PrivateSLP

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.

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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 hit me up 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 set of rules. So when that patient comes to you, is it going to be cash? Is it going to be check? or is it going to be Credit card? But you need to make sure you get paid before the time of service. If you do take insurances, you want to make sure you accept that copay before you perform that service. I have spoken to many clinic owners who have just waited on insurance companies. That’s the wrong way to do business. You don’t sit there and wait for insurance companies to pay you because you might wait a long time. You have to make sure that you collect copays or coinsurance before the time of service.

So back to the basics on Onboarding a patient. You want to get that primary insurance information if you take insurances. That’s the Insurance Carrier’s name, address, city, state, policy number, all that’s the primary insurance information. Then secondary insurance information, you have to get that information as well. Some people may have a form of Medicaid or form of Medicare, they may have other insurances like private insurance for e.g. BlueCross, BlueShield or Tricare. So you want to make sure you get primary and secondary insurance information and then once you get that demographic information and insurance information you want to move on to your policies. Those are your personal clinical policies that might be late policy or cancellation policy or a copay policy or what about if somebody no shows, what if that parent leaves the premise while you’re doing therapy and they just leave their child they don’t come back. I mean you have to think about these things. What if someone has a financial hardship or what about insurance billing a payment? Who’s going to do those things for you? All those should be very clearly set out so you can have a important and successful relationship with your patients and your families.

And then moving on after you do that you want to make sure you get a good case history for that child or that adult that you’re about to treat. The identifying information like the child or the adult patient’s name, address, date of birth, how to get in touch with them and who referred that patient to you. What’s their present communication status and what’s the educational history of this person? And what’s the family history in pregnancy, birth, medical information and developmental history? All those things will give you the clinician a good way to actively help and treat this patient. And then you want to have them maybe fill out some more information about ideological history, speech and language history. Has that patient been in other clinics around your town and received other evaluations? Let’s say this is their first visit, did they have another evaluation that’s an appropriate amount of time or you can treat that patient. Then we don’t have to do another Eval charge. I mean those are the same things that you want to look at.

Then once you do those things you want to move in to what they called Privacy policies. And that’s where you disclose how you treat their health care information how you perform your treatments and payments and how we disclose your health information to public health authorities for the purposes like preventing or controlling diseases, injury, disabilities, reporting child abuse from neglect. I mean that really happens. So law enforcement, I mean attorneys and when you get summons to turn over medical records all that must be in your Notice of Privacy policies. These things really happen. When you have your own Private practice. You’re going to figure out really fast that when you get a summons in the mail that says you need to produce these records. You gotta do it. And patients have information rights to. All those need to be in your policy.

And then there’s something what’s called a Consent release and assignment. That way, do you have permission to use that patient in Social Media? What about if the payment goes directly to the patient and not to your office? How are you going to get that? That needs to be in this consent release and assignment as well. That’s a lot of information. But the good news is if you’re a member of the PrivateSLP All Access Community, all this is right here for you. This is what’s tested tried and true works for us here and it’s something that can work for you too. All these forms have been reviewed by our legal team and so I know they work. And that’s immediately available for you for download if you need that. But if you don’t have access to the All Access Community that’s okay too because you can take this information. There’s a transcription button there at the end of this podcast you can download this and we’ll all be there for you in a nice neat format so you can just have that and use that in your own private practice.

So I hope this has been helpful for you. If you have any questions about your own Speech Therapy Private Practice growing starting out scaling. All you gotta do is reach out to me and as always thank you for listening.

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:

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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 easier.

The other day on Amazon I had an order for ten thousand dollars and I was talking to Stephanie I said check this out. I said, “I’ve never ever order 10,000 dollars of stuff on Amazon Prime”. We have the business Prime account and it’s linked up to our American Express platinum card. So, I like those points. Yeah, but the point is I never thought I’d get to the point where you order 10,000 dollars’ worth of laptops. 25 of them which is a great price. You guys who know me I got a killer deal on these laptops by the way. But my point is this we have infrastructure we’ve invested in the clinic, we’ve invested in the process, so it will make our job easier even on the billing, credentialing and the accounts receivable side it’s going to make everything easier for the whole system.

So that’s where we are right now we’ve got our space available. We’ve got the infrastructure set. We’re getting reimbursed. We’ve got the team, it was time to scale because we’re scaling again and so again I wanted to share this with you guys because the offer that converts get paid. Write down your S.O.Ps, save your profits in order to duplicate. It’s really that simple. You’ve gotta take this step by step and don’t get too emotional and don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely, tired so they say don’t get into fear. Take your time sleep on things for 24 hours. Make sure you’re moving the right checker pieces around the board at the right time. Timing is everything. But if you have any questions about Speech Therapy Private Practice growing it, scaling it, anything at all you can reach out to me, You’ll find more information about our All access community or the Perfect student or our billing services there on the Web site. But as always thank you for listening.

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.

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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 her how to get credentialed and bill insurance companies.

So, I think the main thing is just to start in like you said if you want to get a website. There’re tons of places you can get a website these days for cheap. Even a lot of your registered names you can throw up websites in a matter of 30 minutes. But I think the main thing is to create relationships with those physicians’, pediatricians, all those doctors’, professionals in a community, be nice friendly respectful and tell them who you are and don’t be afraid to say, “Hey, we’re accepting new patients.” Get some business cards made.

Roy: What would you recommend as far as that other do you go to networking events or do you just kind of go to the doctor’s office and introduce yourself? What’s the best way to go about starting to build those relationships?

Kyle: Yeah, that’s a very good question and I think going back to the example with the lady who wanted that doctor to sign off on the report so she can get paid. This day and age where the reimbursement rates are just shrinking and everybody’s just so busy, productivity has doubled and everybody’s just go. I think the best person to introduce myself to any doctor’s office or physician’s office is the Referrals Clerk. That person is the one responsible for sending those patients out to referral sources. So, for instance if you’ve got a Pediatrician down the street and they’re going to send somebody to your office, it’s going to go through that Referral Clerk. The physician really doesn’t have the time to stop treating patients and pick up the phone and call you. That’s like my son says he’s 12, he says Dad that’s so 80s. It’s funny because the physician’s is not going to pick up the phone and go, “Hey Kyle, we’ve got a 4.2-year-old male with a speech delay you think you could.” I mean people still call, Yeah, but they’re going to send that to that referral person in their office and send in on out. And then you’re going to get it on your fax and then you’re going to start that referral process.

But I think just going out and meeting those referral clerks. But again, I don’t know about you guys but I know when people come to my office I can spot a salesman. I mean a mile away they come in and they got their law suit and tie on. I know they’re going to try to sell me something and I’m a real hard sell. But I like the people who don’t try to sell you stuff. I like the people who come in and introduce themselves and kind of talk about, “Hey, it’s a nice office.” Kind of fluff it up a little bit. That’s what I think is important. When you meet people don’t try to sell it. Be yourself, be authentic and tell them what you’ve got to offer. Say we help kids in by the way we just happened to accept all these insurance plans and Medicaid plans. And I see that you guys accept these Medicaid plans too. I know there’s a waiting list across the street for six months. What incentive does we’re ready to go. And then you’re talking solution, because at the end of the day that doctor, that pediatrician, those professionals they want one thing for their patients and that’s help and that solution. And if you can offer that solution you’re in business.

Roy: Is the referral Clerk going to be right down upfront or you think that they usually hide them somewhere in the back?

Kyle: Yeah, they hide them. Yeah, they’re busy they’re wheeling and dealing all day getting prior authorizations and check in benefits. You’ll see a lot of times that referral clerks. They’ve got multiple hats that they wear in an office. They’ll do have referrals and maybe have prior authorizations for the office they worked for or they might be doing answering phones or shuffling papers but they wear multiple hats in that clinic and they keep them in the back. But what you could do is, I mean you’re a father if you were starting your own practice when you take your child to the pediatrician you just say, “Hey, by the way this is what I do and who is your referral Clerk?” Start with your own doctor’s office or somebody that you know. That’s the best way to do it.

And then when you go to the dentist tell the dentist too because they have networks in their dental community for Speech therapy. My son’s getting braces. I talk to the orthodontist. I mean they’re right there might as well take that opportunity, right?

Roy: Right. And also, to kind of go back a little bit. You were talking about how maybe you don’t really need all the things that you think you need just to get started. Of course, optimally you can have a website you can form an LLC if that’s something that you feel that you need to protect yourself. What would you say is the absolute minimum that you need just to jump in and to get started and to say that you’ve taken the first step?

Kyle: I think you need that desire to start. I mean it’s really that simple you need a license from the state that you’re practicing and that’s it.

Roy: And a patient?

Kyle: And a patient. Yeah. Because if you want to see somebody and you’re not credentialed with Medicare, if you’re next door neighbor says, “Hey, your sinter cutting the grass. I mean you guys are cutting the grass on the East Coast. We don’t have any grass to cut here in Tucson Arizona.” Man it’s 111 degrees yesterday. I used to cut 10 acres of grass in Louisiana. So, the lady next door you cutting the grass and she says, “My husband just had a stroke and you just got to the hospital and he’s got Dysarthria and he’s got a speech problem. You think you could see him?” And you look around your shoulder and you look through the window and through the window you see your Speech therapy license. “Yeah, I’ll see him. Give me 60 bucks.” And she says, “OK. Your 60 bucks. We’ll go see the man. Go ahead.” That’s all you need. You just have to do it and nobody’s going to audit you because you’re not billing out insurance companies. Nobody’s going to come knock on your door. The Speech therapy police are not going to come bust your door down and say, “You saw Mr. Jones, your next-door neighbor.” That’s not how it works. If you want to see that patient, see him if you have an agreement. And that’s a minimum. You want some paperwork. You want a release of information you want a case history form that’s really important. And you can Google this stuff.

I’ve got a forum, I’ve got a private community that I work with Speech therapists like this all the time and if you go to a privateSLP.com/coaching, we have an all access community and all these forms are right there. And it’s really affordable. You can just download everything, change the name to your name or business. For example, demographic sheets where the patient puts their name and address. They’ve got a case history sheet where they actually fill out what the problem is or what they think they need to be working on. If there is insurance, if you’re going to even take insurance, you can fill that section out there and then maybe like HIPPA privacy section there where this is how we handle your information, something just to kind of cover yourself. If you’re going to charge cash or fees just a little agreement we agree that for every hour that we spend together I’m going to charge you 60 bucks and I’m going to take cash, credit card or check. It’s really that simple. And just keep some notes. Give him a manila folder, go to Costco and get your pack and manila folders and off you go. I used to buy those packs and manila folders like you wouldn’t believe and our new business was getting better because I’d get more paper, more ink and toner and I just knew we were growing because I was spending more money in ink and toners the biggest scam in the world. I mean that stuff costs more per ounce than titanium. It’s a toner.

Roy: Yeah. A big markup yeah.

Kyle: Oh, it is. Yeah but it’s really that simple. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to like any private therapy sessions like counseling after Hurricane Katrina. I got really sad because of the hurricane and I remember going to this counselor for about three or four sessions. I said, “I think I’m depressed.” She says, “Well you probably are. You just went through a major hurricane you just kind of lost.” I said, “Yeah, but I remember she just whipped out a piece of paper and she just started writing notes and it wasn’t all fancy. It is a pen and a piece of paper, and she just scribbled and shoved it in this photo when I left and I paid her 120 bucks and we were done. That was the agreement. So, I don’t think it takes that much these days to just start. But the main thing is once you start get ready and don’t quit before the miracle because if you do it right and you sell it, again not really sell but if you tell people solve their problems when you can show people how you solve problems that’s been in business because people who are going to be knocking on your door down to get the help they want their problems solved too. And it just goes from there.

Once you kind of figure out how to do it, triple it, that’s the easiest thing to do just keep going. Because I really mean this from the bottom of my heart when I say this I think when people start, when they really start seeing their caseload ramp up, they’re going to start making decisions. Okay, do I really need to work until 7:00 or 8:00 at night? Especially in the speech therapy where people want services after school. So, some therapists will work until 8 o’clock at night. But you’re going to make those decisions but you can’t make those decisions until you have that customer base.

You’re also talking about the office and I’ve seen so many people shut down in two to three years because they got these fancy offices with the perfect paint the big letters on the wall says “Welcome to our clinic” and they’re real pretty pictures of children and the beautiful waiting rooms with all that expensive furniture. And sometimes when I look at these pictures, I’ll say something like, “Ma’am, my therapy children at our clinic they will destroy this waiting room”.

I used to have books, coloring books, crayons and magazines, all that stuff. It disappeared in our office. I used to have a train set, it disappeared. I couldn’t even tell you where the train set went. People these days, it’s funny but it’s true, they steal my Fair breeze, they take my toilet paper, they steal my hand towels, they take my toys, so I don’t even have that stuff at my clinic anymore. People say, “Wow, you can’t have stuff for children while they’re waiting”. Well, they don’t wait too long. We keep our appointments right on time. So, when people come in they’re there about five minutes before their appointment. And boom, they’re in. They don’t have time to sit there and play with toys.

Roy: And then you say that when you have that much overhead you really don’t have your own business you have your own job.

Kyle: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then you working for the bank. I don’t know about you but I don’t like working for anybody else but myself and I don’t want to work for the bank. And that’s why I just don’t want to do the bank loan thing.

There’s no way it’s going to work, because you’re just making payments type credit card payments. I remember early on I needed a little bit of a loan to get started. And now I really did get started which is kind of have a little cushion, if you don’t mind me talking about this.

Roy: Not at all.

Kyle: I saved up about eight thousand bucks from when I was working in the nursing homes. I had about three jobs at one time. I was ready to make that move. And I had about Eight grands in my pocket and I hope this is enough. But I’ve also had about 25 to 30 patients on the other side waiting for me too. So, I was doing all these math calculations but I just wanted about Ten grands because I’d already spent that money but nobody would give me a loan even though I had perfect credit. I had this new business and I couldn’t get a loan. And finally, I was able to get just a personal line of credit. There’s little overdraft line of credit that you get and one of the bankers still tell me about this story today. And she gave me a Ten thousand dollars line of credit, and I would jack it up and pay it off, but I use that Ten thousand dollars buffer to start. And now we see thousands of people a month. We have over 35 employees and I haven’t used that line of credit in a long time but it’s still there.

I have a significant line of credit that I’ve asked for and had on hand if I ever need it but I’ve had that now for four years and never touched it. But it’s nice to have when you need it but you definitely don’t want to get into that rat race of borrowing money like credit cards. I mean what’s the point, that your 30-dollar meals ended up costing you 60 bucks when you’re all set and done four months later.

Roy: There’s a lot of benefits to having your own business to run your own clinic. What would you say are the best parts about it the things that you love the most and that make you really happy that you did this? And then what would you say are the toughest times the biggest challenges and the things that maybe if people don’t think they can handle it then maybe that’s a sign that they’re not ready for this?

Kyle: That’s a real good question. I think the thing that I like the most I wanted time with my kid. When I started this business, I just want more family time. I used to get resentments against this big nursing home companies when I was working. I was the one who had to go in on 4th July or Christmas Eve. Its like everybody’s barbecuing or having a family time and here I am going to work. I was making good money but I was trading my time for money. I didn’t know any better at that time I was a good provider. But I wanted more time.

And here it is like soon as I get finished with this call I’m going to pack and we’re going off on a Disney cruise here. We’re leaving today and flying from Tucson to Phoenix, from Phoenix to Orlando. We’re going to catch a Disney cruise and we’ll be back on Monday.

Roy: Oh, that’s cool.

Kyle: Oh yeah. It’s family time. I get to spend with my son and his best friends going, and his best friend’s mom. She’s the paralegal I was talking about. We’re always talking about businesses so it’s a business trip right. That’s what I like about this. But the time it costs money to have this kind of time it cost. And the second thing I really enjoy seeing these kids and families get the services that they need. That’s the first thing really is just watching these kids get the services they need. Because in our clinic we take all the payers. We take all the Medicaid plans, we take all income levels. Everybody gets the same treatment.

That’s what I really like and it’s funny because people say they’ll see me out in the lobby. I’m cleaning up and picking up, and some mom will say, “How long you’ve been working here?” I go about 11 years and they have no idea that I am the owner. I’ve heard other people kind of talk negatively about this. But I’m the one who will go into the bathroom three or four times during the day and make sure there’s no poopy diapers in there. I’m cleaning up the bathrooms put in common in the toilets and make sure my bathrooms are clean. Then we have toilet paper that somebody didn’t steal it or the chairs are straight or the trash is picked up in the parking lot. I’m a worker among workers. I just don’t treat patients all that much these days and that’s what I wanted to do early on make sure that kids get their services. I didn’t want to treat them. I wanted to provide jobs.

And so that’s another thing I like seeing the employees make a really good living. They all have free healthcare now, free vision, free dental insurance, 401k in retirement and time off. I mean it’s a real good place to work and all these great benefits. And for me offering all that the employees get the work; the patients get the help and everybody’s relatively happy but that cost a lot of money. But it’s my responsibility to make sure this thing rolls.

And to answer that other part of your question if you have trouble with money or you have trouble relating to people, if you’re not one of those people who can’t handle conversations about money or if you’re real defensive and you tend to chew people out this might not be for you because people all don’t want to be treated like that these days. You’ve got to be able to treat people with respect and be like I said a worker among workers. You can’t be like the rich business owner at the beach all the time. That’s not going to fly.

If there’s a cancellation I’ll jump in and see a kid. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again or if there’s a plumbing problem I’m the one out there doing this stuff. My dad was a plumber. Growing up I grew up on plumbing trucks I know how to work. I changed light bulbs. I’m on the roof changing sodium halogen lights for the parking lot making sure people are safe at night. So, you just got to have that can-do attitude but you had to be nice and respectful about it and if you can’t do that, it just may not work for you. I hope that answers a question.

Roy: Yeah definitely, yeah. So, I mean it’s very rewarding it sounds like because you create jobs you’re able to provide a great service for all these patients. And if you do it right, you’re able to have that additional time with your family or be able to spend your time the way you want to. But it sounds like what comes with that is a lot of responsibility because you’re responsible for all of those people’s jobs, you’re responsible to still provide for yourself and your family and to keep that level of care really high. So, you’ve got to jump in and see patients. Really it sounds like you have to be ready to do anything, well a lot of hats, which I think that’s kind of a pretty good picture of an entrepreneur in general.

Kyle: Yeah, you just said it. And I remember growing up my mom told me what that word was. I even not know how spell it but I knew I was one. And I always wanted to pay my own way and it was scary at first. I mean real scary but I manage my money well. I got great credit. I’m a good person. I genuinely care about others and I really want people to get the help that they need. And I just don’t accept no for an answer. No is not in my vocabulary. It’s one thing that I can honestly say if the government shut down tomorrow we’d still be in business. I could flip this thing for months. And that’s the thing that’s what sets me apart from other private practice owners. I don’t need a bank. I am the bank. And it’s taken 11 years to become the bank. But with that level comes responsibility. And if you’re responsible it’s going to take real good care of you but if you’re not responsible, you’ll be down for the count in a matter of no time.

I’ve seen it so many times people are freaking out getting payday loans to pay their employees. I mean can you imagine if you think about it. I mean you’ve got money you can buy a house but it’s not a home or you can buy a bed, but it’s not a good night’s sleep. Money buy a lot of stuff but that other stuff that good night sleep comes from inside and being able to sleep at night. And I think part of that’s the financial responsibility and being an honest loyal person. So, if you have problems with that stuff I don’t think private practice would be for you. Because I mean just don’t waste your time. It’s not worth it. And there’s nothing wrong with working for other people. There is nothing wrong.

I enjoyed some of the places that I worked at. I mean I got paid great. When I left I was done. I didn’t have to think about running. We were running payroll here in a little bit and that’s one of these things I’ve got to do. I’ve run payroll from foreign countries at 3:00 in the morning or 2:00 in the morning. But it gets done because what you said Roy was so true. People were relying on that paycheck and those benefits like the apartments I was talking to one of my tenants the other day he’s always late on his rent. I said, “Man, you need to step it up and now I was real respectful about it but it’s like what if I just decided not to pay the water bill.” He’s like, “Well that wouldn’t be good.” Exactly. So, what makes you think you can just wait and pay me my rent two days later. It’s like I’m not being mean about it, it’s just business. That’s another thing with therapists, I think we’ve got to have that confidence to say this is what I am worth. I need you to pay your bill. So, if not we’re going to send you collections. There’s nothing wrong with having that conversation because it’s part of what we do and if we can’t pay the bills nobody gets anything. The kids won’t get their help, the employees won’t get their wages. Nobody has anything, we would just shut it down. And that’s no good for anybody, Right?

Roy: Right. You got to keep the boat afloat.

Kyle: Absolutely

Roy: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I think this is really valuable information. And so again over at Fusion Web clinic where the only EMR that’s designed specifically for pediatric therapies. And so, we’re going to write this up as a blog post and we’d also loved to offer, anybody listening to this. We have some boxes of Pediatric Therapy activities and some other fun things in there. So, if anybody wants to sign up to be eligible to win one of these boxes they can go to FusionWebclinic.com/privateSLP and they can do that there.

Kyle: That’s great. I might just can sign up and if anybody need some help on the speech therapy private practice side, you can always reach me at privateSLP.com. Like I said earlier I’ve got an all access community whether it’s a private coaching forum. I don’t do Facebook groups and things like that. This is all private and if you need something you can just find me there.

Roy: Have a great vacation Kyle.

Kyle: Thanks Roy. Thanks for everything.

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.

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In this episode:

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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 of incorporation, you announce it to the world. After you announce it to the world there locally via a newspaper a little ad or something you plotted IRS and get a tax I.D. number. You take all that Article of incorporation in your tax I.D. to the bank, get your separate account and there you go. But now that is a different tax return. That’s not just one page on your personal taxes. That’s more expensive that’s when you have to file a separate tax return with a separate tax I.D. number that entity. Now that’s doable too it just depends on where you want to take it. When I started I didn’t want to see a few people on the site or work from home in my socks and fuzzy socks. And drink coffee and see people on the Internet, and do voice therapy whatever. I just didn’t want to do that. I wanted to start a business, have employees, pay taxes, have a rent, have expenses, take insurances and credentialing bill. A lot of people call it a headache and it’s scary. Yeah it is. It’s a big deal but really if you do it right and if you set it up appropriately from the get go you can have this.

Don’t forget it’s a mind thing it’s like the little boy who would take the baseball hit throw it up, throw that ball, swing that bat and right before he swung the bat he says maybe, “the best batter the United States has ever seen” and he misses it. And then he takes that ball, he throws it back up, he swings and he misses it. As he say, “I might be the best batter the United States has ever seen”. And he takes that ball again, he won’t give up and he throws that ball up and he says to himself, “I will be the best batter the United States has ever seen any swings and he misses again”. And then he takes that ball again and he throws it up and he says, “I may be the best pitcher the United States has ever seen”. That’s motivation and that’s what you got to do. You don’t give up. It’s a mind thing you just change your way of thinking and you do this.

So I hope this has been helpful Sole proprietorship vs. LLC or Corporation, because either way you gotta start so that’s the scary thing for a lot of people. But if you need help that’s why I’m here if you need help with credentialing, we do that too we do billing services as well, privateslp.com/billing. And as always thank you for listening.

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:

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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, 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’ve got to have cash in the bank in order to avoid delay. Now when I talk about delay I mean delay. We’ve seen it all with Speech therapy private practice and our company therapy group of Tucson in Tucson, Arizona. We see a lot of kids and adults for treatment with communication disorders and we bill all day long. But that doesn’t mean we get paid all day long either.

We call and follow up on the claim a couple days to a week later and they’ll say, “Oh, we didn’t receive it”. Even though we filed electronically or sometimes we send certified mail to the insurance company because some of these companies they want documentation they want certain things. Different payers require different items to get a clean claim and so sometimes we’ll send a big stack of notes with a certified mail so we can track it and they’ll say, “Oh, we never received it”. So some of those insurance companies they make it up. They have their delay tactics to avoid making that payment. So again go back to the Hurricane Katrina and the Blue roof theory. You’ve got to have cash in the bank and if you’re borrowing that cash from the bank you’re working for the bank you’re not even working for yourself.

So don’t forget Insurance time and Payday time are two totally different things. Talking about clean claims, denials, insurance, billing and HCFA 1500 forms that’s something that we do all the time in the Speech therapy All Access community at www.privateslp.com.

So I hope this has been a good informational podcast for you guys and if you have any questions, below this podcast you’ll see a place for questions. So please don’t hesitate to ask if there’s something that you’re looking for that you’re not seeing, connect with me and as always thank you for listening.

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:

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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.

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.

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:

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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 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. 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 just like money when you take money out of your wallet and you spend it, It helps everybody. When you go out to eat. You want a tip and you want to tip well even if somebody says oh that was the worst service in the world I’m not going to tip. Why? I mean waiters and waitresses in this country in the United States they work for tips and you can’t just stiff people. When you vote with your wallet it still helps everybody. You’re getting a service. The person who waited on you gets the tip. It just makes the whole economy move. You don’t want that money energy to stop with you. It’s the same with recognizing and helping others. The more that I can help other people the more the business will be helped and the better off everybody will be. So just think about that.

Number six – Staying Positive. I can’t tell you how often I speak to private practice owners and they’re down because things aren’t going their way or they didn’t get what they wanted or the rates weren’t good enough in Speech therapy or people say how am I supposed to survive on these reimbursement rates. I mean you’ve gotta stay positive. You have to look at the big picture because staying positive is going to ooze out of me and ooze out to other people. That doesn’t mean that I’m just going to be up 100 percent of the time. No I mean this time of the year right now in Tucson it’s hard. It’s over 100 degrees. We’re in late May moving into June. There’s tons of allergies out there. People are sick and everybody kind of grows walking around in Tucson but you have to stay healthy and maintain a positive attitude because again you can’t show fear. You can’t do that in a private practice. You can’t show that. Because when people see the owner is scared and frail that’s going to ooze out into the business and also ooze out into the patients as well. Everybody picks up on that. So you’ve got to stay positive. That’s one of the biggest Private Practice mindsets to remember staying positive.

And lastly something that I think is very important is Physical health and I touched on this. And number one, Physical health exercising taking care of your own house, not drinking too much alcohol and not using prescription medication too much. I’m not sure I don’t take medications I don’t drink alcohol. I actually have been on a Vegan diet now for over 12 months I feel great.

My cholesterol went from 215 to 170. The reason I did it was because my doctor. It’s a long story about the vegan thing but I lost a bet with my other half and she said you gotta eat Vegan. And it’s a long story but I made that decision I made that choice it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But my health is a lot better for because of the vegan lifestyle. The plan based diet and I’m on I feel better my cholesterol went from 215 to 171. My doctor said you’re going to have to understand medication one day. Now here I am 47-46 when he told me that I’m like I don’t want to take these pills.

So I exercise every single day, I eat the right foods with the exception of Coca-Cola and Oreo cookies. I mean hey Oreo cookies are vegan too. Don’t forget. But I love my Coca-Cola and I love my Oreo cookies so that’s two things that I will never go without. I don’t drink too much coke and I don’t eat too many cookies. But I exercise every day I go to the JCC I hit the treadmill. I do my steam room. I got my jacuzzi on. I feel good about it and I’m able to be a better person. I can joke a little bit more. People want to be around me when I’m happier right. So exercise take care of my body, take care of my mind, take care of my spirituality all that stuff goes hand in hand.

So again the Private Practice mindset. Number one, pushing the boundaries. You know dreaming larger than large and having a vision. Number two, Risk versus Benefit. Taking healthy risk pushing that envelope and making things happen. Number three, learning from the mistakes and successes. Also number four, being curious and having a hunger for more. Number five, recognizing others and helping others. Number Six, staying positive. And number seven, physical health. So I hope you guys get some really good information in today’s podcast, and if you need help with your private practice, go to privateslp.com/coaching and I’ll help you there. And as always thank you for listening.

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.

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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.

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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 and you can have a certain day once a month or you can just disappear from the office. If you’ve got everything in place you can disappear and take care of yourself. So that’s another tip.

The fifth tip would be maybe realize that you can’t please everybody. Now we are in a helping profession. We love to help people we like to fix things. That’s just what Speech Language Pathologist do. That’s her personality trait and if you go back to graduate school when they select people for our profession that’s something that they look at. Do you have that helping gene that helping trait?

So again there’s nothing more scary and worrisome and fearful when we get a negative feedback. I mentioned that on one of my previous podcasts dealing with negative feedback. We want to please and help everybody but sometimes you just can’t please everybody. But the more that you go through the more that I go through, these scenarios of negative feedback or criticism it really helps us grow. So we can change and alter our way we do business I mean recently we had a parent that came into the clinic and she was upset and she posted some negative feedback and my default is run and hide. Let’s just run and hide and pretend like that never happened. But it was six o’clock in the evening and I simply just picked up the phone and I spoke to the mother and I said, “Hey, this is Kyle, I’m the owner of the clinic and I really appreciate the fact that you left me some feedback”. She says, “Well I’m really sorry”. I’d normally don’t leave negative feedback and I said No I’m glad you did because it’s going to help me improve our overall service delivery and systems that we use and we have put in place to provide service.

So the mom at the end the conversation not only was she grateful that I took the time out of my schedule to call her but she got the help she needed. I got the help that I needed because we’re all learning at the end of the day. Nobody’s perfect and because of that it’s given me a chance to grow as a clinic owner and to do a better job to help our patients. So really negative feedback in itself or realizing that you can’t please everybody and you can’t do it all the time for everybody. I mean it’s not a bad thing. I mean good things come out of everything. I think maybe just not on the timeline that I want it to happen on so.

And lastly when I’m taking these notes and writing things down the Sixth tip, would be just the fear of becoming that person, that Business Owner. A lot of people are scared to succeed and become that crazy business owner, where you’re always attached to your phone. I remember the days of the Blueberry member folks way back in the day the big red light days to call it the Crackberry the red light with blink and it’s like Oh man, I got another message, I got another message, or you see people who work in long term care who are maybe going up the ladder not just speech pathologist but they might be in charge of an area or a couple of states and they’re always on the phone, emails, calls, webinars and dealing with problems. But it doesn’t have to be that way because when I put systems and people in place, that’s kind of a buffer between me, other people and consumers and so again that fear of becoming that person, that business owner is not always what I think it’s going to be.

It doesn’t have to be crazy and just always tied to the phone and always tied to the internet. You want to think about it as adding something. This ain’t homework folks. It’s not all about subtraction, it’s about adding value. And you want to think about it is adding you where you can help other people, families in need, entities in your community like donating money to a soccer team or a softball team or helping out a local charity or working in a food bank, given back to the local community. Paying taxes, yes paying taxes. What a blessing to have the gift of being able to pay more taxes right to be a part of the local community. A thriving business in the community so you help employees they get the insurances and health insurances and vision dental 401k with a match. They get what they need, they get a paycheck, patients that they can help. And again, this couldn’t be possible unless you start your business and do it the right way.

So if you need help with starting growing scaling your own Speech Therapy Private Practice, hit me up, go to privateslp.com/membership. Also if you’re kind of be in a right year in a you’ve got your own private practice but you’re having trouble with billing and collections or maybe even getting credentialed. We have a service we have a separate company that does that too. Just go to privateslp.com/billing. And as always I hope you’re getting valuable information out of these podcasts. If there’s anything I could do please hit me up, lol. And as always thank you for listening.

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.

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In this episode:

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.

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:

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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.

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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 collect more so you can get paid and continue to grow.

So I mean it’s a very simple process you want to free up your time to do what you do best that’s provide Speech therapy services not spin your wheels with credentialing, billing and collections. So I didn’t know if you guys knew this but we do provide a billing and credentialing service at privateslp.com/billing. So if that interest you you can always go there too.

So these are the four biggest mistakes that I see that private practice startup owners are making right now so I hope this has been helpful. And if you have any questions about anything in relation to your speech therapy private practice just reach out to me and I’ll help and as always thank you for listening.