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

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?

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 h