Takeaways:
- The hybrid private practice model allows service providers to combine traditional private practice with school contracts, enhancing revenue opportunities.
- Establishing school contracts can serve as a quick revenue builder, potentially generating significant income while building a private practice caseload.
- School contracts can supplement a growing caseload, providing income stability without requiring full-time commitment from the provider.
- The dual revenue streams from private practice and school contracts can offset seasonal fluctuations in income, ensuring consistent earnings throughout the year.
- For niche providers, school contracts can offer opportunities to specialize and monetize their expertise in specific areas, like AAC or bilingual services.
- Exploring various types of school contracts, such as virtual or FMLA coverage, can diversify revenue streams and adapt to individual business needs.
Links referenced in this episode:
- www.thetherapistsupportnetwork.com
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Therapist Support Network
Transcript:
00:00:02.320 - 00:19:05.410
Welcome to beyond the Big Agencies, the podcast for SLPs, OTs, PTs and related service providers who want to work with schools, but not for them.
I'm Elise Mitchell, an slp, a school contracting coach, and the owner of the Therapist Support Network, here to help you take control of your career, do what you love and build a sustainable practice on your terms. Because school staffing should be left to the professionals. Let's dig in.
Foreign hi guys, it is Elise and thank you so much for joining me today for another episode of beyond the Big Agencies.
I am really excited for this topic and this topic is inspired by an increase in questions that I'm getting, which is what is the hybrid private practice? How is the hybrid private practice beneficial and is this a direction that I should take my business?
So we're going to dive into the pros and the perks of combining your more traditional private practice model with school contracts and having multiple revenue streams. All right, so let's go ahead and first define what do I mean by the hybrid private practice when I use this expression?
I mean you have a standard private practice. You can either accept insurance or not. That's not my area of strength. So that's all I'm going to say about that.
I am exclusive to school contracting, so where my expertise will support on this topic is discussing how school contracts can really wiggle into your private practice, if you will, and support your private practice goals and your growth. And I'm going to discuss the perks of having this second revenue stream, what that could do for your business.
Let's go ahead and just get right into it.
So, so the perks of adding on school contracts to your private practice, why this is a topic that people are talking about and how this can support your business growth. So number one, the reason why I love adding on school contracts to your offerings is a quick revenue builder.
This is really for those of you who want to start a private practice and as you know, it just takes a bit to build your caseload.
However, with school contracts you can get one contract and have enough for a full time income, depending on your goals, depending on how large that contract is, etc. So establishing a school contract can be a significant boost to your income while you build up that private practice caseload.
So let's say a full time school contract has the potential to gross. I mean most of them gross over a hundred thousand.
Depending on the territories you're in, it can gross 120, 150, whatever, and that will go towards your business revenue. So even if you choose to staff it out. Right? You're listening to this and you're like, well, no, my private practice is already at full time capacity.
I can't take on a school contract too.
If you decide to staff this out, if you take away your provider's cost and taxes, et cetera, you could still get 20 to $30,000 of revenue added to your pocket from the school contract, even though you're not serving it yourself. So school contracts tend to build revenue quicker than private practice because it's, it's not exactly a B2B. Okay, so quick pause in the discussion.
I'm going to touch on some sales terms. So B2C sales are business to consumer and that's what you typically have in private practice, right?
You are a provider that is selling your services to, to either a caregiver for the loved one or an adult that wants a certain type of therapy. So that's B2C sales and that's beautiful and that's fun, but it is slower, right?
And schools, technically it's a, it's a little weird to word them this way, but technically schools are a B2B sales, meaning you are a business selling your service to another business, even though schools aren't businesses. Just roll with me here so you don't have to go and find the caregivers of all those students on the case list.
You, you essentially sell yourself to a school and they assign 40 students to you.
So because of that, the revenue tends to come quicker and you can go quote unquote, full time in your business sooner if you add on school contracts, if that's a goal, or if you're someone that just wants to get your business revenue to a certain point, like 500,000 or a million, adding on school contracts will typically get you there quicker than those sort of B2C sales. So pro number one is it's a quicker revenue builder than your standard private practice model.
Which brings me to point two, and I touched on that already, is school contracting can help supplement a building a building caseload.
So if you are someone that is still building your private practice, it can be exhausting to be building your private practice plus working the job you need for your income. Right? Especially when, and I remember this, I was a business owner and I was working for someone else.
I just didn't have the same passion for working for someone else anymore.
And so it can be really hard to have your business, your baby that you're building out and you're spending your time there and then you're also working A full time job for someone else or even a part time job for someone else.
If you do have that caseload that you are building up, and maybe you're a niche provider or whatever and it's just taking time or you're waiting to get credentialed with insurance, you can grab a school contract for that other part. And these don't have to be full time commitments.
There are many school contracts out there that are caseload overflow or just the students on service plans or for whatever reason. You know, it's a small school district, you can have, you know, two days a week with a local charter school while you build your caseload.
And many school contracts are annual. There are some that are three year. They're becoming more common, particularly in our northern states. But many school contracts are annual.
And so if you're like, ah, Elise, I really don't want to see students though. I want this beautiful AAC exclusive private practice. I love that for you, this doesn't have to be a commitment.
And maybe next year your private practice will have enough of a wait list or enough of a caseload that you could stop that school contract and you can make the choice choice to hire another provider for that school contract. So you keep revenue coming from that without spending your time doing something that you don't genuinely love.
So perk two with a hybrid model is that you can supplement a building caseload while your business grows. All right, perk three, and I love this about the hybrid model is the two.
So this is more for a pediatric private practice, but the two tend to offset each other with slow times. So with most of our school contracts, unless you have an annual school, when is the slow time when you don't get money? The summer and breaks.
Private practice, on the other hand, particularly pediatric private practices, when is there slow time when school starts back up. So seasonal fluctuations can be challenging for both. I personally take my summers off as a contractor, but that isn't something that everyone wants.
Not everyone wants to go those months with no pay. So those seasonal fluctuations can be challenging. However, they complement each other.
So when private practice referrals really peak in the summer, school services typically pause every now and then. You have esy, but that's usually not a full amount.
And then conversely, if you dip, if you experience a dip in private clients during the fall, they go back to school. School, school contracts can really fill that gap. So these two models can help provide revenue throughout the year, which I just think is wonderful.
Right? You can have that consistent revenue coming in, which is a challenge for any business owner.
And so I like how these two really play to each other in regards to scheduling. Okay, the next perk that I'm going to talk about is for niche providers. And it's funny, I say niche. Some people say niche. Does anyone say niche?
I feel like I've heard someone say niche. I don't know if I'm saying this word correctly.
And there's no better time to, you know, question if I'm saying it correctly than in the middle of a podcast. But whatever we're doing this, I'm going to keep pronouncing it that way. Send me a message on the therapist support network if I'm saying that wrong.
I'm very curious. I'm going to Google it after this, and then I'm going to challenge myself to not redo the entire episode if I'm saying it wrong.
All right, guys, so leaning into your niche, right? So this is another cool thing about hybrid. I will go ahead and say I am not a niche provider. I am very much a generalist provider.
You know, I don't have something that I've always wanted to specialize in or anything like that, but I have customers who do, and I just think it's so beautiful watching them.
So with this, if your passion lies in a specific service is beautiful, and you really set yourself apart as being kind of this expert in this specific area. However, you are limiting your growth in both the private practice side and the school side because there's only so many people that need that niche.
Right?
So let's say if your passion lies in bilingual services or AAC or executive functioning, you can pursue, like, that's your marketing within your business, but you can pursue school contracts specifically for that niche. So an area that I see that is aac, I see bilingual services where you say, you know what? And I've done this.
If you've followed me or you've done a coaching call with me, you've probably heard me talk about this. I don't take on AAC specific contracts. That is not my strength outside of what I got in grad school. That's the extent of my knowledge.
And there are providers in this area that contract that have that knowledge.
And so if I get that sort of student my way, I will encourage my schools to utilize this separate company for the AAC portions of it because they can do a significantly better service than I can. And so I love.
And there's so many providers that can relate to that that can say, I don't know What I would do if I got a feeding case that, I mean I would like binge on continuing ed, but if, you know there's a provider that offers this, not only this, but could provide teacher pd, that's so cool. And it's such again, another way to add a revenue stream involving what you love and to ensure that you have enough revenue coming in from that.
So if you are someone that has that specialty that you love and that's all you want to do, look and see. Do schools need that? Is that something in the schools? There are many areas where they do.
And so that's a really cool way to add on another revenue stream without changing your business model. You know, keep you doing what you love doing, keep bringing you passion.
And then number five, and this is actually kind of the opposite of what I just said, this gives you a chance to add variety to your practice. So this is for those of you, this is kind of a flip side.
If you are just not someone that loves minutia, you are not someone that loves the same routine daily that gives you burnout and you think variety is the spice of life, this is for you. So many providers out there enjoy diversifying their professional routine, right? They don't want to do the same thing every day.
They love the idea of changing their day. They'll do a private school one day in this rural district, two days a week. And the same, same goes for those of you with a hybrid practice.
Either you may want a variety in your day, you may want to do home services for two days a week and then the other two days a week you are in a school, or you may want providers that can take on a few of your private kids, but you don't have enough. And you can give them a few days a week in a school and there's so many providers out there that prefer that.
And then again in the summer, you can either take those days off that you had slotted for your school or you can add on summer camps. I mean, you could do all kinds of things with it. You just get to add variety to the services that you're offering.
I wanted to discuss exploring the different types of contracts, right. Because in some of these things I mentioned very specific things.
So beyond, and it really, to have this conversation, you have to kind of take your mind beyond the full time contract, which 100% exists, and you could take that on as a business and expand your business revenue significantly, you would have to hire for that. If it is a full time school contract and you want to have A private practice as well.
Or I guess they can be different hours, but that's a lot of work on you. So you can absolutely do full time contracts and you can sell that for your business and you can take your business that direction.
But with some of these, it's a matter of adding on small contracts.
Like if you don't want to hire and you want to have two days a week in your clinic and two days a week at a school, really finding these specific contracts.
So marketing yourself as someone that can cover caseload overflow, marketing yourself as someone with specialized skills, you know, these can be on demand, this can be consistent.
Marketing yourself as someone that does FMLA coverage, that's another one that if your school in your area has a provider who's out, you can come in and cover for them and then you exit scene when the provider comes back. It's a six week commitment, eight week commitment, et cetera, 12 week commitment, whatever. But it gives you that revenue boost.
Virtual school contracts. So maybe you're in the clinic but your mornings are really low. Finding a virtual contract and you know, supervision contracts, another one.
So you really can look for very specific type of contracts. Now if that's it, if you're like, I just want to do compensatory time contracts. Some of our states, this is a bigger topic than others.
And so if you are in a state, that compensatory type is a huge topic. And providers don't, the full time providers on site don't have capacity to add in comp time. This can be something that you offer.
I just recommend when you reach out to schools, if you're going to do something unique that combines with your private practice, if you're going to do something like AAC or you know, literacy specific services, make that very clear when you call schools. And so on our episode, when we talk about selling to schools, I talk about defining your offerings first. I believe that's episode too.
But I talk about defining your offering first because what we don't want you to do is we don't want you to spend time.
And all these schools think you're gonna solve their full time therapy needs and you don't want to hire, so you know you're gonna waste both of your time that way.
So I strongly recommend if you are thinking about a hybrid private practice, if you are thinking two days a week or you know, for a few weeks during low times of the year, you do comp time for a school or FMLA coverage for a school, whatever that is, define it in Your sales pitch. My name is Elise. I'm the owner of the Therapist Support Network.
I support school districts with ensuring that therapy services are met during times where their provider is out on fmla, I heard this is it. So then you go with it and say, is this something that you're interested in? So include that.
It's like I tell individuals that are looking for a virtual role. I tell them include virtual in your pitch because you don't want to waste time.
So when you're thinking on that, when you're thinking on, how do I add this to my business? First, decide if you want to hire. If you do, then you can absolutely just pitch therapy services. And two, decide do you want a few days a week?
That's something to sit down and define and then you start the sales process. Just like those of us who are wanting to be exclusive to school contracting. You reach out to school and you pitch whatever services you are offering.
I did want to give a tip for those of you who have established, you have an established private practice in your community and you want to serve your community school, lean into that. There's something beautiful about that grassroots, locally owned and operated business that everyone knows and loves.
So really lean into that local movement. If you are someone that already has an established private practice and you are wanting to add this on as a revenue stream.
All right, so let's talk about resources to get started. If you are a private practice owner and you want to get started with contracting. Absolutely.
Check out my website, my contracting packet and training has everything needed to get started with reaching out to school districts and defining your offering and all of that. And let me know, you can message me on Instagram. I love hearing from people.
Let me know what you're thinking on the hybrid private practice that you want to build.
Whether it's school contracts become an additional revenue stream or this is the other revenue stream as you build your caseload or you're going to specialize, I would love to hear what you do with this. That's a wrap on this episode of beyond the Big Agencies. Remember, success isn't just met for the big staffing...
