Summer School Lesson 4: Get your first clients

The Business of Psychology

Summer School Lesson 4: Get your first clients

Hello and welcome to the Business of Psychology Summer School edition.

Over the six weeks of the English school holidays, we are doing things a little bit differently around here. If you're looking to start up an independent practice in September, then this is the place to be as each week I'm dropping in with a quick lesson and tasks that can be completed in 30 minutes or less from your sun lounger.

By the end of the six weeks, you will feel ready to step into your practice in September, confident that you can find clients and have a safe and viable business foundation.

Each week, the lessons will go out on this podcast feed, but if you want the weekly tasks, workbooks, private community, and a live session with me at the end of the summer to hold you accountable and make sure nothing stands in your way, you will need to sign up here: PBS Summer School

I would love to see you in the community.

Full show notes of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links & References:

PBS Summer School Sign Up

PBS Start and Grow

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

Week 4: Get your first clients

Week four of summer school is here! And now we finally get to talk about marketing. But probably not the kind of marketing that you're expecting me to talk about if you've spent a lot of time, like I have, in the online marketing space, getting all kinds of ads about Instagram and Google and all of that sent to you all the time.

So the question we need to start with when we're thinking about marketing a private practice is, if you were looking for a therapist, where would you look first? And I'm willing to bet that your answer was not, I would scroll through Instagram looking for a therapist. Most of us would start by asking people that we trust, professionals, friends, family, for recommendations. And the best time investment you can make in the early days of your practice is to make sure that you are top of mind for the people your ideal clients are likely to go to for recommendations. So how to get started with what we call relationship marketing?

Local business networking

You can start with local business networking. These events are full of people who might know your ideal clients. Go with a list of professionals or businesses that you think would be useful to your ideal client group and aim to find out enough about them to decide whether you would refer to them. If you do that you're very likely to find that they want to refer to you too.

Different networking groups will attract different people. So for example, because I work in perinatal, I'm looking for people that would very often see people either in pregnancy or in the early days of parenthood. So that might be nutritionists, it might be personal trainers, it might be physios, baby yoga teachers, private midwives, massage therapists. So I really only bother with events where I'm likely to come into contact with those sorts of businesses.

If I go to an event and I find out that it's not right, the right people aren't there, then I'm going to choose a different one for the next month. It's not that it won't be interesting, I'll still make a real effort to understand people's businesses and have some really interesting chats, but it's probably not the best time investment to keep going back.

So have that list in your mind of who you want to meet and make sure you're going to an event where those people are.

Join local mental health professional groups

Another way of building that referral network is to join local groups of other mental health professionals. Alongside regular networking, it's really important to gather those professionals around you who are in a similar field to you.

I'm a firm believer that there's no such thing as competition in what we do. Sadly, there are more than enough people that need our services. So gathering a network of other local psychologists or therapists around you is really helpful in order to help you provide a good service. It may be that these are people that you refer to if you're overcapacity or somebody comes to you needing a different specialism, and I think it's really good to have strong relationships with those people that you do refer out to.

It may also be that this becomes a peer supervision type group where you can ask for advice. If you have a risk situation for example, having a local network who understand the difficulties and know where to signpost people to is really valuable. And you can also help extend each other's knowledge, so it's a really valuable resource and I really, really recommend it.

Link up with other health professionals

You also want to make sure that you make some effort to link up with other health professionals, maybe outside of mental health, but who might have contact with your ideal client. You can find those people in the same way that your ideal client would find them, probably through Google, maybe you'll meet some at networking events, but often it's through Google and reaching out to those people. Again, you're approaching them with this idea of, okay, I might need to refer to you, so I want to understand more about if our values align and the services that you offer.

It can be really difficult to get a response because health professionals are really busy. For example, people often have real trouble getting hold of private GPs. So one way of approaching that is to think about what you might be able to offer them that would be worth them investing their time in. For example, for somebody like me, I might put together a really short 20 minute talk that I can deliver on the mental health impact of severe pregnancy sickness. This is something that very often other health professionals who are not in mental health don't know very much about, and they might really struggle to know what to do if they see a patient that they see is suffering. So I might just put together something really short about how you would identify that somebody was struggling and where you can signpost them to, including charities, the NHS route, and that's why it's good to have a local network so you know what that route would be… and also talking about my services too. So that's a good tip for that.

Use co-working spaces

It's also a good idea, if you're thinking about using any space outside of your home for working, to use a co-working space and chat to the people there. This can be a really great way of seeing the same people week in, week out, and really getting your name out there in the local community.

Often the people that run these spaces are quite invested in advertising the people that work there and trying to create a real business ecosystem of people that refer to each other. So again, this can be a really nice way of building those long term referral networks.

My top tips for building your network

It's all about being reciprocal: Network with people you want to refer to and be explicit about that intention.

Personalised messages

Only ever send messages to people that are really personal and show you've really thought about them, their clients, and the value that you can add for each other's businesses. Don't copy and paste the same outreach message to people. I find, because I often get a mind blank, because I'm an introvert, I'm quite shy, I do start with a template, but I'll always make sure that I adapt it to the person I'm sending it to. Otherwise, we just get so many, don't we? If you're anything like me, I get around 20 of those messages a day from people that basically just want to talk to my audience and haven't really got very much interest in helping me in any way. And you just delete them. So making sure that there's something different about your message that is thoughtful and personal is really important.

Making the most out of networking sessions

I often get asked, how do you make the most of a networking session? So if you make the effort to go networking, how are you going to make sure that you actually get some return on that?

I think something that's really key is preparation. So find out who is going to be at this event before you go. Most of them will have a list of attendees that you can look at before you go, so you can pick out, okay, I want to talk to this person, this person, this person, and this person, because I'm pretty sure that they're going to have contact with my ideal client group. Make sure if you have that information to hand, you know then who you want to speak to at the event. And if it's got their contact details, you could even send them a message in advance, saying ‘Hi, I'm Rosie, I'm really looking forward to meeting you at this event. It would be great to talk about mental health because I think that we have some of the same clients, so let's make sure we make time for a chat’. It's a really great thing to do if you've got access to that attendee list.

Know what you want to get out of the events

So think about, is there anything in your business that you could do with help on? Is there anything that you want to find out about your ideal client group that people that know them in a different capacity might be able to help you answer? It's a really great idea. If there's something that needs doing in your business, for example you're looking for support with search engine optimization, or you need some photos done, go to local networking events and look for the people who are going to do those things for you because people are inherently reciprocal. If you work with one of the businesses in the networking group and you pay them, it's very likely that both them and other people in the group are going to feel more like they want to refer to you. We're reciprocal creatures.

Have clear in your mind what topics of conversation you'd really like to get going

Very often, if you work with me in Start and Grow, and we go into more depth setting up your private practice for longevity and really working out how you're going to grow, something that's really key to that is getting a deep understanding of your ideal client. And very often, when we come to fill out a client persona document, which is basically where you really get under the skin of your ideal client, we find there are gaps in our knowledge that we just can't fill because we've only ever known our ideal clients in our capacity as a mental health professional, and people don't talk normally to mental health professionals. So often there are things that I'll go to a networking meeting and try to find out to flesh out that client persona. So if you've got any questions like that in your mind, make sure that they're clear. And if you're like me and you get blank because you're a bit shy, have it written down somewhere. I find that really helpful.

Take any opportunity you're given to speak

Many events will make you introduce yourself to the group and some will offer opportunities for longer speaking segments as well. So make sure that you've got a two sentence introduction planned where you say who you are and who you help. It's really important and it sounds simple, but again, if you're a bit shy like I am, you might find that you draw a bit of a blank, so practising that is quite helpful. And if they do offer speaker segments, I'm not saying do it on your first go, but when you've gone to that event a couple of times, then do consider putting yourself forward for one, because it really does help people to remember what you do. You don't have to be a brilliant speaker, you just have to communicate who you're trying to help and what your passion is, why you want to help those people. It will stick in people's minds. I still get referrals now from events like that that I did years ago, so definitely worth doing.

Listen and help others

I know that that is probably second nature to you much of the time, but for many of us who would consider ourselves introverts, you go to an event like this and you get so overwhelmed that it can kind of switch off that connection to other people that might be so natural the rest of the time. It's actually really, really important, even if you go to an event and all you do is listen to other people talking about their business problems, empathise and try to offer some sort of perspective. You will probably demonstrate your skills and your expertise because we think slightly differently to many of the other businesses that will be there because we've got different professional backgrounds. I've often found that that's where I make the biggest impression, is just offering what my perspective on that might be, or have you thought about it in this way? Just those simple questions that you ask when you're genuinely curious about somebody else's problem can really demonstrate how good you are in the therapy room and with what you do. So make sure that you're really paying attention and not just constantly thinking about how do I get mention of my business in here? There will be so many people there doing that and it does not work. Go, be a human, have compassion and listen. You're good at that already, so just let yourself shine.

Don't put barriers in your own way

You can start to build a solid professional network simply by searching for people with the same professional title as you on platforms like LinkedIn or Google. Google will also tell you where all your business networking events are. It'll give you a big old list and you can just try them out. Don't worry about things like, ‘I don't have a website’ or ‘I don't have business cards’. You don't need them. So long as you've got somewhere to send people, be that a Psychology Today profile or a LinkedIn profile, fine, that is all you need.

Get contact details

Make sure you get contact details for the people that you speak to at the events and follow up with them. You have to keep that relationship going. It's like any relationship. It's not one and done. It's nurturing these relationships, even if it's just sending out an email once a month to say, hey, how are you doing? Do you fancy a coffee? Are you going to the next event? Or maybe if it would be relevant to them sending over the blog post that you've just written. If you do a lot of this, you might even start up a newsletter, which is actually just for communicating with other businesses and other professionals. However you do it, it's keeping that human relationship alive afterwards and you can't do that if you don't get contact details, so make sure that you do do that.

Week four task

So your 30 minute task for this week: use Google to find three local networking events and commit to going to one per month from September onwards. Or if you're able to do it now for extra brownie points, go now. But assuming that you can't, make sure that you've got your September, October and November events in the diary.

Reach out to at least two other mental health professionals and set up a chat or a coffee and make a list of professionals or businesses that you would like to be able to refer to.

And then final thing for this week, create a two sentence introduction that you can use any time someone asks you who you are and what you do and practise it a couple of times.

I promise that if you don't overthink it, all of those things can be done within 30 minutes. So, 30 minutes, go!