The Secret To Marketing Your Practice.
By Jordan Harris Ph.D
What We Learned Running Private Practice Incubator.
From 2022-2025 I ran a small consulting firm with Paul Peterson. We helped clinicians go from having no practice, to having a fully booked practice, to having a plan for financial independence in 9 months.
We've since shut down the practice. Here's what I learned.
The biggest problem most therapists think they have is marketing. Marketing is all about your network.
During PPI, I also talked to a LOT of people who were interested in PPI. The goal of PPI was to take clinicians who have NO practice all the way through to having a full practice to ending with a plan for financial independence.
A lot of people who scheduled an info session didn’t want that. What they wanted was more clients. They’d say “Well, I sort of already have my own business. Can I just do the part where you help me get clients?”
This is going to sound brutal. Most of the time this question was deeply uninformed.
Unless you know some basic business metrics, you don’t know if your problem is you don’t have enough clients. The first metric you need to know is “how long do you keep clients”? If you’re getting 4 calls a week, and you’re keeping clients for 10 sessions, you can make a decent living earning between 120-145k a year. But if you get 4 calls a week and you only keep clients for 8 sessions, you’ll max out at 18 clients a week and make much less.
The standard benchmarks are that the most common number of sessions worldwide is 1, and the average number of sessions clients come for is 5. If you’re keeping clients for that short of a time, you’d need a LOT more referrals to stay full. You can run your own numbers with this calculator.
This means that while most therapists think they have a marketing problem, they actually have a retention problem.
But let’s say you actually know that your problem is marketing (and not retention). Well, then you have a really hard problem because marketing isn’t easy for therapists. The easiest way for most businesses to get more clients is to ask their current clients for referrals, get client testimonials, or start some sort of affiliate program.
All of those are a no-no for therapists.
Most of the clinicians we’ve seen who’ve had an easy time getting clients started with a strong network. For example, one hotshot therapist we know is well known in her church community. She had a relatively easy time starting her practice. She told her church she was starting her own practice. They asked her to speak at a few events. She got tons of clients.
We’ve seen this sort of thing over and over again. The problem is building a network takes time. A LOT of time. And it’s hard to do. You have to be liked by your network and seen as an expert.
What many people attempt to do is something like run paid ads. Paid ads can work. John Clarke did it. But paid ads are complicated and quite expensive. If you’re going to do paid ads you typically need to hire someone or really go all in on learning the process yourself.
The LAST thing you should do is say, “well I got 500 bucks of credit for Facebook ads. I’ll try that for a week.” That’s only a way to convince yourself that ads don’t work.
Now building a network or learning to run paid ads aren’t the only two ways to build a caseload. There are a few others, but let me be very clear, there are no easy ways to get more clients. You either have to spend a lot of time or spend a lot of money.
Best,
Jordan (the counselor)
Jordan Harris Ph.D, LMFT-s, LPC-s, is a specialist in what makes a master therapist. He regularly offers trainings teaching this skills of master therapists. You can learn more about Dr. Harris's trainings here.
Jordan Harris
Jordan Harris, Ph.D., LMFT-S, LPC-S, received his Doctor of Philosophy in Marriage and Family Therapy from the University of Louisiana Monroe. He is a licensed professional counselor and a licensed marriage and family therapist in the state of Arkansas, USA. In his clinical work, he enjoys working with couples. He also runs a blog on deliberate practice for therapists and counselors at Jordanthecounselor.com You can find him on linkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-harris-lpc-s-lmft-s-418412301/
Paul Peterson
Paul Peterson is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) in the state of Arkansas. He has certification and/or training in EFT, hypnotherapy, and mindfulness as well as adult psychological development models. He's been in the mental health field since 2015 and in 2019 worked with a team of authors to publish a content analysis in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. The content analysis reviewed almost 1,000 research articles and tracked trends in publishing and clinical effectiveness research. He has also published a book on a Wholeness-oriented approach to contemporary Christian faith. He gives regular training on clinical skills, hypnotherapy, and business skills for solo practice therapists.
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