Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup Podcast

Welcome PrivateSLP listeners to Episode 54! Today we are talking with Leanne Sherred, CCC SLP, founder and speech pathologist from expressable.io.   In today’s interview, We will find out exactly why Leanne Started her own business as we talk about the following: * Venturing out and starting expressable.io, * The rewards and challenges of starting a private practice from scratch, * Things expressable.io has forced Leanne to tackle head on like billing, to scheduling, to taxes, to practice management, * Why Leanne decided to be a cash-only practice, and how this can be extremely liberating for other speech therapists, * How expressable.io supports entrepreneurial therapists with our self-referral model, * Tips for therapists thinking about making the entrepreneurial plunge.   In this Episode: 01:23 – Over 68,912 listeners to this show 02:28 – Going to talk to Leanne Sherred, founder of expressable.io 04:11 – Introducing Expressable, a Teletherapy provider 07:10 – Trying to match families or individual with Therapist 08:38 – Not dealing with insurance 09:52 – Our billing works like a subscription 22:56 – Therapists find it a really enjoyable experience as well 25:34 – Consultation is important 26:36 – Don’t have to wait for all that approval DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION I coach a lot of SLPs and OTs for that matter in our all access community at privateslp.com. And we’re always talking about marketing and how to drive business and traffic to our websites and to our practices, into our clinics. And, that’s one thing that I always talk about to our members is, this stuff does take time. It’s not happening overnight and not everyone can do this. Not everybody is cut out to start and grow and scale their own businesses because I think it takes a special person to make things happen. [Commercial] Well, hello everyone. You’re listening to the speech therapy, private practice startup podcast. This is episode number 54. My name is Kyle Medes and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show, everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and questions. And as of today, today’s Thursday, June 11th 2020. We have well over 68,912 listeners to this show. And I’m super glad you guys are out there getting good, valuable information. And if you wouldn’t mind, please go to the iOS or Android platform of your choice and leave some good five star feedback that way other people just like you can get the same valuable information. And if this is your first episode, welcome to the show. You can gladly start out at episode number one and work your way through all the episodes. And hopefully here you’ll find all the tips and tricks you need to start, grow and scale your own Speech therapy private practice. But if you need some more help, I’m here to help you. I have a group of people that I help online, and that is at privateslp.com/coaching. And there’s two selections there. You can simply access the All Access Community and work with me hand in hand in our online platform. And you can also have weekly coaching calls with me as the Perfect student. So those choices are right there for you there. So if you need my help, I’m there to help you. Now, today, I’m going to talk to Leanne Sherred. She is a speech and language pathologist and the founder of expressable.io, and she is going to be interviewed today and talk to us and our listening community about the rewards and challenges of starting and growing and scaling her own Speech Therapy Private Practice. Let’s listen. Kyle: Hey today, we’ve got Leanne Sherred. She’s on the line today and she’s going to talk about her business. Hey Leanne, how are you? Leanne: I’m good, Kyle. Thank you. How are you today? Kyle: I’m doing well. It’s early this morning. I had to wake up and have a couple cups of coffee. What about you? Are you a morning person? Leanne: I am not. If I don’t have the coffee, I don’t know. Don’t come near me. No, I’m good. I get up and go when I need to, but if I’m given the choice, I’ll go slow in the mornings. Kyle: No, that’s awesome. I’m just the opposite. I think I was up at like 3:30, 4 O’clock getting ready for everything. And right now we have a fire on the mountain here in Tucson. So I was reading the news reports and I just got a pilot’s license. So I was looking there’s a temporary flight restriction right over our house. Some guy was flying a couple of drones, yesterday and grounded the whole rescue crew where they spray water on the fire. So that was kind of discouraging, but we’re trying to get through this, so, Leanne: Oh my goodness. Kyle: Oh, it’s always something. Leanne: Yeah. Well, be safe. That’s a bit scary. Kyle: Yeah, but we’ll make it through. Hey, it’s either Coronavirus or, Hey, tell me about your business as speaking of coronavirus, which means Online Therapy. What are you guys up to these days? Leanne: Yeah, so, uh, our company expressable, we are a teletherapy provider, for right now just Speech Therapy Services is our business. And, we got started before all of this started going down, but we’ve really seen that it’s, it’s been a great resource for people, hopefully dealing with all this stuff going on with Coronavirus. We are a private practice or we’re an out-of-pocket practice. Our mission is really to provide therapy more conveniently for people. They can do it anywhere, anywhere they’re comfortable, most do it from their houses, which is very convenient. And then also trying to provide therapy at a more affordable out-of-pocket rate. And so we’re trying to leverage the cost savings that can come along with just having the teletherapy and not needing to rent an office space, not needing to pay gas, mileage, to drive around the house, to house, take those cost savings and pass them on to the clients. And outside of that, we’re also trying to provide a flexible working experience for therapists as well. Kyle: Yeah, that’s a great idea. I know in our business we see thousands of people a month and at the drop of a hat, we were forced to move all of these people to telehealth and it was a challenge, but we were able to keep everyone employed and pay everyone’s insurances and, dental, vision health, and even 401k with a match. So we’ve done okay. But I’m glad we had that tele-health piece ready to go. One of our key employees, her name is Nikki. She helped us move all these kids and families, and the therapist got them already. But it sounds like you guys were ahead of the curve and got all this planned ahead of time. Also, I like what you’re saying is affordable for families. I know in our business, we try to keep things really affordable for people. And I know moving forward, we’re gonna make this telehealth thing, part of our business model. It’s something, we were forced to do, but it sounds like you were ahead of the game. Tell me a little bit about the working environment for one of your therapists. How does that work for them? Leanne: Yeah. So if you’re a therapist with us, we ask that you have about 10 hours that leaves to dedicate towards working with us as we get everything set up. But outside of that, you can pretty much choose your hours. And if you wanted to work in the evenings, if you had another position, if you are a parent and maybe, one parents at home during the day and then kind of takes over at night, if you want to work on weekends, two days, three days, four days, however often you want to work outside of just that minimum is AOK by us. And then a big part of our model is really trying to match the families or the individual with a therapist who’s going to be a really good fit for them. So we’re also trying to help therapists build a caseload that they want to have. So if you are someone who’s willing and able and comfortable working with all sorts of populations, that’s great. And we can just keep your caseload staffed really full. If you’re someone who has a sort of niche population that you really love working with, or maybe that you’re particularly skilled at working with, then we can also help staff that in particular. And so, cause I know, it happens in some other settings where you get cases that come along and, you’re equipped to deal with them and under your scope of practice, you can, but maybe it’s just not your favorite population to work with. And so we do consultations for all of the referrals that come in. And so that’s a good opportunity to kind of find out a little bit more in order to get people matched up with a therapist is going to be a good fit. Kyle: It’s really important. Leanne: Yeah. I think it just lends itself towards greater success. They blend more and they hopefully are making really solid progress in that case. So the next big thing for therapists is the paperwork side of things. I think because we’re out of pocket, we’re not dealing with insurance, we don’t do any direct billing with insurance. We provide superbills if families or individuals ask for them. But outside of that, we are really not super interested in jumping through those hoops. So we document to the extent that, is clinically necessary and important for everything to be understood, but we’re not shaping things to be exactly the way that different companies require this, this one wants this, right? Your goal is like this, please, we’re not doing that. We’re going with what the clinician feels is best. Kyle: That’s awesome. Yeah. And as far as like, what patients have to pay and families have to pay, is it like a per-visit model? Is it a package deal? How do you guys work that out? Leanne: It’s a per-visit model. Yeah. So it’s a per visit model and we’re really transparent about the pricing on the website. We think that that’s important that families have a good picture of that coming in. So it’s right on there on the pricing page. It’s $59 per session. And so it’s per session. And then the way that we set

Welcome back PrivateSLP listeners, I would like to introduce The Perfect Student, Kyle White. Kyle is a super-motivated individual that is out to help as many kiddos in his community by providing some of the best pediatric therapy in the Philadelphia area. In this episode, you will hear how this United States Marine and MBA worked with his wife, Ashley White, CCC-SLP to create a multidisciplinary clinic with over 60+ patients in 10 short months.   Together, they have watched Milestone Therapy Group  grow from an concept and idea into a reality . In this Episode: 02:28 – Introducing Perfect Student Mr Kyle White 04:57 – Getting into Speech Therapy 07:18 – Google source and podcast information 09:25 – Having Entrepreneurial Spirit 12:45 – Leverage knowledge and be multi-disciplinary 17:51 – Getting foundation built 21:02 – Now is the time you want to be an entrepreneur or start your practice 23:28 – Getting help with credentialing DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION Episode 53 is all about celebrating success, and in this episode, Kyle explains how he found PrivateSLP,  asked for help, became credentialed with insurance plans  and worked with me one on one on a weekly basis to become the Perfect Student!   Introduction  “We started from basically nothing to now multi-disciplinary, several different therapists on board and 60 plus kids a week”.   PrivateSLP Intro Solid, sustaining and successful. You’re listening to this Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup Podcast with your host Kyle Meades, speech and language pathologist. Listen, learn and prosper as we share our experience and knowledge so that you can improve your business and your life, one podcast at a time.   Kyle Meades  Well, hello, everyone, you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup Podcast. This is episode number 53. My name is Kyle Medes and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life. One podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show, everyone. Thanks again for all the e-mails and all the questions. And as of today, today is Thursday, April the 2nd 2020. We have well over 65399 listeners to the show. And I’m super glad you guys are out there getting good valuable information. And you know me, I say it every single podcast, value is what you get in the absence of money. And these podcasts are absolutely free for you. So if you wouldn’t mind, just please head on over to the Android or the Apple iTunes platform of your choice and leave some good 5-Star feedback that way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you are receiving right now. And I also wanted to let you guys know that we have a space available for The Perfect Student, and that is when you get to come to Tucson and work with me hand in hand. You also get weekly coaching calls for me. There’s also some billing and credentialing services in there, too. And so you can find out more information about that at PrivateSLP.com/coaching. What many people choose to do is to work with me online and that’s where you get access to me via the private coaching thread and also access to others in the community. And you can also find that PrivateSLP.com/coaching. Now, today, I’m really excited. This is a great episode because you guys know me and you know me well. I’m always talking about The Perfect Student. And finally, you get to meet a Perfect Student. And this is going to be Mr. Kyle White and his wife, Ashley White. And they are clinic owners in Pennsylvania. And I had the great opportunity to talk to Kyle today and ask him and pick his brain about all kinds of things, about starting and growing and scaling his own speech therapy private practice. And the funny thing is, Kyle is not even an SLP. He is a United States Marine, he’s also got a Masters of Business Administration (MBA). And he’s also just transitioned out of his full time job in the Internet cyber security space, working for a large educational firm. Now he’s working for himself. And all of that happened right here in the last 10 months. And also the bottom fell out with the whole coronavirus thing. And so he’s navigating that and he is learning how to increase his patient load from 0 to over 60+ people per week in. He’s got now many employees, speech therapy, occupational therapists and some other therapists included. So I just want you to kick back and listen to the show today and learn about The Perfect Student.   Kyle Meades Hey, today we’re talking with Kyle White – Kyle White is the owner of Milestone Therapy Group. And you guys who listen to the show regularly, you know that I’m always talking about The Perfect Student and we were taken applications for The Perfect Student and I finally had this bright idea, hey one day you probably would want to listen and meet one of our Perfect Students. Wouldn’t you say that’s the right thing to do, Kyle?   Kyle White Yeah, exactly. It’s a good idea.   Kyle Meades Yeah. Kyle reached out to me. I remember I was on the North Shore, Oahu we were on vacation. It was the last week of May. Kind of going into June. And I get this email from one of our contact pages, you know, is this really nice, guy. His name is Kyle White and he was interested in starting a business at that time. And Kyle and his wife, Ashley, they both own Milestone Therapy Group and they provide speech and occupational therapy services in the Philadelphia area. And I just wanted you guys, the listening community out there to meet Kyle and kind of know what it takes to be The Perfect Student. So, Kyle, if you wouldn’t mind, give me some background. How did you even get into speech therapy? Because if I remember right, you’re not even a speech therapist, are you?   Kyle White That is correct. So kind of a lot of winding, twisty roads even deciding that we were going to start the business then obviously till now. But quick, short background. Yeah, I am by no means a speech therapist, any type of therapist. I always joke, you know, therapists are way smarter than I’ll ever be. So, yeah, definitely not a plan route. Just kind of got here and trial and error and obviously with your help. But to boil it down, my background, I was in the Marines active duty for several years. I mean, then got out in 2015 and went to work for a big four firm doing cyber security. And then in a lot of different conversations and whatnot, my wife and I started Milestone Therapy Group in June of 2019.   Kyle Meades Wow, what a story! And Ashley, your wife, she’s the speech and language pathologist, right?   Kyle White  Correct. Yep. So Ashley’s background for several years now, she’s by trade, a speech therapist.   Kyle Meades   That’s awesome. And so you guys were just searching the web one day and looking, you know, on how to start a speech therapy, private practice. Is that how you found us?   Kyle White  Yeah. So in short, yes. So just trying to understand how to start a speech therapy business. Right. Just, you know, using the old Google, trying to figure out where to start, you know, trying to work backwards, really like what does that look like? We need to do. And really, the podcast is kind of where that’s where I started this in your messages and the different podcast. And then it was like, oh, this guy who actually practices what he preached for lack of better words, like, oh, this guy actually has his own, you know, thriving clinics. And so that was like the model. I was like, OK, I want somebody that’s, you know, for lack of better words, doing it right, not just, you know, putting out some resources, saying, hey, here’s how to do do something that somebody is actually doing it. So, yeah. Long story short was listen to the podcast. And I remember I was even traveling around for work a lot. And so we’d listen to the podcast just to get ideas. Yes, I found you on Google. And then the podcast was the tipping point for reaching out to you.   Kyle Meades Oh, that’s awesome. I’m glad you found those interesting. Sometimes I even wonder. I mean, I see the numbers. I see people from all around the world are listening to the podcast. You know, I see the data. But, you know, it’s nice to hear that people actually get good value out of that. But you said you were traveling through your job. You were in the corporate world of cybersecurity, in the education space. Right?   Kyle White  Yep, cyber security and compliance. So, yeah, in in short, I would ensure that the company that I work for, you know, we were compliant in certain areas and then dealing with a lot of different vendors that the company did business with all related cyber security and compliance. So, yeah.   Kyle Meades  And you just over time, I guess you were just searching for something more, right? I mean, I knew when I started my own business, I just got sick and tired of working for other people and I wanted to do things on my own. You know, through the good and the bad. And so did you and your wife one day just look at each other and say, you know, “Hey, we should open up a private practice” or did she mention it? Because if I remember right, too, you’ve got a MBA, you’ve got a Masters of Business Administration to so not only are you in the Marines or were in the Marines – you were in the corporate world, in cybersecurity in the education space, but you also have an MBA, right? So you guys wanted to put that together?   Kyle White Right. So I don’t even remember. So to get a little bit a historical background, I don’t even remember what grade I was in. I think, you know, it might have been first or second grade. And I don’t know how I, you know, might have been around Halloween or something like that. But I had a bag of candy, you know, like a little Halloween bag of candy. And I took it to school and started selling the candy. So I made a little bit of profit off of, you know, the the bag of candy I bought from the Dollar Store or Wal-Mart or whatever. And I was like, oh,

With the onset of COVID-19, I talk about making changes in your your Speech Therapy Private Practice. With sudden change comes anxiety, but in this episode, I look back at other events in my life that gave me the abilities to make good solid changes in our business so that patients can get their treatments and employees can receive a paycheck during these difficult times. Resources for Small Businesses: The Small Business Owner’s Guide to the CARES Act In this episode: 02:15 – Space for Perfect Student 02:45 – Change happens 05:30 – Adapt and Change 08:30 – Teletherapy 09:48 – Shutting doors to take care of family and staff 11:10 – Change comes with opportunity DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION I remember I was on a business trip in Vegas about four weeks ago, and we were talking amongst ourselves, some other big clinic owners and we were talking about the same thing, we’re hearing on the news about this Coronavirus. And I said, I started thinking about that Teletherapy thing and I said, we got to get ready for this. We need to go to our pandemic plans and get this thing moving. [Commercial] Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 52. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show, everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions. And as of today. Today’s Friday, March 27th, 2020. We have well over 64,836 listeners to the show. And I’m super glad you guys are out there and getting good, valuable information. You know me, I said every single podcast value is what you get in the absence of money and these podcasts are free for you. So if you wouldn’t mind, just please go to your Android or iTunes platform of your choice and leave some good 5-Star feedback. That way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you are receiving right here today. And I’d like to welcome those around the world who are listening to the podcast. We’ve got Australia, Japan, India, Canada, the U.K., Germany, South Africa and the Republic of South Korea just to name a few countries. So those are popping up on the list right now. So it’s just really nice to have you guys out there. And if you have any questions, you can also just reach out to me at privateslp.com. I wanted to let you guys know that we still have space for the perfect student. And if you want some one on one coaching with me, you can also get that head privateslp.com/coaching. And for those of you who are starting out and you are working with insurance companies, if you need some help with your billing or credentialing, you can always just go to privateslp.com/billing and I can help you there. Well, today is one of those topics that we all need to talk about. It’s really the 800 pound gorilla in the room, right? It’s called change. And change is something that happens whether we like it or not. And, with this whole coronavirus thing, I mean, I was forced to change, 47 employees, 48 employees, and we had to move thousands of patients over to a new platform and we had to do it quickly. And so I wanted to talk to you about that today. I just got off of a live webinar with our all access community members. And we were speaking about the same thing that I’m talking to you about here right now. And that’s just really how to adapt to an online platform so we can continue to help those that we serve, with speech or occupational or physical therapy or even a B.A. therapy. So, I get many calls from around the United States, e-mails, communications about people starting, different kinds of clinics. And so, we just have to get used to that change. And it’s just really a crazy time in the world right now. And it’s everybody. But it really got me thinking about when I was a kid. I remember I was in a Middle-Class home. And my mom and my dad were hardworking people. And my dad was a plumber. This was back in the 80s. For those of you who are old enough to remember the savings and loan bust back in the 80s. And that’s when pretty much interest rates went sky high. And values of properties went low. And my dad was a plumber. And I remember at that time, he had about 100 employees and he was worried. And I just remember I didn’t know what was going on, but I know that it wasn’t good. I remember my dad. He had some land down the way and he built a couple of duplexes. And I remember he couldn’t sell our house. I just remember that Century 21 real estate sign was just in our yard for the longest time. I remember asking my mom, why isn’t the house selling? And she gave me some answer, but I really didn’t understand it. But I remember my mom and my dad. And now we moved out of that house and we moved down to one of our duplexes. And so, looking back, I saw that what my dad was doing is, he was consolidating and kind of, riding out that storm at that time so other people would pay rent and he could use that money to pay the mortgage. So, that’s one of the things my dad did. But, I just remember that and how we had to adapt and change. You know, we had a Middle-Class lifestyle. We used to take trips, used to go out to eat. And I remember for the most part, all of that stopped and then I remember I had to go to work. I remember my dad and I’ve spoken about this on some of my earlier podcast. I had to go to work on my dad’s plumbing trucks and I had to wash cars and run gasline and dig ditches. But I really understood the value of money. And then fast forward to, the early 2000s and I just moved back from New Zealand and got back into New Orleans. And then, a few months later, here it goes, Hurricane Katrina. And I just remember going through that natural disaster. I lost my job overnight. Yet I had no income. But I did have about eight to ten thousand dollars in the bank. I do remember that. And I remember just all the devastation, all the doom and gloom. I had a hospital pass because I worked at a major hospital, Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans. And I remember I was able to come back a little bit early. My buddy Bobby was in the National Guard, so I got back into the city earlier than most. And I just remember seeing all the flooding. And there’s a Web page that I put up on privateslp.com. If you want to see some of those images, just the destruction that I saw. And it really did something to me. It changed me just like that event that changed me when I was a kid in the 80s. This event changed me in the early 2000s, Hurricane Katrina. And I remember, I had a couple duplexes at the time and I was living on top and renting the bottom out and that was paying for that mortgage. And then down the street, I had another couple, two bedrooms, one bath place, and that was paying for their mortgage. And all of a sudden, after one day there were no more tenants. And that students at Tulane, they were gone. And the students said all the major universities, the whole place to shut down overnight. And I remember getting back to my house and it was just gross. It was a lot of water. And I remember walking my roofs and I needed a couple roofs and called my friend. He was a contractor. And I said, hey, can you hook me up with a couple roofs? And he says, yeah, I do two roofs for it’s going to be about fifty five hundred cash on. Said you got a deal. Next day, I had two new roofs on my house and I remember right then and there I learned this lesson again. My neighbor comes over, he says hey wait insurance company do you use. And I said, oh, that’s the Bank of Kyle. I just pay cash. He goes, Really? I said, Yeah, I don’t have time to wait for insurance companies. I mean, why would you do that? Because when you need to get things done, you got to move quickly. You got to get it done and get it done fast. So I made that phone call and I had two new roofs that next day the roofs were on my house. The top of my house, put a new roof on, so I was grateful I had that money saved up. And here it is the Coronavirus. We got 48 employees, we see about thirty eight hundred patients a month. And then all of a sudden, boom, I remember I was on a business trip in Vegas about four weeks ago. And we were talking amongst ourselves, some other big clinic owners. And we were talking about the same thing, we’re hearing on the news about this Coronavirus. And I said, I started thinking about that Teletherapy thing and I said, we got to get ready for this. We need to go to our pandemic plans and get this thing, move in. And so we got into action. And a couple of weeks ago before all this hit, on our terms. And, because I was seeing all these states being closed down and people, stuck at home and couldn’t leave their house and in quarantine and stuck at home and people were dying at hospitals, this is really getting bad. And so I said, on our terms, let’s get a plan for this. Let’s go and get online and get an online platform and let’s go ahead and start talking to our families and patients and staff and getting them ready, because again, I want to do this on my terms. So that’s what we started doing. I’ve got some wonderful staff here who helped me get this done. And I mean, really worked hard to get all this coordinated. And we got it done. We communicate with staff and family members. And I remember this past Monday, I just decided to shut the doors because really, look, this is not about money and greed. And, I still see businesses open right now who are still seeing patients one on one. And look, I’m not judging. I’m just saying for me and only me speaking for myself. I want to take care of my families, my staff and things that I’m directly in control of. So that’s what I did. I chose to shut my business and have everybody work from home. And I promised everybody I said, I’m going to pay your insurance. I’m going to pay for your dental, your vision. I’m in a match your 401K and you

2019 has been a great year for PrivateSLP, the Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup Podcast and Kyle’s clinics, Therapy Group of Tucson! When starting, growing or scaling a real speech therapy private practice, one of the benefits of learning from an active clinic owner with multiple disciplines and locations is gaining real-life experience and expertise so that you can avoid the pitfalls and mistakes that Kyle has made already.   If you’re going to learn, then learn from someone who is actively managing thousands of visits and multiple locations. In this episode, I review 2019 and list our highlights and celebrate our overall growth while giving you an idea of what to expect if you start and grow your own clinic. Also, the time to join my PrivateSLP All Access Community is right now before the price increases on January 1, 2020. In this episode: 01:12 – 59769 + listeners 01:48 – Welcome to Julie Griffith, SLP to the AAC 05:38 – Making Changes 06:30 – Insanity defined 07:05 – Second location 07:35 – Speech Therapy numbers 07:48 – Employees and benefits DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION If you sit around and talk about it on Facebook or sit there and watching YouTube videos and kind of dreaming about it, you’re going to get what you’ve always got. Nothing, no change, whatsoever, you can sit there and absorb information till the cows come home. But if you don’t get off of it and change and do something get into action nothing’s going to change. [Commercial] Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 51. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions, and as of today, today’s Friday December 27th 2019, we have well over 59769 listeners to the show and I’m super glad you guys are out there getting good valuable information because you know me I’m going to say it every single episode, value is what you get in the absence of money. And these podcasts are absolutely free for you, so if you don’t mind, please go to the iOS or Android platform of your choice and leave some good five star feedback that way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you’re receiving right now. And also I wanted to have a shout out and welcome to Julie Griffith. She’s a speech pathologist. She joined the All Access Community here in early December someone to welcome her to the community. And in our community right now we just launched an iOS and Android application so the community is actually easily accessible more so than ever before. And we’ve got monthly trainings we’ve got weekly coaching calls also wanted to recognize one of our perfect students who’s doing a splendid job. Their company now they contacted me in June of this past year and this is just amazing. I was in Hawaii vacationing with my family and I get this email about the All Access Community and some questions. I pick up the phone and I speak to these two individuals and I start interviewing them for a possible membership in the community but more specifically I just knew that this person was the Perfect student. And since we’ve started working together this past June their business now has over 20 visits per week in less than six months they’ve actually got their own office now. We helped their company complete their credentialing and contracting. I helped these two individuals negotiate their service contracts and helping them with their employees. It just gets better and better and you’re going to be hearing from this company very soon I’m going to do some interviews with these guys. They’re just killing it and it’s just this is what I do this and it’s just wonderful to see what happens when people just ordinary people who have a dream, who have a skill set, who have that degree. Well it’s funny because the person that I’m helping doesn’t even have a degree in Speech and Hearing or communication disorders or Speech therapy services. This person is a husband of a person and it’s just really cool to help people grow and improve their life and sit there and have these conversations knowing that 2020 is going to be even better than 2019. I mean what a great feeling it is. I remember before Hurricane Katrina I used to take these walks around Audubon Park in New Orleans, just complain and edges ticked off and hateful. I was so angry inside because I hated to go to work. I hated the kind of hours I was pulling at this local hospital. And my boss was doing the best she could and the people I work with, they were doing the best they could. But this big organization was just sucking the life out of me. we used to have these beepers on my pants there and on the edge of my coat and that thing would go off constantly, “We need you on this floor.” I mean yes, I’m a hard worker. Don’t get me wrong but I knew I wanted something different, I knew I wanted a different life, I knew I needed a change but I was just stuck in that comfort zone. When you get those checks weekly or bi monthly checks and you just get stuck in a rut and that’s when Hurricane Katrina happened and I moved to Tucson. And so that’s when my life changed. So it’s just nice to see that change happened to other people who reach out and contact me. I’m able to help these guys improve their business improve their life and I can’t wait for 2020 to help these guys grow even more. So I’m just fired up about that so I want to share that with you. But this Episode 51 is sort of a year in review for the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. My business Therapy group of Tucson and also some things I’ve been doing on a personal note so just to kind of give you a glimpse into what can actually happen when you do change your life or when you do change your mindset, when you do have that shift. And again people say, you’re just bragging and blah-blah-blah. No I’m not. I’m showing you guys if you want to do this, what can happen. That’s simply all I’m doing here. I’m giving you guys a roadmap. I’m a guide. I’m kind of a conduit. I’m showing you guys what can be accomplished when you do certain things. So if you sit around and talk about it on Facebook or sit there watching YouTube videos and kind of dreaming about it, you’re going to get what you’ve always got. Nothing, no change, whatsoever you can sit there and absorb information till the cows come home. But if you don’t get off of it and change and do something, get into action nothing’s going to change. I mean doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, that’s called insanity. So you can continue to be insane or you can reach out and pay a little bit of money and get some help and get the right information, so you can change your life and get into action and do it the right way. Or you can get multiple opinions from multiple people and sit there and kind of like a dog chasing their tail spin-spin-spin and you just get sick and fall down right. So I’m just trying to help. Anyway year in review for our business we did this year. We got a new commercial building. We’re able to get almost 8000 square foot commercial building for our second location. I started looking in Tucson and there’s a really nice place down towards the south area town. I started looking into that and comparing rents in the area and we were able to negotiate and actually buy the building from a company who just had this building completely renovated so that was exciting for us. We also expanded our disciplines to meet the wants and needs of our community. We increased our Speech Therapy discipline, we also increased our occupational therapy and added physical therapy to the mix. So we’re now offering all three disciplines speech occupational and physical therapy. Also this year I increased the benefits for all our employees. We offered a couple different health plans to choose from. One is always free and it’s a great plan. It’s the same plan that I have for my family but we also added a couple more. There was an HSA plan and also a plan that you can pay a little bit of money every paycheck and get just a little bit lower deductible copay. So we did that for our employees. Also I increased bonuses for our employees this year. Also going back to that commercial building I went to pay the first half of the year’s taxes on that real estate property and it’s real property. You have real taxes on real property so went to pay and the City of Tucson they sent me my first payment back and they said you don’t have to pay taxes we’re refunding this amount and it floored me. I called and I said, “Why are you doing that?” And they said, the owner of that building in January was approved for a non profit status. And you get that for the year, so basically you don’t have to pay taxes. We’re given twelve grand back to you for the year of 2019. So I said, great I’m gonna give that to my employees so that’s what I did. That’s part of their bonus this year. I also increased the profit sharing plan from a traditional 401 k to a higher plan to give more free money to all the employees who work with me at Therapy group of Tucson because our employees are the best they do the best job they’re the hardest working people that I know wonderful people. And so I wanted to give them more bonuses. And so that’s what I did. I increase that profit sharing for them. So that’s just some of the things that our business has done this past year to give you guys an idea of what we do and how it can be done. It’s not the only way it’s just the way I choose to do things. And also with our all access community and PrivateSLP we had a great year in 2019. We increased our membership and that it’s always fun because there’s always somebody out there who bring something to the table for the other members to learn from

Welcome to Episode 50 of the Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup Podcast! This episode is all about doing things differently to achieve maximum results in business and your personal life. To celebrate my 50th birthday this Christmas Eve, I decided to accomplish another one of my life goals – That is to earn a private pilot’s license In this podcast, I talk about something that I realized while I was soloing a 172 Cessna in the pattern at KTUS (Tucson International Airport), speech therapy private practice just is like flying a private plane – when all else fails, use your checklists, get the right training, get over the fear and don’t give up! In this episode: 02:09 – Taking some time off 05:12 – Taking up flying 06:52 – Learning how to fly a Cessna 172 08:49 – If you don’t change, nothing is going to change 10:08 – Take your checklist, follow your checklist 10:45 – Remember the checklist 14:58 – It’s kind of like in traffic 16:15 – Learning how to start, grow and scale own Private practice 17:01 – Big FIVE O thing DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION We have a checklist in the All access community, PrivateSLP. There’s a checklist for referrals. There’s a checklist on how to get paid. There’s all kinds of checklists that I’ve documented along the way. When it comes to staying airborne, I was thinking I’m freaking out. I’m sure you guys freak out too when it comes to your business. I mean I’m sure some you do but I know a lot of the people I work with on a daily basis they’re always up to something and there’s always something to learn. So my instructor gets out of a plane and he says remember the checklist. [Commercial] Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 50. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions. As of today, today is Friday, November 8, 2019. We have well over 57,000 listeners to the show and I’m super glad you guys are out there, getting good valuable information because you know me. I say it every single time, value is what you get in the absence of money, and these podcasts who absolutely free for you. So if you wouldn’t mind please do your part and go to the iOS or Android platform of your choice and leave some five star feedback. That way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you guys are getting. I hope you guys are doing well, and I’ve had some listeners reach out to me recently and they’re saying things like, “Hey Kyle, where you been? or are you alive or hey, when’s the next podcast coming out?” All right I got you. So I have been taking some time off to myself. When I first started the Speech Therapy Private Practice starter podcast, I always said I was going to do these at least once a month. Sometimes try to do two a month but life is life, and unlike other podcasters that I know I’m actually running a full time clinic. We have two locations in Tucson. We just opened our second location. We offer speech and occupational and physical therapy services to many people here in our community. And we just do a lot of great work. On top of opening our second location and purchasing a new commercial building, it’s a little over 7800 square feet. We’re using all of that space too for Speech and OT, and one of the locations we’ve got PT. On top of that, we just had our Annual Trunk or Treat where we had a ton of kids come out we gave them tons of candy with a cakewalk and we got a D.J. and face painting. And if you think I’m doing all this there’s no way, I mean I am not that smart. We’ve got some really great people who work here for our practice and our clinic and they come up with all these ideas. I just pay for these things and just supply the canvas and let them do the painting. So that’s what we’ve been doing. We also did our annual Halloween employee night out. We went over to Old Tucson studios. If you Google that, it’s an old movie set out here in the mountains outside of Tucson, Arizona. I mean back in the day I was way out but because of our population growth here in Tucson it’s not too far out now. But John Wayne filmed a lot of movies out there and like the Three Amigos with Steve Martin was filmed out there. And for those of you who are a little bit dated if you remember the episodes and show Little House On The Prairie was filmed out there, parts of it. That’s where I took all the employees. They turned that whole movie set into a haunted house. So that’s my favorite time of the year. My son and his friends they like to do all that, and I get tickets for everybody, and the employees, their kids & families and we just give tickets and go out there and have some fun. That’s what we’ve been doing lately and just keeping it real. And like I said earlier I’m actually doing this, I’m running multiple locations and paying health insurance for the employees 401K profit sharing dental vision for our employees. We’ve got many people that we see some running an operation, so sometimes I just may not feel like getting behind a microphone and podcasting. But today I have been really wanting to get back into it. But there’s another reason I haven’t been behind the mic and that’s because I am pursuing something that’s really important to me personally not really professionally. But I’ve got a little bit of time to myself during the week so I’m taking up flying and when I was at LSU, Louisiana State University, I was there from ‘87 to ‘91 and when I was graduating I was also in the ROTC program at LSU and I was supposed to be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force, and I was supposed to fly planes. But because of growing up around guns and shooting things in the bayou. You’ve all seen Swamp People that’s where I grew up. So shooting guns and just not taking care of my hearing and playing drums and things like that, I had a mild noise induced hearing loss in my left ear. I couldn’t get a waiver. It’s kind of cool having a speech therapy audience base because you guys get it. I couldn’t get a waiver for my left ear so I had to scrap the idea of being a pilot or a navigator in the United States Air Force. I mean it was all set. I was supposed to go Lackland Air Force Base and do my Officer training. So for the many years that I’ve been a Speech pathologist I always said when I get a little bit of time I’m gonna start flying. I want to get my private pilot’s license and so back in June and July, which is the hardest time in Tucson. And that’s when the air is the most bumpiest in Tucson, because the heat rises and it causes thermals and you get thrown around. I said I’m going to do it. And so that’s what I’ve been doing. I have been studying and getting in a plane two-three times a week I’ve been working with a couple of instructors and learning how to fly a Cessna 172 and recently I soloed which is when you get in a plane and you go up by yourself with a student pilot license and now next Thursday, I’m supposed to fly from Tucson to a place called Benson, and then a little bit north to another place called Safford, Arizona. And that’s kind of going towards North E sort of close to the New Mexico area border of Arizona. So that’s part of the private pilot training, you have to do Solo in a plane without the instructor. And that’s what I wanted to talk about today because when we’re starting, growing and scaling our own Speech therapy private practice, this stuff can be so overwhelming and so mind boggling because you have to not only deal with scheduling a patient, you got to see the patient and then after you see the patient, you got to document what you did and then you’ve got to take that information and put it into a billing system or have somebody bill it for you. And then once you bill it, which anybody can do really but it’s the AR the accounts receivable, that really helps you get paid. That’s when you go through and because it’s probably going to be denied. Right? And then you have to send your notes and things like that to the Insurance company. So you’re doing all this work just to get paid to see one patient and then if you want to have a real true Speech therapy private practice, you have to multiply that. You got to rinse and repeat, and do this over and hopefully you can build it up to 100 or 200 or 500 people a week. I mean that’s the goal. Why wouldn’t you want to be in business? Why wouldn’t you want to just do something, the best you can do and be the best you can be? Let’s think about it. If you don’t change nothing is going to change. I mean if you keep doing what you’re always done you’re going to get what you’ve always got. That’s what I’m trying to say. So this stuff is mind boggling and that’s what we’re doing at All Access Community. We talk about these things, these systems in Private Practice and that’s why really it dawned on me one day and when I was on the plane because I’m sitting there and I’ve always got my instructor with me, and finally one day he says, “Hey, I need to get out of the economy.” I want you to get out because I want you to solo. I don’t want a solo because it’s time you need to do this. So he gets out of the plane and he shuts the door and the engine’s humming. I’m sitting there, what do I do? There’s nobody in here to yell at me. There’s nobody in the cockpit to tell me what to do. What if I crash? What if the engine goes out? What if there’s no fuel? What if there’s oil burns up and I crash? I know we’re talking Tucson International Airport there’s Alaskan Airlines as FedEx planes taken off all day long here at Tucson International there’s United Airlines is American Airlines. There was a big Hawaiian Airlines jet, they got diverted from Phoenix to Tucson recently. There’s F16 is in and C 130 is in. Like

In this episode I talk about the idea and mindset of being fully committed and “All In” in your own speech therapy private practice. So many times people start their own business and simply give up. They quit because they can’t seem to cut away from their job, or they just don’t have enough patients coming into their practice. Most often, they quit before miracle. Also in this episode I take time to recognize a very busy and motivated speech therapist Grace Tan Cheng Man, a speech therapist based in Malaysia who has an online magazine! In this episode: 01:08 – Value, Value, Value, 03:37 – Gr​ace Tan Cheng Man, Malaysia Speech Therapist 06:07 – Becoming an Independent Speech and Language Pathologist 07:34 – Required Mindset for Private Practice 09:40 – Establishing a solid foundation for Speech Therapy Private Practice 11:51 – Motive for startup 18:45 – All In 20:10 – Self Honesty 20:51 – Worried? 22:52 – Getting Paid DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION [Commercial] Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 49. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions. As of today, today is June 26, 2019 we have well over 51,979 listeners to the show and I’m super fired up. You guys are out there getting good valuable information and it’s free for you. And you know me I say it every single podcast. It wouldn’t be my podcast if I didn’t say it, “Value is what you get in the absence of money” and these podcasts are free for you so what I would like you to do is, just simply go to the iOS or Android platform of your choice and just leave some five star feedback that way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you’re receiving right now because it’s important to give back. And when I started this podcast over three years ago I wanted to give out as much free information as possible and to do that I want to be able to drive traffic to our website and we’re doing great. When you Google “Startup Speech Therapy Private Practice”, we’re right there on top. I mean we’re helping a lot of people, I get a lot of questions during the week and I’m doing conference calls and coaching calls with people in the All access community. And they’re always wanting to know how do you do it all. Well that’s because I have a team I don’t rely as a podcaster and as a business person, I don’t rely on other clinics to show my subscribers and members of my community how to do things. We do it all here in-house so if I want to teach one of the access community members about billing we can get on the phone to have a coaching call with our billing department. We have a referral department, we have a scheduling department, we have a team of therapists multidisciplinary team of people and locations where we can help as many people as possible. That’s from patients all the way to all access community members so if you want to learn how to start your own practice, you’re in the right place. And again if this is your first podcast, welcome, start at the beginning and work your way through all 49 episodes along the way. If there’s anything you need from me, all you have to do is reach out to me at privateSLP.com/contact and I’ll help you. I get people all the time that say, I can’t believe you’re just picking up the phone and calling. Well absolutely, I’m picking up the phone and calling because I don’t like typing emails. It’s just too much work so I’d just rather get on the phone, talk to you, see what’s going on in your business and see how I can help you. Because there is a solution, if you need help with your billing or credentialing. Let me know we can help you. If you want to start your private practice let me know we can help. If you want to grow it and scale, we can help you with that too. Because with all the experience that I’ve had doing this there’s always an answer, so I’ll be more than happy to help you in anyway that I can. OK. Today I’d like to answer some questions from Gr​ace Tan Cheng Man she’s a certified Speech therapist and she’s a member of the Malaysian Association of Speech-Language and hearing. She’s a candidate member of the Malaysian Writers Society. She’s also certified in Hanen. She also is certified in Picture Exchange Communication System and Vital stem. She also has expertise in Parental training on Hanen. She also does talks on breastfeeding, feeding disorders and feeding therapy talk tools and also written communication therapies and her website is Gracetanchengman.com and I’ll leave this in the show notes below. But she simply reached out to me and wanted me to answer some questions for her so that she could share with her listeners. She’s definitely a motivated individual. And she has her own magazine online. It’s a subscription based model so I wanted to answer some questions for her so let’s get to these questions. Question 1: “I always come to the words of Freelance. In Malaysia, we use the word “freelance”, for describing the Speech therapist who work on their own practice. So may I know what it is called? Is Freelance equivalent to the definition of Private practice. Or do you refer to those Therapists who own a center? Please advise.” That’s a great question. So basically the question is about what you would call someone in a different setting basically freelance or a Private practitioner. Now here in the States we have multiple places that we can work in different settings so to speak. So when clinicians work as a Speech and Language Pathologist we can work in an outpatient clinic or an inpatient hospital or a school setting or a private practice. It can be in the community and when people work for someone else they’re generally an Employee or a licensed Speech pathologist who works in a different setting. But when I know other people when you want to work for your own, when you want to be outside of an employment agency or you want to work for yourself, and kind of hang your own shingle for your own location, you can call yourself maybe an independent speech and language pathologist or a private practitioner or a center based SLP or community based SLP. Here’s one how about PrivateSLP or even PR in, that’s when you kind of part time your way around different settings or something like that. But I think for this question when you have your own business, when you have your own clinic, I wanted to start my own business and I wanted employees in that business so I try not to put my name on the business that way I can hire a team to help serve those who need Speech occupational, physical therapy services in our area. So I hope that answers that question. Let’s go ahead and go to the second question. Question 2: “So Mr. Kyle as you know what is the meaning of Private practice, it seems like a very new subject for those Speech therapists who used to work in the center, who work for the center rather than working on their own. So before we start any new venture we might be afraid of the uncertainty. So from your experience what are the mindset for Private practice startup. Kindly mention the mindset we shall have for those Speech therapists who are wishing to have their own practice.” The mindset needed for private practice I mean for me and I’m only speaking for myself but its drive. I just had to have a lot of drive. It’s scary, it’s the unknown and I just don’t know what else to call it. I’ve got something in me. It’s just a fire and I just can’t stay still. I just wanted to make my own business I know what I want and I know I had an expiration date on this. I mean after Hurricane Katrina I knew that I only had a limited amount of time to make the move and I just had to take care me and my family and so I also didn’t understand the meaning of No. I’m a very hard headed individual which means in the States somebody who just doesn’t take No for an answer. My grandfather was the same way I think it’s a personality trait. But besides drive and not really taking No for an answer kind of what this podcast is today it’s about being all in attitude and just being 100 percent committed to being the best clinician I can be for my patients to come to see me in my office. And really I think for most it’s legitimately wanting to do a great job for the patients and families that we serve. I’ve seen and talked to people in our profession and you can always tell when someone’s taking the job for the money or if their heart’s in the right place and definitely I think the people who are the most successful at private practice are the ones that you can just tell it who’s is out of their system. They want to make a difference in their patients and their families because really for me it’s not about the money. It’s about how I can help other people and help as many people as possible so I hope that answers the question about the mindset needed for private practice. Let’s go to the third question. Question 3: “How to prepare our self and how to tell that we are really ready for a private practice startup? Maybe you can give us some advice on how to get a solid foundation to start a private practice.” Well to have any business that’s successful and to have a solid foundation I mean specifically for Speech therapy we have to have patients, we have to have a referral source. So I think having what’s called an offer that converts at its simplest form is how that you are going to have a solid foundation. So let’s think about that an offer that converts what’s our offer in our Speech therapy private practice. Well, obviously it’s speech therapy services for kids or adults or whatever market that you’re going after. So you have to offer a good solid treatment for the patient at an affordable price that they can afford so they can come back

A speech therapy private practice is not always easy or fun and games. Many people suffer from the illusion that business owners are sitting around at the beach on their laptops getting rich while paying employees to do all of the grunt work. This is far from the truth. To be successful in speech therapy private practice, one has to be dedicated, motivated and have serious discipline. Starting, growing and scaling a speech therapy private practice requires hard work, money, elbow grease and late hours but the payoff can be rewarding. In this episode, I discuss the discipline required to make a speech therapy private practice work and discuss some of the challenges along the way! In this episode: 02:22 – Question from SpeakPipe 03:31 – The Perfect Student 05:05 – Our Second Location 09:50 – Topic = Discipline 11:38 – Retraining your Brain 12:47 – Positive Association 13:50 – Starting TODAY 14:30 – Consistency is the Key DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION So at an early age I learned the value of a dollar and how to work. And so I really believe those experiences as a child I carried it over into my business life. So these days what it looks like I’m always up at 4:30 I don’t need an alarm. For the last three or four days, I’ve been really excited to get to work I’ve been getting up on my own at about 2:33 a.m. And got there and sit on my hot tub and I do my morning meditation. I drink my carrot juice, beet juice, I do my juicing and then I go to work. Sometimes I’m at this new office getting it ready but I got to do it. If I don’t do it nobody’s going to do it. [Commercial] Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 48. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails, all the questions and all the SpeakPipes. As of today, we have well over 48,432 listeners to the show and I’m super glad you guys are out there getting good valuable information and you know me, I say it every single time, “Value is what you get in the absence of money” and these podcasts are free for you. So if you wouldn’t mind just go to the Android or iOS platform of your choice and leave some good five star feedback that way other people like you can get the same value that you’re receiving right now. Now if this is your first episode, welcome and you can just easily go back through all the podcasts and start at episode one and you can hear all the great topics that we have all the way from Accounts Receivable, billing, referrals, there is other information on there about mindset. I mean it’s all on there and if you have any questions at all, all you have to do is just reach out to me at privateSLP.com/contact and I’ll do my best to help you. I also received a recent question from SpeakPipe and it was from a gentleman. His name is Michael and he wanted to know about getting contracts and he’s got a business in another state and he’s got some home health going but he also wanted to add another discipline besides speech therapy. He wanted to recently add occupational therapy as well to the mix and he didn’t want to do that in the home and community you wanted to do that more of an outpatient clinical setting. Now again I’m not a lawyer but I did speak to him and I thought the best way to go about this would be maybe just to start another entity another private practice name and get your contracts through a clinic based entity and just start from scratch so that way you can keep your home visits home and then you can run that separate business out of the clinic and just make that a separate tax I.D. and NPI and you can just run everything through that through your contracts and so that was one of my suggestions and again I’m not a lawyer you definitely want to talk to your attorney and make sure these things are working for you in your state in your own unique situation. So that was the advice that I gave. I also wanted to let you know we have a space for the perfect student and that’s when you fly into Tucson work with me hand in hand and I’ll be more than happy to help you work and set your clinic up and also under unique circumstances I can fly out to your area and help you pick a location for your clinic and all you have to do is just reach out to me and I’ll help you as much as I can. We are accepting new students right now in the All Access Community and you can find that at privateSLP.com/coaching and I just wanted to say hi to Darla. She is a new member in the All access community and I heard from her in the forum a couple of days ago and she was just working through all the trainings. We just recently had a training yesterday about how to maximize what you currently have because a lot of people right now think that bigger is better and you got to buy all the software and tools and have multiple locations but you’ll be surprised. I spoke to a clinic owner recently who was not doing well financially and they’re losing thousands of dollars today a day over multiple locations so that’s not good. And trying to help that person adjust and readjust working on contracts and things like that. I wanted to talk to you today about discipline. Discipline is something that I really I’m glad I have because I wouldn’t be in the spot where I am today without a ton of discipline. I’m actually recording this podcast right now in one of our administrative offices at our second location. Currently we are opening up our second location here in Tucson. We just purchased a 7580 square foot building about five to six miles away from our current location. And it’s really exciting because when I first started this business I never dreamed that I would have a building of this size and capacity. I remember I used to see a doctor at this small doctor’s office and he left the state and he was selling his office space and I remember going over there and it was a thousand square feet and I was thinking how I could raise my son at that time. He was about six years old and I was going to try to find out in the back. There was a little woodshed and I was going to try to make that into an apartment and I was going to live and he was going to live in that apartment with me and we were going to live in the back and then I was going to try to rent the front. How I can chop that up and make that three rooms and then right down the street there was a property for sale. And at the time I really didn’t have the money saved up for the down payment. But I remember I was just trying to find a way to make that happen. And that was about a twelve hundred square foot building. But if I would have gone through with either those two deals I wouldn’t be sitting in this administrative office right now recording this podcast in this 7580 square foot building I mean this thing is huge. It’s gorgeous and again I’m not bragging or boasting. I’m just stating the facts and it’s because of discipline that I am able to sit in this little squeaky chair you might hear a little bit but in record a podcast and let you guys know that this stuff is doable and you can attain what you want to attain if you have the discipline to do it. And we’ve got this gorgeous huge gym. There’s actually three big 600 square feet spaces in one’s gonna be a motor room with single point swings. The other room’s gonna be like an office admin meant for our physical therapy and occupational therapy and assistant rooms and there’s gonna be a rock wall in there and then we’ve got a whole huge 600 square foot kitchen with two refrigerators microwaves, so the OTs can do their feeding and then on the other side and I’ll leave some pictures below this podcast so you guys can see it. We’ve got these big beautiful Speech therapy treatment rooms. The people before us who own this clinic, it really was designed for children and they put a lot of money into this building. They kind of I think overbuilt the building for the area but they couldn’t sell it for what it was worth because they really overbuilt the building into giving examples moving some tiles the other day because this whole building was rebuilt and constructed in 2016 and they left a lot of paint cans and leftover tiles and carpet tiles and the place has a new roof and there’s five air conditioners ten ton ACs, the furniture. There were some furniture left but I was moving these tiles and these things are super heavy. I had to grab the Dolly and I look in these tiles were made in Italy and I’m like wow these people put a lot of money into this building but we didn’t pay that kind of price. We got this thing about 40 percent off and so it was just another reason to save your money and to run lean and to be able to purchase an asset. And I did a walkthrough of this building and I put this into the All Access Community for our members to show them all the ins and outs of when you buy a clinic or when you rent and lease a space. Things to look for like safety features if you’ve got fire sprinklers and alarms things to take into consideration, security cameras, the space layout, how people check in, the workflows – checking in / checking out, the check in Windows placements all of that is included in this walkthrough that I did for the All access community. It was just really nice to show the members what it looked like, what it feels like to move in and get it ready and get the equipment going and the insurances that I need to make this thing operational. So it’s just a real delight to be able to have a podcast and record this podcast in my new space. So I just wanna let you guys know that we are really growing and do the best that we can to help our families here in Tucson we just hired another Occupational therapist and we interviewed a Physical therapist this morning and we’ve got another interview for a Physical therap

Today’s episode is all about practice management software with Beata Klarowska, M.S. CCC-SLP. Beata is a speech and language pathologist who started working on practice management software and apps after listening to a professor speak about telehelth services in graduate school. Today, TheraPlatform has grown into a robust practice management and EMR software for SLPs, OTs, PTs and mental health providers. Its features include: scheduling, documenting, billing, secure video conferencing, teaching tools, reports and homework. In this episode: 02:32 – Building a Speech Therapy Empire 03:05 – All-in-one practice management software platform 06:50 – Your own Business and Flexibility 09:40 – Telepractice software 10:59 – Specific Features 13:06 – Multi Modality Learning Approach 14:35 – Open Ended Built-in Tools 20:23 – Practice Management Features 22:15 – Additional Option 30:29 – Special Promo Code for PrivateSLP Listeners DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION It kind of all started for me when I was in grad school, so we had to take a technology class and this class mainly focused on AEC devices. It also covered all over button of practice management and therapy software. And at some point and during this class our professor briefly mentioned that ASHA approved Tele practice and that one day we’ll be just doing therapy online. And so he really kind of planted this little seed in my brain and since that point I was doing a lot of research. I was taking CEO classes about a Telepractice. I did a lot of market research and I finally decided to build a Telepractice software. [Commercial] Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 47. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions and as of today, today is Sunday February 17th 2019. We have well over 45691 listeners to the show and I’m super glad you guys are out there getting good valuable information, and I said every single episode, “value is what you get in the absence of money”. And these podcasts are free for you so if you wouldn’t mind can you please go over to the iOS or Android platform of your choice and leave some good five star feedback. That way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you’re receiving. Also if you are interested in joining in all access community where you can learn how to grow scale your Speech therapy Private Practice, look no further if you go to privateslp.com/coaching you’ll see some options there. I’m not really talking about working from home or just working on the side, I’m talking about a speech therapy empire. I’m talking about having employees, paying taxes and being independent. I’m not really talking and really trying to help people just have a few clients on the side or something like that. I’m talking about the real deal so if you want help you’ve come to the right place privateslp.com/coaching. Now today we are talking to Beata Klarowska and she is a Speech and Language Pathologist and the Owner of TheraPlatform, and what she has done is created an all-in-one practice management software platform. Now TheraPlatform.com is a practice management EMR software for Speech Therapist, OTs, PTs and Mental health providers. Its features include scheduling, documenting, billing, secure video conferencing, teaching tools, reports, homework and more. So let’s take a listen to today’s interview. And today we’re talking with Beata Klarowska and she is one of the co-founders of TheraPlatform and the Virtual speech center. Kyle: Hey Beata, How are you today? Beata: I’m good. How are you? Kyle: Oh, I’m doing great. We’re in Tucson and we’re just enjoying the 65 degree weather. I think it’s a lot different from our listeners up in the Michigan area. I was speaking to a gentleman recently from the state of New York and he said it was freezing cold. Do you guys have the same problem there and on the west coast? Beata: Not freezing cold. I’m in Los Angeles in Burbank area, so February was very nice for us. We got a lot of rain which we highly appreciate given that we had a really bad two years of dry season and the fires, which really appreciate the rain here in February and it looks nice. I enjoy it and I miss the Four Seasons so I’m definitely enjoying the rainy weather today and planning to have a pizza party with my boys. We have tent put out in our living room and after this podcast we will make our own Pizza and have Pizza party. So it’s been nice. Kyle: Oh that’s great. I remember my son used to like to make tents out of the sheet, we’ll get the clothes, pans and I get the broom handle and make the Center for the tent. And then we would go to the camping store and we will get used camping equipment and we used for sleepovers he would have a sleeping bag in the tents and now everything is just dirt bikes, fortnight and YouTube. So those times are going for me. I miss those days. Beata: Yeah it’s fun. I love it. My boys are young so they’re 3 and 5, and such a beautiful imaginary. So I’m definitely enjoying them and camping, cooking, pretend play every day. It’s definitely fun. But they grew up way too fast. Kyle: What a great age and obviously your accent, you’re from Texas. Right? I’m just joking. Beata: No Kyle: Where’s that accent from? Beata: What accent? Kyle: Yeah right. What accent? We’ve got a group of speech pathologist listening in and I’m sure everyone’s trying to guess the accent it’s not New Zealand it’s not Australia, it’s definitely not Southern Texas or Louisiana, that’s for sure. Where are you from originally? Beata: I was born in Poland. So I have Polish accent. Yeah, I usually have people telling me Oh maybe you’re from Russia maybe you’re from Germany. I actually had one person who thought I was from Texas so I was kind of interesting. My accent is Polish. Kyle: Yeah. My other half. Her mother’s name is Timinsky so I know about the Polish. I know about that. I know perogies and all that good food. Beata: Yeah. My mom is here too. She’s visiting us from Poland too. So she’s treating us perogies, kyompki and poarst, good polish food. Kyle: Gotta have it in. You’ve got your two boys. Are you able to stay home with him now that you’ve got this new business or are you doing speech pathology work and working with your businesses. How do you do both of those careers? Beata: Well I’ve been in speech pathology for over 11 years in an medical setting so when I started of my career I didn’t have any children. But after we launched our software company I did get some somehow from family and friends. But having your own business gives you this flexibility and I’m not running a private practice so it’s a little bit easier for me I can kind of arrange my own schedule to meet both needs – the company needs and my kids needs and then it gets easier. They’re growing and are going to preschool now. So I definitely have more time. My working hours are longer. I work five hours in the morning and I have a year break with my kids and I we play and then I work from 6 p.m. to midnight sometimes. But it’s nice to be your own boss and to kind of have this flexibility for sure. It’s not always easy to combine the two but you just do your best. Kyle: So you mean you’re working five hours in the morning and like a local hospital or something like that and then working 6 to midnight. Beata: For our company. Kyle: Oh, So you’re not even practicing any longer. Beata: I am still in the clinical wards. I go to the hospital just twice a month just to keep in touch. It’s hard for me to quit the clinical setting completely. I love both. I love technology and I’m very dedicated to our software company and again our field is so flexible so I’m really blessed that I can focus in our company full time and then still be in touch with our speech word. So it’s nice. Kyle: Yeah that’s awesome. Yeah it’s great to be your own boss. I mean that’s one of the reasons I started my own Speech therapy private practice was just so I could have free time with my son. I mean unfortunately he was sick the other day. He was home Monday and Tuesday because of this god awful flu thing going around but I was able to just text the office manager and say, “Hey I’m working from home today” and he was in bed and it’s just a nice benefit to have when you’re your own boss. How did you get from the Speech therapy world with direct treatment for 11 years to just saying “Hey, I want to start Thera platform or the Virtual speech center”? How do you do that? Did you have help or did it hit you like a bolt of lightning one night when you’re going to sleep. I mean how had that happen? Beata: Well it kind of all started for me when I was into the grad school, so we had to take a technology class and this class mainly focused on AEC devices. It also covered all over button of practice management and therapy software. And at some point and during this class our professor briefly mentioned that ASHA approved Telepractice and that one day we’ll be just doing therapy online. And so he really kind of planted this little seed in my brain and since that point I was doing a lot of research. I was taking CEO classes about a Telepractice. I did a lot of market research and I finally decided to build a Telepractice software. So in 2010 me and my partner we built a prototype video platform but technology back then was not there for what we wanted to accomplish. And the video conferencing technology back then was changing and moving away from all dirt to new technologies. And so we decided to put the video conferencing piece of our business on hold until technology matures a little bit more. So we started developing apps in 2011, which we planned to incorporate later on in our Telepractice software.

In a busy, growing speech therapy private practice, there simply isn’t enough time to make everything happen: Referrals, Faxing, Billing, Payments, Accounts Receivable, Follow Up, Service Delivery, Cleaning, Payroll, etc. That’s why the goal of every private practice owner should be redundancy. The question for every owner should be not HOW to do something, but WHO is going to take the task. In Episode 46, I answer three listener questions and then dive right into the steps to become redundant in speech therapy private practice! In this episode: 02:10 – Helping Others Through Speech Therapy Services 03:08 – Join the All Access Community 04:10 – Welcome Three New members 05:55 – Private practice flyer 07:20 – Private practice startup budget 09:50 – Deduction of fee for every Session 13:29 – What is redundancy 16:00 – Hiring and Training Staff 19:26 – You’re not responsible for everything DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION And then all of a sudden, you’re farming out your payroll and you’re marketing to other companies or people in your business so you don’t have to do it all. I mean over time I found that the biggest question of, how am I going to get this done turn into this? Who’s going to do it? [Commercial] Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 46. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Today is January 26, 2019 and we have well over 44,503 listeners to the show. And I’m super glad you guys are all out there getting good valuable free information and you know me I’m going to say it every single episode, “Value is what you get in the absence of money”. And these podcasts are absolutely 100 percent free for you. So, if you wouldn’t mind just go to the iOS or Android platform or Spotify platform of your choice and leave some good five-star feedback, that way other people just like you in the same boat can get the good same valuable information that you’re getting. I would appreciate if you do that. And I would also like to welcome the new listeners to the show if this is your first episode. Welcome, if you wouldn’t mind to just start at the beginning and work your way up through all these episodes and you’ll see what we’re all talking about. We’re all talking about how to improve our lives, the quality of our lives so we can spend more time with our families and friends. And at the same time help other people get the services that they need through our clinics and our Speech therapy services. So that’s what this show is about, it’s to help you grow and scale or start your own Speech therapy private practice. And if you would like some help doing that, I have a ton of experience I’ve been doing Speech pathology work now for 26 years. And if you want to get some access to me it’s very simple. You can always just go to privateslp.com/membership, there you’ll see two ways to work with me hand in hand. You can do the Perfect student, that’s where you come into Tucson and you can just immerse yourself in our clinic and work with me one on one. Now that’s kind of difficult for a lot of people because they just can’t leave their job and take three or four weeks to get over to Tucson. But if you would like to work with me online that seems to be the easier option for most people and that’s where you can join the online All access community and you can work with me one on one. There’s a private coaching section in there. We just recently had our first online Zoom conference there where we had members from the All Access Community and we were talking about credentialing, contracting, billing in, pay rates and reimbursement. It was just a really good quality membership meeting. And so, we just finished that and we’ve got something planned for February and that happens once every month in the All Access Community we always get together and we’ll have a live webinar. There’re also private coaching sections, there’s forums in there, there’s forums and systems everything that we use to run our Speech therapy private practice in Tucson is in there. So, if you’d like to have access to that just go to privateslp.com/membership. Also, if you would like you can always ask me a question and I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions for you. Also, I’d like to welcome three new members to our All access community. That would be Kimberly, she’s an Occupational therapist and she joined the Speech therapy private practice – All access community, Welcome Kimberly. And also, I’d like to welcome Dana and Kristin who are both Speech pathologists. Now I want to take some time now to answer a few questions from our listeners. We recently had a listener from New York, he was wanting to place a flyer for his Speech therapy services at a local coffee shop. And his question was pretty direct. He wanted to know if that was considered solicitation or was that an advertisement. And I was actually camping with my son and his best friend whose father is an attorney. So, we were in a cabin out towards the border of Mexico, very south Arizona. We ride dirt bikes and camp in and just eating dirt and having a good old time, eaten MREs and MREs or what they give to the military for meals and they have vegetarian MREs. So, I had one of those and my son and his buddy, they had the other MREs. But we’re out there and this gentleman emailed me and, on the way to bed I was able to check my email. And of course, I spoke to the lawyer and I asked him that simple question. Now again even though I’m not a lawyer but the other guy was we are not in the state of New York. But I did get a pretty nice answer for this gentleman. Now I know solicitation is not recommended in any state for Speech therapy services. In other words, you can’t go to a local school with a Private practice flyer, imposes flyers in the school. But if you’re in a Starbucks coffee shop or a local coffee shop and when you put your cream or your sugar in your coffee you look up and there might be a bulletin board. I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with putting a business card or a flyer on that bulletin board there. But here is what the suggestion would be and again we’re not lawyers. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t give legal advice, but my suggestion would be in a small 10 font red at the bottom of the flyer you can put, “This is an Advertisement for Speech therapy services” and I think that would do the trick. I mean in the big scheme of things I think Speech pathologist, we have to get out of that mentality where we should ask for permission. I think we shouldn’t ask for permission but ask for forgiveness later because we have to push the envelope sometimes. Again, he can’t bring a flyer and put it at the school. But if you want to leave a business card or a flyer around town, I think that’s Okay. I don’t see a problem with that. And if somebody calls you on it, you just say, “Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t know that. Show me the law and we’ll fix it”. That’s what I would do about that one. Second question, this gentleman wanted to know about starting up his new Private practice and he wanted some sort of a dummy budget plan so he could get a good friend of his who is willing to invest into a profitable and financially healthy business. He wanted to get that going in so I just simply wanted to respond to that question as well. I never had a dummy budget plan nor I really never had a budget. I never really had a business plan of any sort. I went to the Small Business Administration and I asked for help and they really didn’t give me any direction so I just did it on my own. I made it up as I went along. I started as a Single sole provider. I did all the work, I did everything and every penny I made I saved. I ate a lot of beans; a lot of rice and I didn’t spend any money and so I had no plan or budget to try to sell anybody really anything. So, my answer would be very specific. Number one, I would not mix your friends and your business at all. Because I’ve seen and talked to many Private practice owners and I will say this that friends and money don’t mix and I have seen a lot of partnerships break up. I would actually go the more Sole proprietor or LLC PLO sea route and just be a sole owner of your own business and start that thing yourself. And every bit of money that you make you save and you live on a financial budget as far as budget of your spending habit. Just meet your basic needs, pay your rent or your mortgage or your car insurance, get your food bill paid, if you’ve got credit cards it’s another thing. If you’re in debt get out of debt before you start your business. You don’t want to do that because it just makes it more and more difficult. But just keep it slow. Keep it simple and take your time. And you won’t have to pitch anything to anybody until you do have two or three or four locations and then if you want them triple that then you can start hitting people up and the dummy budget plan you would give that person would be your profit and loss statements from your CPA, that way you can get investors. So that would be my answer to that person’s question. A third question I received recently was about a young lady who is working as a Contractor for a business owner in her community. And she wanted to know why that person was deducting a fee for every session. She wanted to know what that fee was called. Or maybe like a referral fee would she expected it’s reasonable to request that she purchase therapy materials or assessments for her. Was she covered under her liability insurance; should she expect reimbursements for travel? And she understands that she will send her a 1099 at the end of the year. She had to pay taxes on that money that she’s paid. But she was wanting to know more about optimizing her deductions and that never exceeds her s

In today’s episode, I have a great conversation about online and telepractice therapy services with the founder and CEO of BlinkSession.com, Eric DeGrove. Eric and his wife, Rikki DeGrove, CCC-SLP started a new outpatient clinic about 2 1/2 years ago, Sprout Therapy Services in Colorado Springs, CO but suddenly realized many of their patients were coming from far away. Since Eric’s background is in programming, he jumped onto the opportunity and that’s how BlinkSession was born! In today’s episode, we discuss why Eric built Blink Session, Opportunities to Offer Services Online, The Biggest Challenges to Offering Services Online, and then Eric offers online-based Private-Practice Startup Advice for people wanting to enter the space. In this episode: 01:45 – Value, Value + Value !! 02:58 – Home Based Treatment 05:50 – Telepractice and Billing 06:15 – Today’s topic – TeleTherapy 08:28 – About BlinkSession 13:31 – Online Speech Therapy 17:02 – Easy Solution for Teletherapy 18:38 – HIPPA Compliance and Teletherapy 20:18 – Setup, Programming and Teletherapy 25:10 – Recording Teletherapy Sessions 30:21 – Speech Therapy is improvement for Your Patients 31:00 – Added Value for Patients DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION Now a lot of it goes back to what I said earlier about focusing on the results. The result of Speech Therapy is improvement, improvement of your patients life of whatever their therapy goals are. The goal is not just to do therapy. The goal is to see their lives improved and so this online tele therapy option offers that a different way to achieve the same goals. [Commercial] Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 45. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions and as of today, today is Sunday November 25th 2018. We have well over forty one thousand seven hundred and sixty six listeners to the show and I’m super delighted you guys are out there. And if this is your first episode Welcome to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast, and I hope you find everything that you need to grow, scale, start your own Speech Therapy Private Practice. I know you’re in the right place, lots of people get value here every single month and if you don’t mind you hear me say it time and time again, Value is what you get in the absence of money. These podcasts are absolutely free for you, so if you wouldn’t mind just go to the Android or iOS platform of your choice and leave some good five star feedback so that other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you’re receiving now, they can find it much simpler if you would just do your part and leave some feedback. Also we have a space available for the perfect student that’s when you fly into Tucson and work with me hand in hand and we’ll show you how to get credentialed, how to bill and how to grow, scale, work on your referrals, all the things that you need to know. It’s a supercharged system to get you ready to go in Speech Therapy Private Practice. But a lot of people just can’t leave their job and if that’s where you are right now we have another option where you can get training from me and I’m there to help you. It’s the Private SLP All Access Community and you can find these options at privateslp.com/coaching. Now I wanted to jump in today and answer a question. We had a listener and her name is Stacy and she was wanting to know if we are able to treat individuals in their home that have been discharged from home care or maybe they’ve maxed out their Medicare benefits. She goes on to say that she works with adults and the geriatric population, strokes and traumatic brain injuries. She’s got referrals to see these families in their home and she knows that these folks they can’t get to the outpatient clinic. But she’s more than willing to go and see these people in the home setting. And so she wanted to know if they can pay cash and she wants to see those patients and so that’s what she wanted to know. And my big disclaimer here I’m not a lawyer. I don’t want to be a lawyer but I will say this. You want to double check and make sure that you don’t have a contract with Medicare. I mean you may want to have a contract with Medicare but I guess the main issue here is you can take someone’s cash if you’re not in network with that person’s insurance plan and you just might find out if you work for long term care centers. You may already have a Medicare contract attached to your NPI number, so you definitely want to call. If you go to cms.gov, that’s the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, you can reach out to them, give them a call and give them your name and NPI number. You may find that you are already in the Medicare system and if you are you may want to think twice about taking cash from that person because if you are a network provider from Medicare services you’ve got a bill those Medicare plans appropriately and accurately. So it’s a contractual issue and again I’m not a lawyer but I do know that if you are in network with any plan, that could be Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealthcare, Tricare or any other plans when you are in network you’ve got to provide that service to those patients under those rules that you signed in that contract. So you might want to just do your due diligence and double check if you’re in network. There’s nothing wrong if you’re not credentialed with any health insurance plans and you want to see people in the home. That’s fine. If you have an agreement you can do that. In the All Access Community, we talk about how to bill insurance companies if you do have those patients that you see that are in network with those plans that you’re credentialed with. We show you how to bill it and how to collect it. Also too when someone has Medicare especially with these geriatric patients they also might have other insurances like they might have Tricare for Life or they might have Blue Cross and Blue Shield. You need to build those plans first because any sort of government plan wants to be the pair of last resort. Any Medicaid plans or any Medicare plans they always want to be the pair of last resort. So there’s other plans that you need to bill appropriately first if you’re in network with those other plans. So that’s just something to think about. And today what I want to do is I want to talk to you about teletherapy. And recently I had a gentleman named Eric DeGrove. He reached out to me. He is the president of Blink session and you can find him at Blinksession.com. He is a programmer and he is the CEO of Blink session. He reached out to me and wanted to tell me about his software platform that he has made from the ground up and it allows someone to perform teletherapy sessions, bill it, get paid and had a schedule on his platform. And it’s just really nice to see another person out there really making a change and making a difference in other people’s lives through the platform of teletherapy. His wife is a speech pathologist and they own sprout therapy services out in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So when he reached out to me he wanted to let me know that they started out as a brick and mortar business but they found that they really had another opportunity to help people that couldn’t get to their clinic for Speech Therapy services and that’s where this whole idea of blink session got started. So in the interview that we complete today we talk about why he built blink session and some opportunities to offer services online. We talk about the biggest challenges to offering services online. And then his Online Private Practice startup advice so anybody out there who has an interest in teletherapy or maybe is thinking about starting a teletherapy business or some sort of addition to your own Speech Therapy Private Practice, this is the episode for you. Let’s get started, Kyle: Hey Eric! How you doing today? Eric: Doing good. Kyle: Hey, how was your Thanksgiving? Eric: It was really good, had a good time with family and ready to get back to work here before Christmas. Kyle: That’s awesome. Yeah I just got off the plane, got out of Baton Rouge in New Orleans and I’ve been doing that whole vegan diet thing. But once a year I go crazy and ate too much crawfish, grow oysters and fresh seafood. Eric: You got to dig in once in a while. Kyle: Oh yeah. Hey, tell me about this blink session program you made. Why do you do that? Eric: Yeah, So my wife and I we live here in Colorado Springs and she’s been a Speech Therapist for 13 years now. And my background is in software development. We founded a clinic here two and a half years ago and during the time, that we were starting up we were looking for business. We noticed that a lot of our clients were coming from further out from our location out in rural areas and we thought maybe this is a business opportunity for us. Maybe this is an opportunity to serve people who are on the outskirts of the city but do it online. And so we looked into doing Tele practice or Teletherapy and at that time this was about two years ago. So about six months after we started our practice there was really only one software package available specifically for doing Speech online. And it wasn’t very good and it wasn’t selling well. And so since I had that background in software development I thought, let’s look into building something to help Speech Therapist do Speech therapy online to take what they do in person and to do it online. And so that was kind of the impetus for creating this software. Kyle: Man what an idea. We have a lot of emails, all my listening audience sends me emails all the time about software. In our clinic, we had the same scenario. We serve southeast Arizona and the outlying ar

Converting new referrals into weekly patients can be very exciting in your speech therapy private practice, but if done incorrectly, it can cost you big time in the form of lost revenue, unnecessary wasted time and most importantly poor patient satisfaction. In this episode, I answer some recent listener questions about non-therapist clinic ownership and then dive right into the correct way to bring new patients into your private practice. I also highlight very important steps so that the whole process of patient onboarding is accurate and smooth. In this episode: 01:04 – Over 39,959 listeners to the show 02:18 – Welcome Dana, PrivateSLP All Access Community 03:35 – PrivateSLP Blueprint 05:45 – Private Practice ownership, 06:40 – Partnerships 08:14 – Onboarding your first patient 09:25 – Demographics 09:47 – Insurance Information 12:55 – Privacy policies 13:48 – Consent release and assignment DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION Before you go out and spend a ton of money on getting a lease, a building and turning on electricity, phone systems, computers and all that jazz, make sure you have a healthy positive relationship with a therapist who can help you in your private practice. [Commercial] Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 44. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions. As of today, today is Tuesday, October 23rd 2018. We have well over 39,959 listeners to the show and I’m super grateful and delighted you guys are out there getting good valuable free information. Because let’s face it. Value is what you get in the absence of money and these podcasts are free for you. So if you wouldn’t mind just please go to your iOS or Android platform of your choice and leave some good 5 Star feedback out there, that way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you’re receiving right now. And also I wanted to let you know we have a space available for the Perfect Student, that’s where you fly into Tucson, Arizona; work with me hand in hand and we’ll hope you get credentialed and set up your billing, you learn how to manage your referrals & patients, and how to bill and how to collect them, all those fancy things like that but you do have to fly into Tucson to work with me and that takes time. But if you can’t do that the next best thing is to work with me in the PrivateSLP All access community, that’s where you can find me every single day I’m logged in and it’s just a great place to work with other people. I would like to welcome one of our newest member. Her name is Dana and she is working on her Private practice and I know she’s getting good value already and she is asking many questions and I’m just so glad that she’s here. There’s over right now just 101 threads to choose from. With over 437 messages we have just different sections of the community. There’s a results section, discussion section, a place where you can meet other members in your community, trainings, there’s live trainings, we’ve got live trainings on employees & payment and things to consider when you’re moving from paper charts to electronic charts and how to double your practice in ten months even if you’re not ready. There’s things about copays, deductibles, co-insurance, how to make your Website and how to make sure you’re getting good patient satisfaction and getting good feedback. There’s also trainings on key performance indicators, mindset goal achievements, speech therapy codes, accounts receivable. There’s something what I teach called the BTS principle, that’s behind the scenes. There is just a ton of information and that’s just the live training. If you keep looking in the community you’re going to see things about marketing insurance, what I call the PrivateSLP blueprint. Also the referral roadmap how to just supercharge your private practice and get those referrals coming in. Also new patient intake courses and MPI trainings, even how to set up your phone systems, computers and all that stuff. This forms and their media releases on financial hardships, contracts that I use on a daily basis for my own business. There’s a place in a section in there called for the chart, their super bills, daily note forms, case history forms, home programs, time spreadsheets, visit payment authorization, tracking sheets and visit logs. All that’s in the PrivateSLP All Access Community, and all you have to do is sign up and you’ve got immediate access to all these things plus me and I’m here to help you. If you can’t sign up just yet. I do understand that everyone. It’s not for everybody and this is just for those people who really want to change their life. And sometimes people just aren’t ready. And if you’re not ready that’s Okay. If you want me to answer some questions, all you gotta do is send me an e-mail kyle@privateslp.com and I’ll help you. I can’t tell you how many times when I’ve pick up the phone after I receive an email. And people are surprised they say, “Wow, you really do call me” and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m going to help you. Ask me a question and I’m not going to take the time to type this out. I want to talk to you and I want to meet you. And I want to see what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, so I can help you if I can. So don’t be surprised if you send me an e-mail or if you go to the contact form at privateslp.com, if you leave me one of those voice messages don’t be surprised if I pick up the phone and call you back, because I truly want to help you be successful. So that’s all available privateslp.com. Recently I had a couple people ask the same question so I’m going to throw that out there before I get into today’s topic which is Onboarding your first patient. But recently a couple of people had asked me and reached out to me via email. They wanted to know if you have to be a Therapist to start your own Private Practice. I mean in a nutshell the answer is No. But it’s kind of like owning a restaurant. You got to have a really good Chef if you want to have a very popular restaurant, Right? I mean if you’re going to offer good tasty food you better have a really good Chef. Well, it’s kind of the same thing in the therapy world if you want to have your own Private Practice you can, you’ve heard me say it. You can have it but you’re gonna have to pay therapist to work in your Private Practice so before you go out and spend a ton of money on getting a lease, a building and turning on electricity, phone systems, computers and all that jazz, make sure you have a healthy positive relationship with a therapist who can help you in your private practice. Now another part of that question is do you recommend Kyle that we have a partnership. I can’t answer that. I’m not you but I do know in the people that I have spoke to in the past. Partnerships generally don’t work. And I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m just telling you from personal experience and things that I see, things that I hear and one of those things is about partnerships. If you don’t have the right relationship with others that relationship will not last. And I’ve seen that time and time again in the Speech Therapy Private Practice world. So it’s up to you if you want to make a partnership and have your own practice with a therapist. If you’re not a Speech therapist yourself but if you really think about it if you’re a Speech Pathologist and you want to start your own Private Practice you’re in a good spot because you don’t have to really pay yourself when you’re first starting out to do all the evaluations and do all the treatments. You’re in a good spot, so you can slowly grow it over time. But if you’re not a therapist and you need a therapist to start that business, you’ve gotta have some money in the bank to do payroll, meet payroll and pay for those evaluations and treatment. So it’s just something to think about. Consider the restaurant like I said you have to have a good chef to have a popular restaurant with good tasty food. So think about that when you starting out, and I hope that answers those two questions. Today, I wanted to talk about Onboarding your first patient and this is something that I received a few emails in the past and so wanted to throw that out there now. So when you’re onboarding your first patient, first of all what is Onboarding mean. That means the process of getting that patient in to your business, getting that patient evaluated, treated and getting that patient good customer service, good quality service because you can’t have a business unless you have an offer that converts. And for Speech Therapy Private Practice our offer is Speech evaluations and Speech therapy. So the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to receive that referral. And then once you received that referral the next step is you want to contact that family to get that patient’s schedule. Now normally, the first visit is going to be an evaluation and when you do an evaluation of Speech therapy, it could be a language eval, speech eval, voice, swallowed, dysphagia, autism whatever it is you are doing. You’re going to have certain amount of forms to get that family on boarded into your clinic. Now with those forms it’s going to be your demographics. And what are demographics? Demographics, when somebody fills out that paperwork that’s their name, their address, their city, state, zip code, whether that person is single, married, divorced, widowed, separated, domestic partner, their phone number, emergency contact, name, telephone number, that’s all demographics. Then you’ve got what’s called Primary Insurance Information. If you even accept insurance is now if you don’t accept insurance as you could probably skip this step but you need to have a clear

Many people do quite well as a single provider in their speech therapy private practice. However, you’ll soon realize that there are only so many hours in a day, and that you can only see only so many patients during the week. With all of the other duties involved in a private practice, it can be very difficult to do everything yourself. If this sounds familiar, it may be the right time to scale your speech therapy private practice and grow a team, but this can be tricky, and if done incorrectly, it can be devastating. If it’s done right, it can be one of the biggest rewards in your career, resulting in patients getting valuable assistance while providing jobs for others! In this episode, I discuss the 4 key components in scaling your speech therapy business and discuss other aspects to consider when scaling and growing a team. In this episode: 01:04 – Over 37,718 listeners to the show 02:03 – Space available for the Perfect student 03:26 – How to build, scale and grow Speech therapy private practice 04:35 – How do you get paid for your services 05:14 – Standard Operating Procedures 06:02 – Invest profits back into your business in the form of a team 06:53 – Don’t scale when you don’t have core set in stone 09:12 – Infrastructure is very important when you’re scaling DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION When we look at its basic form we’ve got to have what’s called an offer that converts if we don’t have an offer that converts into a patient or a customer we really don’t have a business. [Commercial] Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 43. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions. And as of today, today is Sunday September 16, 2018. We have well over 37,718 listeners to the show and I’m super glad you guys are out there getting good free valuable information. And if this is your first episode to the Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup podcast, Welcome, I hope you get everything that you’re looking for in these podcasts. Also, head on over to your iOS or Android platform of your choice and leave some good 5-star feedback. And that’s going to help not only us as a whole but it’s going to help other people just like you get the same valuable information like you’re getting right now. So, go ahead and do that that will help us a lot here at the Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup Podcast. Also, I also wanted to tell you we do have a space available for the Perfect student. If you go to privateslp.com/coaching, you’ll find two options there one is where you can fly in to Tucson. And it’s kind of like getting pushed into a big deep end of a swimming pool 12 feet, 15 feet, 20 feet whatever. You got the idea. Once you’re thrown into it, you’re going to learn superfast. You’re going to see how we bill it, collect it, document, schedule, handle referrals. We’re going to help you get credentialed. All that stuffs included, but it does take time and that means you’ve got to physically get on a plane, get in a car, get to sign work with those hand in hand and we’ll show you. But it does take commitment and it’s not free. If it’s something that interest you though please reach out. Also, if that doesn’t work for you what most people find more helpful is learning online. That’s the All Access Community at www.privateslp.com, just wanted to say hi to Christy who just recently joined. She’s a clinic owner in Texas and she’s got a thriving business over there and she’s scaling at this moment. She’s bringing a lot to the community and we’re also helping each other out. So, it’s nice to have not only people who are just starting out but people who have a thriving business who want to learn about scaling and growth. So, which brings me to today’s topic and that’s how to build a team and also scaling grow a Speech therapy private practice. Now when we look at its basic form we’ve got to have what’s called an offer that converts if we don’t have an offer that converts into a patient or a customer we really don’t have a business. So, at its simplest purest form you’ve got to have an offer that converts. Now what is the offer? For a Speech pathologist that could be maybe someone who deals with fluency issues or maybe a Voice Speech Pathologist who specializes in voice or dysphagia swallowing disorders or you might be one of those gurus who work on AAC devices or maybe someone who specializes in autism and social groups or you might be a pediatric facility who works with regular normal developing children who have speech and language delays or you might work on the other side of the coin with geriatrics and do strictly work with geriatrics. And another thing is how do you get paid for your services? With the offer that converts you’ve got to get paid. And when you get paid, does that mean you build that patient’s insurance? Do you take cash? Do you take checks? Do you take credit cards? Do you take all of that? And so, when you’re doing this when you’ve got the offer that converts and once you get paid, you want to be journaling and writing these things down on your tablet smartphone, good old-fashioned paper and pen like I use and start writing down these systems. If you go back in the earlier episodes of the Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup podcast you’ll see S.O.Ps. Those are called Standard Operating Procedures and when you start getting that offer that converts, you start getting paid and you start going through the daily process of taking calls and accepting referrals and getting patients scheduled in. Once you get him scheduled you do the evaluation and you bill for the evaluation. You write the report, you send that report back to the referring physician. All those things are Standard Operating Procedures. Write them down. That’s what you’re going to need in order to duplicate the process. And once you start getting paid you have to save your profits. And when you save your profits you can use those profits not to go shopping or take these expensive trips or buy all these things for your family and friends. No, you invest those profits back into your business in the form of a team. The team is people who can help you answer the phones, do your referrals, do your billing, collections and all that other fun stuff. And other therapies too, because I speak to a lot of Private practice owners and the biggest problem that I’m seeing is people are burned out. They’re frustrated they’re tired. Some of them are just purely mad because they’re not getting paid from insurances and they’re not collecting from their visits. They’re not billing their visits out at the end of the day and they’re not getting paid. So that whole part of the process that I just listed having the offer that converts, getting paid, writing down your S.O.Ps, saving your profits and duplicating that. There’s a breakdown there. So, you don’t want to scale when you don’t have that core set in stone. So again, when you’re scaling your business the big thing to remember, is it even time to scale? because if you have a breakdown in any four those areas that I just explained you really will scale the problem and you definitely don’t want to do that. If you need help with your billing reach out to us at privateslp.com/billing. We do Credentialing services and billing to help people who were maybe in that billing rut and it is a rut. I remember when I was just starting out I remember going to my CPA and her name was Loretta and I said “Loretta, I got to get a loan” and she looked at me and she says, “Let me see your papers” and I showed her the statements from the billing company. She says, “You don’t need a loan. You need a new biller”. And that’s when I learned that it’s not normal to go over 30-60-90 days and not get paid. I really honestly, I just didn’t know it was that simple. So, I had to do something I really had trouble doing at the time was firing our biller and getting somebody who really helped us and knew how to be aggressive with our accounts. That’s called AR, accounts receivable somebody who got us paid. And once I started tweaking that out, I was able to get paid and I saved the profits and I was able to hire more people, have a staff and a team. That’s when I noticed that the business was just growing and thriving and I was able to offer free insurance health insurance for the employees and given them all the good stuff, time off, vacations, dental insurance, vision insurance, 401k and bonuses. And that’s what I like to do but it didn’t happen overnight. I had those bumps on the road. I had to get those S.O.Ps in order. I had to get all that stuff taken care of. Another thing is when you want to scale your business, is it time to scale? Do you have a team? Do you even have the money in the revenue? So, you’re not relying on the bank. You guys you hear it from me first. You don’t want to go, buy and borrow money from the bank because then you’re working for the bank. How bad is that? Can you imagine you think you’re really owning your own business but you really just own your own job and then the bank owns it for you? So, you’re not really working for yourself. And also, infrastructure that’s something very important when you’re scaling. Do you have the right infrastructure? I mean right now our business is going through a major change. For the last 10 or 11 years we have had paper charts and people used to laugh at us and say, “Why would you do that?” Because I wanted to wait until the right time. I mean Electronic health documentation programs. They’re not cheap. And I like my paper charts and it’s served us well until a point and so I’m investing thousands of dollars into the infrastructure of our business. So, the therapist will save time and make their job

In Episode 42, I speak with Roy Harmon over at Fusion Web Clinic and discuss the ins and outs of a speech therapy private practice.  There many advantages to owning your own private practice, but there are some negatives, too.  All of these aspects are discussed in this interview. Fusion Web Clinic also has a pediatric therapy giveaway for the Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup Podcast Listeners and you can register for that right here. In this episode: 01:18 – If you do it right, it’s something that can change your life 02:05 – Name that can showcase services in community and that will grow with business 06:58 – You don’t have to have an LLC if you want to see some people on the side 09:25 – Main thing is to create relationships 10:15 – The best person to introduce yourself to any doctor’s or physician’s office is Referrals Clerk 11:45 – When you meet people don’t try to sell it, be yourself 14:58 – Nobody’s going to audit you because you’re not billing out insurance companies 19:46 – I don’t like working for anybody else but myself 24:46 – It’s my responsibility to make sure this thing rolls 27:35 – If you’re not responsible, you’ll be down for the count in a matter of no time DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION Roy: So, thanks a lot for talking to me I really appreciate it. What I’m really interested in is, we are a Pediatric therapy EMR. So, the people that we serve are Pediatric therapists, whether they’re OTs, SLPs, PTs and we really try to provide them with valuable information that they can use, just really in every aspect of Pediatric therapy. And one of the things that a lot of therapies in general whether they’re pediatric therapies or not is eventually I think a lot of people start thinking maybe I should go out on my own, maybe I’ll start my own clinic. And you are the expert on this so I’m really looking forward to hearing some of the things that you think people need to think about before they get started. And I know that you’ve kind of talked about some things that people need to do before they open the doors. So, to speak could you go into that a little bit? Kyle: Yeah, Nice to talk to you finally Roy. I know we bounced some emails back and forth and just finally nice to get some time where we both can talk about this stuff. This is I think important information for therapists who really want to start their own Private practice because if you do it and you do it right, it’s something that can change your life and really put you at that next level. But on the other side, if you don’t do it correctly it can destroy your finances. And again, I’m not a doom and gloom, but if you don’t do it right you can wipe you out. I’ve seen people shut their clinics cause health problems. I know of one lady she got really sick and I know a gentleman who just financially bankrupt from it. But starting out, it’s something that you got a plan and you’ve got a plan to do it right. So, I do have some thoughts on that. Yeah. Roy: Awesome, I guess really the simplest thing is if you’re going to have a business you got to have a name for it, right? Kyle: Yeah absolutely. And I’ve always said this is just personal preference. I like a name that can showcase my services in my community something that will grow with the business because I think what sets me apart from other people who were in this space. I teach people how to start a real business something that will take care of me, take care of employees, give the government their cut every month and give the state their cut every month. Everybody has something and I teach people how to start real life clinics not part time on the side, but real-life businesses. I guess people would say “headache”, that’s what a real business is. It’s not all peachy keen just roses. It’s very difficult at times and I think for me I remember, I went and got some magazines and I was thinking what can I name my business and what can I name my Website. Because I didn’t want anything cheesy. I wanted to serve kids and adults, so I wanted a name that was kind of neutral and I found that name. And I remember looking at buzz words and magazines and this was a while back. So, when you could actually go to a convenience store and pick out a magazine. So, I picked out some of these magazines and look for these buzz words like support, prosper, things like that and I finally came up with Supportvoice.com. And that was for our clinic Therapy group of Tucson. I remember this gentleman telling me, “No, you can’t do that. Your Website’s got to match your name because how are you going to rank on Google.” “Oh my god, I don’t know how to do that stuff. I never did SEO and I couldn’t do that.” This was 15 years ago and he said you just can’t do that. Well we did. Your name on your Website doesn’t always have to match your brand. I mean it’s part of us. We started this very early on so I just wanted to tell people, just start. That’s the main thing. You don’t have to sit there and over analyze everything you gain into that whole analysis paralysis thing. Therapists are notorious for ideas in no implementation, and I can say that because I’ve been a therapist for 25 years, Speech pathologist graduated from LSU Medical Center in New Orleans. So just get a domain name. Find you a good solid name that you feel that will work. Register it and just start and go with it. You can always change stuff later. Roy: So, then what about when it comes to getting incorporated or the more legal aspects of the business. What comes next? Kyle: Once you get your name you can go see a lawyer if you want but I use paralegals. I’ve got my favorite paralegal here in Tucson and she does only work here in Arizona. I threw her name out there but I know you guys have an international base of listeners so really wouldn’t do them any good. But I like paralegals I did a lawyer thing once and it was a lot of money. It was a bunch of money. But you can even get online and just get incorporated. Put your name in there put your address that you want your articles of incorporation mail to. You’ve got to get on that government Website and get your Tax I.D. number. And it’s a simple process it takes minutes and once you have that piece of paper from the government it says here’s your Tax I.D. and once you have your articles of incorporation from your paralegal or your legal team, you take that information to the bank and you can open up a separate Business checking account and throw some money in there and off you go. It’s really that simple. And then I think the next thing would be is like for Speech pathologist you could get on the ASHA Website. I think they use Mercer insurance or something like that. They get a little deal. You can get you some general professional liability under that business name. It’s cheap as one of my podcast episodes where I actually talk about that and I even put a screenshot on there of the actual amount of the cost of that insurance. But it’s supercheap cheap and you just go with it. Roy: At that point you’ve got a business, right? Kyle: Absolutely. Roy: Is there sort of any other steps? I mean I know that a Website is big. Is that something that you think you need right off the bat or should you focus more on finding patients at that point? What’s the process that you go through. Kyle: That’s a real good question and to answer your question or to comment on what you said. That’s a business. I know people who and I just talked about this in a recent Episode 41, PrivateSLP.com in the podcast section. Some people don’t even need a corporation. I mean I wanted to start an empire I’ve always wanted to say that but I wanted a speech empire. People used to joke with me I’m like now I’m going to do it one day I will do it. But you don’t have to have an LLC if you want to see some people on the side. You can do that as long as it’s ethical and moral for you. Like if you’re a school-based Speech therapist and a parent hits you up and says, “Hey, can you see my kid after school today?” That might be a problem. I don’t know the whole legal ramifications for taking kids out of the school setting and seeing them privately on the side. I think that might not work. We have a code of ethics at ASHA, there the American Speech Hearing Association. But if somebody off the street their mom had a stroke and they wanted you to see them for cash. You can do that. You got a license to practice in that state. You can do that. Sure, and you can have them write that check out to you and you can put that money in your checking account. You can be what’s called a sole proprietor so you don’t have to be a corporation. People say there is liability, you can get sued, but I’ve even made the example, I’ve had apartments for years in New Orleans I had apartments in here in Tucson. I’ve got rental property and I’ve always operated under a sole proprietor. I gave an example, I had a water heater blow up on one of our tenants. But it was their fault but I never got sued and I did the right thing I helped the lady out. And it’s a long story. But my point is don’t be afraid to jump in. I think that’s where people shut down. They’re scared. They’ve got in their mind somewhere, you’re going to get sued for treating this patient. You just can’t do that. I had a lady recently. She contacted me and she wanted to know how to get paid. She said she got a referral and she wrote the report and sent it to the doctor and the doctor signed off on it and sent it back. And she says, “Well, how do I get paid?” I said you don’t have to do all that. You need to send that bill to the Insurance company. That’s what you going to do if you want to get paid because you’re not going to have a business if you don’t get paid. But I commended her because she started even though she’s not going to get paid for that. She is probably five steps ahead of the next person because she’s doing it and then she’s got more people coming in. So, I picked up the phone called here and showed

Not everyone needs to be incorporated to have a business. There are advantages and disadvantages of both situations and in Episode 41, I address these questions and give some examples why each situation may work better for some.   Want to build a high converting website? We are loving Thrive Themes! In this episode: 01:42 – Thank you for the good feedback and emails, 02:25 – Home Health and Clinic Based Businesses, 04:27 – All Access Membership community, 05:12 – Thrive Themes for building websites, 05:55 – the Perfect Student 06:10 – Sole Proprietorship vs. an LLC or a Corporation 10:02 – Personal Tax Return vs Business Tax Returns 11:31 – Tax I.D. number 12:37 – Clarity DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION Not everybody needs to have or incorporate, because let’s face it if you want to just take cash for a visit and someone’s home or if you have a little office on the site or a place outside attached to your home or in the back there you have a special room for your sessions. I mean you are in business essentially. [Commercial] Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 41. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions and as today, today is Sunday July 8th 2018. We have well over 35,253 listeners to the show and I’m super delighted that you guys are out there listening and getting good valuable information and I’m going to say it as always, Value is what you get in the absence of money. And these podcasts are very free for you so if you wouldn’t mind please go to the Android or iOS platform of your choice and please leave me some good 5 star feedback. I recently got some good feedback from a listener and it was just really nice to see that she’s getting the help that she’s needed to start her own Speech therapy private practice since she’s been at it over a year now and she says she goes back and listens to the podcast, and you get that motivation and information. So it’s just really nice to have you on board. And also if you’re new to the show welcome and I hope you find everything you’re looking for here at the Speech therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. Now what makes this a little bit different is we are managing and running and owning clinics here in Tucson, Arizona. We’ve got two businesses an Outpatient speech therapy and Occupational therapy business; soon to be physical therapy here in Tucson, Arizona. We also have a Home and Community based like a home health type business that we run. And so between both of those businesses we actively employ over 35 full-time, part-time therapists and we see many kids and help adults every single month, so we’re really making a difference. When I first started the podcast I wanted to get this information out to you guys because what I wanted to start my own business I really couldn’t find anything on the internet about starting or growing your own Speech therapy private practice. I’ve found some PDFs and things like that but it just really didn’t make sense to me so this is my way of giving back to my listener base and just letting you guys know that I appreciate you being out there, listening and supporting me. So I try to give you guys that value that you’re looking for. And not only am I trying to help you guys I’m trying to set and lead by example by actively running multiple businesses here. So that way you can see that I’m not work in other places, I’m work in on the side at a school or a nursing home. I’m running this machine and that’s what I’ve been to for the last 11 years of my life. So I dedicated myself to this. I saved up about eight thousand bucks I think, and I jetted left those nursing homes and said, “Never again”. So this is what I’m doing full-time and I hope you guys learn what you need to learn from me. And if you want more access, if you want a little bit more guidance and you want behind the scenes in monthly webinars and if you even want a phone call with me on a weekly basis, that’s available. It’s called the Speech therapy all access community and if you’re a privateslp.com/coaching you’ll see the sign up form there. If you don’t see a sign-up form immediately you might see and apply now button. Certain times of the year I have the community open for new members but I really try these days to hand select people that I know will be a good fit. We just did our last webinar while I was traveling and I couldn’t get to my monthly live webinar with others so what I did was I was showing the members how to make a very good High Converting Website for their speech therapy Private Practice business. And I was doing that with some Thrive theme plugins and I’ll leave that link at the bottom of this show so you can see there is an easier way to make websites. If you want to spend extra money you can hire a programmer at upwork or something like that or fiverr.com and that’s a very good way to do it if you’re more hands on. It’s very simple. And judging by the comments in the All Access Community I know that the members who have really enjoyed that video so that was the training this past month and there’s tons of trainings in there so if that interests you just go to privateslp.com/coaching. And I also want to tell you I have space available for the Perfect Student if that interests you, there’s a link at privateslp.com/coaching for that as well. I got an email recently from a gentleman named Matt and he wanted to know about sole proprietorship vs. an LLC or a corporation. It is a very good question because he is working at a nursing home right now but he also sees kids on the side just private clients. And that’s a great question and it got me thinking not everybody needs to have or incorporate, because let’s face it if you want to just take cash for a visit and someone’s home or if you have a little office on the site or a place outside attached to your home or in the back there you have a special room for your sessions. I mean you are in business essentially. So there’s nothing wrong with being a Sole Proprietor. It’s really nothing special you have to do. You can put all of the money in a separate bank account under your name and you can take that money put it in a separate bank account. You can pay your business expenses out of that separate account or you can actually commingle those funds into your own Personal checking account because again it is not a separate entity or anything of the sort. An example I have been a Sole proprietor with my real estate since 1999 / 2000. I have purchased Duplexes and Triplexes in my own name and a lot of people say, “Oh, you know you’re going to get sued you’re exposing yourself to increase liability”. Well I’ve had these properties for a long time. And no. 1, treat people well and with respect. And accidents do happen, but that’s what insurance is for. I’ve got liability insurance and umbrella policies. I’ve got the veil going and I got that corporate veil thing going without the corporation. When I was living in New Zealand I had a personal manager managing four houses in New Orleans uptown there for me. And I remember there was a lady, she ignited the gas water heater in one of the upstairs homes on Pine and Spruce Uptown, New Orleans there by Tulane University. And she made a mistake and she suffered some burn damages. And that was really sad and very scary. I had a licensed plumber come out and look at that water heater. And everything was obviously in code and appropriate and offered to pay some of her medical bills. She didn’t want that she wasn’t one of those types of people who wanted to sue or anything. She just wanted to make sure that that water heater was operational and yes it was. It was a functioning operating water heater. She just tried to light the gas water heater incorrectly. But all that to say this is just another example of exposure and liability. There is always going to be a liability and increased exposure in anything you do. And that right there is what stops a lot of people from taking a job and doing what they want to do for themselves and that’s that comfort zone that people get when they think just work for other people. Everybody’s an expert these days. Everybody says, “Oh, you know you’re gonna get sued”. Well, I have basically a lady with the water heater incident and I didn’t get sued. I tried to help the lady and I did the right thing because I believe that comes back. I’ve had apartments in real estate for years in my own name. My sources tell me that me as in my sources say that it’s okay if you want to see a few private clients on the side and be a Sole Proprietor. There’s nothing wrong with that. You can check with your lawyer you can check with your CPA in my experience. It’s the same personal tax return you will just show a different schedule which is a different piece of paper on your personal tax return. So for me each property address has its own schedule in my personal tax form and that list the income and the expenses and things like that. So your business and your part time private practice would be something just a different schedule on your tax return. So it’s really simple as my point about all of this rambling because I want you guys to see that it’s not that scary because if you want to have a private practice you’ve got to do something and make that move. You got to get into action and get it going. Because if you don’t 2018 or pass you by 2019, 2020. Next thing it’s over, so get it while you can and start. Now you can also start a Corporation and that’s okay too. And I’ve talked about that many times before and that’s when you simply incorporate. You can do it online. You can find a paralegal in town. It’s cheap. You have your Articles of corporations. You take that Article o

When we have our own speech therapy private practice, we work for our patients. In order to stay in business, we must receive patient co-pays, deductibles and co-insurances as payment at the time of service. If claims are to be billed out to TPL, Medicaid or Medicare, these claims must be timely and clean in order to adjudicate appropriately. However, in this podcast you will discover that in spite of doing things correctly, insurance companies continue to be notorious for denying and delaying claims, and generally use tactics so that your business won’t get reimbursed for services that you provide. In this episode, I expose some of the reasons why insurance companies delay or deny claims and offer suggestions on how to mitigate these delays. In this episode: 02:00 – Shout out to the California listeners! 02:25 – The Perfect Student 02:45 – All Access Membership community, 03:35 – Insurance Payment times differ from Payday time, 03:47 – Hurricane Katrina and insurance nightmares, 06:22 – Cash and the lean machine, 07:15 – Decreasing debt, expenses 08:02 – HCFA 1500 forms DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION In order to stay afloat and to stay profitable, you must run a lean business and stay out of debt and make your expenses on a monthly basis. What are those expenses? Electricity rent if you have insurance, Professional general liability those are expenses and whatever you have left over is a profit. [Commercial] Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 40. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails, all the questions and as of today, Today is Saturday June 16 2018. We have well over 34,178 listeners to the show. And I’m super delighted you guys are out there getting good free valuable information and I’m going to say it every single podcast. Value is what you get in the absence of money and these podcasts are free for you so if you wouldn’t mind please go to the IOS or the Android platform of your choice and leave some good 5 Star feedback that way other people can get the same valuable information. Now when you go to the demographics and look at the world view most of our listeners a majority of our listeners are coming in from the United States. Then secondly we have Japan, Australia, India, the UK, Canada, Germany, the Republic of Korea. And then lastly is South Africa. And when you break the demographics of the United States as a whole you’ll see that California topping the charts. Then we’ve got Texas, Florida, New York, Arizona, Illinois, New Jersey, Georgia and then Pennsylvania. If this is your first podcast welcome to the show, if there’s anything that you would like to talked about on the Speech Therapy Private Practice startup Podcast, shoot me an email kyle@privateslp.com. Also want to tell you guys I have a space available for the Perfect student. That’s when you can fly in and work with me hand in hand and we will get you credentialed, ready to Bill and help you set up. You’ll have coaching calls with me, work with me here live in Tucson, Arizona. We will help you grow your own Speech Therapy Private Practice. But a lot of people reach out to me and they say they just simply don’t have the time. So I do have an all access membership community and that’s where you can log on and you have direct access to me. There’s a private coaching section in there, there’s tons of threads on billing, collections, How to Start grow scale your own Speech therapy private practice. We have monthly trainings, webinars, those are transcribed into PDF format. They have audio formats for you to listen to, video formats or you can watch those. So there’s a lot of information in there and that’s available at www.privateslp.com/coaching. Now when you go to forward slash coaching you might see an “Apply” button there or the membership may be open or close but you can go ahead and click that button and leave me your name & details and I’ll review your application. So today I wanted to speak to you guys about Insurance time. Now what is insurance time? I can guarantee you that your Insurance time is different than your Paycheck time. Now what do I mean by that? Insurances have their own set of rules. They have their own time that they pay you on. So here’s an example I remember after Hurricane Katrina. We had some leaks in our roof and we just didn’t have time to sit down and call the Insurance company. The insurance companies were inundated with phone calls. I remember the guy who came out to adjust our home and look at our home for our insurance company. He was called out of retirement. He was retired Airline pilot and he was also an Insurance adjuster on the side so I remember climbing the ladder and getting on top of one of these big duplexes in New Orleans. I don’t know for those of you who grew up in New Orleans or been around duplexes. The duplexes in New Orleans are kind of like a shotgun house but they have two stories and then this huge roof. And it’s way high up but I got on the roof with him and walked the roof and I was talking to him and he was just telling me they’re so backed up on these insurance companies. They just simply couldn’t handle the volume of calls. People who were calling in distress it’s Hurricane Katrina. People’s homes were flooded, their roofs were destroyed, their houses were gone and here I am just trying to get my roof taking care of. But I remember when Hurricane Katrina happened the very next day I was able to call a friend of mine. He was a contractor and I said “Hey, I need two roofs. What can you do for me?” He says how you pay and I said cash. And he said “I’ll be out there next week” and I said “I appreciate it”, and I’ll never forget we had a team of roofers on one house and then two days later they’re on the second house and it was ready it was a done deal. I think the total for each roof was about twenty seven hundred dollars each and I had cash in the bank and I was able to deal with the insurance company later. And so again think about what I just said, when you’re dealing with insurance companies you’re going to have to wait. Think about a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina you got all those people trying to call insurance companies, they’ve got a skeleton crew answering the phones and they got people who they’re hiring temporary employees to go adjust homes and it was really crazy. But the takeaway that I learned as I was looking when I walked that roof I saw all those people waiting. They had blue tarps I don’t know if you google “Blue tarps New Orleans Hurricane Katrina”, You’ll see what I’m talking about. Tons of blue images just people who wanted to keep the rain out of their house they put tarps over their roof. And I didn’t have to do that because I was able to pay cash and get my service immediately. So what’s the takeaway from here. The takeaway here is have cash in the bank for a rainy day. Go figure “Hurricane Katrina Rainy day”, you get that. So have cash in the bank so you can stay operational. Insurance time is completely different than your Payday. When you’re employed you’ve got a paycheck every two weeks or every other week or by monthly you might be a salary employee or an hourly employee or you might have a contract but you’re going to get paid. But with insurance companies it’s not set like that when you work for yourself you’re employed by your patients and ultimately their payments to you whether that’s a cash rate or it might be a copay towards their insurance or a deductible towards their insurance or it might be that actual payment from Insurance companies. But in order to stay afloat and to stay profitable, you must run a lean business and stay out of debt and make your expenses on a monthly basis. What are those expenses? Electricity rent if you have insurance, Professional general liability those are expenses and whatever you have left over is a profit. Now in order to maximize your cash flow you have to realize that insurance time is different from your time or your pay time. So you’ve got to have money in the bank so you can get paid and so you can sustain your business. You’ll get your payment hopefully if you do it right with insurance companies and we do talk a lot about that in the All Access Community, how to bill and collect from insurance companies. But when you deal with Insurance companies you have to put all the information for each claim on a form and that form is called a HCFA 1500 form. CMS – The Center for Medicaid services, they have an official standard form that’s used by physicians or speech occupational physical therapists. When you submit a bill or a claim for reimbursement to Medicare, Medicaid or even private insurance companies, that form is called a HCFA 1500, and HCFA just stands for Health Care Financing Administration. It’s a standardized form and when you fill that form out it’s got to have other appropriate patient demographics, that diagnostic codes, CPT codes or pick codes all those codes go on that form and then it’s sent to the Insurance company for payment. Now you have to submit a clean claim in order to get paid or let’s say someone has Medicaid for instance, if they have Medicaid and then they have a third party payer like a private insurance company like Cigna, UnitedHealth or Blue Cross you still have to submit a clean claim to the Medicaid company in order to get payment or you have to submit a clean claim to the third party liability company. Normally when it comes to Medicaid though the state always wants to be the payer of last resort. So you will bill the private insurance company, first submit that clean claim, get the denial then send that denial. If you still need to get paid to the Medicaid companies. So it’s a tricky process but you’v

Let’s face it, many SLP’s worry about perfection. They want everything to be just right, families to like them all of the time, kids to come into the treatment all happy and leave excited, etc. Well, being perfect doesn’t exists – But being GOOD does! When starting out in this journey of speech therapy private practice, many people worry about getting things perfect, all of the time – “How does my logo look”, “How does this letterhead look when compared to the envelopes”, “What about my colors in the office, I hope they match”. Stop! Press GO and be consistently good and watch your business take off and flourish. In this episode: 01:21 – Thanks again for emails and questions 02:11 – Building business that will afford you ability to have more time 03:02 – We spend time every year at same place in Hawaii 05:10 – Money is not always the most important factor in any decision 06:00 – Being consistent DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION A lot of SLPs are Type A, we know we want and it’s got to be this certain way. But with Private practice it can never be perfect. There’s no way that our treatments can ever be perfect. I mean think about it there’s too many variables. You’ve got different types of families, you’ve got different types of diagnosis, you’ve got different types of children, you’ve got different age groups, it can never be perfect. But something that I always tell my employees at our clinic is, “Don’t worry about being perfect. It just has to be consistently good.” [Commercial] Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 39. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions. Today is June 2nd, it’s a Saturday 2018 and the listener base keeps growing and I know you guys are out there because you’re emailing me questions and reaching out to me. And I see the statistics on our blog, video, views and the audio listens, and so it’s just really nice to have you guys on-board and you’ll hear me say this time and time again values what you get in the absence of money. These podcasts are free for you so if you wouldn’t mind just simply go to the iOS or Android platform of your choice and leave some 5 Star feedback that way other people just like you can learn how to grow and scale your own Speech therapy private practice. And I’m not talking about working from home or working on the side, seeing patients after your job. I’m talking about building a business that will afford you the ability to have more time and stop trading time for money so if that’s something that interest you and you would like more help go to privateslp.com/coaching. We also have a service where we can help you with your billing and contracting and credentialing. Just go to privateslp.com/billing and I’ll help you and I want to see you succeed. Now for those of you who listen regularly to the show you’ll notice that the audio for this episode is different from all others. That’s because we are recording this live in North Shore Hawaii. We’re here every single year same time same place. You know me I’m consistent, I do the same thing over and over and over. When something works, I just keep doing it. Well that’s what we’re doing. This is our family time where we spend time together and we spend it every year same time same place in Hawaii. We’re up in the North Shore Oahu, way up and this small town called Sunset Point. And it’s right around some of the biggest waves in the world normally in the fall there’s this beautiful area called pipeline and that’s the area where we’re staying right now. So I know for those of you who listen regularly you’ll notice that I was talking about Scuba diving in Maui a few months back. We’ve been working on our certification process and this time we were able to dive in a beautiful area called Shark’s Cove and what I’ll do for this episode I’ll leave some beautiful pictures of that dive. I’m always taking my GoPro with me so I can document these dives and so I will leave pictures on this post so you can see those beautiful fish and those beautiful reefs. It was just really nice to have that special time with my son. He’s 12 and he’s got his buddy Luke with him and they are often riding the bikes, having fun playing basketball and throwing football. That’s what life’s about. It’s not all about internet and YouTube it’s about getting outside sweating a little bit getting dirty throwing the ball around and just having a good time. That’s what a recent listener of mine. His name is Matt. He emailed me last week and wanted to know how to get more Pediatricians on-board with his Private practice. But he also in that email reminded me the real reason that I wanted to start, scale and grow my own Speech therapy private practice was because I wanted more family time. I was sick and tired of working in the nursing homes. Yeah I was just sick and tired of it so that’s why I started my own business. The timing was right and so that’s what I did. I’m glad that Matt reached out to me and just reminded me because that’s why we’re here to be of service to our family and our friends and others. That is the real reason that we chose to help other people, it’s to have your own Speech therapy private practice. Again money is not always the most important factor in any decision. I mean it’s nice to get paid yes but it’s not always the right thing. How many times a Speech pathologist who work in long term care? We work with a lot of patients who are on hospice and who are kind of that end of life and how many times have those people said to us “Wish I had more money in the bank”? Now, it’s always I wish I had more time and so because of my Speech therapy private practice, I’m able to spend more family time and I want to thank Matt for emailing me and reminding me of that, so I appreciate that. If you guys have any questions about your own speech therapy private practice you can go to privateslp.com/contact or send me an email! Now today’s episode is going to be about being consistent and I’ve talked about this a little bit before but I was reminded of this when we were over at Ted’s bakery. Now for those of you who know the North Shore Oahu, there’s this really cool bakery called Ted’s bakery. And it’s a place where you can get food, and they’re really famous and known for their chocolate pies and they’ve got donuts and things like that. But I got up early the other morning and the boys were still asleep. So I went over to get a little cup of coffee and a doughnut. And there’s always a line outside of Ted’s bakery. And so I finally get to the counter and I get my glazed doughnut and I get my cup of coffee and I’ve been into that warm doughnut, It’s just great. And as soon as I got that taste in my mouth I knew it was consistent. I’m like Oh yeah there’s that Ted’s bakery glazed doughnut like that I’m always used to. It’s kind of like Krispy Kreme. When you go to Krispy Kreme there’s that certain texture and flavor that you like of a Krispy Kreme doughnut. Teds has its own little glazed doughnut with its own little Teds flavor and consistency, and they’ve got that chocolate pie everything’s consistent. And so I was thinking about Private practice, it’s got to be the same thing with your own Private practice business. I think a lot of Speech pathologist we get stuck in this perfectionism and we want everything to be perfect. A lot of SLPs are Type A, we know we want and it’s got to be this certain way. But with Private practice it can never be perfect. There’s no way that our treatments can ever be perfect. I mean think about it there’s too many variables. You’ve got different types of families, you’ve got different types of diagnosis, you’ve got different types of children, you’ve got different age groups, it can never be perfect. But something that I always tell my employees at our clinic is, “Don’t worry about being perfect. It just has to be consistently good.” And don’t forget that when you’re growing and scaling your own Speech therapy private practice, It’s just like Ted’s bakery. Every time you go there it’s the same flavor, it’s the same texture, it’s the same everything, it’s always consistent. It’s just like when you get a Coca-Cola, you open that can, you pop that can open and all of a sudden there’s that taste that you know and trust “Coca-Cola”. I mean big brands do it. So you can do the same in your Private practice too. Don’t be perfect. Be consistently good. Well I hope this was a good episode for you if you have any questions reach out to me via email! And as always thank you for listening. The post 39. Press “GO” and Be Consistently Good appeared first on PrivateSLP.

In this episode, I discuss the speech therapy private practice mindset and how it’s important for private practice success. I also list strategies that help you acquire and maintain this mindset so that you can start, grow or scale your business. In this episode: 01:59 – One space available for the Perfect Student 02:51 – Need billing and credentialing help? 03:12 – Private Practice Mindset 04:46 – Pushing Boundaries 06:36 – Risk versus Benefit 07:56 – Learning from your mistakes 08:56 – Curiosity and a hunger for more 09:47 – Recognizing others and helping others 11:00 – Staying Positive 12:15 – Physical health DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION Again you’ve got to be prepared and have funds for a rainy day so to speak. So again taking healthy risks, pushing the envelope and making things happen. [Commercial] Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 38. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails, questions and comments. And as of today, today is Saturday, May 12 2018. We have well over 32,674 listeners to the show. And I’m super glad you guys are out there getting good valuable information and you know me every single episode, I say value is what you get in the absence of money and these podcasts are free for you so I would appreciate if you just go to the iOS or Android platform of your choice and please leave some good 5 Star feedback. That way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you’re receiving. And if this is your first episode welcome to the podcast and I hope you find everything that you’re looking for here and if there’s something that you are looking for and you’re not finding it. All you have to do, the solution is simple, shoot me an email kyle@privateslp.com and I’ll help you. I mean it can’t get any easier than that but you have to do one thing and that is get into action and send me that email. Also too, I wanted to say we have one space available for the perfect student and I get a lot of requests for the perfect student. You can find that at privateslp.com/coaching and you’ll find two different types of coaching that I offer at the moment. One is the all access community that’s where you can have access to me online and we have monthly webinars, we have an online community of people that we help each other out, we answer questions, there’s forums systems, training, everything is on that platform. If you’re looking for something more in-depth and something a little bit quicker pace, then you can fly into Tucson and work with me hand in hand. That’s called the perfect student. I have one space available. And again you can find this information at privateslp.com/coaching. Also too, if you are looking for help with your billing or you need some help with credentialing, for instance taking Insurance’s. If you’re just starting out and you need help. All you have to do is reach out to me at kyle@privateslp.com. Or just go to privateslp.com/billing and there’s help there as well. Now today I wanted to talk to you about the Private Practice Mindset. What is the Private Practice Mindset? So when you start a Private practice or grow or scale your own Speech Therapy Private Practice, there is a certain mindset that one has to have in order to achieve certain goals and it’s not the same type of mindset. Like an employee, I remember when I worked at the nursing home I had to be there pretty early so we could work with the dysphagia patients at 06:30-07:00 in the morning. We had to do our breakfast and get all that stuff taken care of and we had to be there early and I have to clock him. Got to see all my patients, figure out how many patients I had for the day. Trying to roll that documentation time in so we could meet our Rug levels and get off the clock. So you don’t want your productivity drops because you didn’t want to get in trouble by the manager. I mean that was my mindset when I was working for the nursing home. And I’m sure a lot of you guys out there what I just said you totally get. That is a different mindset compared to Private practice where when you have your own Private Practice you see what you want to accomplish and you can project it out into the universe and not get on hippie here. I’m just saying you have to be able to visualize this stuff and so when you can see your building or your employees are helping patients I mean that’s when you get into this mindset. And I’ve kind of broken this thing down into seven parts so you have to have a mind set for growth. Number one – you’ve got to be able to push boundaries and you’ve got to dream larger than large and you’ve got to have a vision. Again you’ve got to see this thing. You have to know deep down in your soul beyond that deeper than that, that this thing that you want to create will work. And for those of you who are listening right now to what I just said deep down if it’s going to work or not because some people they want it and they want it badly. I’ve talked to a lot of people and they want this thing they can taste it. They want this Private Practice but they’re not ready for. They’ve got tons of debt tons of debt. Because when I speak to people when people reach out to me on the Contact page privateslp.com/contact people e-mail me all the time and I surprise people because I pick up the phone and call them and ask them these questions, what kind of debt do you have? And some people say, “I’ve got ten fifteen-twenty thousand dollars.” and they’re not ready yet because what happens if they get a bump in the road and they need more money. And people say my credit lines maxed out. I always say to someone if they’re high in debt, “Get out of debt first” because again Private practice, you want to work for yourself. You don’t want to work for the bank. So that’s something you’ve got to be able to do. You’ve got to push boundaries. Dream larger than large and have that vision but you can’t be in debt. Another thing I’ve talked to people who have substance abuse problems. Those things will stop you dead in your tracks debt substance abuse people. It’s just very real. Some people won’t say it but I’m going to say it it’s very real. And you have to take care of that before you start out. So you got to get your own house in order if you know what I mean. Number two Risk versus Benefit. I mean you’ve got to take healthy risks. You’ve gotta push the envelope you’ve gotta make things happen. But just like I said for number one you don’t want to borrow a ton of money because then you’re working for the bank. But let me say this there’s nothing wrong with borrowing a little money. I had a 10,000 dollar line of credit that I used to jack up and then pay it off and jack it up and pay it off but never went over that ten grand threshold because when I started out with my own Speech Therapy Private Practice I had some money saved up it wasn’t a ton of money but it wasn’t cheap to start out. I mean I’ve seen people say you can do it for this amount and that amount. I think there’s any set way to start that Private Practice. I don’t think there’s a dollar sign out there but for me I know that I just didn’t want to assume a bunch of rent. I recently spoke to a private practice owner who had to shut their doors because they had high dollar rent and they had some patients but little to no reimbursement. And a big staff of people this is going quickly belly up floating to the top. And now the person is in serious debt, repeat to step number one is what we’re just saying again, you’ve got to be prepared and have funds for a rainy day so to speak. So again taking healthy risks, pushing the envelope and making things happen. Number three – Learning from your mistakes. Well we’ve all heard that right but also learning from things that work successfully. As a private practice owner, I can only push so much. I can only make things happen so quickly. So when things work well I want to do that over and over and over rinse and repeat. But when things don’t work I don’t want to do that ever again. I’ve had many conversations with Esther, she’s our office manager and for those of you in the All Access Community you’ve probably heard Esther’s voice on the videos. Because we do a lot of the webinars together because they have to do with billing and collection and credentialing. And you’ll hear Esther and I talk about we don’t want to do this ever again. We tried this once and it didn’t work. So again you have to learn from your mistakes and also learn from your successful parts of your private practice too. Number four – Curiosity and a hunger for more. That’s a big quality and that’s a big mind set that you just have to have. You want to stay curious and you want to stay hungry for more. For example, if you’re curious about more Speech therapy patients, what about maybe adding another discipline like Occupational therapy. Did you know a certain percentage of Occupational therapy patients need Speech therapy as well or what about moving into a whole different branch of services that help your patients. So again this doesn’t have to be disciplined specific. It just doesn’t have to be Speech therapy over time. As you grow and as you save your revenue you can move into other disciplines and help more people. So that’s a mindset that you definitely have to have. Being curious and hunger for more. Also number five – Recognizing others and helping others. This is a really big part of this I really believe deep down that when I recognize other people and the more people that I help the better off the business will be. It’s kind of throwing things out there to the universe. Some people call it Karma. I’m not getting all hippie but it’s a big part of it, it’s called energy and it moves. It’s

It may seem counter intuitive, but I believe that some people may be more afraid of being successful than failing. When you look the flow charts of failure and success, failure is easy. A successful flow chart is more complex, however. In this episode, I address common fears of success and provide some action steps and tips to overcome the fear of success and self sabotage.   In this episode: 01:32 – 31,182 listeners to show 03:21 – Fear of Succeeding 03:55 – Flowchart for success 07:18 – Grow your reputation in the community 07:38 – Improve your savings account 08:18 – Increase your Patient flow 08:38 – Take care of yourself, physically or mentally and emotionally 10:45 – How to deal with negative feedback 12:29 – Fear of becoming Business Owner DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION I always wanted to start my own Speech Therapy Private Practice and it took Hurricane Katrina to throw me out of my comfort zone to push me into this realm of starting and growing and scaling a Private Practice, so again it’s for a specific type of person. And I’ve also talked to people who say you, I want to do this, I want to open my own Speech Therapy Private Practice and then they join the community or they start getting coaching and then after a couple of months they get a little complacent. They don’t interact with the group. They start doing other things or not being as accountable to their own actions. They’re not being honest with themselves and they kind of just fizzle out and it’s just the same idea over and over. [Commercial] Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 37. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails, questions and all the feedback. And as of today, today is Sunday April 8th 2018. We have well over 31,182 listeners to the show and I’m super happy you guys are out there getting good valuable free information and I say it every single episode, “Value is what you get in the absence of money”. These podcasts are absolutely free for you so if you wouldn’t mind please go to your Android platform or your iOS platform of choice and leave some good 5 Star feedback that way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you’re receiving. And I would really appreciate that that way other people can get the same help and assistance that you’re getting off of these podcasts. Again when I first started out I just didn’t see or hear or find anything on the web except for some PDF and things like that, so I wanted to change that. And as I slowly grew and improve my own business I wanted to just go ahead and share that information. So that’s what I’m doing on these podcasts. And we have listeners now from all over the world. It’s really cool to see who’s out there. United States is topping the charts, but lately the Japanese are coming up there and we’ve got Australia on the top the list. We have India, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, South Africa and The Republic of Korea. And when you break it down in the United States from the state standpoint, we’ve got California topping the charts, then Texas, New York, Florida, Arizona, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Georgia. So again I’m happy you guys are out there if you have any questions or if you want to know more about Speech Therapy Private Practice just simply go to privateslp.com/contact. You can reach me there and I’m willing to help you. So I wanted to talk to you today about the ‘Fear of Succeeding’. Now that might sound a little bit counter-intuitive because a lot of people are just scared to fail. But when you start your own Speech Therapy Private Practice or when you’re growing it and scaling it, there’s a lot of fear because when you do something one time you need to do it over and over and over. So the stakes just get higher and higher and higher. And if you look at success, success is actually more complex than failing. The flowchart for failure is simply you try something you fail and you’re done. But the flowchart for success can be really complex. For example, you start your own Private Practice, you see some patients in the home or the home of community setting or your office and then you might lease a space and then you start to make a small profit. You save that money so you can hire other employees and then you hire an employee and then you save more money and you grow it. That’s success, that’s when you just opened yourself to a new set of growth opportunities. And those growth opportunities, for me those things are very scary. They makes a person sort of fearful. You’ve got employees and you’ve got management, you’ve got compliance issues, I speak to a lot of people in the private practice world and they have fear of compliance issues, service delivery, taxes, problems with billing and credentialing, payroll, legal issues and employment issues. And the list goes on and on. But that’s success. That’s what’s going to take me obviously to another level with my own Private Practice. But also it’s going to help me grow and push me into those areas that I really don’t want to be pushed into. And again let me say this being successful and having your own Speech Therapy Private Practice it takes a certain type of person to want to do this. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being an employee working for the same company or multiple companies for multiple years. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s a simple good consistent life where you can go to work for a set amount of days and a set amount of time, you get a paycheck and you get benefits. You get your caseload and you get everything done for your schedule and it’s very convenient. And there’s nothing wrong with it. And I did that for years. But there was finally a piece of the puzzle, I always wanted to start my own Speech Therapy Private Practice and it took Hurricane Katrina to throw me out of my comfort zone to push me into this realm of starting and growing and scaling a Private Practice, so again it’s for a specific type of person. And I’ve also talked to people who say you, I want to do this, I want to open my own Speech Therapy Private Practice and then they join the community or they start getting coaching and then after a couple of months they get a little complacent. They don’t interact with the group. They start doing other things or not being as accountable to their own actions. They’re not being honest with themselves and they kind of just fizzle out and it’s just the same idea over and over. And so that’s something that when you do start your own Private Practice you want to make sure that you get over those humps and that you get over those problems of getting distracted. I’ve mentioned that another podcast going after those bright shiny objects, those BSO’s, spending too much time on Social media, Facebook, Insta, Twitter, YouTube and its just distractions. So here’s some tips on how you can overcome sabotaging yourself when you’re starting or growing your scaling your own private practice. Number one, what you can do is you can really grow your reputation in the community and this takes time. Wherever you’re working, whatever community you’re involved in. You can actually help and change a lot of lives for a lot of people and be of service. So that will help you overcome that sabotaging fear. The second thing is you can improve your savings account your bottom line. There’s no secret the more money you save in the bank the more money you’re going to have to grow your business and that’s directly proportional, you can go out and borrow money but there’s no guarantee that you can pay that loan back. You might be able to service that loan and make those minimal payments but again why would you want to borrow a lot of money when you haven’t tested the waters on a smaller scale. That way when you borrow a lot of money from the banks you’re working for the bank and when you’re borrowing money from yourself you’re in for yourself. So that’s another thing to remember when you want to overcome sabotaging yourself. A third tip to remember you can just increase your Patient flow. I mean over time if you’re doing a good job and providing a good quality service you’re going to get more patients, more doctor referrals. You’re going to see that patient flow increase and improve. Also a fourth thing you can do to overcome fear and self sabotage. I mean you can just take care of yourself, physically or mentally and emotionally. Physically you can hire a personal trainer. You can work out, you can eat well, you can exercise, you can set off time, set aside time during the week to take care of you. I love to go to the gym. I’m not a big weight lifter but I do like to get my cardio on. I like to exercise and rhyme. I love to hit that treadmill, like to steam and I like to sit in a jacuzzi. I like to go to the JCC, it’s here in Tucson. It’s a place I’d like to go work out and I do that on a regular basis. And I do notice when I’m not taking care of myself physically, my mental state I get a little fearful when I get a little worried, I get a bit squirrelly they call it but I gotta get back into my routine. Now mentally and emotionally, you can take care of yourself. You can attend seminars and there’s nothing better than getting on a plane going to a foreign country and working with others and meeting new people and working with other people and getting a new perspective on different ways to run and scale and grow a business. You can also meet other professionals through close communities like privateslp.com/membership there. You can get one on one coaching with me and also meet other professionals and receive feedback from others too. So also besides getting coaching or attending seminars you can block out time in your week a

Big moves in your therapy practice come in many shapes and sizes: New hires, a new lease, expanding additional clinics, paying taxes, the list goes on and on. In this episode, I discuss some things to consider before making these big moves.     DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION In this episode: 00:38 – Cash Flow – The Heartbeat of Your Clinic 01:58 – Health Insurance Deductibles 03:01 – Healthcare Landscape in 2018 03:15 – Increased Co Pays and Planning Hey this is Kyle with PrivateSLP.com. I wanted to give you some information today that you probably won’t read in any book or find online or find on a PDF somewhere or you probably won’t hear this from many gurus or on a podcast. But I wanted to give this information to you when you are dealing with Insurances and you’re dealing with third party payers like Blue Cross Blue Shield, Tri Care, Humana, Aetna all those big insurance payers. Now it’s important to remember the cash flow of a clinic. In one of our private SFP All Access Community trainings recently I was talking about K.P.Is or Key Performance Indicators. And I was mentioning this exact thing on that training so I’m going to share that with you today in the listening community there on the Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup Podcast. So don’t forget when you’re dealing with insurances and you’re dealing with a big move in your clinic, for example, you’re opening up a second location or you’re just starting to lease a new location or you’re adding one or two more employees. Those are big jumps those are big leaps. That’s going to cost you money. So when you are doing something like that of course you’re going to need as much cash flow in savings as humanly possible. So what you want to do is make sure that you take that leap maybe wait until May or June or July sometime after April. Why is that so? Because let’s think about this, most insurance plans have some sort of deductible. Now a deductible can be a calendar year or it can be a benefit year. Now a calendar year is simply January through December of that given year. Now a deductible year would be maybe from June 2018 through May, 2019. So that’s the deductible year that the Insurance company is going to make up. But for this discussion most of the deductibles that we see in our clinic and probably you as well in your clinic, you’re probably dealing with a calendar year deductible January through December. Now most patients don’t meet their deductible until May late April or May of any calendar year. So let’s think about that when it comes to cash flow in your Speech Therapy Private Practice. You want to be mindful of that. You want to make sure that you have cash flow when you make your move. Also too don’t forget in the healthcare landscape in 2018, if you’re watching this in 2018 in 2019 you know what I’m talking about, the healthcare landscape is very crazy right now. So we’re finding in our business that Patient copays are going up from 13 dollars for some payers all the way up to 30 dollars. Now if if some of those families have one-two-three kids or loved ones in therapy you know that for three children that can be 150 a week for therapy services. So you may find some of these patients may drop off of your schedule in January, February and March until they meet their deductible. So again think about this when you’re making big moves hiring employees or signing a new lease. And when you take insurance plans as forms of payment for your Speech Therapy Services. Keep this in mind and I hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions reach out to me and thank you for listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice Startup Podcast. The post 36. Do This FIRST Before Making a Big Move appeared first on PrivateSLP.

Recently, a listener named Darlene emailed me about starting her own speech therapy private practice. The more I read, the more I could see that she was unsure and scared about the process of getting started. She wanted to know the most common mistakes that people make when starting their own therapy practice. Back in August 2017, I made a video post about the most common mistakes that people were making at that time.  Whenever I have monthly coaching and strategy calls with other business owners,  I always take notes.  So in this post, I go through all of my notes and update my listeners on additional mistakes that you should avoid when starting your own speech therapy private practice. In this episode: 01:20 – + 29,930 listeners to the show 02:10 – Answering listener question 02:55 – Too much, too fast 06:11 – Relying on others 07:23 – Obtaining good advice 08:21 – Investing in yourself/knowledge 09:03 – Don’t Waste Your Time with insurance contracts, credentialing and billing – Let us Help You! DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPTION We’ve all seen those YouTube videos with cats and dogs who jump on a fast moving treadmill or those joggers when they jump on a treadmill. It’s going way too fast and they fall flat on their face and they get kicked off the treadmill. Now think about Private practice being that treadmill and if you jump on to a fast moving treadmill you’re going to fall flat on your face and not only that you’re going to get kicked out of the treadmill space. [Commercial] Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 35. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time. Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions and as of today, today is March the 10th 2018. It’s a Saturday and as of today we have well over 29,930 listeners to the show. And I’m glad that each and everyone of you guys are out there and if this is your first podcast welcome to the show. I hope that you will find everything that you’re looking for when you start your own Speech Therapy Private Practice. And don’t forget the reason that I did this was because when I first started out there wasn’t anything out there like this so this is a way for me to give back and I hope you guys get the same valuable information that others do and for other people to find the podcast easily. If you wouldn’t mind just please go to the iTunes or Android platform of your choice and just leave some 5 star feedback. That way other people can find the podcast easily. Now I wanted to go ahead and jump into today’s topic and it is from a listener. Her name is Darlene. She is from Pennsylvania and she emailed me a question recently and she says, “Hi Kyle, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see when dealing with new therapy business startups?” Now I take notes when I speak to other private practice owners on the phone. And I do speak to private practice owners a lot and I take notes on every single phone call and I put it on my life sheet and that’s an Excel spreadsheet that I keep in my google drive and so I went back through that google drive and I searched my drive and I found these important points and I wanted to share that with you guys today. Now one of the biggest mistakes with new Speech therapy business owners is starting out way too fast and just taking too large of a first step. Now let me give you an example. I spoke to someone recently who was just head over heels ready to get going. And I had to remind that person I said you want to take small steps and here’s the example think of a treadmill. We’ve all seen those YouTube videos with cats and dogs who jump on a fast moving treadmill or those joggers when they jump on a treadmill. It’s going way too fast and they fall flat on their face and they get kicked off the treadmill. Now think about Private practice being that treadmill and if you jump onto a fast moving treadmill you’re going to fall flat on your face and not only that you’re going to get kicked out of the treadmill space. So you have to be very careful because we’re all human we all see other people who are successful who have their practices, who are making it and making a good living and having a great life. And of course we want that too. I mean I saw that, that was one of the things that made me want to do that first step and start my own Speech therapy private practice. I remember after Hurricane Katrina I was out of work for a long period of time and I had a lot of time to sit and reflect and I just remember thinking about some of those private practice owners in New Orleans and seeing those lifestyles that people were living and I wanted that too. And so I got on the internet and I searched and searched and found a couple of PDFs and things like that. It just wasn’t a lot of information. So that’s one of the reasons I’m giving this back to you guys but don’t forget we see other people making it and we want that too. A lot of us still subscribed to that old thinking that old cliche. Build it and they will come. I think that’s dead now because there’s so much competition out there with the Internet and social media. You can’t just throw up a clinic and put some chairs out there and buy a bunch of fancy equipment and hire a bunch of employees and borrow a bunch of money from the bank. Because if you do that too quickly without any patience you’re going to fail and you’re going to go belly up and you’re going to sink just like a ship with a hole in the bottom of it. So we have to take small steps. You don’t want to be on the hook for a lot of money because I’ve said it in those first three podcasts you’re going to be working for the bank and that is just no fun. If you really stop and think about it to get what you want, it’s going to take about three to five years and once you have that in your brain add another year to it because this takes a long time to get established. Because you have to work out your referral base, you have to work out your payer sources or your contracts and your credentialing. And you have to save up money at the same time that you may have to borrow a little bit of money from the bank. But you want to do that slowly and gradually. It’s a long game and if you listen again to episode number 12 you’ll realize that Speech therapy private practice and in the startup process it’s a long game so you want to be in this for the long haul and it takes a certain personality and someone who is very driven and very motivated. Now one of the second biggest mistakes that I see is relying on others too much. As humans we’re all fearful and we get nervous, we get scared, we get anxious and sometimes we want to cling on to somebody else but because of fear some people just think they need a business partner. Now I’m not saying that people shouldn’t or should have a business partner. That’s not my decision. I personally didn’t want any advice from other people. So I started my Speech therapy private practice by myself. I didn’t want any partners so I just chose not to do that. And if you do want to have a partner or multiple partners you want to make sure that the personalities fit the clinic and the partnership you want to make sure that everyone gets along. There’s nothing worse than having friends and I’ve seen this and this is why I wanted to put this out there. I have seen and spoke to people who went into business with others who they loved and respected. And it tore their friendship, it tore everything up. So at the end of the day make sure you get this part right if you’re going to have partners. Also too you want to make sure that you seek the advice of an attorney because if you do have a partner in your business you want to make sure everything is legal and legitimate. So that’s what I wanted to say about that. Also again I chose to go into Speech therapy private practice by myself but it wasn’t until I hired a team. That’s when I started seeing the growth. Now again a lot of people think that if you have a lot of employees you’re just making a ton of money, right? Wrong. Don’t forget with employees you have a lot of expenses, payroll taxes and things like that. So again a sole provider a one person show can do well in Speech therapy private practice but you have to remember it takes a team to really grow it to the next level take it to the next level and scale it. So don’t forget about that. Now the third biggest mistake that I see new Speech therapy private practice owners make is they forget to invest in knowledge for themselves. Now don’t reinvent the wheel. I’ve seen so many people out there and spoken with so many people out there who are isolated and who just don’t take the time to invest in themselves and to network and get help. That’s one of the big reasons I started this Speech therapy private practice All Access Community forum. So people just like you can connect with people others who are just like you in the community. So you can find that at privateslp.com/coaching. Another problem that I see people were just wasting too much time with insurance contracts and credentialing and billing. Again if you are a one person show and you are seeing every single person, you’re doing this scheduling, you’re doing the referrals, you’re doing the follow up phone calls, you’re doing the billing, credentialing and contracting. Don’t forget in order to get paid so you can be sustainable you’ve got to do your billing at the end of the day and that takes time. So if you’re seeing a full caseload 8-9-10-11-12 hours I mean that’s what it takes to be a private practice owner sometimes right. We have to work more than others so we can be successful. You have to have help. And when you start getting some payments you want to save those payments so you can pay your team to help you bill and col