Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses

7. Paul Carrola Interview: Bridging from Graduate to LPC Associate

November 03, 2022 Dr. Kate Walker Ph.D., LPC/LMFT Supervisor Season 1 Episode 7
Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses
7. Paul Carrola Interview: Bridging from Graduate to LPC Associate
Show Notes Transcript

#7  Hey Texas counseling grad students - things are not like they used to be. You've noticed, I'm sure. But the best ways of adapting to an ever-changing practice landscape are less than obvious. So what should you do to make sure you successfully bridge from graduate school to LPC Associate license? What are the pitfalls you need to watch out for and the strategies that actually work right now? I’m so excited to have Dr. Paul Carrola on the show to share his expertise with us. Dr. Carrola is among the most knowledgeable counselor educators in Texas and he absolutely delivers in this essential episode. This chat is jam-packed with golden nuggets for counselors at any level. We get a supervision masterclass, an in-depth look at the benchmarks that graduate students must hit, and exam tips galore. This is one of the most valuable podcast episodes to listen to, so enjoy! Show notes and more at https://katewalkertraining.com/paul-carrola-interview-bridging-from-graduate-to-lpc-associate/

Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.

Now, when I talk about tripling my numbers, what does that mean? Well, those of you who have worked with me before, you know that I believe in something called KPIs, or key performance indicators. Now, I did not make that up. Somebody way smarter than I am made up the term key performance indicators. But these KPIs are specific, measurable, trackable data that you can judge, look at, measure, to see in an instant how your business is doing. So one of those metrics, obviously, is income. You can track income over the course of a quarter or a year or over five years, just depending on how you want to set those business goals.

So I do it through sales, I do it through income, for my clients, for AchieveBalance.org, my therapy practice. I track phone calls that go unanswered, phone calls that are answered, and then conversion calls, those are folks who actually go through the phone call with a person and then book that initial session. So what you see behind me, I know if you’re listening to me on the podcast or you’re not able to see what I’m pointing at, this is my white board. I love white boards – they are just my happy place. I like the squeak that they make, I like to wipe it off, I like the different colored markers. 

So what I have behind me are metrics. This is for my side hustle, which has now become my primary business, Kate Walker Training course sales from 2019 through basically today. That’s how I can measure and tell you with absolute conviction that my business has tripled since I started working with my business coach – my business coach who was recommended to me by the amazing Cyndi Doyle and has nothing to do with my industry. So we call this cross-pollination, right, when you are working with an industry that isn’t necessarily yours. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s not. In this case, it was wonderful, and I was really, really happy to be able to do that.

So what I was able to do, when I started working with my business coach, it was in something called a mastermind group. Now, a mastermind group is basically a small group of five to seven people, and they hold each other accountable, and about every three meetings, you, the participant, has to talk about something you’re working on, so there’s a whole lot of accountability. Well, I got into my mastermind group, and there I was with food bloggers, a travel blogger, a fitness blogger who was also a medical doctor, another food blogger who was an ultramarathon runner, and a woman in Chicago who is an Instagram star for young moms with kids called MostlyUnderControl. And I was really skeptical at first, I was like, wait a second, what am I going to learn from this? And it blew my mind – obviously, I have the numbers to prove it. 

So with participating in the mastermind group, with being held accountable for my own stuff, I was able to learn how to produce some other key performance indicators that would show me that my content was leading to sales. Now, I’m going to talk about that with you today in terms of your side hustle, if that’s what you’re here for, great, awesome, that’s wonderful. I’m going to talk to it also in terms of building a client load, building a case load. My only caveat is you have to give me some grace today because I’m fighting a head cold – actually, I think I’m at the tail end of it, but there will be some coughing. I will try to remember to hit the mute button. But as I said in Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses Thursday Thirty this morning, the good thing about head colds is it makes you sound super sexy. So maybe if I end up coughing, I’ll just do it sexily. That was a horrible word – I’m never going to use that word again.

Alright, so let’s get going. Number one, let’s talk about cornerstone content. So when you blog, if you’re a food blogger, one of the things to remember as a food blogger is something called your secret recipe or a special sauce, your superpower. So if you are a food blogger, let’s say it’s your recipe for a sourdough bread starter. Now, why is that important? Because you can use that sourdough starter recipe in lots of other recipes, right? So it could be bread over here, it could be pizza over here, it could be rolls or some sort of bread thing over there. But what that means is you are going to be linking to yourself, right? Providing those internal backlinks that Google loves. So cornerstone content is one of the ways that we can create, as a counselor, this ability to link to ourselves, which increases that Google love as it crawls through our content and hopefully leads to that first page.

So when we talk about cornerstone content, I don’t want you to get this confused with niche-building. Obviously, my food blogger friends aren’t all like, we are champion sourdough bread makers! Not, that’s not what they’re doing; they’re simply looking for one thing that they can intersperse in several recipes. And that cornerstone content can be for their vegan recipes, it can be for their barbecue recipes, it can be in lots of different meal plans. So that cornerstone content becomes what you’re known for. 

Now, let’s talk about with counselors. With counselors, I often tell you, you’ve got to position yourself as an expert in your community. Again, this doesn’t have to be a niche. This can just simply be you positioning yourself as the go-to person who knows all the people and all the recent sources, you have great referrals, you have that ten-minute consultation where you’re able to answer phones quickly, you’re able to get to people same day. So whatever it is that is your secret sauce, that is your superpower, that can start to become your cornerstone content. Then, you’re able to position yourself as an expert in that cornerstone content.

So, for example, I could choose for my cornerstone content anything having to do with the laws surrounding supervision. I could really drill down and say remediation plans. So I could make sure that I’m writing lots of articles and then link it back to my articles about remediation plans. I could link it back to my articles about supervision. So these don’t have to be long articles. And don’t worry, I’m not just talking about articles – you could be doing a podcast, you could be doing a YouTube video. There are ways to make these all work together. So whether you have a niche, if you do, that’s wonderful, there’s your cornerstone content. If you don’t, that’s alright, you can also position yourself as the expert in the community and being the go-to resource is your cornerstone content.

So, when we talk about content, as I mentioned, content is king, but it’s not random. If you have taken some time to go listen to my interview with Nicollette Wax, we talked about the sort of chicken and egg: do you write and produce content sort of randomly because you just have the feeling that that’s what you want to produce today? Or are you producing content based on Google search results? I use Uber Suggest, I think she gave us the name of something else. These are extensions that you can download into Chrome, and it’s fun because you can start pre-writing your article based on the suggestions so you can start to be strategic about your content. 

So, for example, with me, I’m working on course sales, supervision, CEs, membership sales, I’m working on selling more supervision courses. So I’m going to go to the Google machine and I’m going to type in “supervisor training Texas” and I’m going to see what people are searching for. Are they looking for remediation plans? Are they looking for training courses? Are they asking questions about how to find a supervisor, where to find a supervisor? Now I have ideas for writing my content. Is that going to be a video? Is that going to be a blog? Is it going to be a podcast episode? Is it going to be all three? Well, I can do whatever I want because now I have topics, in fact I have five topics if I’d like, and that content is going to direct people to me because I’ve already done the homework. 

So what the tribe of bloggers taught me is to use Uber Suggest, use the search terms, as I create the content. Don’t reinvent the wheel. I remember, I used to write blogs about oh, just anything, I guess whatever I looked at out the window when I woke up in the morning. And then I would try to jjam these search terms into it, like let’s talk about fountains and yards that need mowing. And what does that have to do with grief and cousneling? I mean, it was very random. I’m teaching you to flip that. That’s what the bloggers taught me: start off with what people are searching for. Grief during the holidays. Processing recovery through the holidays. Staying sober through the holidays. Then you can write about all of the things because you already know what your key search terms are and you can build your content around that.

Also, I mentioned I think in the podcast episode with Nicolette, Yost. Yost is a plug-in on my WordPress website, and it actually gives me hints and tricks and tips. I’m not an affiliate for them, I mean, it really is kind of a neat program. So as I’m writing, it will let me know if I’m SEO-optimized, it’s got a green smiley face, and if I’m not, it’s got a frowny face and it turns red. So something like that is also something to consider as you’re choosing a website host or if you already have a website, make sure you can get into your back office and download that. 

So we talked about cornerstone content, having something that’s yours and that you’re known for and that you can use in lots of other articles. I just mentioned one: grief. Grief during the holidays. Grief during family reunions. Grief during family vacations where you’re visiting places where you found out that your partner was having an affair. You can use grief in lots of different places as you produce this content and you can be linking back to yourself. Then we talked about content is king. That is, it is not random. So using tools like Uber Suggest or just searching into Google and seeing what folks are looking for, then building your content. 

But without number three, it’s really not worth anything. It’s like having the best fishing boat and tackle on the whole lake and you just sit home and watch fishing videos, right? You must have a call to action. there has to be something for the person who’s reading, watching, listening to do once they have consumed your content. Now, this is what Jodi Halsted talked to me about. She’s our guest expert in a couple of weeks, I did the interview with her the other day. It was just like I expected, it was amazing. She talks about how he learned that Instagram was not where her people are, where her customers were. So she uses those key performance indicators so she can actually measure and know, hey, you know what? My people who book Ireland Family Vacations, they’re not coming from Instagram. I can do reels, I can do little stories, I can do the TikTok videos and all the things. 

She found out her people were coming from her podcast content. And, in her podcast content, she talks about how she matched it up with the book she wrote and the workbook she produced, and her business is booming post-COVID. And she really had to do some rebuilding, as we all did, after COVID because of the travel industry shutting down. She survived COVID, she has grown, and she is now teaching me awesome things about how to be strategic about which content you produce. 

This is kind of, I guess, a tangent, but I know a lot of times with counselors, we feel like we have got to do all the things. I get asked sometimes, who should I hire for my social media manager? I’m like, why do you need a social media manager? How do you know what social media is doing for you? I know for me, personally, I’m thinking about putting more time on Instagram, but before I do that, I’m going to come up with some key performance indicators to tell me if it’s actually working: are those clicks, are those likes, are those interactions, are those impressions, how many accounts were reached? There are a lot of metrics that Instagram will give you.

Now, one of the things I’m doing this month is I’m offering applications to join in a counseling mastermind group where we’re going to talk about this stuff. Minimum of five people, super small groups, and the applications are going to go out in a couple of weeks. I don’t want people just signing up. It’s a commitment, you’ve got to show up every week, you’ve got to be there for your co-group members. And of course we’ll pick a time when everybody can come. If you’re taking your business to the next level and one of the things you’re trying to work on is your website or your content or your call to action, having people around you is vital. 

Now, I’m going to talk to you about the call to action in two ways. One, if you’re watching me and you’re thinking side hustle, like online courses, or you’re writing a book, or you want to be a blogger or a podcaster, and I’m going to talk to you about a call to action if you’re trying to get new clients. Because here’s what we’re doing. We’re building a sales funnel. I know that sounds icky and swarmy, but it’s what we’ve got here; it’s our visual. So at the top is the cornerstone content, the people who are like, oh my gosh, I love sourdough bread and oh my gosh, this person has so many recipes that use sourdough bread, so they start noticing you. I know for me, on Instagram, there’s Jamie Geller, she’s JewlishByJamie, and a lot of her recipes have bread. So I’m guessing that’s part of her cornerstone content, but I love her recipes and I love her recipe videos, so I’m always going there. 

Which is the next part: content is king but it’s not random. Folks will know what to expect right from your content. They’re going to know that oh yeah, she wrote this article about grief and the holidays, or he wrote this article about recovery and staying sober at the New Year’s Eve party. So they will come to trust you. And imagine if you do YouTube videos and podcasts and they get to hear your voice and see your face: building that trust, building that emotional connection. They notice you, they trust you. And Jodie will talk about this more when I post that expert interview in a couple of weeks, you’ve got to tell them something to do. What is the click? What is the call to action?

So if you’re trying to build your case load, I talk about the conversion call that books a client, I talk about the ten-minute consultation, I talk about the 30-second commercial so that potential clients can kick to create the ten-minute consultation slot with you. It’s very simple. If you’ve worked with me before, you know I like websites where that big old button is right there in the middle, click to schedule, because we know with our potential clients, they’re in a state of anxiety. They’re in a state of stress. Anxiety goes up, cognition goes down. So that means folks don’t want a bunch of decisions to make. They don’t want to have to hunt all over your website. So if you have attracted them, if your content has caused them to trust you, or resulted in them trusting you, then having a button that says, “call to schedule,” then we can start talking, you and I, about KPIs. Phone calls that went unanswered, phone calls that were answered, first sessions that were booked, and you’ll start to see how particular content is now working or not working for you.

If you’re wanting this information for your side hustle, for your own blog, for your own YouTube channel or a book that you’re writing, this is always the toughest part. I find that folks who come to me for coaching or masterminds, they’re wanting to do all of these things, but I’m like, okay, what are you selling? And it’s like, wait, what? So think about what you’re selling at the end. Are you going to coach clients? B2B, are you going to coach other therapists – business-to-business? Are you going to try to develop a speaking schedule, have a schedule where you go out and speak to organizations? Are you going to sell advertisements? That’s the other thing I’ve learned from my travel bloggers, you can just have things that people can click that result in advertising revenue for you, affiliate revenue for you.

So there are lots of things you can sell at the bottom of the sales funnel for your side hustle. And if you’ve listened to me before, you know we talk about things like, how do you know when it’s time to start a side hustle, so I’m not going to talk about that today. But it all comes down to this idea of, what are you selling? So with potential clients, we know that you’re selling that first appointment. With your side hustle, it’s just a big question mark. I don’t know what you’re selling. 

I know what I’m selling. I know that when people get to the bottom of my sales funnel, I want to give them a choice to interact with me for free, and of course that’s through Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses Facebook page, podcast, blog. I want to give people the choice to have a low-price option, of course that’s the Step It Up group – people pay a monthly fee, quit anytime they like, no contracts, all the content. And I want people to have a choice to take the supervisor training or join the mastermind groups. Those choices are designed to get the most tools into the hands of the most therapists at a level of investment that is comfortable for them. Because that’s my mission. My mission is to get tools into the hands of therapists so they don’t go out of business. So we’ll talk about missions and why’s, of course, in another podcast, but that’s what I’d like to leave you with, is just understanding this flows so much easier when you understand your why.

So what I hope you got out of this today was understanding that you must develop some cornerstone content to attract people’s attention, then content is king but it’s not random, so being strategic about it, and then of course, having a call to action at the end. I’m Dr. Kate Walker, this has been your training.