So I just, I need a new website. But it actually goes a lot deeper than that, because a website is and should be an investment into the future of your business. It's, it's the way that people are going to find you. And it can be just a great tool to bring lots of traffic to your business and convert that traffic into new clients. So my question for you is why website redesign right now?

Gordon Brewer
Right, right. Well, one, one thing, I guess there's several reasons is that I'm adding some new clinicians to my website, and I just figured this was just the timing of that is good, because I'm going to be adding their information to the website. But also, as you mentioned, it's really, you know, the the look of my website has been about the same for the last four or five years. And so it is time to really kind of give it a facelift, you know, just need to paint the house. Yeah, you know, kind of thing. But, uh, you know, the other thing too, about the website, is I recognize that that is, that is even more important, for lack of a better way to put the most important real estate that I think any practice has, in terms of its it's more important than my office in my way of thinking because I know, just from, you know, just kind of, you know, informal surveys of clients is that the vast majority of people that come to us find us or not, because they found our website. So, yeah, it's, it's important to keep that house so to speak, and good repair. And I think, just Also, I'm recognizing that for, you know, feedback I've gotten from clients and, and just my staff is, is that it's the navigation On the website is, is a little fun in terms of being able to, you know, easily find things. And I'm also realizing that I made when I created the website and I used, you know, I'm one of those people that has always been a tinkerer. And so I like kind of playing around with things. Yes. And so I taught myself how to use WordPress several years ago, and have just kind of gotten in the habit of, you know, my, my website probably get too many pages in it in terms of not really relevant. Yeah. A little bit clunky, the, yeah, the menu is, is is too full on the website, those kinds of things. So yeah, those are those are kind of mental notes I made for myself as to why I really want to change things up.

Daniel Fava
Okay. Okay, that makes sense. Alright, so let me just sort of review here, we've got your your adding new clinicians to the website. So there's updates coming to the content. It's about five years old, so it's a little bit a little bit dated there. You want to just make sure that it is functioning well and works well. Because it is the face of your business. Like you said, it's super important. You also want to clean up the navigation make it easier for people to use. So the next question I always ask a potential client is out of all those reasons, what is the most important one to you and your business? Oh, wow.

Gordon Brewer
That's a great question. I think it's, again, the impression that we make on potential clients, I think is the most important, important thing. Yeah.

Daniel Fava
Okay, and why?

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, so, um, what one of the things that I know that we have kind of built our reputation on it, at least in our community is our responsiveness. Now, you know, I was having a conversation just yesterday with our intake coordinator. And she was talking about how people are just really just really pleased the fact that we get back in touch with them so soon. And so they you know, and just being able to respond quickly, because for whatever reason, other therapists other practices in town, they say that call but they are they, they send them a message or whatever, nobody responds. Yeah. So, you know, just being able to match all that up, I think is part of the why Yeah,

Daniel Fava
yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Cool. All right. So, so now, so that's kind of like my exercise, a little bit of just digging into some of those initial reasons why someone might want to redesign their website. And obviously, there can be like, a host of other reasons, you know, somebody is like, I really want to add groups to my, to my practice and do that more, you know, sometimes that's a reason. Sometimes people are, they're wanting to build online courses. So they need a new website that kind of positions them, you know, stuff like that. So now that we have kind of dug into why you're thinking about doing this redesign, right now, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit about the business. And up to you how deep you want to get into numbers and stuff like that. But I always wanted to know, when I'm talking to somebody about redesigning a website, you know, we could just stop and say, you know, oh, Gordon just needs a new website. That's the front of his business, obviously, it needs to be clean and work well. And so he can still be so responsive to his clients. But we also, I think, because goals really drive what website design really is, we need to talk about those things, because it's great to have a pretty website. But if I'm not aware, as you know, your web designer, not that I'm doing this, but I'm saying, you know, if I'm talking to a new client of if I'm not aware that, oh, you actually really wanted to increase your visibility in Google search engines. Before we did the project, there's extra things that we're going to want to include that we're really going to want to make sure that we deliver on. So that's really like my next question in the same vein, that I asked you, you know, what's most important to you? In the why question is, what are the most important goals that you have for your business for the next 12 months?

Gordon Brewer
Right, right. Yeah. So one is adding more more clinicians. And the thing that's, you know, interestingly, you know, as we're recording this, one of the things is we're in the middle of this, this, this little thing called the pandemic. Yeah. It's not a little thing. But one of the things that I'm recognizing is there's a lot of potential for adding clinicians that want to do just telehealth do, yeah, yeah. And so I'm in the state of Tennessee, and so I'm, you know, in a small geographic area, but my website has been focused on, you know, clients in this geographic area. So one thing in the back of my mind is, how do I maybe have a website that has more of a statewide reach? Yeah, you know, in terms of, you know, my, my location where my offices were, we're pretty close to maxing out the number of clinicians that I can house here. But if, if we were adding clinicians that were strictly online, that's going to be fairly unlimited. Yeah. And so that's, that's part of my kind of my business plan for this next year, is to really think about how do I add clinicians that aren't necessarily housed here in here in the brick and mortar space? Yeah. And so that's, that's one one of the goals. Yeah,

Daniel Fava
that's, that's awesome. I just want to stop you right there. Because like, for me, as a designer, and a consultant, and strategist or whatever, I call myself out of, you know, these days. But my, my, my bells kind of go off right there because that, that that will impact a lot of the content that we write, it'll impact a lot about how we talk about your practice on the site. So So for me, like that's a really big nugget, that's going to play a key role in in this project. So something for you to kind of take back and remember, how can I be speaking about that on my website? How can I make sure that people are aware that we offer telehealth stuff like that?

Gordon Brewer
Right, right. Yeah. And that's, yeah. And so currently, you know, is, is is a mentioned in the middle of this COVID pandemic, where pretty much all telehealth at this point, and we have a pop up that comes up? Just kind of saying, Yeah, you know, we're doing online kind of thing. Yeah. So yeah. So that's, that's kind of the I guess, maybe the overarching goal for this? Yeah. Yeah. website?

Daniel Fava
Do you have any 12 month goals around? You know, new leads into the business or new clients revenue? Anything like that you want to share?

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, so yeah, what you know, in terms of, you know, I think when you have a group practice, one of the things you want to do is to be able to make sure that you've got referral sources, constantly bringing new clients, so that you can keep your therapists full. And keep them making sure that they are, they are getting the case loads that they want to carry. So that's kind of that's, that's kind of the, you know, I don't have any specific numbers around that. But for my for my practice, a full caseload would be for for our average therapist, would be between 20 and 25 sessions a week. So yeah, so you know, you do the math and think about, okay, what, how many clients is that we're bringing in and how many do we need to bring in to maintain that? So yeah,

Daniel Fava
yeah. And that's good to know, that's good to know about your capacity. And, because that's also a good goal, if you can, if you obviously, if you can max out those clinicians, and it's kind of okay, we can bring on another one, you know, and keep layering on the, you know, the revenue and the growth that way, right.

Gordon Brewer
Right. Yeah.

Daniel Fava
Okay, cool. Well, in the same vein, you know, that we did before with, you know, why do you want to redesign now, I'm going to ask you out of these four reasons here, four goals, you want to add more clinicians, you want to be more on top of the telehealth, marketing towards people who are looking for telehealth and also increased business by getting more clinicians who are just focused on telehealth, improve your referral networks and also max out those sessions per week for all your clinicians. So out of those four, what's the most important for you, as you think about heading into the next year? Right,

Gordon Brewer
I would say I would say being able to make sure that the telehealth is an easy process for potential clients. Yeah. Them understanding that process. Yep. of understanding that and then you know, just the, you know, there's almost two to kind of Parallel goals there and again, is the referral number of referrals coming in, you know, fairly, fairly consistently.

Daniel Fava
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, a lot of the times these goals are obviously like intertwined. You know, because if you increase, if you increase the number of referrals, you're gonna impact your bottom line, you know, more revenue, for sure. But yeah, so that's, that's super helpful, you know, for me to know, if I was somebody who's going to be helping you with this redesign, then I come away from this meeting and this conversation, knowing what the main focus needs to be for this redesigned. So it was this was as helpful for you as Yes, about heading into this.

Gordon Brewer
Yes, it is. And I think that's what I love about it is, again, the listeners to the podcast, hear from me all the time. Know your why. And so I think that's, that's helpful. And, you know, being able to clarify that. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Daniel Fava
Yeah. So as far as you know, a redesign goes, that's really, that's really, the best place to start is with the why. So you know, if anyone is listening to this, and it's something, whether they're thinking about DIY, buying it and doing the website themselves, or they're going to hire out for it, just knowing before going into that process, some of these goals that they're, they're really wanting to hit in the next year. Because you, it could even be that you start out, you're thinking, Okay, I'm just gonna DIY this thing to save money. But then when you start looking at your goals and your vision, and maybe you got some big, some big, hairy, scary goals, and you might need to think a little bit bigger, and you're gonna want to reach some of those goals, then I would encourage somebody to reach out to a professional to build the website, because you might end up spending a ton of time and, and some money on trying to put it all together, which can be very time consuming, or you can save a ton of time, but invest in something that's going to increase those conversions. It's going to be SEO, you know, optimized for search engines, all that sort of Right,

Gordon Brewer
right. And that's, I'd like to echo that as well, in terms of, you know, being aware of your ROI, your return on investment of not only your time, it, you know, not only your money, but also your time. And that, and this is this is going to be something that's going to be that I'm thinking about in in this redesign. You know, how much of this do I really want to do myself? Right now I have the, you know, probably had the skill set for doing that, you know, how do I read design in a way that's going to gonna free me up to work on other things? And then, you know, with the redesign, and with the goals that I have, for, for my practice, should pretty quickly see the return on the investment with it, right?

Daniel Fava
Yep. Absolutely. Yeah, really important to know your numbers, because then you're going to know how much you're going to want to invest. And also just know, how quickly Are you going to reap the benefits and get that, you know, return? return back?

Unknown Speaker
Right?

Daniel Fava
Yeah, I just recently spoke to actually one of our past clients, I interviewed her. And she's a owner of a group practice in North Carolina. And I was just kind of digging into her business a little bit. I asked her, why did you decide to redesign your website, you know, getting into that, why? And she was just like, because because I knew the numbers, like she was paying all this money to some other company for marketing and building their website. And she knew she redesigned the website and put that investment upfront. I think it was within three, like she knew within three months, she would get that back, because conversions would increase and all that sort of stuff. So it can really drive a lot of your decisions to know, know your numbers and your data.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, yeah. And it's, um, you know, it's a money mindset thing. I think for a lot of us. You know, we do, we do like to be frugal, we like to be able to save money, that kind of thing, but, but you can also be penny wise and dollar poor. When it comes to things of being able to know when to outsource and be able to kind of put, you know, handed off to somebody else that's really better equipped to do this, right.

Unknown Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Gordon Brewer
Well, Daniel, for I know, we're gonna have much more to come. tell folks how they can get in touch with you. And if they want to kind of go through this process of thinking about redesigning their website, how do they how they get in touch with you?

Daniel Fava
Yeah, absolutely. You can go over to private practice elevation, calm, and I've got a podcast over there. But if someone is ready to get started, you can go to private practice elevation comm slash apply, and we've just got a quick little forum there. And then we can hop on a phone call together, see if you're a good fit. And if you are a good fit, then we'll actually schedule A little bit more time where we'll do an exercise similar what we did today really dig into some of the goals and some of the challenges of your practice in business and see how a website can help you overcome those challenges.

Gordon Brewer
Sounds good. Sounds good. So be sure to listen out next week for for the second part of this, we're really going to really just dive into the nuts and bolts and really kind of some of the back end kind of stuff around this particular project.

Daniel Fava
Great, thanks so much, Gordon. Yep.