Who are you helping? Three ways to specialise your psychology or therapy practice

The Business of Psychology

Who are you helping? Three ways to specialise your psychology or therapy practice

Hello and welcome to today's episode of The Business of Psychology Podcast. We are continuing today with our special theme around specialisation and how you can find the people that you really want to help in your practice.

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

Links & References:

Episode 103: Why you should specialise – old gold that is still important

Episode 61: Turning a practice into a service with Dr Melanie Lee

Start & Grow: The Complete Course for Psychologists and Therapists - Psychology Business School

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

The first thing we need to talk about today are the reasons to specialise.

Then I'm going to talk you through a few different ways specialisation can look in your practice, because I've been teaching about specialising for over three years now, and what I've come to realise is that like with everything in business and marketing, there is no one size fits all approach to specialisation.

Then finally, I've got something for you if you're not quite sure of your specialism yet, or if all of this makes your head feel a bit fuzzy. So stay tuned to hear about that.

Why do I think it's important for you to specialise in your practice now?

If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you'll know that I'm really passionate about specialisation, and that is not just because it makes life easier, but it really does. It is also because it makes it easier to provide what our clients really need. We're in a fairly unique industry in mental health, in that we're in an industry where people are not only trusting us with their money, they're also making a huge emotional investment and taking a huge emotional risk when they come to work with us.

My belief is that we need to respect that and pay attention to what is going to reassure people that we can really help them. To do that, we need to build our authority in the best way that we can, and all that really means is proving to people that we care about them, that we invest lots of time in learning how to help people like them, and that we're staying on top of the evidence base.

In order to do that, I just do not believe we can do that properly as generalists. Now that might be controversial. I know that people disagree with me, and I think that it may be less true if you're working in the NHS because there you have access to CPD and colleagues and perhaps a wide range of supervision. But in private practice, let's be real, you are busy. There's only so many papers you can read, there's only so many projects you can be working on at once, only so many evidence bases you can keep on top of.

I think that patients that come to see us in private practice deserve to feel special, and they deserve to feel that the clinician that is talking to them cares deeply about the struggles that they're coming to them with. And I think the best way that we can offer that to our clients in reality as well as in marketing, is by specialising and spending a lot of time thinking deeply about a particular struggle.

I also do believe that it is easier for us. I think that's important to acknowledge. It's really overwhelming when you are faced with new problem after new problem after new problem in private practice. I'm not standing on my high horse about this, this is what I did in the first year of my practice. I would take literally anybody, and it meant that I was acting like a trainee all the time. I was reading papers right before I saw somebody. I was having sleepless nights thinking I don't really feel confident about this. I was paying out so much for different supervisors and different CPD options because I was trying to be on top of everything all of the time, and I always felt like a failure.

The imposter syndrome was massive. And my marketing wasn't very effective, so I was really only able to get clients who were looking on directory sites or who were coming to me through insurance, and that meant that the fees that I could command were much lower than they are now.

So I think there's two really strong reasons to specialise; firstly because it's what our clients want and need, but it's also because it's really hard as a solo practitioner to keep up a generalist approach and not feel like a imposter, or that you're not doing a job as well as you want to do it.

So those are my reasons. I go into it in a lot more depth in the podcast on specialising that I recorded way back at the beginning, so I've linked to that in the show notes for you. It's also something that we're going to be talking about in more depth on the training that I'm running on the 13th of September. If this is new to you, if you haven't thought about your specialism before, or you have, but you need to revisit, then make sure you register for that training now. The link is in the show notes. We're going to go into depth on the reasons that you need to specialise, that overwhelm, authority, that client need, but we are also going to dive into the practicalities of how you choose your specialism and how you make it work for you.

What specialisms can look like for different business models

So let's think then about what specialisms can look like for different business models.

Solo practitioners

Firstly, if you are an individual or a solo practitioner, then it's pretty straightforward to specialise. Maybe you start out by going to networking events and meeting new people and talking about a particular area of interest. And just talking about it is ‘oh yeah, I'm a psychologist, or I'm a therapist and my special interest is…’ I always recommend that's how you start when you're developing a specialism, because when you do that, you quickly realise whether this is something that you're really passionate about and you can talk about with enthusiasm at length or whether it's something which actually makes you feel a little bit awkward, in which case it might not be the right specialism for you.

So you might start out by just talking about your special interest. Then when that starts to feel good, then you might change the copy on your website. You might start to change the wording on your directory site profiles, and then you might start to change the branding of your practice to reflect that specialism. Notice I'm talking quite incrementally here, and that's how I recommend approaching specialisation.

This isn't about saying I shall never see another client outside of my specialism. because it doesn't work like that. You're still going to get general inquiries, and until you've been established in your specialism for quite some time, you'll probably want to accept some general clients while you gradually build up your bank of clients within your specialty. And that is absolutely fine.

I think now I've been specialised for about five or six years, and now I only really receive referrals from within my specialism, but that wasn't true at all for probably the first four or five years. I was still getting lots and lots of general inquiries that I would have to turn away. And actually even now, I still get inquiries for children, even though I really don't work with children, so I'm always referring those on. You don't need to worry that all of your referral streams will dry up. You don't need to worry that current clients will think it's weird because to be honest, they don't usually notice, and if they do notice it, it's normal in healthcare for clinicians to have special interests. We’re used to seeing practitioners that have a special interest that might be slightly different to what we're seeing them for. In my experience and in the experience of the hundreds of people I've spoken to about this, nobody seems to find it that weird, so don't worry about that.

So it can look that straightforward as a individual or solo practitioner, and I think often it feels hard to do, but the secret to it is just taking the first step, seeing how it feels, tuning into what your body says about it, what your mind says about it, and continuing on through some of the discomfort that's likely to come up around it.

If you want any guidance around that and you are a solo or an individual practitioner, then please make sure you register for the training on the 13th of September, because that's where we're going to go deep into exactly what this is going to look like in your practice.

Group practices

The second thing to think about is if you run a group practice or if you aspire to run a group practice.

I'm always really encouraging you to think, even if you're at the beginning of your business, where do I want this to go? Because it's so easy to set up as an individual practitioner and stay that way just because that's the easiest way to get set up.

If you want your service to be bigger than that, if you want to be a group practice, start thinking and planning it from the beginning because it will alter how you go about things, and this is one of the decisions that you will need to make, which might be slightly different if you are planning to be a group practice or you are a group practice versus if you plan to stay as a solo practitioner.

Specialising the whole service

One option if you operate as a group practice is to specialise the whole service. We've got a really nice podcast episode with Dr. Melanie Lee, who runs a brilliant example of a group practice that is highly specialised. This is a lovely idea because what this allows you to do is create a service that may not exist in the NHS or may not be very accessible, or may not be accessible or desirable to certain clients in your area.

You can bring in other clinicians from other disciplines, other specialised psychologists or therapists, and really create the holistic service that you would love to see and bring it into existence.

What's nice about this is you take the same approach to specialisation that you would take as an individual. You tailor your website copy, you tailor your branding, you make sure you get out there and you talk about the specialism of the service and the people that you serve specifically. So everything about it is pretty much the same as what you would do for the individual, but you are able to offer other clinicians something really special, and that is you can bring people under your umbrella. And yes, you will charge a fee for that, and you'll use the associate model usually, although you could look at employment as well, but most people would use the associate model for this. But for that fee, you can provide CPD, you can get people in to talk to your specialist group of clinicians about issues which are really exciting and interesting to them. You can do things like carry out research and achieve much more in the kind of ‘do more than therapy’ space. Things like workshops, things like online courses. All of this becomes easier and much more possible when you have a whole service specialised to one particular area.

It's also easier to win contracts. Approaching somebody like a local authority, for example, or a corporate company and saying, ‘Hey, we offer these specialist services, these are all the clinicians we have available, would you like to do a deal?’ That's much more likely to go well when you've got a specialised group practice.

Obviously with any group practice, there's a lot more involved in the setup, and we're going to be talking about that when we dive into business models later in this series, but it's a really powerful tool. What I would say is, if you want to run a specialist service, you've got two marketing jobs to do. So you've got the marketing job, which you're going to be doing for the public, for the people that you want to bring in as clients, but you've also got a marketing job to do to get the right clinicians under your umbrella. You have to give them a really great reason to want to be part of your service rather than setting up on their own. I think often we forget about this when we're setting up associate practices, but this is really important if your ambition is to specialise your whole service. So be thinking about that from the beginning of your business, if that is your plan.

Group practice as a general service

Finally, you can specialise in a different way if you have a group practice, but your vision is to maintain that practice as a general service. This can be a good route to take if your ambition is to have a very big group practice. There's a few examples up and down the country of associate practices which are massive, really, really massive, and they win big contracts, lots of big contracts with lots of different types of organisations offering lots of different services.

What these practices do really well is they get to know the individual specialties of their clinicians, and they use those individual specialties to run particular specialist campaigns under the umbrella of the more general practice. So for example, If you've got people under your umbrella that are specialists in neuro assessment, then you would market your neuro service separately from the brand as a whole, so you wouldn't be talking in the same breath about neuro assessment and birth trauma therapy. That wouldn't make any sense to people. People wouldn't really know what you were about. But what you could do is approach people who might be interested in neuro assessment, really singing the praises of your neuro colleagues and approaching that as a completely separate marketing campaign.

Then you would do the same thing for your therapists in different areas. And we're not just talking here about campaigns to the general public, but if you are looking to run a really big group practice like this, you're going to be looking at trying to win contracts. So you'd be going to local authorities and corporate organisations and saying ‘Hey, we are such and such psychological services and this is a particular service that we offer that we think might be of interest to your organisation. Can we talk about how we might be able to serve you with this?’ So you wouldn't go in and just be like, hey, we've got all this stuff, what do you need? You would work out what you think they need, and you would lean into that. Yes, you offer more stuff and if they go to your website, they'll be able to see that, or you can talk to them about that when you get on a call with them, but you are going to be leading with particular specialties so that it doesn't become confusing and you still have that clear marketing message with all marketing communications that you have.

I hope that can help you visualise a bit what a specialism might look like for different business models, because there isn't just one way to do it, but it is a principle which I think is really important in healthcare marketing, and that is different, I should say, to marketing. On the whole if you are like me and a bit of a geek, and you read lots of marketing literature, then you will see that there is an advantage to being general.

If you have a product or a different kind of service, then generalism is the most likely way to grow a big business, and that's still kind of true for us. If you want a really huge group practice, then generalism is the way to do it.

So I really hope that that has given you some inspiration and got you thinking about specialism and whether you might need to take on a new specialism, refine the one you’ve got, or just started you thinking about the specialising process.

As ever, if you've got any questions about this episode, please feel free to get in touch with me. I'm @rosiegilderthorp on Instagram, or you can always email me at [e-mail].

Mentioned in this episode:

Start and Grow

Before you go, did you know that I have a course for professionals just like you who are starting out in independent practice? In fact, my Start and Grow course has already supported hundreds of psychologists and therapists to build impactful, financially rewarding, and professionally fulfilling practices. When you sign up to the course, you get clear step-by-step support to build a practice that supports your values and rewards your hard work through our comprehensive online learning modules. You get peace of mind, thanks to our complete suite of legal documents from Clare Veal at Aubergine Legal, you get 12 months of membership to our supportive student community, access to our private students' podcast, so you can learn in your own time and in your own way. You, yes, I see you learning while you're doing the washing up! And you get access to regular group coaching sessions with me and the rest of our lovely students. If that sounds like exactly what you need to get out of private practice paralysis, then sign up today at https://psychologybusinessschool.com/psychology-business-school/