Summer School Lesson 4: Get your first clients

Hello and welcome to the Business of Psychology Summer School edition.

Over the six weeks of the English school holidays, we are doing things a little bit differently around here. If you're looking to start up an independent practice in September, then this is the place to be as each week I'm dropping in with a quick lesson and tasks that can be completed in 30 minutes or less from your sun lounger.

By the end of the six weeks, you will feel ready to step into your practice in September, confident that you can find clients and have a safe and viable business foundation.

Each week, the lessons will go out on this podcast feed, but if you want the weekly tasks, workbooks, private community, and a live session with me at the end of the summer to hold you accountable and make sure nothing stands in your way, you will need to sign up here: PBS Summer School

I would love to see you in the community.

Full show notes of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links & References:

PBS Summer School Sign Up

PBS Start and Grow

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

Week 4: Get your first clients

Week four of summer school is here! And now we finally get to talk about marketing. But probably not the kind of marketing that you're expecting me to talk about if you've spent a lot of time, like I have, in the online marketing space, getting all kinds of ads about Instagram and Google and all of that sent to you all the time.

So the question we need to start with when we're thinking about marketing a private practice is, if you were looking for a therapist, where would you look first? And I'm willing to bet that your answer was not, I would scroll through Instagram looking for a therapist. Most of us would start by asking people that we trust, professionals, friends, family, for recommendations. And the best time investment you can make in the early days of your practice is to make sure that you are top of mind for the people your ideal clients are likely to go to for recommendations. So how to get started with what we call relationship marketing?

Local business networking

You can start with local business networking. These events are full of people who might know your ideal clients. Go with a list of professionals or businesses that you think would be useful to your ideal client group and aim to find out enough about them to decide whether you would refer to them. If you do that you're very likely to find that they want to refer to you too.

Different networking groups will attract different people. So for example, because I work in perinatal, I'm looking for people that would very often see people either in pregnancy or in the early days of parenthood. So that might be nutritionists, it might be personal trainers, it might be physios, baby yoga teachers, private midwives, massage therapists. So I really only bother with events where I'm likely to come into contact with those sorts of businesses.

If I go to an event and I find out that it's not right, the right people aren't there, then I'm going to choose a different one for the next month. It's not that it won't be interesting, I'll still make a real effort to understand people's businesses and have some really interesting chats, but it's probably not the best time investment to keep going back.

So have that list in your mind of who you want to meet and make sure you're going to an event where those people are.

Join local mental health professional groups

Another way of building that referral network is to join local groups of other mental health professionals. Alongside regular networking, it's really important to gather those professionals around you who are in a similar field to you.

I'm a firm believer that there's no such thing as competition in what we do. Sadly, there are more than enough people that need our services. So gathering a network of other local psychologists or therapists around you is really helpful in order to help you provide a good service. It may be that these are people that you refer to if you're overcapacity or somebody comes to you needing a different specialism, and I think it's really good to have strong relationships with those people that you do refer out to.

It may also be that this becomes a peer supervision type group where you can ask for advice. If you have a risk situation for example, having a local network who understand the difficulties and know where to signpost people to is really valuable. And you can also help extend each other's knowledge, so it's a really valuable resource and I really, really recommend it.

Link up with other health professionals

You also want to make sure that you make some effort to link up with other health professionals, maybe outside of mental health, but who might have contact with your ideal client. You can find those people in the same way that your ideal client would find them, probably through Google, maybe you'll meet some at networking events, but often it's through Google and reaching out to those people. Again, you're approaching them with this idea of, okay, I might need to refer to you, so I want to understand more about if our values align and the services that you offer.

It can be really difficult to get a response because health professionals are really busy. For example, people often have real trouble getting hold of private GPs. So one way of approaching that is to think about what you might be able to offer them that would be worth them investing their time in. For example, for somebody like me, I might put together a really short 20 minute talk that I can deliver on the mental health impact of severe pregnancy sickness. This is something that very often other health professionals who are not in mental health don't know very much about, and they might really struggle to know what to do if they see a patient that they see is suffering. So I might just put together something really short about how you would identify that somebody was struggling and where you can signpost them to, including charities, the NHS route, and that's why it's good to have a local network so you know what that route would be… and also talking about my services too. So that's a good tip for that.

Use co-working spaces

It's also a good idea, if you're thinking about using any space outside of your home for working, to use a co-working space and chat to the people there. This can be a really great way of seeing the same people week in, week out, and really getting your name out there in the local community.

Often the people that run these spaces are quite invested in advertising the people that work there and trying to create a real business ecosystem of people that refer to each other. So again, this can be a really nice way of building those long term referral networks.

My top tips for building your network

It's all about being reciprocal: Network with people you want to refer to and be explicit about that intention.

Personalised messages

Only ever send messages to people that are really personal and show you've really thought about them, their clients, and the value that you can add for each other's businesses. Don't copy and paste the same outreach message to people. I find, because I often get a mind blank, because I'm an introvert, I'm quite shy, I do start with a template, but I'll always make sure that I adapt it to the person I'm sending it to. Otherwise, we just get so many, don't we? If you're anything like me, I get around 20 of those messages a day from people that basically just want to talk to my audience and haven't really got very much interest in helping me in any way. And you just delete them. So making sure that there's something different about your message that is thoughtful and personal is really important.

Making the most out of networking sessions

I often get asked, how do you make the most of a networking session? So if you make the effort to go networking, how are you going to make sure that you actually get some return on that?

I think something that's really key is preparation. So find out who is going to be at this event before you go. Most of them will have a list of attendees that you can look at before you go, so you can pick out, okay, I want to talk to this person, this person, this person, and this person, because I'm pretty sure that they're going to have contact with my ideal client group. Make sure if you have that information to hand, you know then who you want to speak to at the event. And if it's got their contact details, you could even send them a message in advance, saying ‘Hi, I'm Rosie, I'm really looking forward to meeting you at this event. It would be great to talk about mental health because I think that we have some of the same clients, so let's make sure we make time for a chat’. It's a really great thing to do if you've got access to that...