5: Your First Speech Therapy Office

Your first office doesn’t have to be perfect.  As a matter of fact, easing into your new space and growing slowly over time is a smart way to manage cash flow while growing your referral base.  In this episode, you’ll hear how we moved from community visits to our first office, then adding 2 additional offices in that suite before settling into our first free standing clinic.

In this episode:

01:48 – A growing, functional speech therapy practice

03:25 – Choosing an area of town

04:30 – Accessibility for all

05:34 – Multiple etiologies

05:58 – Office suite number one

07:26 – Big ole’ lawyer desk

07:37 – The basic setup: A blueprint to follow

08:48 – Big, bigger ideas

09:46 – Computer programmers, attorneys, acupuncturists and a speech clinic

10:52 –  One big square + 2 little squares

11:10 –   School House Rock

11:39 –  Lessons Learned: Speech Clinic + Acupuncture & Massage = #$%^&

12:00 – The truth about clinic bathrooms

12:40 – How to exit correctly

13:00 – Free standing clinic number one

13:14 –  Waiting room

13:35 – Dermatology office turned speech clinic

13:50 – Free standing clinic number two

14:56 – When you need to do what you need to do, you just do it

15:10 – It doesn’t have to be perfect

15:30 – When is too much too much

16:00 – Patients can move with you, too

17:04 – Do you need help and assistance for your own private practice?

Office Suite Number One

Office Suite Number One Waiting Area

Transcription of Episode Five:

Well, hello everyone! You’re listening to the speech therapy private practice start up podcast. This is episode number 5. My name is Kyle Meades and I’ll be your host for today’s show and I’m a speech and language pathologist since 1993. And after a hurricane Katrina hit the New Orleans, you know, I’ve moved to sunny, dry  Tucson Arizona and I was just really bummed out.  I was really sad about the whole hurricane and I had to pick up and start all over from scratch.  So I decided to start my own speech therapy private practice and at that time when I did start it, I looked online and I remember searching for just anything (and if you listened to my other podcast, you’ll hear the same story where I searched for a mentors, I searched for help from the small business association, I searched and searched and searched and I just couldn’t find any information design for a speech therapists and speech language pathologist out there who wanted to start their own private practice).   So that’s what I’m doing in this private practice start up podcast – showing other speech pathologist how to do this correctly.

And when I say how to start a private practice, I’m not really talking about just working on the side and seeing one or two patients and making a few bucks here or there. I’m talking about a business that will support you and your family for years to come. I’m talking about employees, paying taxes, paying rent, all those things that a normal brick and mortar business would do. So that’s what this podcast is designed to do and in today’s episode, I wanted to share with you the way I started my own brick and mortar business and how I transitioned from seeing people in the community to seeing people in my first office. So, that’s what I wanna to talk about in today’s podcast – how to get that first office.