There are only so many hours in the day and no matter how much work you have to do, sometimes you just can’t get it done. Do you risk your health, and perhaps your sanity, by working 80+ hours a week while still tending to your family? That schedule will result in many long sleepless nights and sleep deprivation is no way to run an efficient, productive, and growing business.

So what is the solution?

Outsource those tasks that you:

• Don’t like to do
• Are too time consuming and don’t directly affect your bottom line – these would primarily be administrative tasks.
• Are skills that you may not have or would take you a long time to learn. An example might be trying to create your own website or handle all of your billing.

The best way to decide what to outsource is to have some goals. Are you looking to gain some more time in your day? Are you looking to increase your hourly value by focusing on tasks that will directly affect your profits?

Remember that when you outsource, you’re not handing over your business, you’re delegating some tasks to people who are experts in that particular field. You’re still the manager and owner of your practice.

That being said, outsourcing may be the best business decision you make this year. It can free up valuable time for you to focus on more profitable tasks, it can increase your hourly value, and it can certainly make you more productive.

The end of one year and the beginning of another lasts for a priceless few days. Schedule the time while you’re feeling the change of time to commit to your business. In as much as your practice is part of your identity, then you will recognize the attention you give your business as you commitment to yourself.

Inevitably as you follow your bliss, honor and live in to your intentions, your life and your business will improve and profit. Being in private practice is about being accepting all of the challenges and rewards that come with being a business owner. Giving your best attention to your business will ultimately strengthen you and identify you as an outstanding therapist.

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Take stock of your business processes, equipment, and procedures. What needs improvement? Is your web host no longer meeting your needs? What about your computer?

Here are some systems to look at to see if there is room for improvement:

• Invoicing and billing system
• Website
• Accounting system
• Filing and organization
• Business hours/schedule
• Fax/phone/printer
• Auto responding
• Marketing campaign
• Search engine rankings
• Subscription forms
• Client support

Take the time to improve or replace any systems or equipment that isn’t working and you’ll have a better, happier, less stressful year and your clients will appreciate it too.

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This is huge. If you do not take time out for yourself, you’re going to burn out. It may not happen tomorrow. It may not happen next week, next month or even this year but it will happen and on the way to burning out your practice will suffer, your life will suffer, and your family will suffer. Besides, don’t you deserve a little time and TLC? Of course you do.

Making time for yourself doesn’t have to be huge – you don’t have to visit the tropics every winter for two weeks. (Of course you can if you want to!) The key to real and lasting sanity is to make time for yourself often – not just once a year. An optimal routine might be to do something every day that you want to do like exercise, take a bubble bath, get a massage, do yoga, or read a good book.

You can take a long weekend every month or every other month to spend quality time with your family and by all means turn on the closed sign at the end of the day and especially on the weekends.

Annually, or semi annually, go ahead and take that big vacation. It is understood that you’ll probably take your family but that doesn’t mean you cannot sneak some time for yourself into the vacation.

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crowd of same

Networking offline and online is an exceptional way to build your private practice. Hopefully you already belong to a few organizations and they are helpful, stimulating, and encouraging. There’s nothing more stimulating than seeking the input of others who can relate to you and your business. That being said, what is stopping you from adding another wonderful group to your list?

New people can add new ideas, new opportunities, and new inspiration to your already growing business. Chances are you already have an idea of a group or two you want to join. Get busy. Schedule it into your calendar to join them. If you don’t have a group you’re already interested in take a look at what your community can offer. Offline organizations are an excellent way to increase local opportunities. Of course there are many opportunities online too. Do some research and make a list of 5 groups you can join this year to improve your business.

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Sometimes we, as business owners, fall into a rut. Sad but true. You get up, get your family off to work, and set about the business of seeing clients. True, one of the great things about being in private practice is that you can spend your day doing what you love but what about all of those wonderful things that you don’t know how to do?

Do you want to learn to do effective business blogging? Write a Kindle e-book? What about learning how to give workshops, or a new skill that compliments your business? How about learning about social media for business? Make a list of three new skills you want to learn. They have to be related to your business but they don’t have to be mundane skills. Make it exciting and look for new ways to grow your business at the same time.

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Planning is a skill that all business owners must have to succeed and sustain their business. Planning helps you avoid costly mistakes and stay on track. It increases your productivity and best of all, it takes much of the stress out of being a business owner.

Planning your business begins with planning your day. One of the best ways to keep your business running smoothly is to take a daily assessment of your goals. We just finished talking about short range goals. Extremely short range goals are often defined as tasks. They’re things you need to get done daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Many successful business owners take a few minutes every night to plan their task list and goals for the next week and to asses their productivity for the day.

Here’s what a planning schedule might look like:

Sunday nights, take a few extra minutes to plan your week including any goals for the week as well as your schedule and tasks.

Monday – Friday Night take a few minutes to assess what goals and tasks were accomplished and what needs to still be worked on.

Once a month take stock of any goals you’re currently striving toward as well as take a few minutes to assess last month’s accomplishments, goals met, and goals yet to be met.

Quarterly you will want to evaluate your income and expenses as well as the status of any goals you’re working on. It is also the time to set new goals for the upcoming quarter.

Annually – well annually you will want to make 10 business intentions just like the ones you’re making now.

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You’re swamped with clients and trying to see them all. Your website needs management, your next project is taking up a majority of your time and yes, your beautiful family needs you too.

What happens to your visibility, relationship building, and promotion tasks? They fall to the bottom of your to do list.

Once your business reaches a profitable level, it is easy to let go of those potentially time consuming marketing tasks. However, if you want your practice to grow, if you want to reach your financial goals, then you need to set aside the time to market your business. It’s the same as your personal health intentions. You don’t exercise until you can walk 3 miles comfortably, for example, and then stop. Or eat 5-7 servings of veggies every day and then quit. Talking care of your growing business means building in relationship building, marketing, and promotion as the normal everyday part of doing business.

The beginning of the year is the perfect time to create a marketing plan. Devise a schedule, schedules are easier to stick to, and plan marketing right into your schedule.

A marketing plan can include your: 

• Your strategic branding and promotional plan
• The expected costs or budget for your marketing efforts
• The amount of time you will schedule each week for your business growth
• A list of media to be used and when you plan on using them. For example you may want to run a highly targeted Facebook campaign during your busy season and during your slow season you can run an article marketing campaign for your niche audience.

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Did you make a specific or general business plan when you first opened your practice?

Take a look at your old goals. What goals have you reached? What goals have you yet to achieve? This is an important time of evaluation and the perfect time to set new goals. If you have achieved old goals – congratulations! It’s time to set new and loftier goals. Use your results from Resolution #1 to help you create your blueprint for your next steps..

If you’ve yet to attain your goals, why not? What do you need to do to make those goals a reality this year?

If you’re starting with a fresh slate because you never really set any business intentions, now is the perfect time to start. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Intention setting is extremely important in your personal life as well as your business life. It is a way to inspire yourself to reach new heights but it is also a tool to measure your successes. If you don’t set intentions, and create a plan to achieve them, then how will you know where you are, how far you have traveled, and what course adjustments will get you where you want to be faster?

How to set intentions

Intention setting is an art. How will you know if you’ve reached your goal? For example, how will you evaluate whether you’ve attained a goal of “making more money?” How long do you have to reach the goal? A month? A year? What about quantity? Would a dollar more than last year’s profits work? What about the quality of your business? Just setting a goal of “seeing more clients” doesn’t tell you much.

Here is the way to determine if an intention SMART

S  – Your goal must be specific. Be as detailed as you can about your goal. I want to increase my profit margin by 10% or I want to reduce my business debt by 50% or I want to double my gross income.

M - Your goal must be measurable. Measurable means that there must be some kind of quantity you can evaluate. I want to reduce my business debt isn’t measurable but I want to reduce it by 10% is measurable. You have a beginning debt and an ending debt, the calculation is easy.

A - Your goal must be attainable. The goal of making a specific six figure may be a measurable and specific goal but is it attainable? If you’re currently making $15,000 then what can you reasonably aim for and believe in your intention? This is a tricky one because you don’t want to set an intention that is so close to your current situation that you are dis-heartened, but also don’t want it to be so difficult that you cannot possibly reach it.

R - Your intention must be relevant. Watch out for this one. Good intentions relate to you and/or your business. Your intention can be to outsource 50% of your administrative duties or it can be to increase your hourly value however if your intention is to get another certification, that may satisfy your desire to learn but will it really help you connect with the clients with whom you you would like work. Maybe or maybe not.

T - Your intention needs to be timely. Give yourself a specific date for when you will “arrive”. Just because we’re talking about New Years doesn’t mean you have to give yourself a year to realize your intention.. In fact, the best way to set intention is to have a few that can be experienced in the short term, a few mid range, and a few long range intentions . Your short term intentions can be a week, a month, or a fiscal quarter. Mid range can be one or two years and long term goals are generally five years and beyond.

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What were your profits last year? Exactly how much did you make? Because psychotherapists are not money motivated, this is a pretty challenging task. But how will you know what you want to focus on to improve your business if you don’t really have a pretty good idea of what is actually occurring business-wise?

Be brave and let yourself look.

Hourly value. This number is calculated by figuring out what your average monthly profits were. If you made $48,000 last year then your average monthly profits will be 4,000. Divide your average monthly profits by the number of hours you work each week.

Note that for this number to be accurate you need to track how many hours you work. If you don’t track this information you have another New Year’s Resolution – start tracking your time!) Assuming you work 40 hours a week, your hourly value is 4000/160 (160 is the number of hours a week multiplied by 4 weeks in a month.) 4000/160 is $25 per hour.

You can also find this number if you take your annual income and divide it by 2080 assuming you worked 40 hours a week, every week of the year.

Why is this information important?

Knowing how much you make per hour is helpful in many ways. It can help you set goals for the upcoming year. It allows you to have an honest picture of the financial health of your business. It also helps you to know how to prioritize your workload. Maybe there are tasks you can outsource at a lesser hourly rate so you can focus on more profitable tasks.

Profit margin This may be your best measurement of success because it tells you exactly how much take-home income you actually have. It also helps you evaluate your costs. It may be easy to know how much you spend on web hosting or how much you spend in office supplies but when you see your profit margin, you get a better idea of how they affect your business.

The formula is: Profit margin = Net income/Sales

Net income is calculated by taking your gross income (all of your profits for the entire year) and subtracting your costs and expenses.

For instance, your sales are $40,000 while your net income is $25,000, you profit margin is $25,000/$40,000 = 62.5%.

Every dollar you receive more than 62 cents is net profit. While this may seem pretty good, the only way to truly use this statistic is to calculate your profit margin every year and compare the numbers. Obviously, your goal is to increase your profit margin.

I bet you looked at these figures before you opened your practice, but have you done so since then? Made sense then. Still does.

Once you know where you have been, does it help you become determined about where you intend to go?

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With the intensity of the holidays finally in the rear view mirror, the New Year comes to us as a time for reviewing what went well and appreciating your accomplishments, a time to reconcile and make peace with what didn’t go as well as you might have hoped, and a time to begin figuring out how you intend to close the gap that exists between your hopes/plans for your business and any unresolved dissatisfactions.

The New Year Awaits. What are you going to do with it? Here are ______ to help you get moving towards a private practice business that is robust therapeutically, energetically and financially.

Resolution #1 – “Find Your Bliss” (Thanks Dr. Jung)

*Acknowledge and Celebrate What Went Well

Whether the year that has past was stellar in every way or what my kids would call an “epic fail”, there was something—probably a lot—that went well or that you did right and can find to appreciate. Starting off the New Year thinking mostly of what needs to be improved to feel happier in your practice is a sure fire way to experience energy drain and discouragement before you ever get going. Be good to yourself by recognizing your capabilities, strengths, and accomplishments that you have made—last year and in the course of your life’s journey.

*Set Time Aside To Vision Your Future and Decide Where You Are Going

Deciding on what you really want takes some time. Is your business worth it? Do you believe you are worth the time to be honest and clear about your most genuine desires.

No one has the authority to determine what kind of business you will have but you. If you intend to be the author of your professional life (vs being tossed around by market forces beyond your control) then you will need to demonstrate your seriousness by giving time to your own purpose. That includes realizing what clients or kinds of problems you feel most comfortable and capable of working with, how much time and energy you can afford to allocate to your work and remain in good healthy balance, how much income and what kind of revenues you need to have to feel comfortable and appreciative.

Before you take a single action step to improve your business, start out by knowing what exactly you are aiming for.

But CELEBRATE and APPRECIATE first!

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