From the Ground Up: Building a Business in the Mental Health Field – Pitfalls and Suggestions to Think About – Leveraging Your Assets

One of the biggest mistakes that many clinicians make when building their practices is failing to leverage the assets they already have.  These range from their personal connections, to their education, to their past clients and professional relationships, your current staff and many more.  In the business world, salespeople, marketers, executives etc. learn how to use every asset they have to grow and build their companies, but for some reason in mental health we seem to be loath to do this. 

I want to talk about a few underutilized areas and how they can be leveraged effectively to increase your brand visibility, get more clients, and grow to the size you want to grow to.  I want to talk about how to leverage your personal and professional connections, your staff, your past clients, and your education.

Leveraging Your Education and Experience –

By the time you become a licensed clinician, you have probably been through at least six years of school, and at least two years of internship after school.  By this point you are probably very well versed in at least some aspects of the mental health field.  This education and knowledge is a huge asset, not just clinically to help clients, but also in growing your business and making more contacts.  There are three main ways to do this, which I talked about earlier in an earlier article.

1. Writing – If you have gone through school, written some form of masters or doctoral dissertation or thesis, then you have enough writing skill to write consistently about what you know. Writing or co-authoring a book, writing articles for publications, and many more are ways you can leverage the expertise you have.
2. Teaching and Training – Whether you believe it or not, you are an expert in something, at least more so than most people. You can use this expertise to train others and grow your practice.  Teach a class at a local community college, put together a community workshop on something useful to the public, or create groups within your practice to teach specific skills.  You can always teach people to do something you already know how to do.
3. Speaking – This can fall into the category of teaching and training, but it can also become a mainstay of your income generation if you do it often. Public speaking can be scary, but it is possible for anyone to do if they are willing to learn.  I wrote an article earlier about some of the reasons why it is and can be important.

Leveraging Your Personal Connections –

Most of us have friends, family members, and acquaintances we have met throughout our lives.  These are often the best early referral sources for a new practice.  They know us, they know what we have learned, and they often trust us already.  It can be awkward to ask your personal connections for referrals or opportunities, but it can be incredibly beneficial.  I was reading a sales book a few years back and one of the points that it kept reiterating was that before you ask for something of value, you should always give something of value first.  Before I ever try and leverage my personal connections, I always try to help them out with things, without ever expecting anything in return.  When it comes time that I do need something, or they can help me, I don’t feel nearly as bad about asking because I have given to them first, and they usually don’t feel weird about helping me out, because I have never asked anything of them before.

Your personal connections often also have skills which you may be lacking.  I had very little hands on knowledge of business, but I knew members of my friend group and family who did, and I asked them questions when I had them, and they were always willing to help me out.  I couldn’t have gotten where I am without using these resources.

Leveraging Your Professional Connections –

This is an even more important group to leverage, as it grows the more you use it.  The same principle of give first ask later applies here as with personal connections, but even more strongly as there is often less of a prior relationship with these people than with friends or family.  Paradoxically, the less intense relationship can often make it easier to ask professional connections for things.

The most important thing to remember about professional connections is that often they are “out of sight, out of mind.”  Maintaining your presence in their lives, whether by interacting often, or by small little reminders of your practice, keeps you in the forefront of their attention.  The other side of this is that again, paradoxically, the more you give to your professional connections, the more you add value to their lives, the more you wind up getting in return.

Leveraging Your Past Clients –

This is often the stickiest area, and therefore the single most underused source of referrals and business growth.  I want to say before I go on, that there are ways that this can be done legally, ethically, and with the best interests of the client in mind, and there are ways to do it unethically, illegally, and with only your own interests in mind.

If you are doing your job right, your past clients often can become your best brand ambassadors.  They can write testimonials, they can tell people about the work you do, they often are the strongest advocates for your services.  While it would be unethical to badger your clients into doing these things, it is perfectly reasonable to let them know how much you appreciate it when clients do. You can also call your past clients periodically to check up on them.  This not only allows them to come back if they need to, but it also reminds them about you, and they often know someone else who might.

Make sure when doing anything in this arena that your motives are right.  Make sure that you actually are focused on helping the clients, and remember the principle from the prior two sections, the more you give, the more you get.

Leveraging Your Staff –

If you have grown beyond just yourself as an employee of your business, this is the simplest, and as such easily overlooked, resource you have in your practice.  All of the prior principles can be applied to each member of your staff, regardless of their positions or experience.  This includes both clinical and non-clinical staff.  Every one of us has networks of people that we have helped, that know us, that know what we do, and we can use these to grow our own business.

The key to leveraging your staff is that you have to give them a reason to work as hard for you as you do.  I worked doing sales at a gym (the shadiest type of sales and it drove me crazy), and our managers were always pressuring us to sign up our friends, our family, our neighbors, anyone we could sign up, and they didn’t care how we did it.  This didn’t breed loyalty, instead the way the pressured me to pressure them made me not want to bring my friends and family into it.  On the other hand, now, working for companies that treat me with respect, I am interested in promoting the company.  There are no incentives, monetarily, but the loyalty that I have for the employers that have helped me along my way makes me all the more likely to be willing to help them.

This is not a complete list of all the different assets you can leverage for your business, but it is a short list to get you thinking. If you have and questions, comments, or opinions, please comment below, or email me privately at [email protected].

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- Jeremy Larsen

Business Development and Practice Manager

Coherence Associates Inc.

www.coherenceassociates.com

[email protected]