← Abundant Practice Podcast
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- [00:00]
Katie Reed
Foreign.
- [00:09]
Alison
Hi, welcome to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm Alison from Abundance Practice Building. I have a nearly diagnosable obsession with helping therapists build sustainable, joy filled private practices. Just like I've done for tens of thousands of therapists across the world. I'm excited to help you too. If you want to fill your practice with ideal clients, we have loads of free resources and paid support. Go to abundance practice building.com Links all right, onto the show. So I've talked about therapy notes on here for years. I could talk about the features and the benefits in my sleep. But there are a couple things I want you to know about therapy notes that doesn't typically make it into an ad script.
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Allison Per
First is that they actually care if
- [00:50]
Alison
you like their platform. They don't only make themselves available on the phone to troubleshoot so you don't pull your hair out when you get stuck. They also take member suggestions and implement those that there's client demand for. Like Therapy Search, an included listing service that helps clients find you internal and external secure messaging, clinical outcome measures to keep an eye on how your clients are progressing. A super smooth, super bill process, Real time eligibility to check on your client's insurance. In my conversations with the employees there at all levels, they all really believe in their product and they want you to love it too. Second, they are proudly independently owned. Why should you care about that?
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Allison Per
Because as soon as venture capital becomes
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Alison
involved, the focus shifts from making customers happy to making investors happy.
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Allison Per
Prices go way up.
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Alison
Innovation plateaus. Making more money with as little output as possible becomes the number one focus. With over 100,000 therapists using their platform, they've been able to stay incredibly successful and they don't have to sacrifice your experience to stay there. You can try two months free@therapynotes.com with the coupon code Abundant.
- [01:58]
Allison Per
Welcome back to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm your host, Allison Per, founder of Abundance Practice Building, and I'm here with my good friend Katie Reed.
- [02:06]
Katie Reed
Hello.
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Allison Per
Katie's been on the pod before and Katie is an expert in both marketing and in AI. And so I've asked her to come on today to help y' all understand how you can use AI without it sounding stupid and salesy and flat and robotic. How there are all these different creative ways that Katie has learned how to use AI that I think could really benefit you guys. So thank you Katie for being here.
- [02:34]
Katie Reed
Yes, hello. I'm excited and we will talk about anything and everything. What do you think? I'm curious for your audience, what are they doing in marketing Right now that they hate doing and that they wish they could offload to someone or something else. Maybe we should start with that question.
- [02:52]
Allison Per
Yeah, I mean all of it. Seriously. Most therapists don't feel like natural marketers eventually, if they join the party or something like that, I teach them that they are natural marketers and they're great at this. But yes, I would say for most of them, writing whether it's writing their website copy or whether it's writing blogs for SEO or these kinds of things feels painful. And they'll go to ChatGPT and they'll be like, here's who I work with. Write me a homepage. And it sucks. Yes.
- [03:25]
Katie Reed
Unfortunately, yes. Yeah, that's so true. Okay, let's get into it. So I'm just gonna riff a little and you can stop me anywhere and dive into extra questions. But I will say this and for your audience, let me actually lead off this podcast. If you are somewhere where you have access to a computer right now, go to your computer. I promise I'm not just selling myself here. I really want you to do this, to get this feedback because some of what I'm going to teach you is coming directly out of the trends that I'm seeing right now and what is working well on websites. So go to KatieRead.com K A T I E R E A D like read a book dot com, hit the green diagnostic button and put your website homepage, the URL into that box there. There's a widget on my page. It will immediately give you. So you'll see some sliders showing how well your website is doing at addressing the four main areas that work in marketing and that we need to address all four of these areas for our marketing to work well. And those are Dr. Which is the emotional push towards something like towards hiring a therapist. Identity. Is this person right for me? Am I right for this person? Do I match into this person's services? Risk? What risk do I have here? How expensive are they? What if I fail at this? All of those things and pattern, which is how well does this person kind of fit into my daily life? Are they a text based therapist? Are they in person? If they're in person, are they near my house? All those types of things. So you're going to immediately get those scores and then you're going to put in your email under those scores and you're going to get a full report of what you need to add to your website right now. And I can tell you, because I've now had A couple hundred therapists, actually. And other. It works on any kind of website, but a lot of therapists are on my list. And so they have been putting their URLs in there. And we're finding something really interesting that people need to think about in the age of AI, which is that so many of us built websites back in the day where our, our homepage was like very short and lovely, and it was a nice Brene Brown quote and a picture of water and some rocks. And we said, hello, and I'm here to help you. And I'm just nice and sweet and soft and lovely. And if you want to read more about my services, here's my 27 different things that I focus in, and here's 27 different pages of my website. And we had to do that. We were taught to do that back in the day for SEO because you wanted your anxiety page to pop up when somebody was searching, you know, anxiety therapy Pittsburgh, you wanted your couples counseling page to pop up. So now, as we've all seen, web search has changed drastically because of AI. Because when you search anything now, what's the first thing you get? You get the AI summary.
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Allison Per
Yeah.
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Katie Reed
What does that mean for us? So what that means for us and what I have been able to observe now across watching hundreds of therapists put. Put their URLs into this widget, is that the therapist websites that are performing so well actually now get all the information onto the first page. It's very different than how we used to do it and how people used to be trained by, like, SEO teachers to do it. So I am not at all saying get rid of your other pages. They're still good. Don't get rid of them. But interestingly, what we actually need to do now is make people do less work, have there be less friction, get all the information right there. So you're going to say, I specialize in X and Y and Z. And here's a little bit about each of those with a learn more button where they can go and learn more, but that really, everything else is still going to be on the page. I take these insurances. This is how I work. This is where my office is or I do online. And you're going to really walk each person through the experience of signing up with you. I used to tell people, just visually have a picture of your friend, have a picture of your waiting room, have a picture of your office, like all those things so that that person right on your homepage doesn't have to make any decisions. They don't have to take any actions, they don't have to click any extra buttons, but they can feel the full walkthrough of coming and starting to contact you and work with you. And because of the way Google search has changed, it's still fine and good to leave your pages up there. But you actually want when AI, when somebody goes to their ChatGPT and says, who's a good anxiety therapist in Pittsburgh? You want the AI to have all the information about you on that homepage so that when it hits your homepage, it's now giving a summary to that person of who you are. And if all you've got up there is like a pretty picture and the Brene Brown quote, it doesn't know enough about you. And the AI won't go through the whole trail of your website to try to dig and find that information. It'll just move on to the next one. Make sense. And so really, making a more robust homepage is one of those things you could literally go do in an hour tonight, just adding that stuff into your homepage. And it's a great way to immediately be adding more value and be getting found even more easily in AI type searches.
- [08:55]
Allison Per
Yeah, yeah. And don't be afraid to be redundant
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Katie Reed
with your other pages. Yes, totally.
- [09:01]
Allison Per
I know that's something that's held me back in the. In the past is like, well, I don't want to, but people don't read everything. So many of you are like, I don't take insurance. And half my calls, even though my website says it all over that I don't take insurance, people still call and they're like, do you take Blue Cross Blue Shield?
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Alison
So people don't read.
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Katie Reed
Right, Right.
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Allison Per
They don't read all.
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Katie Reed
So, Right.
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Allison Per
It's okay to be redundant. I would say it's beneficial to be redundant because it also tells any AI search, any Google search, there's consistency here.
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Katie Reed
Exactly, exactly. And so I totally agree with that. And we've all gotten a million of those calls where we're like, I thought I said that already. But you're absolutely right. We don't read. And I honestly think more and more, the trut truth is because people have the tool of AI available to them, they're not even reading your whole website. Sometime the behavior that we're seeing is somebody takes your URL, they don't even read it all. They stick it into chat and say, is this a good therapist for me? Well, this is why you need chat. You need to make sure for one thing, that the Robots can read your website. This a lot of websites that were made a couple years ago, before AI came along, they can actually block bots. And you might have no idea. And that's another good reason to go through the widget on my site, because if it comes back to you, it tries a couple different ways to read your website. And if it comes back to you and says, I can't read this, but you can copy and paste in your homepage, that means none of the AI are easily reading your website. And so whatever you built on, go in there and figure out, how do I make it so the robots can read my website? And this is googleable, or this is. You can go to your own cloud or chat account and find out that answer. So start there, make sure they can read your website. Get as much as possible on your homepage now. Now, to answer your question, how do I make it not sound like crap? So here's my feeling and my own personal philosophy about AI, which people can take or leave. I think we should use AI to help us save time, as long as it's not costing us quality.
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Alison
Yes.
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Katie Reed
And so let me give you my personal example of that. I know a lot of people want AI to do their writing for them. It would save a tremendous amount of time if I had AI do my writing for me. Writing for me, I consider my primary skill. I consider it the one thing that I was good at ever since I was a little kid. When I give over writing to AI and try to have it right for me, I absolutely hate everything it produces. And there has not been any amount of me loading up content samples or showing previous emails or previous. There has not been any amount of me doing that that has actually produced something where I think, oh, the AI has beat my quality of writing. Now, if I hated writing and I wasn't good at it and it wasn't my skill, then the AI would not only save me time, it would produce a more quality product. And so if you're that person and you're like, I freaking hate having to write this stuff, then you should use it for that. If you're more like me, where you enjoy it and you know that you have a quality product, I think that more and more the AI revolt against the quote, unquote AI slop. And just the fact that we're all getting so used to what AI writing looks like more and more, I think that human voice is going to be such a commodity.
- [12:31]
Alison
Yeah.
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Katie Reed
This is why when I write my newsletters, like I put on the top Always written by me, not chatgpt. Because I want people to know I spent way too long yesterday writing this because it's important to me that it's my voice going out each week. And so if you are that person, I know it's tempting to be like, I'm gonna just train this robot until it can write like me. And at the same time, I do think there's a diminishing return in there.
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Alison
Yeah.
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Allison Per
Yeah.
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Katie Reed
And so for me, at least. Yeah, that's the marker. Go ahead.
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Alison
Yeah.
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Allison Per
And I think knowing. Knowing your skill level. Cause I also write all of my newsletters. Like, it's really important to me. There's stories about my life and what's Claude gonna say about that? You know, like, Claude doesn't know me. So there's that. If. If you're not a great writer, you can ask AI to write for you, but I need you to be like, I want you to go through it so well. You're annoyed that it almost feels like a waste of time because it took so much time for you to reread it. You could have written it yourself if you had the skill. If you don't have the skill, that's fine. Does ChatGPT does. But I want you to, like, be like, no, I don't like this sentence. I want it to feel more like this. You don't have to edit each sentence.
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Katie Reed
Your.
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Allison Per
But you can ask for a different feel, a different vibe. You can be like, that's. Actually, my client's not worried about that. They're worried about this because AI doesn't know your people anywhere near like you do.
- [14:02]
Katie Reed
You know your people, right? Completely. I love that. I love that that's so important. Yeah. And I think in terms of therapists in general, if you're really looking at AI and you're like, I'm using it to chat, like you might be using it for maybe some, like, casual case consultations. You know, send me more information about. I had this new client come in, and I didn't know much about this issue they were coming in with. Where can I go read more. Those types of things, I think are great, and they can definitely cut our learning time on stuff and be really helpful. The thing that I have found most helpful in terms of running a practice, figuring out what you need to do in the background. Alison is in a program of mine right now that we're calling it the Incubator. But it's basically teaching how to build a dream team of just the couple of AI employees that you need to be able to do what we just said, run more efficiently without losing quality. So what we do in there, and everybody can do this on their own as well. And if you need help, I can help you with this. But we basically create. There are a ton of people out there right now that are like, buy my 150 AI employee pack. Buy my 8 billion AI employees. That got me to $11 billion. You just don't need it. And it becomes such crazy overkill that people are building a lot of complexity because it sounds like a shiny object. And to me, I'm like, I just need simplicity. And so we build out a dream team. So the dream team that we built out, it has a strategist. And the strategist is probably the AI employee that I have that I talk to the most. The strategist employee knows everything about my business. And like we were just saying earlier today in a meeting, I was able to use it twice this week when opportunities came my way that both sounded kind of like shiny objects, but I was able to bring them into the strategist. And the strategist employee was able to say, you know, Katie, if I look at all your goals and I look at this opportunity, it's not such an opportunity that it seems like for you, it's going to be this much of a time burn for this little of a result. And so it was able to help me actually say no to two things, things that would have taken time and not produced a result. That's super helpful for me because I can get shiny object about a bunch of stuff, you know? And so we do that. We build out a copywriter. We build out what I call a social media repurposer, which is, at least for me, it's like, if I have a newsletter, I'm proud of the newsletter. I don't want to then have to chop it up into LinkedIn posts. So I have an AI employee where I have given it the clear instruction, like, you can't change my words, but just chop it up for Instagram, chop it up for a carousel, chop it up for LinkedIn. And then we have a call evaluator, which I do not advise, obviously, for therapy calls, but if you're doing coaching or you're doing something that doesn't involve protected health information, we have a sales call evaluator and a coaching call evaluator. I actually love these two employees, partly because Allison and I were both saying we both hate sales calls and we're not good at them, and we don't enjoy doing them. And so a sales call evaluator is so good for me because it will show me my trends of, oh, you're never really trying to push towards the close. And you're always just chatting with people and giving them ideas instead of selling them into your program. And I'm like, guilty as charged. But it's good for me to become aware of those patterns that I have. I think about it so much more the next time. And then my one last employee that I have is actually a visibility employee. So this is an employee that goes out and looks for opportunities, like places I should apply to speak podcasts, I should apply to be a guest on any place else that maybe is a conference that my ideal clients might be hanging out at and I should think about buying a ticket for next year. So that's what my visibility employee does. And that again is perfect because how long would it take me to go research a million podcasts? Way too long. But if I've got this employee that knows my whole business and knows what kind of audience I want to get in front of now, it's literally a two minute process of me writing go and pushing a button and it goes and does its job. It's great.
- [18:21]
Allison Per
And that one would be like, that's a good example of something that could be great for therapists who want to do more speaking.
- [18:27]
Katie Reed
Yes.
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Allison Per
Or who are really like, want to be thought leaders.
- [18:31]
Alison
Yes.
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Allison Per
It's an opportunity to, instead of having to have a virtual assistant hunt that down or spending your non clinical time doing that, you can just have AI.
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Katie Reed
And I honestly think, think, I think every therapist is in a position to become a thought leader on some area that is of interest to them. And that can be this sort of like intimidating phrase like you have to go be some big fancy person up on a giant stage somewhere. I don't even think it's that. I just think people are desperate for the information that therapists have. People are struggling in their lives. They wish they knew the stuff that is just second nature to you as a therapist and that you don't realize how valuable it is because it's just the sea that you swim in every day. And even just publishing information about any one niche or one area that you're passionate about, boom, you're a thought leader. And that, that is massively valuable to the world. Like, we build our wealth, our everything we build in the world on how much we're able to help other people, on how much we're able to influence and interact with and improve other people's lives. And so being able to serve maybe the 20 clients on your caseload, but also serve a couple thousand people from SPE or podcasting or publishing or any of those things, that just grows you even more.
- [19:53]
Allison Per
Absolutely. I'm trying to think of like other stuck places in marketing that AI can help with for therapists. I mean, I think the strategy employee type thing can also be really helpful because therapists will get in slumps. They'll be like, well, I've got a website and I'm networking and I have a psych today and now I the end. Yeah, well, we certainly walk you through all that in the abundance party.
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Alison
Exactly.
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Allison Per
It can be really helpful to be like, okay, well now I know I want to do speaking. I need those opportunities. But I also need to be really clear about what's going to make for great referrals.
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Katie Reed
Yep.
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Allison Per
Like what's my topic? What is going to be interesting based on the people I'm speaking to? Because if you're speaking directly to your potential clients, that's a really different talk than if you're speaking to other referral sources.
- [20:45]
Katie Reed
Yes, completely. I've even had things where if I was going to a local networking event, I have gone to my AI beforehand and been like, this is a local networking event. These are the kind of people I think that are part of this networking group. What should my little elevator pitch or my little two second, you know, what do you do while you're standing there with strangers? What should I say in this room? Because me going on and on about like, well, I have a marketing framework, blah, blah, blah, like some plumber doesn't care. I need to adjust what I'm talking about for the room that I'm in. And being able to do that can be so eye opening because we do get in our ruts where we're just used to saying the same thing all the time.
- [21:27]
Allison Per
Yeah, absolutely.
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Katie Reed
You're exactly right on that. You know the one other area that I find it saves me a lot of time and this is more for therapists who have spent time in Canva creating like social media posts and things like that. I find Canva to be such a time suck and a time drain because you can get in there, want to make a really pretty post and spend ages on it. And now with AI tools like Claude Design, you can just literally upload your brand colors and the fonts that you like and it can do all of that stuff for you so quickly and then you just post and then boom.
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Allison Per
And if you don't like it you could be like, I want fewer words on that slide. It's not like you're having to like mess with it on Canva.
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Katie Reed
Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's a huge time saver in terms of marketing in general. I would also use it, frankly. If you're not in love with your Psych Today profile, why not do a refresh? Why not let Claude or Chat analyze your Psych Today profile, Have it analyze against other Psych Today profiles, ones that it thinks are really high performing. Why not go in and do a little refresh on that? That would be a 30 minute project with AI and you never know what kind of new results you might get from it.
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Alison
Yeah.
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Katie Reed
And for the advanced.
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Allison Per
The advanced user, yes. Months ago you started talking to me about Vibe coding. And as you know, I've Vibe coded a few different websites since then. Which is basically you go into Claude and you're like, I need a website and I want it to feel like this. And here's some colors I like. I am not visual. Right. I can use a squarespace template, no problem. And I have many a website. But with Vibe coding, everything I've created Vibe Coded is a thousand times better than anything else I've ever created. Because. Because it will put in. It makes sense to have a square to highlight this one particular thing that I would have fought squarespace with or at one point, WordPress. Hell. So like, to be able to create a website like that is huge. Huge. Huge. I love it.
- [23:33]
Katie Reed
And I am just like you. I've built a million websites in my time on a million templates in different places. And my one that I love the most, I have a website buyer B U y E R psych P S-Y-C-.com and that is my entire castle guard marketing framework.
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Allison Per
So cute.
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Katie Reed
I love it so much. Like it's my baby and I. That entire thing was brought to you by Vibe coding. It was me having an impression in my head of what I thought I wanted this to be like visually. And I went into, I forget it might have been Gemini or something and said, I want to have these little grumpy guard images and I want them to kind of be like this and kind of be like that. Went back and forth until I finally got little guards I was happy with. And then I do my websites on something called Replit. Replit is just a vibe coding site. There's other ones that are similar. Lovable is another one. These are things where you can just go in with an idea for a website page or an App or whatever you want. And you're literally just talking to the robot and saying, I think I want it kind of like this, or I think I want it kind of like that, or. Or maybe there's a gorgeous website you saw, and you bring over a screenshot and you say, build me something that's as pretty as this one and you give it something to go off of and you just go in. And because of vibe coding, I'm not a technical person at all, I'm not a coder, but I was able to go in on that website and be like, would it be possible to make little interactive parts of this website, like little sliders that the person could push their finger on the slider and it's like, sure. Boom. 30 seconds later, done. Here's your slider. Boggles my mind, because I could never do anything cool like that on. So you can have all these cool ideas now and you've got a little robot that knows how to code it. That is massive. It's massive.
- [25:24]
Allison Per
And you're not having to pay $20 a month for Squarespace or anything like that.
- [25:29]
Katie Reed
Right, Right. Completely.
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Allison Per
Which is pretty cool.
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Katie Reed
Yeah. Which is great. Well, and we were just talking in a meeting we were in earlier, there was a therapist who is getting a lot of traffic to her site, but she wants to be able to start collecting emails because she knows that she works in a N where people come to the site kind of in crisis and then they, like, panic a little bit and they don't take action right then. And so we were talking about different ways she could start collecting emails from her website, having ways that people could get a little bit of valuable information from her via helpful AI doing the thing and sending them what they need. And that way she's starting to collect emails and then she can write to them little by little over to the time, so that when they're ready, they already feel like they know her. She's not just a website they bumped past at 2am one day and never thought about again. She's now actually capturing that information, staying in touch, being a helpful resource, and boom, when they're ready, they're there.
- [26:29]
Allison Per
Right? Yeah. So many, so many different ways that AI can be helpful for marketing. You and I have acknowledged that there are some real faults with AI and when you're not saying no problem, you know, but it can be very beneficial. It's a train that's not going to stop. If you're already using AI and you're just interested in using it in a much more efficient way for marketing, then know that that's possible and hopefully you can use some of what we talked about today. Katie's going to be in the abundance party. She's going to do a training later this month. Month. And so if you're in the party, you'll get to come in and ask her all sorts of questions. And if you're not the party, you should join so that you can ask her lots of questions.
- [27:11]
Katie Reed
It's my favorite party. It's the best party.
- [27:15]
Allison Per
Amazing. Thank you so much, Katie.
- [27:17]
Katie Reed
I appreciate it. Thank you.
- [27:19]
Allison Per
And I'll make sure we've got everything in the show notes for y' all to make it easy.
- [27:23]
Katie Reed
Yeah. Bye.
- [27:24]
Alison
Bye. If you're ready for a much easier practice, Therapy notes is the way to go. Go to therapynotes.com and use the promo code abund for two months free. 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.