Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive
Welcome to Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive, the ultimate resource for mental health professionals ready to step into their power, grow their practices, and create a career they love. I'm Dr. Kate Walker, a Texas LPC/LMFT Supervisor, author, and business strategist who's here to show you the path to success.
Formerly Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses, we’ve rebranded because, well, we’re way too big for Texas now! This community of badass therapists is growing nationwide, and we’re here to help you create a career and practice you love, no matter where you are.
Every week, you'll get practical advice, proven strategies, and motivation to help you build a thriving practice—one that gives you the freedom to live your life on your terms. From mastering marketing to designing scalable systems and becoming a clinical supervisor, this podcast is your roadmap to leveling up without burnout.
Hit subscribe and get ready to unlock your badass potential. Your thriving practice starts now!
Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive
165 HIPAA, VAs, And What To Delegate Now
If the idea of hiring help in your practice immediately brings up fear about HIPAA, confidentiality, or losing control, this episode will bring a lot of clarity. Dr. Kate Walker breaks down exactly what therapists can delegate right now, what you should never hand off blindly, and how to protect your license while still getting critical tasks off your plate.
Kate walks through real-world examples of delegation—from marketing and intake calls to email management and SOP creation—while explaining how HIPAA actually works in practice (not the scary myths most of us carry around). You’ll hear why delegating the wrong things first can waste time and money, how to train VAs responsibly, and why systems—not hustle—are what allow practices to grow without chaos.
If you’ve been trying to “build the plane while flying it,” or you know your systems need to be in place before your caseload spikes, this episode will help you delegate with confidence instead of fear.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What therapists can safely delegate to a VA, including marketing tasks, intake calls, email workflows, and follow-ups—without violating HIPAA.
- How to train and onboard virtual assistants using HIPAA education, clear boundaries, and simple SOPs that actually prevent mistakes.
- Why screen-recorded SOPs, Trello boards, and structured workflows work better than long written instructions—and how to set them up efficiently.
If you’re ready to stop doing everything yourself and start building systems that support your growth, this episode gives you a practical, HIPAA-safe place to start.
If you’re ready to lead with confidence, join the 2026 Supervisor Course waitlist for early access to bonus tools, templates, and fast-track grading. Strengthen your systems today with the free Supervision Onboarding Checklist, and get ongoing CEUs and live coaching inside the Step It Up Membership. You’re not just building a practice, you’re building a legacy.
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.
So if you came onto this going, okay, I know I'm gonna get stuff to offload, I need to offload this and that, and I've changed your mind. I'm okay with that because I don't want you wasting money. Welcome to the past therapist, building practices in the money. Now do you remember K welcome over a little money? Today we're breaking down a topic every practice owner wrestles with: HIPAA, virtual assistants, and what you can safely delegate without putting your license at risk. We're cutting through the fear and getting clear on what's yours to handle, what a VA can take off your plate, and how to keep your systems clean as you grow. Keep listening for details on how to grab the December bonus. It pairs perfectly with this conversation. Now let's get to work. Hey, I'm Dr. Kate Walker, and we're talking about what you can delegate right now. And the first thing you can delegate. So, of course, I'm going to talk about SOPs as well. And we did do a webinar on this last week, an entire 1CE webinar on this. So be sure to check that out as well. All right, so let's talk about delegating tasks. If you're hitting this time of year, and I try to explain this to people, I was talking to someone the other day that, you know, our clients tend to, you know, they get through the summer and then that then school starts, and then that first note comes home, and then we've got kiddos coming to counseling. Well, we also have on the other side, we have folks that know the holidays are coming up. And once the holidays hit, it's like, okay, who's got the money or the time for counseling? So this is sort of that I don't want to call it golden time. I don't know what we should call it, but we do see an uptick in our clients. Um, and if you're not, then we can talk about marketing, but not today. This is something totally different. But because we see an uptick in clients right now, if we haven't done the work before now to get our systems in place, we may be feeling a little overwhelmed. So this is sometimes referred to or feels like putting the plane together in mid-flight. You're like, oh gosh, I have to do something. That's okay. I've been there too. You're okay. I'm okay. We're gonna be okay. Or you may be thinking, well, Kate, I don't know what you're talking about because my client load is not building right now. I do not see that uptick. I will look at the marketing training, but I need to get my systems in place before my door just gets knocked down. So let's talk about the things to delegate first. And one of the things that I start with a negative, what not to delegate are the things that waste your time. Okay, so I'm stop thinking specifically about social media. So hang with me for a second. So if you think about social media and you think, I'll just speak from personal, right? If I'm gonna do an Instagram reel, well, it's gonna take me probably 30 minutes because I'm gonna have to go find the video. I'm gonna have to get the video to sync with the music, and then I'm gonna have to make it a catchy little, you know, okay, if you're gonna do this, then be sure to check out the 40-hour training and then all the hashtags, and then I have to make sure that it looks, sounds good. I mean, it it takes me 30 minutes of time. I don't get back. Now, when I talk to another colleague about this in my business world, and I share what's what's happening, and I share with them, hey, how can I do this more efficiently? They're like, stop, like, don't do it. There is no algorithm that you will hit. The algorithms are so weird now with Instagram and social media that that is an extremely poor use of my time. So I have to own the fact that if I'm gonna make an Instagram reel, it's pretty much just because I want to make one, right? I must be bored or whatever. So you really have to have a heart-to-heart talk with yourself because just because it takes time to make an Instagram reel doesn't mean you should hire it out. So step one is to make sure you have the most recent information and you know my go-to. Go to Chat GPT, go to Claude, go to your whatever your favorite AI is, and ask it what is the best way to market as of this date? If I want to be found, then don't just ask how to be found on Google, ask how to be found by chat. Ask chat, how can I show up in your searches? And then do those things. All right. So starting there with things you don't do. Now, let's take social media for a second. If you do want to use social media, you know, one of the things that's things that I really like are marketing Mondays or marketing Tuesdays, right? So if you wanted to hire someone to create your graphic in Canvas, C-A-N-V-A, it's a program, it's software that someone can build a real pretty graphic for you. And they can remember to post in all of those different groups on the designated marketing days, that's a great use of delegation. It's not going to take more than about 15 minutes, though. So thinking about those things in terms of, okay, I and it, and this isn't easy. And I talk about this with my VAs, Irvin Nixon, Cruz, and Jennifer Marie Fairchild. You know, how much time do I need to offload before I hire someone? So if you've got your list and you're like, okay, that sounds good, Kate. I want to I want to start posting in other groups marketing Mondays. So write that down. Write that to take about 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes for your person to build the Canva and get all of those things preloaded so they're ready to go. If you're trying to fill up an hour though, let's keep digging. So another thing, once you ask chat, okay, what can I offload? You may get some more marketing ideas, but let's talk about for your practice. So one of the things that if you're still chasing emails or you're still chasing text messages, or you're still trying to get clients booked for that first session, right? Let's say you watch the training on a 10-minute consultation script and you're like, okay, I want to use the script, I want to get people booked. That would be a great thing to offload and delegate to someone else. And a big question may be, well, what do I do about confidentiality? Well, what does anybody do? What does your physician do about confidentiality? What does your dentist do about PHI? Right? They train their staff. They train their staff or they send them to a training, a little three-hour, two-hour CE, right? Because HIPAA doesn't specify how long it has to be. House Bill 300 doesn't specify how long the training has to be. It simply says best practices is to be trained in these things. So you're the business owner, you find the HIPAA training or the confidentiality training, PHI training that you like, and you say, okay, potential staff member, I'm going to hire you, but and and pay for you to go to this training, or better yet, you give it, right? Because you can be a CE provider too. And they then understand their obligation to HIPAA and protected health information. All right. So moving through that. So we've got marketing Monday emails. We've got how to get your staff trained. I want to do one more thing to delegate before I move to SOPs, though. Your email inbox. There's a great program that we just discovered here, and you guys may be using it. It is called Trello in conjunction with something called Hipperello. Hipperello is a form that integrates with your Trello board so you don't have to use email ever again. It's so you could use this with your clients, potential clients, I should say, put it on your website, and then potential clients could fill out a form. Now, I'm not sure if this particular one is HIPAA compliant. I think there's one that's called HIPAA relo that is HIPAA compliant that you could uh work with as well. But once you get that, oh my goodness, then you have a whole system where you can hire someone for one hour a week, two hours a week, five hours a week to go into that Trello board one time a day, get every single card replied to. And that's reasonable for a small practice if you let people know, look, I'm gonna reply once a day, or it's gonna take at least 24 hours on a business day for me to get back to you. That person that you hire, you can offload your email. You can offload. I don't know if texting hooks to it. I I wouldn't, I don't see why not. But you know me, I don't like texting with potential clients anyway, but that's me. And I think you can probably hook up your Google Voice to that as well. So we have email, we have marketing Mondays, and we have the ability to offload your handling of your clients, the actual phone calls with your clients, training a VA to go through and answer the phone calls using the 10-minute script. And the non-HIPAA compliant one, so we have Trello board, that's the organizational system, because you're gonna have to pick an organizational system, a way, a way to communicate. And then the form system that integrates is called H-I-P-P-O-R-E-L-O. Hipporello. And like I said, I think the HIPAA compliant version is just Hipporello. Okay. And then it's really convenient because the cards populate and you reply right through the Trello board. So I didn't mention blogs and podcasting and things like that because if you're a small practice, your go-to, your number one thing is not going to be starting a podcast. Please don't do that, right? Don't start a podcast. Number one, it's not searchable. It's an RSS feed, which means it's going into Apple, it's going into Spotify, it's going into all these places that people don't search. You want to do a YouTube channel? Awesome, because Google and YouTube are the same thing. So when we talk about blogging, if that's something you want to offload, you know, that's okay, right? Because that may mean in your marketing, you're ready to do some search engine optimization. You're ready to stand out, you're ready to position yourself as an expert. So if you're there and this is the next thing you want to offload, this next part you're gonna like. So I am gonna talk about what I'm gonna show. Quick break. If you haven't grabbed December's bonus yet, go get it. I put together the practice reset cheat sheet to help you clean up your systems, tighten your HIPAA basics, and walk into 2026 without dragging this year's mess behind you. It's totally free for podcast listeners. Just go to KateWalkerTraining.com slash bonus. So this is my Trello board that I use with my virtual assistant Irvin Cruz. And again, if you watch the webinar we did, how to hire a VA and create an SOP, his contact information is there because he would love to take on more people. But a Trello board can be set up any way you like. I can make these lists. So if I want to make a list over here called done there. And then when something's done, I'm just gonna slide it over. If I want to start here, so the way Urban and I work, we do work left to right. And so if something needs a blog post, it goes into this list. If something's going to be processed into the one start here, that's in your profile, step it up members. That is a training, it's not for CEs, then it goes in this list. If it is a replay of a webinar that we are going to repurpose and turn into a one CE webinar, it goes here. So if you could see what we have here, processing an online course, zero out of three, zero out of three, that means we have checklists. The checklist for an online course, there are three items. And each one of these items has an SOP. SOP stands for standard operating procedure. I've got 11 steps for creating a blog. So when we click on that, you see each one of these is an SOP. So why are they videos? Well, that's because I used to do handwritten types, right? I'd put them into a Google Drive, I would share the Google Drive with my assistants. These would be like three and four page documents of click here, then click here. Then once you click there, click there, you know. And I was going crazy reading it after I had written it. I'm like, they're never, ever good. And we had a lot of uh miscommunications, we had a lot of fails. It just was too many steps. And so what I've switched to and I highly recommend you switch to is screen sharing, screen recording. And it can be as simple as something on your PC or your Mac where you click the button and it records the screen, or you can ask special software like I do. There's something called Loom, L-O-O-A. I use something called Camtasia, but the result is the same, and I will show you a few of these SOPs. And so if you're listening to me, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to my YouTube channel for SOPs. And this is easy to do. If you have a Google account, then you have a YouTube account. So your YouTube channel, if you go to playlists, you saw I have one that's just called SOP. And when I click on that and I go to my videos, these are all of my SOPs and they are short. Look, this one's eight seconds long, okay, and there's no sound. So if I click play on that eight-second video, the title of this is create an H2 heading in a blog post. So when you click it, what it's showing is how to there's the drop-down menu, heading to end of video. That's it. So instead of me putting that into a document that they would have to read and reread and reread, when we go here to the checklist. So I've just opened my Trello board again and I'm going through my checklist. Let's see where it's the spot where I have to do an H2 heading. Copy the whole blog, it's chat GPT, ask it to select H2 headings that are optimized for Google searches, create those H2 headings. There's a video right there, and all Urban has to do is click that video and he can watch again and again and again how to make sure that is an H2 heading. Now, that's why I didn't start with blogging when we were offloading things, because if you're blogging, then you better be doing some optimization. You better be having some conversations with Chat GPT about H2 headings. So what Chat GPT does for me, since I always record first, I record, I get the transcript, take the transcript of my words, upload it to chat and say, okay, make this into an optimized blogs. Tell me what the H2 headings ought to be, and it spits it out. So I taught my virtual assistant how to do that as well. Saves me time and he does a great job. And I don't have to worry about it being AI's words because it's literally just taking my words. So if you're getting ideas while I'm talking and you're like, I love to talk, I love to give webinars. You can record your presentations, you can do like we're doing right here and just record a webinar. Again, before you offload this, before you delegate it, because this could turn into Kate doing a reel that takes 30 minutes, and you realize it's not doing anybody any good. Don't do that until you have watched the training. In your profile, you can watch the training from Couch to Click by Jenny Melrose. And she talks about how to make sure that you're blogging with the right search terms and the right keywords and things like that. Go through your trainings in the one start here module in your profile and just type in SEO. If it says SEO, watch the training. So if you came onto this going, okay, I know I'm gonna get stuff to offload, I need to offload this and that, and I've changed your mind. I'm okay with that because I don't want you wasting money. I think I've told this story before. I have hired out SEO. I hired it out for a year to a virtual assistant in Poland, and all he did was add a call to action to the bottom of all my blogs. I mean, this was years ago. I hired someone else to do blogs for me, and they were basically gonna guarantee me that my blogs would be higher in the search rankings, but it almost got me like sanctioned by Google because all they were doing was copying the same blog over and over and over again and changing one or two words. You can't do that in Google land. So I don't want you wasting time, I don't want you wasting money. I want you to really do your homework first, identify one or two things. And the the way I usually do it, I try to categorize it into a task that's going to get me down the road to my financial goals. So that would be marketing, right? So doing a blog. That's not something that I'm gonna turn around today and and make money because it's a little bit longer return on investment. So that's one category. But then I have things on my list that could make revenue today. And sometimes I avoid those. I don't know why. I just have a mental block against that. But try to really divide up your day and say, for example, if you're listening to me and you're a counselor, how many calls have you returned? How many people have you knocked on the door of their doctor's office and said, hey, I just want to introduce myself and you know, make sure you know that I'm local and I can take your clients. How many PTOs have you called and said, hey, I'm available to speak? So sometimes those things you can't delegate, you can't hire out, but you have to do it. So once you have a list of PTOs that you have contacted, well, yeah, then delegate out all the follow up emails, right? And the phone calls and say, Hey, I just you want to wanted to follow up. Kate Walker contacted you last week, and I wanted to make sure that you knew she was available to speak. And here's her calendar. Before you go, grab December's bonus, the Practice Reset Cheat Sheet. It's your quick guide to starting 2026 with clearer systems and less chaos. Get it at KateWalker Training.com/slash bonus. See you next week. If you love today's episode, be sure to leave a five-star review. It helps other badass therapists find the show and build practices that thrive. Big thanks to Ridgely Walker for our original fun facts and podcast intro, and to Carl Guyanella for editing this episode and making us sound amazing. See you next week.