37 | From Free Consults to Paid Structure: What Increasing Revenue Without Raising Rates Actually Requires

Today's episode was inspired, um, by a conversation-- a coaching conversation I actually had with a coaching client recently, and what it brought up for me was thinking about the difference between busywork and business work.

Now, are you spending time on actions that actually change the bottom line for your business? I want you to think about that.

Are you spending time on actions that are specifically targeted to change the bottom line of your business? Because I want you to think about that.

And don't get me wrong, there's always busywork that we love to do.

Um, for most of us therapists, really, it's the creative stuff, and we're just gonna name it.

And I find this across the board all the time.

We love updating our website, overthinking Instagram posts or trying to get that perfect caption figured out, retaking a video probably for mill- like five million times just to get the right lighting.

Or maybe it's reading our consent forms or organizing the office, putting that, "Well, should I hang the picture here or should I hang the picture there?" Or, "Should I change the organization of this space?" Um, or we're scrolling on Amazon for the perfect piece of artwork, or we're looking on Amazon for that, you know, next thing that we need in our office that somehow is gonna complete the space.

Or we're looking at different tech options or what we could add.

None of that stuff actually moves our revenue, though.

None of that actually creates profits.

None of that actually impacts any of your profit margins.

And yet it's so easy for us to get distracted by the little things that actually don't move the needle.

So why do we do this? And trust me, I've also done this, and I spent years doing the busywork and not doing the business work.

Because the thing about the busywork is that it feels good.

[chuckles] I'm not gonna lie.

It feels like we're doing something.

It's movement, right? And it feels like we're moving in some direction, and some direction is better than no direction.

But I think that we do this because I think we're just a little bit scared.

And not the ge- generic kind of fear of failure kind of fear, because that's not what it was for me, so I'm gonna assume that it's not that for you either.

I think that we're scared of being seen as the kind of therapist who cares about money.

And I really just wanna name this because most of us were trained in a culture that treated focusing on profit as kind of like failure of integrity.

As if the more we cared about our clients, the less you should be allowed to think about revenue.

And I...

That conditioning is in our bones.