Free consultations? Should you offer them in your psychology/therapy practice

The Business of Psychology

Free consultations? Should you offer them in your psychology/therapy practice

Welcome to this week's episode of the Business of Psychology podcast. This week, I'm considering one of the questions that I get asked most frequently from my students in Psychology Business School, and that is should we be offering free consultations for therapy work? Now, as you might expect from me, if you've been listening to this for a little while, I don't really think that there is a clear cut answer and there's certainly not a one size fits all answer. If you'd asked me this a couple of years ago, I would have advised you against doing free consultations in your practice. The reason for that is that I did not do these very well. When I had a really busy clinic, I was spending hours every week offering free consultations to people who then ghosted me, and I blamed the free consultation model because when I stopped doing those free consultations, those problems went away, I started to get much better quality referrals, clients who came for their first session stuck around, and I didn't get ghosted very often. Initially, I thought that was because free consultations led to client ghostings, mainly because of some of the stuff we talked about in last week's episode around ghosting and the beliefs that clients can sometimes hold about the value of our time. But we'll talk about that a bit later in the episode, because what I have come to realise is, it wasn't the free consultation that was the problem, it was the way that I did them, and specifically the lack of boundaries that I had around them. I do think they can be very valuable if you do them correctly and for the right reasons, in the right way. So today I want to talk a little bit about the advantages of free consultations, the disadvantages of free consultations, and some factors I think you need to bear in mind if you're going to offer them and do them well, and that is based from my own experience, but also from things I've learned from my students in Psychology Business School. So a big thank you to all my students who have talked about this many times in Office Hour; I am bringing a lot of your expertise to this episode and I hope it's going to help a lot of people.

The advantages: why you would want to offer a free consultation

1. It's a really great opportunity to assess the goodness of fit for you and for the client. We're not the right therapist for everybody, are we? You could be amazing for the right person and rubbish for somebody else. For example, there's a lot of humour in my therapy sessions, I just can't get that bit of my personality out of therapy and frankly I wouldn't want to. But there are some clients who don't share that and that's not what they're looking for in a therapist. They will know that quite quickly in a free consultation with me because it tends to come out quite quickly in a free consultation. So it's a great idea for people to have that conversation with you so that you can show how you like to work, and they can decide whether that is a good fit for them, and equally, we often get that feeling don't we, that we're not the right fit for somebody. Maybe they're looking for a type of therapy that we don't offer, maybe you know that there is a model that would suit them better, and you've got a colleague that you could refer them on to. So assessing for goodness of fit is a great advantage to doing a free consultation.
2. You can use it to iron out any accessibility issues. When I did offer free consultations, I didn't do it as a phone call, because I don't offer phone therapy, so I don't really think it's that useful to do it on the phone. I used to get people to come in to my physical therapy room because I used to work in person, or I used to get people to log on to zoom and have an online session with me if that's what they wanted, so that way we could work out if we have technical problems, or do you find it difficult to park near my room? Iron all of that out before anybody's paying for a session. I thought that was a massive advantage, and certainly if I offer free consultations in the future, I will keep that as part of it; it will not be a phone call, it will be a test session where people actually come in to my practice or log on online with me for a shorter session (and we'll talk about timings a bit later), but a session that is very similar in format to whatever they will be experiencing, so you can iron out any difficulties.
3. If they show up, it shows some commitment on the part of the client. We talked in the last session about ghosting and how awful ghosting can feel. Well, I do think sometimes getting somebody to show up for a free consultation session allows you to make a judgement about whether they've got that first bit of motivation that they need to actually break their normal routine, and make time to see you, and I think that's really important.
4. It allows you to signpost people in a more comprehensive way than you can do with an email. When I'm not offering free consultations, if somebody fills out my intake form, and we think that they're not the best fit for working with me, I will send them some recommendations for other places or other people that they could go to, but I'm never confident that those emails get read. Whereas when I've signposted people in a free consultation session, I can look them in the eye and tell them why I think that this is a better service for them, or why I think that this colleague of mine is a better fit and I think that probably gets taken on board more, so I often feel like those signposting conversations are better in a free consultation than they are by email.
5. Possibly the most important one; I do think that offering a free consultation is helpful to the client, because it allows them to feel a bit more confident before they have to put money behind their decision. We know if we're buying anything, that the thing that is most likely to stop us from buying something, even when we know it's going to be helpful to us, is confidence that it will work for us. And with therapy, that is a really big deal, because people are sceptical about the idea that therapy itself is helpful. They also need to overcome their scepticism that you yourself can be helpful. So there's two barriers for them to overcome before they make that decision to jump in with both feet to something as scary as therapy. I think a free consultation can really help people to overcome that fear, so I think it's a really nice thing to offer from that perspective.

Those are the advantages or the reasons that I could think of that you might want to offer a free consultation in your practice. But as I shared before, I did stop doing it, and I stopped doing it because of some big disadvantages to offering free consultations.

The disadvantages to offering free consultations

1. It takes up your time, and if you're already really busy with referrals, then it's really difficult to make time to do free consultations, especially as if you're doing them right, some of them will not convert to therapy. These are not sales calls. When you listen to other kinds of marketing courses, courses that I've done, they often talk about 'closing the sale', and a free consultation being an opportunity for you to convert more people to come and work with you. But actually, what I found is when I'm doing free consultations ethically, and I'm doing them well, that's not the purpose. Half the time I'm assessing that they might not be a good fit for me and there might be somebody better. So they might not lead to more people working with you, but what they are likely to do is lead to more of the right people working with you. If you're doing them well, they won't always convert to paid work, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage, because if you're very busy and you're turning down paid work in order to make time to do free consultations, that can quite quickly become a problem for your business model. So what you need to do is make sure that you have a boundaried period of time in your calendar for free consultations, and that it is worked into your fee setting, so you know that you need to charge a little bit more for your paid sessions to pay yourself for the time you're spending to do free consultations. If that doesn't make sense to you, don't worry, go and listen to the episode with Sally Farrant on pricing; she talks about how you need to factor all this unpaid stuff into your fee structure that I think is really important.
2. The time factor is likely to be more of an issue if you aren't boundaried enough about what you actually cover in your free consultations. Again, this was something I did really badly. Full disclosure; my free consultations frequently became an hour long. I am really naturally bad at stopping people talking if they want to talk; I get interested, I want to hear somebody's story, and I was rubbish at setting boundaries around the sessions. That's part of the reason I had to stop doing them, but some of my students in Psychology Business School have shown me that you can do this well, you can keep these conversations to 20 minutes, and you can hold boundaries around them. So yes, they can eat up a lot of your time, but if they are eating up a lot of your time, it's likely because you're not setting those boundaries around them, or you may not have set your fees correctly in the rest of your practice. So before writing them off, consider both of those things, but time is definitely a disadvantage to offering free consultations.
3. If they're done badly, as they were by me, sometimes offering a free consultation can encourage people that can't really afford your services to come along and have a chat with you. I think that stems from not being clear about the difference between a free consultation and a therapy session, which I was definitely guilty of, and also your process. We'll talk about this at the end, but I think if you have a clear process in place, and the free consultation is not the first step in that process, you can mitigate that risk. But certainly that is something that happened to me and I think that isn't helpful for potential clients, and it's not helpful for you either.
4. I think there is a danger with offering a free consultation that we can set a precedent that our time isn't worth money, that we can feed into that belief that we talked about in the ghosting episode that some people might hold anyway. I think that is important to consider; you don't get a free consultation with your hairdresser or your accountant or your lawyer, you wouldn't get a free consultation from a private GP, or a private doctor of any other specialty. So we are offering something that is a bit different here. I think as we've already talked about, there are good reasons that we might do that, but we need to make it really clear and boundaried why we're doing that, why it's different from other professions, and the fact that they will then be paying for any subsequent sessions with us. I think we need to be really upfront and transparent about all of that, and if we are, it's probably not going to be a problem. I think it was a problem for me because I wasn't transparent about any of those things and I didn't get the right boundaries in place.

What you need to do to make sure that your free consultations work for you rather than against you.

1. I think it's all about setting really clear boundaries for yourself and the client about what you will cover in that session, what makes it different from a therapy session, and what you will not be doing in that session and sticking to it. For me, I think when I start offering these again, I am going to have a piece of paper in front of me that says 'talk about this', 'do not talk about this'. Let them know that you'll be talking about that other stuff that both of you probably really want to get into in the next session, because actually it's not that safe to talk about it in a free consultation that is supposed to be 20 minutes. Be very clear about what you will and won't cover, be clear about how long it's going to be, and stick to that for both of you.
2. Factor it into your fee structure. Have a clear slot in your diary that is for free consultations, never offer a free consultation outside of that time, make sure that you're paying yourself for it by charging slightly more for your paid sessions. You can listen to the episode with Sally Farrant if you're not quite sure how to do that.
3. Make sure that this potential client knows your fees, they've seen your terms and conditions, and they filled out your intake form before they come along to that free consultation session. I think if you've done that, then there is no danger of them coming along to that session wondering if they can afford you or not; that conversation has already been had. I think that is a lot more compassionate because there is nothing more horrible for the client than finding out after they've decided they really like you that they can't afford you. That's a horrible thing to do and I know we wouldn't ever do that intentionally, but if you haven't given them their T&C's, if they haven't filled out your intake form, there is a real danger that could happen. Likewise, they might fill out that intake form, and there's something on there that indicates to you that actually they're not a good fit, and it would be a waste of both of your time to have that session, so I think that's really important.
4. If they fill out an intake form, that's a good indicator that they are committed enough to this process, that they're unlikely to be one of those people that comes along, does the free consultation and then ghosts to you. It's getting a bit of commitment from them. You're not taking money yet; you are asking for a commitment of another sort from them, and I think that's really helpful in making sure that they're actually in the right place to make good use of therapy, before you waste your time or their time with this conversation.

So those are the things that I would make sure you have in place if you're going to offer a free consultation. It's completely up to you whether you think this is a good fit for your practice or not. As I've mentioned, I decided for a long time that it wasn't a good fit for my practice. I realised that that was likely because I hadn't done them very well, and I am now going to be restarting them in my therapy practice, so I will let you know how it goes. But this is the framework that I'm going to be following to make sure that I get high quality consultations that work well for me, and for my practice.

I hope that's been helpful as ever. Come and talk to me about it over @RosieGilderthorp on Instagram, I'd love to know your thoughts.

LINKS

Episode 41: How to set your fees in your psychology private practice with “pricing queen” Sally Farrant

Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp

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