Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive

140 What to Do When Your Business Ideas Don't Make Money

• Dr. Kate Walker Ph.D., LPC/LMFT Supervisor • Season 3 • Episode 140

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Speaker 1:

Ever have a business idea that you loved but it just didn't make money. Today, I'm going to teach you how to spot what's profitable, what's draining your energy and your wallet, and what to do with those passion projects that just aren't working yet. Hey, I'm Dr Kate Walker, welcome to your Tuesday Coaching, and today I'm going to. I want to read this because I want to make sure I get the title correct. But what if it's not profitable? Three things to do with bad ideas that will help your business, and I'll probably give you more than three. I just like doing odd numbers, so it's either going to be three or five. So here we are three, probably going to be more than three, but let's let in folks. I've got five people in the waiting room. These are Step it Up members and they get to attend the live group coaching every week that we have it, and it's pretty much every week at Step it Up. So here we go and we've got people joining. Get everybody in. I want to make sure that I keep that open and we've got notes being taken. Everybody grab your chat and make sure you have that handy and I'll get that open so I can catch questions as well, grabbing my notes. So this topic is near and dear to my heart. And it's funny because I see Ellie on the call today, because I said something in our business coaching chat today that was like why do the mistakes always have to come first? So that's kind of our overarching concept here, because when I see people in real life, you know a lot of times what they'll comment is like oh, it's so cool, you've got so many things that work. And y'all, they have no idea. The things that I have cut, chopped, tossed, trashed. And I will tell you this, every mistake I make always costs money, whether it's 15 bucks because I bought licenses instead of the free trial or whatever, it's always going to come before whatever it is that actually works. So I'm putting that out there, because if you are here, live with me, or you're listening on a replay and, by the way, if you're listening on a replay, go you, because you're going to learn something today that hopefully gets your business to where you want it to be. But this is something that it's. There's this notion that it's just going to all. No, nobody thinks it's all going to go right all the time. Right, we're therapists. We're constantly telling our clients it's not going to go right all the time, but here's how to make it profitable. So the premise comes from and I want to say this I actually wrote it out phonetically Mike Michalowicz.

Speaker 1:

Mike Michalowicz, the pumpkin plan. Google it, find it, read it. So the idea in the pumpkin plan is you know, there are these folks that grow giant pumpkins and there are folks that grow tiny pumpkins, right, so you can guess where I'm going here. One giant pumpkin seed can sell for like $10,000 a seed, and you compare that with having to have a pumpkin patch and then people come out and, you know, run Halloween, and they're taking pictures. Well, you're not making near the money. You're having to spend all the money on water, feeding, gardening, whatever, when you just could have grown one giant pumpkin and each one of those seeds could have been profitable for you.

Speaker 1:

So the pumpkin plan, this idea of figuring out what's profitable and then pruning your business so that you are focusing on the things that bring profit and we're not going to throw out the little pumpkins. We're actually going to turn these pumpkins into something that brings you more clients. Or if we're talking side hustles, I'll use the word customer, so just keep that in mind If you hear me say customer. If you hear me say client, I really am speaking to whether you're we're talking side hustle today or we're talking about your practice. So let's define profitable. I'm not going to get complicated here. You could go listen to another podcast where I talk about how to set up a business banking account and how I talk about the difference between profit and income, and it's probably one of those episodes where we're talking about taxes, because that's how you get taxed. Really just want you to take your best guess.

Speaker 1:

And so when you think profitable, does it make money? And then the next level is does it make enough money? Those are the two things we're just going to look at. Does it make money? Does it make enough money? All right, so you with me so far, when you start to look at defining these products I'm going to be very, very general here because I know we've got people in all walks here. We've got people very beginning stages of practice and they're just focusing on hour by hour, and then I've got folks who've got a big practice and you've got enough people and you're ready to start your side hustle.

Speaker 1:

So let's define those products. When we're talking about profitable products, it could be a side hustle like a course or a webinar or, like me, I did a DVD set that I filmed in my kitchen and I sold at conferences. Holy moly, that was expensive. So, when you're looking at your therapy business, though, I want you to think in terms of two things the type of therapy so think about your CPT code, right. Individual therapy, group therapy, couple counseling okay. And the specialty so I'm going to be very kind of loose there. So, when we think of the CPT code, individual could be adult, individual could be kids, individual could be an adolescent right. So when we think about specialty, I want you to dig down a little deeper there, right? So are you looking at your individual sessions with people suffering with grief? Are you looking at couple sessions with people recovering from infidelity? Are you working with individual sessions with young adults struggling to launch in their late 20s, early 30s, something like that? Okay. So we have your CPT code. That's one thing. Those are products. And then we have the people who actually walk through your door.

Speaker 1:

Now, everybody I've met in this business, including me. We have started out with the I'm going to see syndrome, right? This is why I got into this business. This is the population that I am going to see, all right. So a few years later we usually have a different conversation at the conference. When you come up and you're talking with me, right, because it's changed right After five, six, seven years, you're like you know, the thing I thought I wanted to see in my practice isn't really the thing that I'm seeing now, and then we discuss things like you know, it just wasn't a good fit.

Speaker 1:

I found that it. You know it was not energizing for me, but rarely do we talk about this idea that it wasn't profitable, right? This is a real taboo counselor thing. We're not supposed to say that a certain type of clientele was not profitable. So this is the place where we talk about that stuff. So if you, for example, you live in a suburban community and you want to see clients suffering with grief and you're going to put that out there as your specialty, but you've got five mega churches in town that give away that stuff for free, that is tough. That is a tough, tough market.

Speaker 1:

And then, if you start looking at your calendar, like I'm challenging you to do, and you start to say and then, if you start looking at your calendar, like I'm challenging you to do and you start to say, oh, you know, most of the people that come through the door are actually struggling with addiction, and if I look at the past two months, they're between the ages of 25 and 45. Okay, so this is that moment when I want to challenge you to perhaps flip to. You know, maybe I should start identifying this as my profitable pumpkin. All right, I'm not even going to call it a niche, right? Because niche that gets into marketing and you know, yes, we'll get to that, or you can go to a different episode and listen to that, or a training, but right now, you're just looking at the people walking through your door. And if you look at the people walking through your door and then you start running numbers, holy moly, you're going to get an eye-opening experience here, because you may look at this and say you know, I had 80 sessions this month. Only 20 of them were couples, but they made up 50% of my income. That's a big pumpkin, right?

Speaker 1:

When you look at 25% of your sessions making 50% of your income. I'm not talking net, I'm not talking profit, I'm just looking at what's making money. Remember our definition what makes money? What's making enough money? Well, those kinds of percentages. I mean those don't lie Numbers. I mean you can do a lot of things with stats, but when you're looking at 20 sessions making up half of your income, so you see where I'm going here too, because this might even apply to insurance versus cash pay, right? So if you're looking at your 80 sessions and you notice that those 20, 20 of those 80, and I know my percentage that's not quite 25%, is it 20, 40, 60? Actually, it is 24, 68. Yeah, okay, anyway, I don't, I don't math. Well, you look at those sessions and you're like, oh, okay, that made up half my income. That also, they were all cash pay. I mean, if you knew that 20%, 25% of your sessions brought in half of your income and they were cash pay.

Speaker 1:

This is one of those moments when you, after reading the big pumpkin or the pumpkin plan right by Mike I'm gonna say it right again, michalowicz you say you know what? I need to start focusing on couples who are cash pay. I mean that would turn your marketing on its head, right? Especially if you were relying on insurance to bring in clients. Nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with that at all. Right, you're listening to this training right now because you're wanting to go deeper or and I'm going to go over here to number four you're starting to burn out a little bit.

Speaker 1:

I call this the ooey gooey, right? So this is and I hear this a lot you know, I know it's not profitable, but it energizes me. I'm like, okay, you know what Playing music energizes me too, but I don't make a lot of money, right? So I mean, if I started to just focus on playing music every single day, things around me would start to suffer, right? I mean, my family would be like, hey, we don't see you very much. You seem to be doing a lot of this music thing. What happened to the things that make money? Why aren't you bringing in an income? We kind of need your income, right? So I respect, if you do all of this work and you're like I don't want to give this up. It energizes me. Please stay with that, right, but stay with it.

Speaker 1:

Knowing what you're learning in this training right now, which is this, is something that may have to be relegated, delegated, whatever the word is, to a hobby. All right, I love music. It was my first degree, I mean, literally, I was a bass major back in the day, right, but I had to look at my life. I knew I wanted a family. I knew that I wanted to be a co-wage earner, things like that, and I had to make tough decisions. I mean, we've all had to do that.

Speaker 1:

So when you look at this thing that brings you energy but does not bring you money resentment and we know this because we talk to our clients who love triathlons, right. We talk to our clients who love to golf on weekends. We talk to our clients who have a crochet club that they're in charge of or a bunco group they've coordinate for the entire city and it wears on them, it wears on the relationships, even though it started off as a passion project. So we call that an ROI, a return on investment. So when the return on your investment goes down so we're talking about that as money today, but it could also be collateral damage in your life and your relationships that means your balance will suffer, right, your emotional balance, your life balance, right. And when that suffers, then that resentment sets in. So I want to talk about that Because, like I said, I do meet a lot of folks that say I know this doesn't make me any money, but I'm going to keep doing it. I got hobbies, you got hobbies Wonderful. That actually helps us achieve balance, but that's not the topic today, right?

Speaker 1:

So lots of reasons. There are lots of reasons things are not profitable. I keep checking over here I just want to make sure we don't have anybody in the waiting room. So number one, I think, is because you're not marketing right. I mean, everything you come up with is amazing because you're amazing. You went to school for it, you have the passion for it, so it's not because these things are bad ideas.

Speaker 1:

So when we say you're not marketing it right, I want you to compare it to a company that would be marketing it right, right. So let's say my, a company that would be marketing it right, right. So let's say my little three DVD set that I made 10 years ago. I thought it was amazing, packaged. It bought the CDs, paid to have it all done up, you know so that it looked professional. Well, I'm not Sony Records, right, I can't put a you know team on this to make sure it gets in the hands of every counselor in the country, right, it's just my limitation. It was a side hustle, it was part of something I loved doing, but at the end of the day, I recognized it would take more marketing than I had the bandwidth for right. So that's okay, that's all right. There is a way to market and maybe if I had dug in a little bit more I could have found the golden marketing tool.

Speaker 1:

And I see that a lot. I think I've talked about that in this group, you know. I see a lot of social media threads where everybody's like I'm not getting client calls right now. I feel like my client intakes are going down. I don't think it's as many clients as we saw during the pandemic. So I talk a lot about pivoting. So, yes, there probably is a way to market your love project, your passion product.

Speaker 1:

But there's another side to this and I can't remember where I heard this reference. I mean, I know it was in a book I read. So when somebody hears it they may say, hey, I wrote that, but it's the idea of opening a Canadian restaurant. All right, now, if you're a Canadian right now, please don't hate on me. I love Canada and I love Canadian bacon and I love all things Canadian. But I I mean I don't know if you open up a Canadian restaurant in downtown Austin, people might pass you by to go to the latest, you know, Latin fusion sushi place right it's.

Speaker 1:

There's a possibility that there's just no demand for your, for your thing right, and it could be because you are in that suburban community with five megachurches that offer free counseling for the thing you want to offer, right, or it could just be something that's so obscure that it's just not needed yet. Right, it's just not a thing yet. It could be something down the road, right, we may have a whole counseling specialty devoted to. I lost my job to AI. Right, and it may, but it may not be there yet. So don't give up hope on it, but just recognize it may be one of the reasons that it's not profitable, all right.

Speaker 1:

So what do you do with these non-profitable things? I am going to talk about marketing, right, so you've got you should have two piles now. You should have one pile with only one thing in it, one or two things, and that is the thing the product, the CPT code, the specialty, whatever it is where you know you are making enough money. Then you got another pile over here with all this stuff and you may have been it's maybe 12 months worth of stuff that didn't make you money. So I had some examples here I want to see. I I I wrote it down. I mean, what have I done? I've done the DVD set. I hosted. I wanted to host retreats. I wanted to do marriage counseling intensives. I love menus and so I thought, for sure the community I was in would love like a concierge menu with all these different items and things that I could deliver. I could go on and on and on here.

Speaker 1:

So my box of stuff that didn't work out or make enough money it was pretty substantial and so many, many, many of those things became freebies on my website. So, for example, my retreats or marriage intenses for couples who are wanting to survive infidelity, that actually turned into a YouTube video that got 1000s and 1000s of views and I was able to put that YouTube video on my website so people could click and this didn't even have my face on it. This was like and I think it was narrated by my daughter it did not have my face, not my voice, I think it just had like a headshot of me. And then some you know, really kind of not great PowerPoint images, like before AI, like very, very canned images. But those thousands of views got me clients, people, because I put my call to action right next to that right, schedule a free consultation. Folks would watch the video, they would schedule a free consultation. They would say you know I watched your video, or you know I had my wife watch your video, or I had my husband watch the video, and so I took my non-profitable marriage intensive that I was, and honestly, I was probably going to write a book about it. I had a lot of stuff, y'all, I had a lot of stuff, so I turned it into a video that increased my like and trust factor. When people like you, when they feel like they know you and they trust you then they were they are more likely to press that call to action right, and you've got to have that call to action right next to it.

Speaker 1:

Another thing is downloadable freebies. You know we've talked about this before. If you are interested in creating sort of a real brand, a brand around this idea of you positioning yourself as an expert in the field, well, you're going to want a newsletter. You're going to want to contact folks and let them know what you're doing this month, what new thing you've learned. You can start this with a freebie. Take that thing. That's not making a profit, but you know so much about.

Speaker 1:

So I'm going to go back to grief. Right, you know so much about grief. Give me a PDF of five things I can do over the holidays when I'm struggling with grief and I'm around my extended family. Or if I have a spouse that dies, how do I keep my kids involved with my in-laws? Oh, my goodness, you could come up with so many things, and it's not even time intensive anymore. You can do these things in Canva. You can do these things in AI. Give me five things that I could put into a PDF that would help a potential client who is struggling with grief.

Speaker 1:

Now, I'm not going to take you through the 10-minute consultation. You know there are a ton of trainings in our Step it Up membership that you can go to and click on that and see more about that. So, and also on the podcast, I think I think I've put. I've told you a lot about that 10 minute consultation. But marketing freebie Also, you know something else.

Speaker 1:

That's two things. Right, we've had YouTube video. We have a downloadable freebie, but you're like you know, kate, I don't want to make a video and I hate emails. Okay, but I'm going to turn you into an extrovert. You can start a networking group in your town. I know all of you just shivered. You're like I'm not going to do that. Okay, so go to a networking event in town and develop a list of referrals, right?

Speaker 1:

So if you aren't going to be the go-to person for grief anymore, but you have five places you feel comfortable referring to because you've shaken their hands, you've given them your card, you've taken their card, you have talked to them and you have said, hey, I believe in you, I'm not taking this type of clientele anymore. I got to have somebody to refer to. Guess what they're going to do back at you, right? So when you start going to networking events with a giver's mentality, saying I want to give you business, I'm going to take you right back to that phone call, that idea that if they don't become your client, they're sure going to become your fan, because they will refer you to friends and family and they will say you know what? I called this person and they had five referrals waiting for me. And you've heard of ghost referrals, right? This is on insurance company lists all the time. Right, the list looks super long, but when your clients call them, nobody's taking clients anymore.

Speaker 1:

You are going to make sure that you keep in contact with these referrals to make sure that they know you will refer to them and you might say to them hey, by the way, if you've got a waiting list, send them my way. I've got openings, or I'm a supervisor and I've got these associates just chomping at the bit to take on some clients. So, got a waiting list, got a waiting list, got a waiting list, bring them, send them my way. Right, this givers gain mentality, right? So that was what are we up to? Four, three, four, networking, cross-referring, making sure you've got a marketing freebie, make sure you've got a YouTube video. So, in a nutshell and I don't, you guys may love me or hate me, but the idea that your website is going to become a resource, it's going to become a community resource and people will remember you, they will remember that branding and if you've got a great call to action and make it easy for them to either click the button themselves or refer that button to friends and family, your business will grow. And you can reread the pumpkin plan and decide what your big pumpkin is. Right, you can decide what it is that you are going to focus on.

Speaker 1:

So I'll tell you what happened with mine. So you know my DVD set and you know I did try business coaching. I tried a lot of different things and what it turned into. I had a colleague, cindy Doyle. She's like well, what are you going to do with this? And I said I don't know. She's like, why don't you start a Facebook group? I was like, oh so I started Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses Facebook group and we have over 4,500 people in that group.

Speaker 1:

Free resources, that's all that's in there. Free resources, business coaches galore, experts. It's well administered, it's one of the nicest groups. When I hear other people who have these types of groups say well, I quit doing it because you know therapists are mean, not in our groups. Right, we have the nicest, most nurturing people. And that's what became of my three DVD set, right? So that giver's gain turned into a community. That community now supports each other and I'm able to focus on my big pumpkin. All right, I am going to close with that and open it up for questions. So I'm going to hit the pause button. If this got you thinking differently about your practice, don't forget to hit subscribe so you never miss a coaching replay. And if you're ready for something more? Sign up for the Step it Up membership. Let's build something profitable together.