I recently wrote a blog about how to become a wealthy therapist.
One of the things I've found is, for many people you have to be very clear and direct. That means my post on money won't resonate with some people. It's too abstract.
So I want to be more clear and direct. If you want to make more as a counselor, there are only two ways.
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How to raise your salary: Charge more.
For most clinicians the easy way to charge more is to simply go into solo practice. If your agency takes 40% of what you bring in, and you go into solo practice you get a 40% raise.
If you're already in solo practice then you have to raise your rates. The big number to pay attention is your number of referrals. If you're getting 10 referrals a week, then odds are one of them can pay a higher rate.
Also, how many of your referrals are word of mouth? If you're getting 2 referrals a week, but they were referred by a past client then they probably really want to see you. Which means that it's worth it to them to pay a higher rate.
Which brings up the "how do you get more referrals?" You can check out my series on referrals here.
How to raise your salary 2: Serve more people.
Usually this means starting a group practice. This is hard to do because you have to learn how to run a business, as well as learn to get clients for other people. However, you could also run a groups. But groups are notoriously hard to fill.
Group practices tend to make less than you'd think. Yeah, a lot of money flows through the business, but most of that money goes to paying the rent on your building (rent on the buildings really is astronomical), paying employees, and taking care of other expenses.
To side step the complexity, many clinicians decide to become a supervisor. This allows them to see multiple therapist at one time instead of seeing multiple clients. I'm a supervisor, and I've done some coaching, but I've not done a ton of this. The big question here is do you trust your supervisees. If you get the wrong supervisee it's a liability nightmare.
The boring truth about making more money as therapists
Those are the basic paths.
If you're more creative you can give courses to other therapists. For instance you can teach other therapist how to start their business. Ideally you'd price it over your hourly rate (hence charging more) or give it in a group format (hence serving more people.)
But it's pretty much that simple.
If you liked this post, consider reading this next. It's part 1 in this series where I cover the '9 laws of money mastery'.