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Rebecca Smith
Foreign.
Alison Puryear
Welcome to Ask Abundance. Y' all ask the questions about having a fun and thriving practice. We answer them. We have a worksheet for you today so you can bring this answer into your life. If you want support in your practice, we have you covered with on demand or one on one support. Links for the worksheet and support are in the Show Notes. Can't get enough Ask Abundance? Check out our YouTube channel for the entire library.
Podcast Host
The VC backed platforms made promises and then they changed the pay, they changed the rules and they made it clear that those promises were never really about us. I built platform to private pay for therapists who were done being dependent on companies that have already shown them who
Alison Puryear
they are, but who aren't ready to
Podcast Host
blow up their income to get out. You don't have to leap. I'll show you how to bring in private pay clients while you stay on the platforms for stability and then replace graduating clients with private pay clients until the math works in your favor. If you've been circling this decision, hit the link in the Show Notes. Doors to this cohort close July 3rd.
Alison Puryear
Hey hey. Welcome back to Ask Abundance. Today I'm joined by Rebecca Smith. Rebecca is a limitless practice grad who came aboard Team Abundance. She has a premium fee private pay practice in New Orleans and is really great at helping Abundance therapists imagine what's possible for them. She's going to tell us today's question.
Rebecca Smith
Yes, I am. Thanks Alison. This one says I've been networking consistently for almost a year. Coffee chats, emails to referral sources, showing up to events and I feel like I'm doing all the right things, but the referrals just aren't coming in the way I expected. I'm starting to wonder if I'm missing something fundamental about how networking actually works or if I just need to keep going and trust the process. How do you know if your networking strategy needs a real overhaul versus just one more time?
Alison Puryear
I love this question I feel about networking okay, yes. All right. So first, I do want to thank our sponsor, TherapyNotes. I've talked about them for years and know their features by heart, but what truly sets them apart is that they genuinely care about your experience. It's not just about troubleshooting. They actively implement user suggested features like Therapy search, secure messaging, and their AI notes feature. Therapy fuel Everyone at TherapyNotes believes in the product and they want want you to love it too. Plus, they're independently owned, which means no venture capital and no pressure to prioritize their investors over customers. This independence allows Them to keep their prices fair, focus on innovation and prioritize customer experience. With over 100,000 therapists already on board, they've proven you don't have to compromise success for quality. If you're ready to see for yourself, try TherapyNotes free for two months with code abundant@therapynotes.com okay, so there are two things top of mind for me. The very first one is niche. If you are not niched, if you're a generalist or if your niche is not a niche, a lot of people have non niche niches, then you are unlikely to get referrals because you are not going to be the person they immediately think of when they see that client in front of them or on the phone. So that's one of the first things I'm thinking of is like you have got to make sure you are niched and you are communicating that niche in a way that people really immediately think of you as the go to for that.
Rebecca Smith
Yeah. And like a not niche niche is like I like working with people who are really ready for change.
Alison Puryear
Right. Or even like a really popular one that's not really a niche is I love working with women in transition and New York.
Rebecca Smith
Yeah. Yes.
Alison Puryear
If you're talking about trans women, sure, that is different. But if you're like, maybe that's what
Rebecca Smith
they meant this whole time.
Alison Puryear
No, it's not, I promise you. Because when I ask him, do you mean women who just moved here? Do you mean empty nesters? Do you mean women whose kids are going to kindergarten?
Rebecca Smith
Do you mean women going through divorce?
Alison Puryear
Yeah. And they're like, yeah, those, these women are looking for very different things.
Rebecca Smith
Yes.
Alison Puryear
Like that I'm never like Rebecca, I'm just, I'm having such a hard time, just such a woman in transition.
Rebecca Smith
You seem like you're in such transition, Alice.
Alison Puryear
I mean if you have therapist friends, maybe, but maybe yeah. Normal people, but.
Rebecca Smith
Exactly. It feels like if you're going to these networking things and nobody knows who to send you, they're not going to send you anybody.
Alison Puryear
Right? Yes.
Rebecca Smith
If you're not a hell no for some people, then you're never a hell yes, exactly. Like it has to be that specific niche.
Alison Puryear
And I think the other maybe like specific to networking. The biggest error I see is people who are not following up with people. They're networking twice a week with a brand new person every time. It's just a bunch of one night stands and no second dates.
Rebecca Smith
Networking.
Alison Puryear
Ghosting is how. There we go. And then it's because they don't even Realize the follow up is where the juices they think, okay, well, I've met 53 people this year.
Rebecca Smith
Yeah.
Alison Puryear
Why aren't I getting referrals? It's because they also met, you know, between five and 53 people this year and they're, they've forgotten you because you didn't actually form a relationship network. Networking is actually literally just relationships.
Rebecca Smith
Yeah. It's not a bouquet of flowers, it's a living plant. Yes. Like, yeah, I went on a networking. You can take, you can take that one if you want. I went up to a networking dinner last night with, with a, with a friend who, she's a therapist. We did, we met once before. She sent me a new client. I was like, we gotta go to dinner. And I, my kids were like, why are you going to dinner, mama? And I was like, so the way that my job works is if people are friends with me, they give me clients. And that is how it is. It is about friendships. It is about relationship. You don't have to be buddy buddy, but you have to be friendly. You have to be a real person. I think the bottom line for this one, does their networking strategy need an overhaul? Yes, it does. It's not working. This is not working for them.
Alison Puryear
Yeah. And I think too it's also looking at like, who are you networking with if you're going to like young professionals of your city? Plumbers aren't likely. Like, if you're chatting it up with a plumber, like, maybe he has a friend or somebody he's really close with that he could refer to you if your niche is right for them. But he's not going to have a constant flow of potential referrals in the way a primary care provider will.
Rebecca Smith
Right.
Alison Puryear
And so sometimes people are like this person said, I'm going to these events. If these events aren't full of people who are like, gosh, I really wish I had a therapist to refer to for X, Y or Z, then you're probably wasting your time. I'll also say if your niche is someone everyone treats, this is tough. And this may be your niche. A real popular niche right now is women who have it all together on the outside but are falling apart on the inside. And yeah, that's a niche. You can speak to your specific ideal clients, daily lived experience of that. And she will see herself on your website and be like, it's this therapist. But if that person calls me, I'm still going to see them probably.
Rebecca Smith
Yeah.
Alison Puryear
And so that doesn't mean you have to change your niche. It just means you have to network more, and you need to network with people who aren't treating those people. Maybe a couple's therapist, people who only work with couples who can send you the wife or again, primary care providers, because they see this polished woman come in, but she's got tummy troubles and she's getting on SSRIs and, you know, those kinds of things.
Rebecca Smith
Or pediatric therapists send the moms to you. But the other thing is, you might not have to change your niche, but you might have to narrow it within that scope.
Alison Puryear
Yes.
Rebecca Smith
So, for example, what you just said definitely used to be my niche, and I really leaned hard into it. And then I started to realize that my friend, who probably had a very similar niche, her angle on that was a very, like, depressive burnout angle. And my angle was a more like overthinking anxious angle. And then I really started to see a lot more traction when I went even further into, like, more and more and more and more and more and more and more narrow. So for me, that was ocd. And I described it as, you might be on a spectrum between overthinking, anxiety and ocd, and, like, we don't know where you are on that, but that's a very different angle than the burnout angle or the, like, doing too much for the kindergarten class angle or whatever.
Alison Puryear
Absolutely. Yeah.
Rebecca Smith
I'll also say one thing that kind of. Kind of stuck out to me here. A lot of my friends and I have been practicing our elevator pitching and trying to have a very wonderfully consistent and clear way of describing your niche in a networking situation and having a different elevator pitch depending on, are you talking to a potential client? Are you talking to a psychiatrist? And my friends and I are calling it like a telescoping elevator pitch. So you should have one that you can say in 10 seconds. You should also then be able to balloon it out to a minute. Are they still listening? Cool. Two minutes. How do we keep going? Right. But if that first bit isn't going to grab them and be very clear about what your niche is, you might lose them in the networking process.
Alison Puryear
Yeah. I mean, I think about it like social media. You need a hook.
Rebecca Smith
You need a hook. Yeah.
Alison Puryear
The very first thing you say needs to be like, oh, you know, interesting, or at least clear. It doesn't even have to be interesting. It can just be clear.
Rebecca Smith
Yeah.
Alison Puryear
So making sure that you practice that in the car, in the shower, in the mirror, I don't care. Just practice it so that it feels crisp and nobody is left being like, wait, who?
Rebecca Smith
So also say, probably are doing so much time on this one, but it's such a good one. Something that you, Allison Puryear, have taught me is that marketing, a lot of good marketing, is about giving something very valuable away for free because then people want more of it. And in networking, depending on who you're networking with, but if you're networking with other clinicians in any other professional who might have your client also as a client or adjacent, the really valuable thing you're giving them is not a free talk about your niche. It's clients. They want clients. You want clients. You don't have to actually give them clients. But if you approach the networking situation like, hey, who can I send you? Yeah, instead of, please send me these people. If you say, who can I send you? They're like, wow, Rebecca was like, super nice, and she seems really generous. I'm gonna send her a client.
Podcast Host
Right.
Rebecca Smith
That vibe is so helpful in networking. And you might not even talk about your clients that much. You might just be like, hey, we're friendly. I'm so glad I have you. I'm gonna send you these people. And that's it.
Alison Puryear
Yeah. And I think we so often, when we're trying to build our caseload approach, networking is like, what can I get out of this? Instead of, like, part of what you get at it is like, really good people to refer to because you're not needing to treat everybody and everything. So, yeah, making sure that you are building your resources for referrals as well. Amazing.
Podcast Host
Awesome.
Alison Puryear
Well, thanks, Rebecca. And we do have our usual free worksheet. If you are on the pod, you can look in the show notes for the link. And if you're on social media, you can put the word sheets or worksheet and I will send it to you. And I'm going to put in who to network with, because I think most people don't realize there's this huge breadth of people that you can network with based exclusively on who you see clinically. And so this kind of helps you work through that.
Rebecca Smith
So I need to look at that one again. I'm grabbing it.
Alison Puryear
Yeah.
Podcast Host
Awesome.
Alison Puryear
All right, I'll see you next week.
Rebecca Smith
Bye.
Alison Puryear
If you're ready for a much easier practice, TherapyNotes is the way to go. Go to therapynotes.com and use the promo code abundant for two months free.
Podcast Host
I hope that helped.
Alison Puryear
Please get in touch with any of your questions for askabundance. If you're listening, you probably need some support building your practice. If you're a super newbie. Grab our free checklist using the link in the show notes. I'd love for you to follow, rate and review, but I really want you to share this episode with a therapist friend. Let's help all our colleagues build what they want.
Podcast: Abundant Practice Podcast
Episode: #768 – Why Your Networking Isn’t Leading to Referrals
Host: Allison Puryear
Guest: Rebecca Smith
Date: June 20, 2026
In this episode of the Abundant Practice Podcast, host Allison Puryear is joined by Rebecca Smith to tackle a frequent and frustrating question for private practice therapists: “Why isn’t my networking turning into actual client referrals?” Together, they break down the common networking mistakes therapists make, clarify the misunderstood concept of “niching,” and discuss practical strategies to transform networking from a dead-end exercise into consistent client generation. The tone is warm, candid, and filled with practical anecdotes for any therapist struggling to build a thriving referral-based private practice.
If you’re struggling to turn networking into referrals, use Allison’s worksheet (linked in show notes/social media) for practical steps on who to network with, and focus on clarity, relationship-building, and giving generously to others in your professional community.